IPcentral Weblog: February 2007 Archives

February 2007 Archives

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02.28.2007

eSnips Update, or Whack-an-Orc

Any Lord of the Rings fans out there? (Come on, admit it, you're reading a blog, for pete's sake, that's a dead giveaway!) BBC reports on an interesting strategy to beat the whack-a-mole game (or should I say whack-an-orc) that is the DMCA's notice-and-takedown approach. I posted recently on eSnips, a site where people who are not the author (I'm pretty sure in this case JRR Tolkien didn't post his works) post copyrighted books and other media. Like similar sites, eSnips says it willl take down works if requested, but the Tolkien estate knows that there's nothing stopping the books from being posted again. So after eSnips took Tolkien's books down, the estate sued for the names of the posters, and a US District Court has ordered eSnips cough them up. eSnips says it needs to talk to the posters first and see if they object.

This is quite rich. From peer-to-peer networks to uploading sites, those posting copyrighted works love anonymity. Would they be as willing to infringe copyright if they knew the site they were posting to would turn over their identities?

Oh, and in case you have no sympathy for Tolkien's heirs and don't believe he should have been able to pass down his intellectual property the way one might pass down a flower shop or a family farm, please read the comments in my previous eSnips post (at this point we're at 23 comments and counting). That field is full of published authors trying to make an honest living off of their hard work and creativity. They are the real victims of sites like this.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 2:32 PM | Enforcement & Remedies

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Wikipedia: Be All That You Can... Make Up

Please check out this hysterical post by Nick Carr, the latest entry on Wiki-truthiness. Remember, Wikipedia explicitly does not require truth.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 10:29 AM | Free Culture Movement

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02.27.2007

A Digitized Hollywood Needs IPRs

Janet Sassi from Fordham University has an excellent write-up of a talk by Dr. Edward Epstein, a former professor at MIT and current columnist at Slate Magazine. Epstein recently released The Big Picture (Random House, 2005), a book in which he traces the diminishing value to entertainment labels of movie theaters and movie set “analog productions.” Epstein predicts that the entertainment industry will increasingly leverage cheaper production mechanisms and digital modes of distribution, that make enforcing intelletual property ever more important.

Epstein said that the piracy of intellectual property is the biggest issue facing Hollywood studios in the coming decade.

In order to fully control piracy with so many distribution routes (theatres, DVD, pay-per-view and video-on-demand), [Epstein] said, studios must work with governments and the MPAA to create the concept that piracy is theft.

“You can create social behavior if you create sanctions against [theft],” he said. “If the Chinese government said that you’d get 10 years in prison for [bootlegs], all the video shops in Shanghai would close.”

Right on. Piracy is theft, its not merely sharing, its not moral and is hardly something to build a "free culture" on.

posted by Noel Le @ 7:25 PM | DRM & Watermarks, etc.

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Boucher and Doolittle, What Do You Have Against Creators?

Rick Boucher is at it again. A few years ago he gave us the Music Online Choice Act (MOCA), a bill that would have imposed compulsory licensing on the digital music market because it was so obvious that studios were going to dominate that market; hey, notice all the download services are independent of studios, and iTunes even has the market power to dictate retail price? Now he is back and has joined with John Doolittle to introduce the FAIR USE Act of 2007. This is Boucher's latest iteration of his legislation to gut the DMCA, which he first introduced before the DMCA became law almost 10 years ago. This bill is at best unnecessary and at worst dangerous. Absolutely no part of the bill respects the rights of creators to designate through the market which rights will convey with their creations.

Continue reading Boucher and Doolittle, What Do You Have Against Creators? . . .

posted by Patrick Ross @ 5:21 PM | Access: Commons, Fair Use, Orphan Works, Public Domain , DMCA , DRM & Watermarks, etc. , Free Culture Movement , Legislation and Legislators , Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation

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Save the Date: March 16

On March 16, PFF is hosting an noon event on Capitol Hill entitled "What Goes Up Must Come Down: Copyright and Process in the Age of User-Posted Content."

The Internet is all about information generated by as well as for the end user. From eBay to YouTube to MySpace, an endless stream of complex content is posted—and if taken down, reposted—within minutes or hours. Section 512’s Notice and Take-Down provisions were intended to help cope with the resulting onslaught of posts that infringe copyright. But recent cases such as the Tur litigation suggest it is not fast enough to make a dent in infringement. At the same time, is it fair to the occasional innocent user subjected to an overbroad interpretation of infringement? What is the proper role of intermediaries? Can filtering or watermark technology help sort this out?

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 3:03 PM | DMCA , Enforcement & Remedies

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02.26.2007

The Growing Threat

Do you love free and unauthorized digital content but find you really want books and they're not available on YouTube? You're in luck. A visit to www.eSnips.com and you'll find all sorts of books, as well as other copyrighted content. None of it has been posted by the copyright owner; this is posted by fans, like YouTube. Yes, it's odd that a fan of a novelist would want to deny that novelist the payment that would come if a downloader were instead to buy the book, but this is an odd world we live in.

I spent exactly one minute on the site, and after that I had a pristine copy of Bill Clinton's My Life on my hard drive. The file is about 7.5 MB, and is the full 883 pages. The image quality is spectacular; there's no sign of page distortion like you might find when a book is pressed against a scanner and the photos are crystal clear, including a cute one of Socks the Cat briefing the press on page 565. I can only see one page missing; the copyright page that warns against unauthorized reproduction. I of course did not pay for this and neither Bill Clinton nor his publisher Alfred A. Knopf received a dime.

Continue reading The Growing Threat . . .

posted by Patrick Ross @ 6:20 PM | Books

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How Much Do Music Services Want to Ditch DRM?

Most readers will be aware that EMI has scoped out opportunities to offer music without DRM over online services. But apparently, none of the major online distributors (including Apple, Microsoft, RealNetworks, Yahoo!) wants to bet their money on DRM-free offerings.

I don't fault Microsoft, as the firm already licenses its DRM technologies to facilitate interoperability between offerings from different parties and has shown itself to respect the rights of content creators. RealNetworks has reverse engineered FairPlay so that DRMd songs from its music service can play on the iPod, and has not tried to play Jobsian PR games with consumers. However, Apple and Yahoo!, after calling for the elimination of DRM, evidently, don't want to put their money where their mouth is. Not the least bit surprising.

posted by Noel Le @ 5:22 PM | DRM & Watermarks, etc.

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Berkeley DRM Conference

Next week, PFF Academic Advisory Counsel member, Professor Douglas Litchtman, will participate in a DRM conference hosted by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. Others scheduled for the event include reps from Apple, EMI, Microsoft, Sony and Warner Brothers. I'll review conference materials when they become available.

posted by Noel Le @ 11:55 AM | Academia

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BitTorrent Joins the Legal Media Industry

Brad Stone from the New York Times reports that BitTorrent has signed deals with several entertainment labels, including 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount and Warner Brothers, to provide content, legally, over its network. This is good news, but I can’t help but pick out several issues.

The partnership between BitTorrent and the entertainment industry exemplifies one aspect of how DRM provides consumers with additional options in digital media by allowing scaled offerings and tiered prices.

...while [BitTorrent] will sell digital copies of shows like “24” and “Bones” for $1.99 an episode, it will only rent movies. Once the films are on the PC, they expire within 30 days of their purchase or 24 hours after the buyer begins to watch them...

Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said the company had secured the right to permit users to buy outright digital copies of films, but the studios wanted to charge prices that would be too high for most consumers. “We don’t think the current prices are a smart thing to show any user,” he said. “We want to allocate services with very digestible price points.”

But wait, if the vast majority of movies and music are available illegally, as the anti-DRM/DMCA crowd likes to say, then what does this business venture really offer consumers? Is BitTorrent's new venture just an effort to raise prices above free?

Continue reading BitTorrent Joins the Legal Media Industry . . .

posted by Noel Le @ 10:54 AM | DRM & Watermarks, etc.

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No. 10 Downing Street Defends DRM

About 1,400 UK activists told the UK government they only want one option in the digital music market -- a flat fee with full rights over the content. As such, they wanted DRM banned. The Office of the Prime Minister has rejected that petition. No. 10 Downing Street stated that content distributors have every right to protect their works from piracy with DRM if they so choose, but also noted DRM benefits consumers: "DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay." Well said.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 9:18 AM | DRM & Watermarks, etc.

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02.24.2007

Patents in the Diffusion of Innovation and Knowledge Spillovers

posted by Noel Le @ 5:04 PM | Academia , Patents

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02.23.2007

XM-Sirius

posted by James DeLong @ 2:09 PM | Radio

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