I thought everyone would enjoy this little diddy from today’s LATimes on how distributors are just kind of giving up on Spain as a viable market. As if it will somehow stop the illegal downloading. (!?!?!?!)  I delicious’d it, but wanted to expand a bit.

Of interest: The politician backing the bill is the minister of culture, a former filmmaker, btw. Normally, I would think nothing of it, but after just viewing Food, Inc. (legally streamed through Netflix, of course), I’m a little sensitive to the whole self-interest and government connection. Granted, to the best of my knowledge, he wasn’t the head of a media conglomerate or studio.

The article discussed the ACTA’s “Three Strike” policy as a possible solution. It also sounds like the ISPs are positioning the accessibility to the movies as a bit of a value proposition in their marketing, which consumers consider as a form of permission and endorsement for illegal downloading.

Good times.

The National Swimming Pool Foundation (NSPF) has filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, against three Nebraska health departments alleging copyright infringement of materials from the NSPF Certified Pool/Spa Operator Handbook. According to the article, the NSPF is a non-profit organization that offers certification courses for public pool operators to help prevent illness, drowning, and accidents. The infringed materials were registered by NSPF with the U.S. Copyright Office and as a result, infringers may be held liable for damages and attorney’s fee.

 The departments being accused for using the materials are the Nebraska Department of Health & Human Services, the Douglas County Department of Health, the Lincoln/Lancaster County Department of Health, and individuals within those departments. Thomas M. Lachocki, the CEO of NSPF said “It is unfortunate that we are forced to file suit to recover damages against agencies and individuals in a profession we have worked so hard to help. Any damages received by NSPF beyond out attorney fees will be directed to our grant budget to fund projects to protect citizens.” The handbook includes information regarding the latest on pool water contamination from the CDC, chemical testing methods, information about health benefits, and guidelines from the National Plasters Council on pool resurfacing, among other info which can be found here.

 It bothers me to see a non-profit organization sue health departments for infringing on materials that I’d consider facts. As soon as I read this article I thought of the discussion we had in class about scientific research and how it should be freely available for others to use and work on. I understand that it takes time and money to conduct such research and that it was the NSPF’s initiative to compile a handbook, but isn’t copyright supposed to be about creative works? Most of the content in the handbook are guidelines, testing procedures, or other factual information.

 I don’t think the NSPF will have much of a strong argument to win the case. The lawsuit itself is going against its purpose to provide and communicate research information between state and county health departments and leading environmental health officials. Copyright laws and regulations need to be re-evaluated for society’s best interests.

It’s a cutthroat, dog eat dog world, and it’s true; when you get famous, loyalties get extinguished. What’s been punned as a “Bad Romance” in the news lately is a law suit Lady Gaga encountered with her ex producer & romantic interest, Rob Fusari. Rolling Stone reports that he is suing her for $30 million, or a twenty percent cut of her profits from a contract she signed in 2006 which she argues was an illegal contract.

Fusari who co-wrote songs such as “Papparazi” and “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” is claiming that he even accidentally came up with her name “Lady Gaga” and help craft her much of her image. Lady Gaga’s rep has left no comment on the lawsuit but I don’t think this is something that will just disintegrate or escape the headlines. The whole situation has left me questioning what can be considered intellectual property, and what type of defense there might be to the accusations if they don’t settle into an agreement.

As we obviously know, songs are copyrightable, and Fusari was given credit to the songs that he co-wrote. Although this is not an issue in the lawsuit, it does establish and legitimize her professional relationship with Fusari, proving he is not some scorned lover. So let’s tackle the name first. If he did come up with the name, does he have it registered? My guess is probably not, so any other documents or an admitting statement from the defense, proving his invented it would be helpful to his defense. But my guess is that he just gave her the name without getting into any sort of contract. With that alone, I don’t think there is much of a lawsuit.

Now to say that he help craft her image and came up with the name, it’s almost as if he is suggesting he branded her, and came up with her trademark. Yet as unfortunate as it may be for him getting shafted now that she’s famous, if he doesn’t have any valid documents to prove this, then he doesn’t have much of a case. Therefore, it is all going to come down to this allegedly “illegal contract.”

Until E! News gets a look at this document, I don’t think we will be able to determine if it is legitimate and binding. So the moral of the story goes: don’t give up your ideas so easily, especially the good ones, and be weary of everything you sign off on. I think this case gets at the heart of copyright law because even if something is IP, it comes down to our written contracts that establish ownership.

So what does everyone think of the ACTA draft that leaked this weak? (And has anyone written about this yet? It seems like a pretty big topic in the digital rights/copyright community, but I couldn’t find any other blog posts about it.)

The ACTA draft is a US-driven international treaty that, if adopted, would hold internet service providers responsible for their customers downloading infringing material. This is the first time this policy would be adopted on a global scale. Negotiations have been going on for two years, but this January draft just leaked via a French digital rights group called La Quadrature du Net.

The European Parliament agreed to oppose it if it contained a “three strikes” policy, which sees consumers disconnected after a number of notification letters warning that they are violating copyright. The three strikes/graduated response policy is pretty much the cornerstone of the proposal. The MPAA and the RIAA, on the other hand, are very big fans of these measures. Other negotiating parties are Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and Switzerland.

The comments on the Wired post vary from “it’s about time!” to “This is akin to shutting down a businesses parking lot because a thief parks his stolen car there.”

To me, it looks like another case of trying to get the most retribution out of the service providers rather than tackling the actual problem – the infringing users.

Thoughts?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/terminate-copyright-scofflaws/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher#ixzz0jURbLQ

On Tuesday I had the pleasure of having Sam Yagan come speak in my Patterns of Entrepreneurship class. For those of you who are not familiar with Yagan, he is the founder of such websites as, Sparknotes.com, Edonkey.com, and Okcupid.com. As you would imagine, based on the popularity of these websites he is extremely successful, and it was very interesting to hear him speak. But more importantly his startups, Sparknotes, and Edonkey are heavily influenced and affected by copyright law. Sparknotes was his first startup, which he founded with two of his classmates in their senior year at Harvard. It was originally called TheSpark.com, and started out providing humorous content. When the three friends and classmates were about to graduate, they had a website that was receiving millions of hits per month, an exceptionally high amount of traffic for that time period. At that point they wondered what they could do with the site to turn it into a viable business model. Ultimately, they decided that they could offer study guides similar to Cliffnotes, and commission literature students at Harvard to create study guides to post on the web. They immediately received positive feedback from the users of the sight and began to commission additional study guides. Yagan said that this was only possible because him and his partners were 100% positive that they would not be sued for copyright infringement of the works of literature that they were offering the study guides for, because Cliffnotes already offered the same exact service, only in print. If it weren’t for the pre-existing business for them to model themselves after, they would never have been able to take the risk assuming fair use, which would just be too too unsure, and expensive if they had to go to court. Yagan and his partners eventually sol d sparknotes.com to Barnes and Noble. Yagan went on to co-found Edonkey.com with one other partner, who designed the digital platform, while he handled the business side. He said that they decided to target the European market, and avoid doing business in the United States to avoid coming under fire from the RIAA. He claims that within a couple of years of launching the site that the traffic on Edonkey.com was taking up 30% of the total bandwidth in Europe. He confirmed many of the ideas about file sharing that we have been discussing in class and reading about, such as when he said, “We didn’t make music free, but we reinvented the single…people loved getting the three songs they want, not the 15.” He also went on to talk about how he ended up becoming a public voice in the fight against copyright law, because of his leadership role in edonkey.com, despite his desire to keep a low profile. He said most of his colleagues were there to promote the free culture movement, while he was merely in it for the monetary gains. Finally, he argued that with the rise of file sharing websites and programs, including his, that, “A revolution occurred in young people’s perception of the value of music.” I believe that this perceptual revolution is the reason for the troubles of the record industry today, and a revolution that they will have to address in order to become as successful as they have been in the past with the old format of doing business. All in all it was a very interesting speech, and I recommend that everybody look Sam Yagan and Edonkey.com up if you haven’t already heard of it.

Since I don’t have cable TV in my apartment, I’ve been watching some old Saturday Night Live on Netflix on my computer. After watching a few episodes from last season, I noticed that the musical performances were left out of the episodes. I searched the internet to see if there was an explanation for this, but I found nothing. I’m sure that there is a legal reason, quite possibly pertaining to copyright law that explains why Netflix would leave this aspect of the show out. The issue raises some interesting questions about who owns the rights to the musical performance. A SNL episode is definitely a creative work, that would be copyrighted by NBC as a work for hire, which Netflix has to secure the rights to in order to stream it on their website. Maybe the reasons that Netflix would not include the performance in their streaming of the episodes is either A) NBC doesn’t own the rights to the performance, and possibly the record label or the artist does, or B) NBC charges a higher licensing fee to include the musical performance for some reason, which Netflix doesn’t view as worth the cost. The situation seems unclear because there is a musical performance of a copyrighted work within a television show that is also copyrighted. I will keep looking for the answer to this question, but it does raise some interesting questions. Is the artist contributing their performance to the episode, and if not who owns the rights to the performance?

According to a former advisor of Michael Jackson, Fox News aired clips of a 2003 interview with Jackson’s ex-wife Debbie Rowe on the show “Geraldo at Large” on July 5th without proper payment or permission.  The advisor, F. Marc Schaffel sued Fox News last Thursday seeking damages in the U.S. District court of Los Angeles, CA.  Schaffel has previously sued and won judgment again Jackson.  Schaffel owns the copyright to the interview supposedly aired “as part of a special intended to balance out a damaging interview aired earlier that year”. (Huffington Post Online) Claims on behalf of Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., are that of “fair use” and the right to air the footage as part of new programming. In turn, Murdoch has threatened to sue competitor the British Broadcasting Corp. for copyright infringement, stating that they’ve been stealing content from his company’s newspapers. “There’s a doctrine called ‘fair use,’ which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether. But we are better. If you look at them, most of their stuff is stolen from the newspapers now, and we’ll be suing them for copyright,” claimed Mr. Murdoch in an interview the TV channel Sky News Australia.

I intern at a publishing company and while I was there, I came across an interesting article in Publishing Weekly about an interview with Jaron Lanier, whose new book, You Are Not a Gadget, is coming out this year. Lanier was very active in the development of Virtual Reality and, in this article, reveals his thoughts about Web 2.0 and copyright.

A little about Lanier:

Lanier has a rather diverse resume. He specializes in unusual music instruments, has co-composed a few sound tracks, and writes chamber and orchestra pieces. As a musician, he has several connections within the musical community, and thus witnessed the damage caused by the Web on their musical careers. He says this has served as motivation for his current platform on Web 2.0. Lanier was also among the first to explore the potential of ‘Virtual Reality.’ In fact, he was the one who coined the term. His company, VPL Research, was the first to sell Virtual Reality products and find beneficial applications for the technology aside from avatars and virtual worlds. VR technology has since been used for surgical simulation, vehicle prototyping, and architectural modeling. Lanier is, of course, an author as well.

The article: “PW profiles Jaron Lanier: The Single-Copy Web”

With his background experience, Lanier has developed some interesting opinions regarding Web 2.0. The article discusses one of his current arguments, which basically is for the elimination of multiple copies and the ability to create more, leaving a single-copy web. Lanier suggests that for a small price each time, Web users can access whatever it is they are interested. And this, he believes, should be a universal system implemented and regulated by the government. In the article, Lanier also briefly discusses his dislike of ‘freemium.’ Freemium is an idea developed by Chris Anderson, in which all basic products are provided for free on the Internet, but advance or special features are sold for a premium. Lanier believes that this idea is an unsuccessful one because the new market it creates, built solely upon the unique availability of these features, is nullified when what it provides becomes the common standard.  

Here is the link to the article if any one is interested in reading it in full: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/447925-PW_profiles_Jaron_Lanier_The_Single_Copy_Web.php

What Lanier proposes is interesting concept, but ultimately an improbable success. Without a doubt, his idea ‘solves’ the problem of copyright infringement, but at the expense of the author’s right to make copies. It would take a monumental amount of time and energy to convince congress to scrap their copyright laws and, frankly, I just don’t see that happening.