Archive for the ‘Copyright’ tag
Pirate Bay founder and BREIN head Meet Face to Face
Gottfrid Svarholm, founder of the Pirate Bay came across Tim Kuik, the head of the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN recently. The two encountered each other at Random, a hacker conference that takes place in the Netherlands. It was a few mere months ago that BREIN took the Pirate Bay founder to court to have the site shut down; BREIN won the civil case.
Currently, the verdict on the case has been put on hold, which is allowing the three defendants of the Pirate Bay to appeal the verdict. The meeting between Svarhalm and Kuik occurred during a panel discussion on copyright laws and the future of media distribution at the conference. Although Svarholm was in the audience, he took the opportunity to address Kuik.
Asking Kuik, “Can you please tell me where that profit is, because I’d like some of it,” which included an overwhelming applause from the audience. Swarholm wanted to know if there was evidentiary support that the Pirate Bay is making money from distributed copyright works.
Kuik replied, “You tell me, you’re here, somebody paid for your trip,” implying that the revenue from the Pirate Bay had paid for his trip to The Netherlands. Swartholm, who is currently working as a software programmer in Asia said, “I paid for this trip by developing computer software for my customers,” again with cheers from the audience.
Kuik’s ultimate rebuttal went on to back up the fact that a Swedish investigative journalist earned hundreds of thousands of kroner in one year due to advertisements, however, this may not even be enough money to cover the hardware and bandwidth costs.
RIAA Claims it Will Stop Suing
The Recording Industry Association of America has announced that it will cease the suing of individuals who downloaded music without paying. The RIAA will now pressure Internet Service Providers to protect copyrights.
Due to the increasing unpopularity of the Association for the punishment of over 35,000 individuals has made decided to go with this decision instead. In most of the cases, those individuals have been college students and minors—often the types of people who are least able to afford hefty fines.
Anticipated Pirate Bay Trial Begins
The much-anticipated criminal trial of The Pirate Bay’s operators begins in a Stockholm criminal court on Monday reported CNET.
The men behind of the notorious BitTorrent tracking service known for pointing the way to pirated software, games, music and movies are accused of contributory copyright infringement and face up to two years in prison each, in addition to fines as high as $180,000.
The defendants are Hans Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström. Prosecutor Hakan Roswall has summarized the charges as “promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws.”
The trial is expected to be closely followed by law enforcement agencies, internet surfers, Hollywood and others. Among other things, it represents the first prosecution of its kind in Sweden, a country once thought of as a bastion of the liberal laws that gave rise to The Pirate Bay five years ago.
Apple claims iPhone jailbreaking violates their copyright
CNET reported that Apple recently told the U.S. Copyright Office that it believes iPhone jailbreaking is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and infringes on its copyright, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The EFF is trying to get the Copyright Office to grant a DMCA exemption on behalf of iPhone owners who have chosen to jailbreak their iPhones, or bypass the restriction Apple places on standard iPhones that only allows the installation of applications from approved sources: the App Store. In its response to the Copyright Office (click here for PDF), Apple disagreed that such an exemption was proper because the very act of jailbreaking the iPhone results in copyright infringement.
The EFF’s argument is that jailbreaking your iPhone is protected under fair-use doctrines, and that the Copyright Office should grant an exemption because “the culture of tinkering (or hacking, if you prefer) is an important part of our innovation economy.” But Apple’s response is that few users of jailbroken iPhones actually jailbroke it themselves; instead, they downloaded software created by other parties to make that happen.
YouTube Content ID Tool Capable of Muting Video Sound
- YouTube now mutes recognized copyrighted songs in user’s videos.
As the court cases against YouTube and similar services, they are testing the employment of various strategies to keep them out of hot water. One such tool, YouTube’s Content ID Tool, is capable of identifying music in the audio stream of a video and muting it. This link to YouTube, YouTube: Joni Mitchell - Summertime (1998) !STEREO OPTION!, clearly demonstrates their ability to remove the sound from a video. In this particular case, the user, MYoutcastOR, clearly was infringing the song “Summertime” by Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell that is featured on the album Gershwin’s World, which is a Polygram Records record. Ploygram Records is owned by Universal Music Group, who is currently battling tube site Veoh.
This has several intended and unintended effects. On the upside, it allows youtube to leave creative works that might have um, “borrowed” some tunes to help them make their point in arguably viewable and working order. Whatever visual and textual messages were contained in the video are not lost. However, on the negative side this filter cannot determine when the occurance of such music would fall under the terms of fair use, and other exceptions to the copyright doctrines. And finally, for the users it results in un-removed YouTube dead pages like the one meationed in this article, which frustrates users, and hurts user exerpience.
Exclusive Interview with RemoveYourContent.com
We approached top removal specialist firm RemoveYourContent.com about their perception of the online market with respect to infringement. They were kind enough to stop sending DMCAs for just long enough to answer a few of our questions.
In your travels, would you say that copyright infringement is becoming a more pervasive problem?
I think that it’s not more pervasive… rather more organized and user-friendly. Back in the early days of the net… Usenet and IRC were pretty much common place for folks wishing to exchange pirated media. Nowadays, you can find that same level of piracy, but now on the web and you don’t need any knowledge related to IRC clients or Usenet newsreaders to access it.
Would you say that the degree of expertise required to acquire infringed materials decreasing?
Most definitely decreasing. The explosion of free file hosting server farms make downloading media as simple as clicking your mouse.
Besides your services, what other means of intellectual property rights control do you think content owners should exercise?
Content producers need to start suing copyright infringers (of their media) and holding people accountable for their actions. Internet piracy has become the equivalent to “jay walking”. The crazy thing about this whole process is that each copyright infringement is a violation of FEDERAL law, if one resides within the United States. Robbing a bank is a federal offense (here in the United States) and investigated by the FBI. The same could be said about copyright infringement, however, the government fails to see the tangible losses.. thus they do next to nothing in enforcement.
Do you think penalizing the end-user for doing the uploading is an effective strategy?
There’s a place for people who violate laws. It’s called jail or the penitentiary. If someone goes into convenience store,
shoplifts and is caught.. they go to jail. What’s happening online is tantamount to that very same crime.. yet nobody is “penalized”. There’s something very wrong with that.
Are there any sites that seem to accommodate you removing infringed material as a part of their expected business plan?
Answer related to pirated sites:
Not to my knowledge. We work with a lot of “pirate” sites directly.. to get client content down faster than just bombarding the host with Dmca notices. It’s not because we like what’s going on, it simply more efficient for everyone involved, except for the uploader that is.Answer related to clients:
We now keep our client site list confidential. I can say that we do work for approximately 67 producers worldwide.. including online mainstream, reality, hentai, sologirl, gay, shemale and fetish.. as well as a large portfolio of DVD lines.
Do you notify the advertisers that appear on a page containing infringing material?
Not anymore. We changed out terms of service to specifically
include that verbiage as well.
If so, do they respond? How?
Most, non-content producers do not respond or take any action against copyright infringement sites.
Do you feel removal requests received by infringers from your company tend to receive more attention than a similar request from a lesser known organization?
Honestly, I’m not sure. I would hope they would address every infringement notice they receive as equal. We’ve had our notices made public on more occasions then I can recall. Maybe that’s why.
What is the biggest trend in infringement that no one is talking about?
Affiliate infringement
We appreciate RemoveYourContent.com taking their time to speak with us about this issue. We look forward to speaking with them again about their ongoing endeavors.
YouTube’s copyright filtering system goes crazy
It seems that the filtering system from YouTube just pushed the limit of what you can do with content to a new level. The EFF’s Blog reported that in January, a teenage girl singning “Winter Wonderland” has seen her video removed by the filtering system since it was considered infriging on Warner Music copyright. The main problem seems to come from YouTube’s system who is unable to make a difference between a real copyright infrigement and fair usage of it. The EFF intend to appeal the decision.
So be carefull with posting your next birthday party video, as you may or may not know, the “Happy Birthday to You” song is copyrighted and you may end in violation the law
Eircom Instates “3 Strikes Policy”
I thought “3 strikes” was an american concept, but Irish Internet Service Providor, Eircom, announced that it would be placing such a policy in effect. At current, no American ISP has such a policy, but it is certain that they will be watching closely to determine if such measures are successful internationally. AVN reports, AVN: Irish ISP Adopts ‘Three Strikes’ Policy for Copyright Offenders, saying:
Irish internet provider Eircom has agreed to a “three strikes” policy that will disrupt service for those who violate copyright laws.
Eircom Group is the largest telecom in Ireland. The music industry and other corporations dealing with copyrighted entertainment are watching closely to see which ISPs follow with similar agreements.
What continues to be unclear is whether groups like the RIAA are being honest regarding their removals of content, and reports of infringement. Side stepping the court’s ability to determine the validity of such claims, and going direct through the ISP will probably result in a lot of “de facto” actions that may not actually be fair to the end users. See IPHRA: User Counter Claims for YouTube Videos Removed by Warner Music Group
What penalties if any would apply to companies filing invalid or dubious complaints?
Adult Affiliate Compay EuroRevenue Removes DRM
EuroRevenue, the adult affiliate company behind GermanGooGirls.com, 666Bukkake.com, ExtremeBukkake.com, and Teen18.com, recently removed Digital Rights Management from their member’s areas. Company representitive, Todd Glider, shared his thoughts on EuroRevenue’s 4 years of DRM usage with adult news outlet Xbiz in an article entitled, Xbiz: DRM is Dead, Long Live DRM. Overall, they saw DRM protection as necessary and cite still having to spend hours searching illegal websites for stolen content. When asked to explain the move they said:
So why did we do it? Why did we move away from DRM?
Simple: Windows stopped supporting it and we found no suitable alternative that was both secure and hassle-free. Truth be told, if Windows had not dropped the ball our DRM protections would still be in place.
Reports like these indicate that although resistance to DRM has been strong, and the support for DRM may be waning, the market for such a technology may be as strong or stronger than ever.
YouTube Users Affected by Warner Music Dispute
It appears to be somewhat unclear what rights users have over derivative content made from original works. In this article, CNet: YouTube users caught in Warner Music spat, Warner Music extended the rights to use their music to YouTube’s community of users, then revoked those same rights later. Warner even went as far as to request removal of any derivative works that were created by users, with some questioning the authority and spirit of such requests concerning derivative creative works.
The article also aserts that some affected users have attempted to respond to the complaints, recieving little help (CNet):
But he has so many questions about whether his video truly violates copyright law and if so, what part of the video infringes? That’s the other problem raised by the quarrel between Warner Music and YouTube. When users are dragged into it, there’s few places to get answers. Vidal said he called Warner Music and talked to about half a dozen people in the eight days since his video was removed. He has yet to hear back why exactly the video was pulled down or whether he and the record company can strike a separate deal.
To its credit, Viacom set up a support hot line to help answer questions and address disputes when it began pulling content from YouTube.
Although unlikely, it is possible for a person to seek damages for false copyright claims, especially if organizations are unresponsive to attempts to resolve such issues. Could Warner Music be exposing itself to some degree of liability by so liberally removing YouTube content?