Intellectual Property Rights Holders Association Blog

According to The Wall Street Journal, the file-sharing web sites Pirate Bay and Kazaa made attempts to launch as legal music download sites after the copyright infringement charges both are facing. Hans Pandeya, the CEO of the Swedish company Global Gaming Factory (GGF) explained that his company would acquire the Pirate Bay for nearly $8 million. However, the site would now be subscribed to by users and would be a “give and take” model.

This model would work by having content providers and copyright owners being paid for user uploads, and subscribers might work off subscription fees by sharing content, or by lending PC storage capacities.

Nevertheless, this week, Ricardo Dijkstra, attorney for the GGF announced that GGF would only purchase the Pirate Bay if it could be turned into a legitimate business. He said the business would depend on “whether those assets can be used in a legal manner.” GGF was named along with the Pirate Bay in a civil lawsuit and wants to currently emphasize that they presently do not have control over the BitTorrent site.

Kazaa has now managed to break free of any legal woes. Although they were brought down along with Napster in 2006, they now have become a legitimate business and users can now download unlimited music for $19.98 per month.

According the Wall Street Journal, movie studios began to drastically increase the prices of DVDs that came with the right to download a digital copy of a movie to one’s computer. However, it is now up to a federal judge to decide the legality of this issue questioning whether or not the studios are the only ones to profit. In April, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of U.S. District Court in San Francisco opened up a hearing to assess whether RealNetworks are allowed to sell a computer program named RealDVD which allows consumer to copy purchased DVDs onto personal computers. Prior to this issue, the studios won the temporary right to ban the sale of RealDVD; if the program is allowed back on the market, studios may lose their efforts to gain profit from the digital copies of DVDs. The question is whether or not it is worth it now for consumers to purchase high priced DVDs, when there is a piece of software which allows someone to get the same thing for free.

Most importantly, studios wish to keep control of their own products and do not want outside companies to become involved with a piece of the profit. With studios earning over $13 million in profit from the sale of DVDs last year, this issue becomes imperative for the studios to be proactive on the ban of Real sales. Furthermore, the studios claim that this is an infringement of the DMCA because nobody can make copies of a movie without the permission of the copyright holder. Although Real claims that its product is only for personal use, a spokeswoman for the MPAA claims, “What Real is actually doing is usurping our product.”