News: March, 2004

“Canada’s Federal Court has ruled against a motion which would have allowed the music industry to begin suing individuals who make music available on-line.”

While the music industry publicly flays Kazaa and other file-swapping services for aiding piracy, those same services provide an excellent view of what’s really popular with fans.

Korea: “Roiled by technology that allows consumers free access to Internet music files, the entertainment industry wants to lower the sound on MP3 mobile phones.”

“[Lawyers] greeted the happy news of their deceased client’s Scottish connection with their customary heavy-handed copyright warning. Within 24 hours of the discovery, Elvis Presley Enterprises had issued a reminder that it owns all the intellectual property (IP) rights in his name, his image and his songs, including the trademark of the very words Heartbreak Hotel.”

“How I wish Jack Valenti had been on our side in the copyright war.”

“By focusing on the specific iTunes example, the Case Study offers a concrete view of the way law, technology, and business model interact in the post-Napster world.”

“Digital video recorders are set to break out of their niche, and they have pay TV providers to thank for the movement.”

“Researchers at two leading universities have issued a study countering the music industry’s central theme in its war on digital piracy, saying file sharing has little impact on CD sales.”

Lessig quotes the Wall Street Journal: “What’s to fear, that Hollywood will end its generous support of Republican candidates? And talk about wedge issues. Voters under 40 are already more Republican than any other generation. What if the administration stood with them on this issue, proposing a cap on the damages that the industry can extract from college students for downloading music? Say, $1 a song, or even $10, instead of $150,000. Karl Rove could put that on the table, sit back and let John Kerry choose between his contributors and our kids.”

“Copyright law has become a tool for the powerful, argues technology analyst Bill Thompson, but that is not the way it is supposed to be.”

“Lawrence Lessig, an influential scholar who advocates greater consumer rights to use copyright works, is making his latest book available for free on the Internet.”

“If spending $2 million on lawsuits will deter enough infringement to increase (the present value of) future copyright revenues by more than $2 million, then copyright owners will find it in their interest to file the suits themselves. If not, then the government has no business filing the suits, since doing so would burn $2 million of government money to create a benefit of less than $2 million. So let’s save ourselves the trouble, and just give the cash to the RIAA and MPAA.”

“A study of file-sharing’s effects on music sales says online music trading appears to have had little part in the recent slide in CD sales.”

“[…] the law says that if you shoplift a CD from a store, you can max at up to a $1000 fine verses the $150,000 per song statutory limit for file-sharing.”

“Recording industry associations in Europe and Canada are going after 247 people for illegally swapping music on-line, taking up a tactic used by music companies in the United States.”

The music industry is to take legal action against 247 online song-swappers across Europe in the biggest crackdown against music piracy outside the US.

“Okay–so the recording industry rejects voluntary collective licensing, implying that it’s a compulsory system and therefore tantamount to the dreaded government solution to a private sector problem. Yet it supports the PIRATE Act–a government solution that would have taxpayers paying for lawsuits, not music.”

“Maybe these legislators think that the FBI should be spending their time on KaZaA instead of helping to explain the threat of terrorism to Condi Rice and the rest of this administration?”

“In Hatch’s world, the FCC would work to crackdown on indecency while the DOJ fought on behalf of pornographer’s rights.”

“Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale.”

“A draft bill obtained by Wired News recently circulated among members of the House judiciary committee that would make it much easier for the Justice Department to pursue criminal prosecutions against file sharers by lowering the burden of proof. The bill also would seek penalties of fines and prison time of up to ten years for file sharing.”

“Like any other digital-rights system, it starts with a payment that gives consumers the right to use the song or video clip on their PC. But with LWDRM, from that point on consumers decide what may be done with it. They can copy the clip to another device like an MP3 player or distribute the file to a limited number of friends and relatives.”

“Just like other DRM, it does nothing to actually stop the spread of the copy once its on P2P; the only difference between this and other DRM is that LWDRM actually lets you spread a functioning copy over P2P. With this in mind, does this add anything to the current threat of lawsuits?”

“An Australian judge on Wednesday rejected an attempt by U.S. prosecutors to extradite a man accused of helping lead a high-profile Internet piracy group.”

“Apple tells us that its DRM “keeps honest users honest.” I’m a pretty honest user. Apple’s DRM hasn’t kept me honest, though: it’s kept me angry with Apple. It’s kept me feeling like a sucker for giving them my money. It’s kept me in chains.”

“State Sen. Kevin Murray has a plan for fighting online piracy: just ask the pirates who they are. The Culver City Democrat is pushing a bill that would require California file sharers to attach their real names and addresses to the copyrighted goodies they let others download over networks like Kazaa and Morpheus.”

“With proprietary formats and DRM, you may well be renting a book, not buying it. Even if the software still exists, the hardware to read it from may not.”

“Even before the recording industry went on its present prosecution binge, bigfoot proprietors of intellectual property were targeting the reproduction-happy new technologies of the Internet world for often absurd control initiatives.”

“Thanks to the once-powerful but now-defunct copyright renewal requirement, George Romero’s horror classic Night of the Living Dead has successfully entered the public domain.”

“Wal-Mart Stores is bringing cut-rate prices to the ever-more-crowded world of online music.”

“Microsoft said Friday that the second half of the year will see the launch of its online music store, a long-expected entry into an increasingly crowded business dominated by Apple Computer’s iTunes.”

“Following numerous lawsuits against Internet users suspected of file-sharing, the record industry will soon subpoena the University [of Michigan] for the names of students allegedly sharing music illegally.”

“EMI’s move against Danger Mouse was a spectacular backfire in the war over what’s fair when the muse runs afoul of copyright law in the Digital Age. Technology is making it easier than ever to sample and rework recordings, and to the chagrin of entertainment companies and some artists who hold copyrights, the public is showing little sympathy for their efforts to control original works.”

“TiVo plans to unveil a new feature this fall that will bring Web-like, interactive advertisements to TV, highlighting early efforts to reinvent television for the age of the digital video recorder.”

“So the Stanford Center for Internet and Society has filed an action on behalf of the Internet Archive and the Prelinger Archive challenging unconditional copyright restrictions that ‘orphan’ works.”

“The 21 universities that hosted the alleged file trading are in Arizona, California, Colorado, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin.”

“The recording industry sued 532 people Tuesday, including scores of individuals using computer networks at 21 universities, claiming they were illegally sharing digital music files over the Internet.”

The Recording Industry Association of America stepped up the pace of its lawsuits against music swappers again, with a renewed focus on university students.

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Jack Valenti, chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America said on Tuesday he aims to retire from the industry group in a few months, confirming earlier speculation he would step down.

“The stores are finding that file sharing can help create a buzz online that can lead to more sales, according to a panel of independent music store owners who spoke at the South by Southwest Music Conference & Festival here Friday.”

“It’s surely not the product designers’ fault. They’ve built a great new category and an incredibly useful and usable product. But a few dumb decisions, coupled with intransigent corporate arrogance and overweening lawyers, have doomed TiVo to death. I’ll surely miss the poor guy when he’s gone.”

From Australia: After several years warning of dire consequences for record companies because of rampant music downloading and copying, the Australian Record Industry Association yesterday released sales figures for 2003 showing an increase of nearly 8 per cent.

A pair of coders nurturing a deep antipathy for software pirates set off a controversy Thursday when they went public with a months-old experiment to trick file sharers into running a Trojan horse program that chastises users and reports back to a central server.

I’m no fan of increased regulation of speech, but the controversy had at least a small silver lining: It served as a demonstration of the power of innovation to promote the democratic process. In this case, the innovators were the entrepreneurial companies that harnessed the open nature of the Internet to enable users to easily capture, transfer, upload, post, and search for the TV clip.

The music industry’s “war against file sharing,” if successful, will mean “significant collateral damage” to the rights and interests of Internet users, a federal court was told Monday.

The European Parliament approved a controversial piracy law that would allow local police to raid the homes and offices of suspected intellectual-property pirates, search their financial records and even freeze suspects’ bank accounts.

A draft letter purportedly circulated by Bill Lockyer to fellow state attorneys general characterizes P2P software as a “dangerous product” and describes the failure of technology makers to warn consumers of those dangers as a deceptive trade practice…However, the metadata associated with the Microsoft Word document indicates it was either drafted or reviewed by a senior vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America.

Pop star George Michael is abandoning the music business to release his songs online for free instead.

Television may be a “vast wasteland,” as former Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow famously called it, but a coalition of public-interest groups is suing to ensure that even as the wasteland goes digital, viewers can share a copy of the final episode of Survivor: Antarctica.

Today, after four years of discovery battles and summary judgment briefing, the trial court ruled that Nader’s use was, in fact, fair.

Enter DVD To Pocket PC, a controversial program from Amsterdam-based Makayama Software. The application lets you easily convert a DVD into a WMV file that fits on a 128MB or 256MB memory card. You can buy the $25 download on the Handango Web site, where until recently, a disclaimer read, “Due to regulatory limitations this software may not be used by citizens of the U.S.A., Norway and Malaysia to convert copy-protected DVD’s.

A New York federal judge has temporarily put on hold a ruling against 321 Studios, which makes DVD-copying software, pending a hearing next week.

The European Parliament passed controversial legislation Tuesday aimed at cracking down on copyright pirates, ranging from DVD counterfeiters to illicit Viagra sellers online.

“A federal judge ruled on Friday that the music industry cannot sue over 200 alleged file sharers in one swoop and that the companies must sue each defendant individually.”

“A 15-year-old is reluctant to pay 99 cents to download a favourite song from the Internet. On the other hand, this same teenager won’t think twice about spending $1.50, sometimes more, to get a 15-second snippet of the same song — inferior touchtone blips and beeps, really — as a ringer for a mobile phone.”

“There’s no constitutional guarantee, [the judges] said, to make perfect duplicate copies. Such a narrow view, while pleasing copyright holders, denies consumers huge benefits of digital technologies.”

“We aren’t at the beginning of an era where we numbly accept content. The beginning of that era was when Edison first set stylus to wax cylinder, the beginning of the era of mechanical reproduction. […] What we are seeing is the birth of a new era, an era of empowerment, where people are both consumers and producers of content, a wonderful bricolage of both old and new.”

“Earlier today, the Canadian Supreme Court issues a copyright decision that may rank as one of the strongest pro-user rights decisions from a high court in recent memory.”

“Record shipments declined in 2003, but at a substantially slower rate than the steep slide seen in 2002, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said Thursday.”

“Sharman Networks has failed in its efforts to have evidence in an Australian case against it dismissed, forcing the company to face up to the music copyright infringement charges over its peer-to-peer file-sharing software, Kazaa.”

“Workers continue to swap music and other files on peer-to-peer applications at work, despite the legal threat from the record industry, a survey released Wednesday said.”

“Loudeye, a digital music services provider, said Tuesday that it has acquired privately held Overpeer for its antipiracy tools and services.”

“Indeed, many technologists that I’ve spoken with believe that the broadcast flag introduces dangerous Trojan Horse technology—a technology that could be rejiggered with even stronger anti-consumer provisions as time goes on.”

“Internet music company Kazaa has failed in its attempt to delay proceedings for alleged copyright breaches brought by the Australian record industry.”

“OK, P2P is “piracy.” But so was the birth of Hollywood, radio, cable TV, and (yes) the music industry.”

“A new political battle is brewing over Net music swapping, focusing on a company that claims to be able to automatically identify copyrighted songs on networks like Kazaa and to block illegal downloads.”

Few examples of technology-related federal legislation have stirred up more controversy in recent years than the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and now the European Union is considering a similar, yet far more sweeping act—one that could extend to virtually all kinds of intellectual property protections—which critics describe as “nuclear weapons of IP law enforcement.”

“But critics say the bill would give the companies ownership of facts — stock quotes, historical health data, sports scores and voter lists. The bill would restrict the kinds of free exchange and shared resources that are essential to an informed citizenry, opponents say.”

“Hewlett-Packard Corp. took several steps forward in enforcing digital-rights-management on consumer devices Tuesday, licensing Intel Corp.’s DRM scheme and co-developing a similar technology with Royal Philips Electronics NV.”

“Napster could start to increase market share in the more profitable business of selling monthly subscriptions, where customers can listen to — but not own — as many songs as they want each month for $9.95.”

“In my view, our constitutional system placed such a limit on copyright as a way to ensure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development and distribution of our culture. Yet, as Eldred discovered, copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.”

“The venerable MP3 music format, the technology most widely associated with unrestricted file swapping, is getting a makeover aimed at blocking unauthorized copying.”

“The entertainment industry’s pursuit of tough new laws to protect copyrighted materials from online piracy is bad for business and for the economy, according to a report being released today by the Committee for Economic Development, a Washington policy group that has its roots in the business world.”