Copyright legal issues in the news

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

From Sans:

"--US Legislators Plan to Re-Introduce Bill to Allow Seizure of Websites
(February 16, 2011)
US lawmakers plan to introduce legislation that would expand the
authority of government agencies to shut down web sites that traffic in
piracy or counterfeit merchandise. Legislation with the same goal was
introduced last year, but the Senate did not take action on the
Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act, which would have
granted the US Department of Justice (DoJ) the authority to shut down
websites that were committing copyright infringement. Some suggested
changes to COICA include a cap on the number of domain seizures DoJ
could request before paying ISPs for the cost of compliance and using
domain name seizures only when other, less restrictive measures are
untenable."

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

From Sans,

"--Spain Approves Anti-Piracy Legislations
(February 16, 2011)
Spain's parliament has approved a law that would allow authorities to
shut down websites involved in illegal download of pirated entertainment
content. An earlier version of the bill was defeated. The new bill
established a panel to hear complaints against the sites suspected of
engaging in content piracy. A judge will make the final decision in all
cases."

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

Even more from Sans,

"--Sony Threatens to Ban Jailbroken PS3 Console Users from PlayStation Network
(February 16 & 17, 2011)
Sony says it will permanently ban users of jailbroken PlayStation 3
(PS3) gaming consoles from the PlayStation Network. Sony has not said
how it plans to enforce the new policy. The announcement comes just
weeks after code to jailbreak PS3 consoles was posted to the Internet.
The code allows users to play "homebrewed" games on the devices, but
with a few changes, could also be used to allow the consoles to play
pirated games. The action stems from a legal case against George Hotz,
who allegedly posted the code; Hotz is facing charges for violations of
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other offenses."

gunner · **Joined:** 02 Jul 2007 **Posts:** 194

http://rocknewsdesk.com/world-news/indu ... erts/1274/

Industry failure not down to pirates, say financial experts

Sunday, April 10th, 2011

Labels lie to hide incompetency, new study suggests as it states “downloads’ effects on sales are statistically indistinguishable from zero”

A study of the music industry by leading financial body the London School of Economics concludes that filesharing has not contributed to the collapse of the music business in any way – and suggests industry chiefs are lying when they say it has.

Bosses of the music and movie industries have focused on blaming pirate activity for all negative financial results, and have ignored the fact there’s a decline in leisure spending across the world, says the LSE. They conclude that pirates are not to blame for a drop in sales. Instead, people are simply spending less on leisure pursuits because they’re faced with higher bills, lower pay rises and less job security.

And the report points out that people who don’t own computers – and therefore can’t share files – have stopped buying music at exactly the same rate as those who do.

Citing an earlier report the LSE quotes: “Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

While bosses avoid tackling the real causes of the industry’s decline, it will continue, they say: “Household budgets for entertainment are relatively inelastic. Downward pressure on leisure expenditure will increase due to rising costs of living and unemployment, and drastic rises in the costs of public services.”

The LSE report suggests the introduction of strong laws against online piracy will not prevent the music business from collapsing – and that bungling bosses are only wasting time and dwindling resources by claiming otherwise.

Mathew Lasar of Ars Technica says: “The content industry has won a key aspect of the war: the argument that filesharing has hobbled the music and movie businesses, hurts artists and costs jobs.

“The LSE’s paper argues that everything the content industry says about filesharing is wrong. It suggests filesharing is the future, and that revenue downturns can be explained by other forces.”

A different study does indicate that filesharing could be responsible for 20% of lost income – but also finds the other 80% is a result of the music industry’s own sales techniques in offering music in a massive range of formats from digital singles to video game add-ons.
Legal filesharing is on the increase across the world – the LSE says income from digital streams has increased by over 1000% between 2004 and 2010 to $4.6bn.

In January industry pressure group the BPI let slip that their position on filesharing is based on the assumption that, without pirates, sales would never drop.

Commenting on UK figures which showed physical album sales were down by 12% in 2010 while digital album sales were up by 30%, BPI boss Geoff Taylor said: “Legal downloads should be able to offset the decline in CD sales.”

JohnG · 03 Aug 2006

Never did think Jack Sparrow had anything to do with the decline.

More a combination of aging baby boomers who don't collect anymore and kids who don't care about buying music/ listening like the boomers did years ago. Then add the talent pool seems to have declined since the 60's 70's.

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

Pip · **Joined:** 16 Aug 2004 **Posts:** 2921

I think most of us had this figured out when we noticed that during the heyday of Napster sales were booming. What was that, 10 years ago?

Walter P · 20 Sep 2006

The sad thing is that this study and others like it will have a zero impact on the music industry. They'll continue to operate in the ass-backwards way they've been operating for years and continue to blame it on anyone or anything but themselves.

Linda · 13 Jan 1966

Quote:

New Study Shows Many Artists Think File Sharing Helps, Not Hurts

With the Dutch government introducing draconian anti-copyright policies, the government also decided to survey musicians, and the results were somewhat surprising. Many, many artists did not think that file sharing harms them, with plenty believing it helped. It appears there was a big age factor in the results -- with younger artists being much less concerned about file sharing than older artists. Only 28% of artists asked believed that file sharing hurt them financially. And slightly over half of artists surveyed claimed that file sharing helps them build an audience by getting their work more widely known.

You would think, then, that this would push back against the government's new copyright policies, but apparently, it does not.

Of course, some will also point out that even though these artists claim that file sharing isn't harming them and that it's often helping them... the majority still believed in DRM and stricter enforcement against infringement. That seems like a bit of a conundrum, and it appears the government basically just focused on this latter point, rather than the earlier points. But, it's really not too surprising. If you ask someone: do you want a government-granted monopoly privelege and/or a method for limiting competition, many will say yes. Even with empirical data that they're better off without it, it's difficult for people to give up government protectionism... But that's no reason to just grant such protectionist policies. It makes sense to see if a sugar monopoly actually benefits the overall production of sugar in a country. It does not make sense to ask the sugar monopolist if they need a sugar monopoly.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201104 ... urts.shtml

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

Finally some good news:

From ZD Net:

"Court rules Internet IP addresses are not people

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | May 4, 2011, 10:21am PDT

“I am not an IP number, I am a free man!” OK, so that’s not exactly what actor Patrick McGoohan said in the classic TV show, The Prisoner, but Number 6 would have agreed that people aren’t numbers, and they certainly aren’t their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. And, now a U.S. District Court has ruled that an IP address is not the same thing as a person’s identification.

This current decision came about because of a recent wave of copyright owners filing approximately 100,000 lawsuits against file sharers based on their IP addresses. Mind you, the organizations, such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) know that lawsuits don’t actually stop file piracy. In a recent statement to the Commerce Department these groups and their allies wrote, “The role of lawsuits in solving the online theft problem is clearly limited “For instance, bringing clear-cut claims against major commercial infringers is not by itself a solution in the long run. These cases take years to litigate and are an enormous resource drain.”

That hasn’t stopped them though from suing file-sharing services, such as Lime Wire for, I kid you not, $75 trillion in damages. This recent wave of lawsuits isn’t about taking a leading file-sharing service out behind the barn for a whipping. No, this recent lawsuit flood was designed to scare individual file sharers using services such as BitTorrent from sharing files.

One of their main tools, using IP addresses as unique personal identification tools, has just been ruled out in the case, VPR Internationale v. Does 1-1017. U.S. District Court Judge Harold Baker ruled that VPR, a Canadian adult film company, couldn’t subpoena ISPs for the personal information connected to their subscribers’ IP addresses. His logic was that just because an activity has been conducted from a specific IP-address doesn’t mean that the IP address’ owner has actually done anything wrong.

As Judge Baker wrote, “In this case, not a single one of the plaintiff’s 1.017 potential adversaries has been identified. … Moreover, VPR ignores the fact that IP subscribers are not necessarily copyright infringers.” He also said that even when the ISP does provide an IP address’ subscriber information that the subscriber may not be guilty of any crime.

In his decision, Baker cited the recent example of Federal agents arresting a couple and seizing their computer, iPhones, and iPads for child porn only to find out later that it was a neighbor who had used their Wi-Fi connection to download the illegal material. This kind of situation, where someone is arrested for what’s done without their knowledge or consent with their network connection, is not uncommon.

While Judge Baker’s decision will make it harder for copyright owners and their organizations to take a “guilty until proven innocent” approach, there’s another lesson here too. You need to secure your Wi-Fi connection. Sure, anyone piggy-backing on your Wi-Fi connection is probably just using it to check their e-mail, but there’s that one time in a thousand where they may be doing some illegal and it will be you, not them, explaining to a court that it wasn’t you who downloaded am illegal copy of The Hurt Locker.

Linda · 13 Jan 1966

Quote:

Pirate Bay access being blocked but by whom?

One of the biggest sites on the Internet devoted to pirated software cannot be accessed by a number of Internet users at the moment. Engadget reports that some Comcast users are reporting that they have been unable to access the Pirate Bay BitTorrent-based file sharing web site. However, the current situation is looking like it may not actually be Comcast's fault. The report adds that customers that use other internet access providers have also been unable to access the site today.

A Comcast rep has already denied that the company has engaged in any intentional blocking of the Pirate Bay site on their end via their Twitter page, saying flat out, "We don't block websites". However the rep added that the company is still looking into the situation. The Engadget report states that on their end, "Pings and DNS lookups seem to be resolved correctly, but users are unable to get to the site." While it's possible that the Pirate Bay could be under attack by hackers so far no hacker group has taken responsibility for such an cyber attack.

Of course this is not the first time that Comcast has been accused of limiting its customers' access to the internet. In 2007 it was reported that the company was shutting off customers' access to peer-to-peer (aka BitTorrent) file sharing services. Comcast has also been accused of limiting access to VoIP Internet phone services in the past. In 2008, The Federal Communications Commission ruled that Comcast had indeed engaged in such practices.

http://www.neowin.net/news/pirate-bay-a ... ut-by-whom

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

From Sans,

" --Proposed Anti-Piracy Bill Increases Government Authority
(May 12, 2011)
Legislation introduced in the US Senate would increase the government's
authority to disrupt the availability of and close down websites that
are "dedicated to [copyright] infringing activities." The Protect IP
Act, sponsored by 11 senators, would grant the government the power to
bring lawsuits against the websites and obtain court orders prohibiting
search engines from returning the sites in their results."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/protect-act/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20062419-38.html

IMO, This won't do much, as most of said sites & search engines are not hosted on US soil.

Linda · 13 Jan 1966

Quote:

RIAA Calls 4th Amendment Passe: Pushes For Warrantless Searches

Wow. It's been obvious to plenty of people for quite some time that the RIAA and the MPAA don't much care about things like free speech and due process rights afforded to people under the Constitution (see COICA and the PROTECT IP Act). But, I hadn't realized they'd gone so far as to blatantly disregard something like the 4th Amendment. Obviously, as we've been discussing lately, it seems like all three branches of the federal government have decided to crush the 4th Amendment, but they usually try to at least pretend that they're paying attention to the Constitution.

Not any more, apparently.

The RIAA has been pushing the state of California to pass a new law that would allow completely warrantless searches for law enforcement, allowing them to enter and search any CD or DVD manufacturing plant without either notice or a court order.

Yes, let's repeat that: the RIAA is pushing a law that would let law enforcement, without any oversight, without any probable cause, without any notice, enter and search any company premises that involves pressing CDs or DVDs, in order to assure that they're legal. Oh, and if said law enforcement discovers repeat violations, fines can be up to $250,000.

The RIAA claims that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply here because of all the recent attacks on the 4th Amendment by the courts:

Quote:

The RIAA argued that courts had carved out 4th Amendment exceptions already. So far, it said, warrantless searches have been allowed at such businesses as automobile junkyards and repair shops, mines, gun and liquor stores, nursing homes, massage parlors, pawn shops and wholesale fish dealers.

The common trait, the trade group contended, was that the businesses were in "closely regulated" industries in which "the pervasiveness and regularity of the government's regulation reduces the owner's expectation of privacy in his business records."

It gets worse. The RIAA's Marcus Cohen honestly makes this sound like it's no big deal:

Quote:

"We're literally talking about walking into a plant, walking up to the line and ensuring that, indeed, the discs are in compliance," he said. "I don't think the scope of the search is something a regulator needs to be worried about."

Oh really? And how about the RIAA member labels? How about, in exchange, they let some of us walk into their offices, take a look at their books and ensure that their royalty payments to artists are in compliance? I don't think the scope of such a review is anything to be worried about, right?

And, here's the crazy thing. Despite numerous legal experts saying that the bill is almost certainly unconstitutional, it sounds like it has a decent chance of passing. It's sponsored by California state Senator Alex Padilla and has already been approved by two separate committees, and will be heard on the Senate floor on Monday. If it passes there, it'll go to the Assembly. You can see the full text of the bill, SB 550 at that link, or embedded below.

It's really an astounding showing of the sense of entitlement of the RIAA that it feels that the 4th Amendment shouldn't apply. The RIAA and its member labels should be ashamed of themselves.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201105 ... ches.shtml

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

The sad thing is our politicians (of BOTH parties) are likely to support this.

alantig · **Joined:** 20 Sep 2006 **Posts:** 4811

No, Geff - they support getting paid to support whatever your pet project is. They pay lip service to things like the Constitution, but they've shown over and over that they don't really give a damn what that old piece of paper says unless it's in agreement with the position they're being paid to support.

AMW · **Joined:** 26 Sep 2006 **Posts:** 4543

Under what sort of regulations are CD and DVD pressing plants in the state of California currently operating?

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

What a fine gvt we have...................

From Sans:

" --UK Student Facing Extradition for Running Site With Links to Pirated Movies
(June 17 & 20, 2011)
A UK student who allegedly ran a website that contained links to other
sites hosting pirated content is facing extradition to the US to face
charges of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and criminal
copyright infringement. A British court granted Richard O'Dwyer bail,
the terms of which prohibit him from entering airports and other ports
and from applying to register new domain names. If he is extradited and
convicted of the charges in the US, O'Dwyer could face a five year
prison sentence. O'Dwyer's lawyer says the extradition demands violate
his client's human rights. O'Dwyer's website was hosted in the UK and
UK laws pertinent to the situation already exist. If he is extradited,
O'Dwyer would face harsher penalties."

Tricky Kid · **Joined:** 23 Sep 2007 **Posts:** 5298

So if the allegations are true, do you have a problem with what O'Dwyer was doing? Should the facilitation of copyright infringement be a criminal act?

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

My problem is the USA demanding extradition to the USA for a POSSIBLE crime committed on UK soil using UK servers. This has nothing to do with the USA. That is straight up bullying by our gvt.

I also disagree with extradition for posting links! He is not charged with filesharing, just posting links.

When given sufficient Campaign contributions, the USA Big Brother is watching YOU!

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

From Sans,

Quote:

--Sony Insurer Asks Court to Say it's Not Liable to defend Sony Against Breach Actions
(July 21 & 22, 2011)
Sony's insurance company Zurich American Insurance Company (ZAIC) and
its parent company the Zurich Insurance Company are suing the media
company, saying that the series of security breaches the company
suffered earlier this year are not covered by its policy with Zurich.
Zurich's complaint alleges that Sony has demanded that it defend the
company against the plethora of lawsuits and "potential actions
instituted by one or more state attorney general's offices." ZAIC
maintains that Sony's policy covers "bodily injury," "property
damage," and "personal and advertising injury."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/22 ... insurance/

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/ ... onomyId=17
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/ ... PY20110721
https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/D ... ystem=prod
[Editor's Note (Pescatore): No cyber insurance policy ever protected your customers'
data, and many of them even fail to provide any meaningful bounding of the financial
exposure from a cyber-incident. Since software engineering is an oxymoron, it is
impossible for insurance companies to have a meaningful basis for assessing risk and
thus premiums are high, payouts are limited and, as the ZAIC suit illustrates, the
definition of a qualifying "injury" or event may also be very limited.
(Paller): A few years ago the White House cyber coordinator was being pressured, by
people paid by a major insurer, to back cyber insurance as an incentive for better
security - "just as fire insurance and resulting building standards helped improve
building safety." The coordinator asked me to find out how well cyber insurance was
working. I met with the representatives of nearly every organization selling cyber
insurance in the U.S. and was surprised that they were unable to provide even one
example where any of their insurance policies ever paid for the kinds of losses that
weak cyber security facilitated. It turns out the problem they face is lack of
reinsurance, without it insurers will not take the risk. Reinsurance requires that a
fire in Chicago not also be happening in New York and Atlanta and everywhere else.
The cyber threat can and does affect many victims in many places; its losses simply
cannot be re-insured effectively. Without reinsurance, the insurers had to
radically constrain the losses they covered. If you bought a cyber policy, don't bet
your career on telling your boss that your company "is covered for cyber losses."]

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

The following is simply a factual set of numbers I found in an article about the current congressional "super committee" breaking down lobbyist contributions to the 12 members by party & industry since 1998.

It only lists the top 14 categories of contributors to each party.

Category: "TV/Movies/Music"

Democrats: #9 on the list of contributors. Total given to the 6 dems by the entertainment industry from 1998-2011: $5.1 million
Republicans: "TV/Movies/Music" is not in the GOP's top 14 contributors.

Draw your own conclusions!

Brotoro · 12 Apr 2008

I don't understand the data.

Copyright legal issues in the news

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