Archive for November 2004
Rip & Burn Made Legal
"While the music industry attempts to shutter peer-to-peer services in court and in Congress, one company is using P2P networks to promote and pay artists.
"Shared Media Licensing, based in Seattle, offers Weed, a software program that allows interested music fans to download a song and play it three times for free. They are prompted to pay for the ‘Weed file’ the fourth time. Songs cost about a dollar and can be burned to an unlimited number of CDs, passed around on file-sharing networks and posted to web pages."
Katie Dean. File Sharing Growing Like a Weed. Wired News. Nov. 22, 2004.
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The Problem with U.S. Copyright Policy
"Imagine a process of reviewing prescription drugs which goes like this: representatives from the drug company come to the regulators and argue that their drug works well and should be approved. They have no evidence of this beyond a few anecdotes about people who want to take it and perhaps some very simple models of how the drug might affect the human body. The drug is approved. No trials, no empirical evidence of any kind, no follow-up.
"Even the harshest critics of drug regulation or environmental regulation would admit we generally do better than this. But this is often the way we make intellectual property policy. Representatives of interested industries come to regulators and ask for another heaping slice of monopoly rent in the form of an intellectual property right. They have doom-laden predictions, they have anecdotes, carefully selected to pluck the heartstrings of legislators, they have celebrities who testify – often incoherently, but with palpable charisma."
James Boyle. A Natural Experiment. FT.com. Nov. 22, 2004.
SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.
Actor Fined For Film Piracy
"Warner Bros. has secured a $309,600 judgment against an actor for allegedly making promotional ‘screener’ copies of ‘The Last Samurai‘ and ‘Mystic River‘ available for bootleg DVD copying and unauthorized Internet trading, the studio said Tuesday.
"Studio officials say Carmine Caridi, a former recurring actor on ‘NYPD Blue,’ has refused to respond to their civil suit for copyright infringement, forcing them to ask the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to enter a default judgment of $150,000 per film and $9,600 in attorney fees.
"Judge Stephen Wilson granted that request, adding that the defendant’s conduct was ‘particularly egregious’ because of the intentional and deliberate nature of the infringement."
Jesse Hiestand Actor Must Pay $309,600 in Film Piracy Case. WashingtonPost.com. Nov. 24, 2004.
(Editor’s Note: The Post allows free access to their stories on the Web for 14 days before sending the stories to the paper’s fee-based Archives.)
SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.
Judge Allows Internet Archive Snapshots as Evidence
"Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys, in the Northern District of Illinois, ruled that ‘snapshots’ taken by the Internet Archive that depict web pages as they appeared in the past are admissible under the Federal Rules of Evidence.
"The court rejected the arguments of plaintiff Telewizja Polska USA that the archived pages constituted hearsay and that the Internet Archive was an ‘unreliable source.’
"He also noted that, since Polska was seeking to suppress evidence of its own previous statements, the snapshots would not be barred even if they were hearsay."
No author. Internet Archive’s Web Page Snapshots Held Admissible as Evidence.
Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. Vol 2, No.3.
SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.
Senate Passes Scaled-Back Anti-Piracy Bill
"The U.S. Senate has voted to outlaw several favorite techniques of people who illegally copy and distribute movies, but has dropped other measures that could have led to jail time for Internet song-swappers.
"People who secretly videotape movies when they are shown in theaters could go to prison for up to three years under the measure, which passed the Senate on Saturday.
"Hackers and industry insiders who distribute music, movies or other copyrighted works before their official release date also face stiffened penalties under the bill."
Reuters. Senate Passes Scaled-Back Copyright Measure. News.com. Nov. 22, 2004.
See also:
Katie Dean. A Kinder, Gentler Copyright Bill?. Wired News. Nov. 22, 2004.
SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.
Copyright Bill May Wait Till After Holidays
"Marybeth Peters, the U.S. register of copyrights, told a conference here (.pdf) that the so-called Induce Act would not be part of the slew of legislation–including key spending measures–that Congress is expected to vote on before leaving for next week’s Thanksgiving holiday.
"’I don’t think you’ll ever see database protection,’ said Peters, who has been involved in closed-door negotiations this fall over copyright legislation. ‘Something else you won’t see this year is something known as the Induce Act.’
"The database bill would create a new intellectual property right for collections of information, while the Induce Act would prohibit inducing anyone to violate copyright law."
Declan McCullagh. Anti-P2P Bill May Slip Past Legislative Rush. News.com. Nov. 18, 2004.
SNTReport.com™ Covering the Intersection of Collaboration and Technology. A Seso Group™ Venture.
RIAA Continues P2P Lawsuits
"The Recording Industry Association of America has filed new lawsuits against 761 people who allegedly use peer-to-peer software to trade music files without permission, the trade group announced this week.
"The lawsuits included users of the eDonkey, Limewire, and Kazaa services, as well as 25 people using university Internet connections to distribute music files.
"American University in Washington, D.C., Boston College, Iowa State University, and the University of Massachusetts were among the college networks used by those sued."
Grant Gross. RIAA Files New Lawsuits. PCWorld. Nov. 19, 2004.
SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.
COPYCENSE 