[Quote]:

Last week, the MPAA joined the fray with a brief in support of Illinois federal judge John F. Grady’s ruling. It urged the Seventh Circuit not to draw a legal distinction between hosting content and embedding it. In the MPAA’s view, both actions should carry the risk of liability for direct copyright infringement.

[Quote]:

And yet… Congress still appears ready to move forward with CISPA the week of April 23rd. And the amazing (no, astounding) thing is that many politicians in Congress have no idea that people are up in arms over this yet. In talking to different people on Capitol Hill, the story is along the lines of “oh, is there some controversy over this?” Like SOPA early on, it appears that Congress simply takes for granted that if you call something one thing (whether it’s “stopping piracy” or “protecting cybersecurity”) no one will bother looking at the details to realize just how problematic the bill actually is.

Yes they paid attention, they just don’t give a fuck. Their corporate backers want this so they will try until it passes or they are voted out. And they also know the average voter has the attention span of a demented fruit fly. We need to educate congress and congressional aides and lobbyists that freedom on the internet is the third-rail of the digital age.

[Quote]:

Video footage of a police raid on the home of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is missing, and authorities claim they’re not quire sure what happened to it.

How…. convenient.

[Quote]:

Open-education resources have been hailed as a trove of freely available information that can be used to build textbooks at virtually no cost. But a copyright lawsuit filed last month presents a potential roadblock for the burgeoning movement.

A group of three large academic publishers has sued the start-up Boundless Learning in federal court, alleging that the young company, which produces open-education alternatives to printed textbooks, has stolen the creative expression of their authors and editors, violating their intellectual-property rights. The publishers Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher Education filed their joint complaint last month in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The publishers’ complaint takes issue with the way the upstart produces its open-education textbooks, which Boundless bills as free substitutes for expensive printed material. To gain access to the digital alternatives, students select the traditional books assigned in their classes, and Boundless pulls content from an array of open-education sources to knit together a text that the company claims is as good as the designated book. The company calls this mapping of printed book to open material “alignment”—a tactic the complaint said creates a finished product that violates the publishers’ copyrights.

So they claim copyright on “particular subjects to teach, in a particular order”? Say goodbye to the concept of teaching, then.

[Quote]:

When hospitals come upon a technology with a proven track record of saving lives, you’d expect a flood of investment to expand its use, and a race by manufacturers to bring new products to market. Digital medical records, which give physicians quick and easy access to patients’ case histories, is an example of such a technology. Over the past dozen or so years, hospitals across the country have gone digital, leading to better patient outcomes and making hangar-size file-storage facilities obsolete. But even as more hospitals opted into using computer records, the leading vendors of picture storage software—an important component of medical records—completely stopped introducing new products to the market.

Why, precisely when the market for their product had just taken off, would companies stop innovating? An explanation comes from Catherine Tucker, an economist at MIT who has studied the medical IT sector. In an unpublished study, she shows that the slowdown in R&D occurred as a result of litigation by a company whose primary reason for existing is to acquire the rights to others’ inventions and file patent claims against producers of related products—a patent troll. Tucker’s study is, to date, one of the best pieces of quantitative evidence of the broken state of America’s patent system, a critical concern not just for improving health care but for encouraging the innovation that’s needed to ensure future economic prosperity.

[Quote]:

Ah, Chris Dodd. It seems like every time he opens his mouth, he makes things worse. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, he responds to a series of questions about SOPA by trying to tiptoe around the issue, but basically admits that there are backroom conversations going on between a small number of people, and that “between now and sometime next year,” Hollywood and the tech industry will “come to an understanding.” He’s asked specifically if there are conversations going on now, and if the White House is pressuring folks to come to such “an understanding.”

THR: Are there conversations going on now?

Dodd: I’m confident that’s the case, but I’m not going to go into more detail because obviously if I do, it becomes counterproductive.

THR: Did you feel personally blindsided by Obama over SOPA?

Dodd: I’m not going to revisit the events of last winter. I’ll only say to you that I’m confident he’s using his good relationships in both communities to do exactly what you and I have been talking about.

Yes, you know why it would be “counterproductive” to go into more detail? Because he knows damn well that the problem with SOPA was that it was negotiated in the backrooms with private parties and no participation from the actual stakeholders: the public.

So, yes, admitting that you’re doing the same thing all over again would be counterproductive. You know what would be productive? Stopping this political backroom dealing crap, and finally coming out and having a public discussion. But he won’t do it, because Dodd is a coward and a DC-insider who only knows how to cut deals, not how to actually respond to the public’s best interests.

[Quote]:

Record labels and Hollywood have described The Pirate Bay as one of the biggest threats to their business, but thousands of artists clearly disagree with this view. In recent weeks more than 5000 independent artists have signed up to be promoted by the world’s largest torrent site. Those who were lucky enough to be featured are overwhelmed by the career boost and the positive responses from the public.

[Quote]:

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a treaty aimed at harmonizing global copyright enforcement, is now weaving its way through the various committees of the European Parliament. Its final vote could come as early as June 11th.

“The first committee to file a recommendation, the Industry, Research and Energy committee (ITRE), has just published their draft opinion on ACTA,” writes Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge this morning.

Crucially, the final point in the ITRE’s draft opinion advises the Committee on International Trade to withhold its consent to the agreement [ACTA].

[Quote]:

Can a farmer commit patent infringement just by planting soybeans he bought on the open market? This week, the Supreme Court asked the Obama administration to weigh in on the question. The Court is pondering an appeals court decision saying that such planting can, in fact, infringe patents.

[Quote]:

In their ongoing efforts to make The Pirate Bay inaccessible, the Hollywood-backed anti-piracy outfit BREIN is now going after the Dutch Pirate Party. BREIN is demanding that the political party ceases operating a proxy site, and is threatening to sue. The Pirate Party is not impressed by the demands and has sent BREIN their response as a torrent, fittingly hosted at The Pirate Bay.

[..]

“The demands are ridiculous,” Pirate Party chairman Dirk Poot told TorrentFreak.

“A private lobbying organization should not be allowed to be the censor of the Dutch internet. We were also amazed to find an ex-parte decision attached, threatening Dutch minors with €1000 per day fines for operating their proxy. If we would have yielded, their trick would immediately be played out against numerous other private citizens.”

According to the Pirate Party chairman BREIN’s efforts are not just going too far, they are useless too.

“There are a plethora of proxy sites on the internet. On almost any them TPB can by reached, even with a single URL. That’s not even mentioning the ways you can get to TPB if you’re willing to put in more effort than saving a single URL. If this keeps going there will be no Internet left by the time BREIN has achieved its goal of making TPB inaccessible.”

“In their self-righteous zealousness they have brought substantial damage to the free and open Internet,” Poot said.

If you want to support a Dutch political party:

BIC: RABONL2U
IBAN: NL41 RABO 0108 3789 69
name: Piratenpartij, Zwolle
Bank account: 1083.78.969

Quote

The South Shore Public Libraries system is boycotting Random House e-books after it abruptly increased the price of downloadable books.

“I don’t want to pick a fight with them, but their pricing’s unfair and I think they need to change it,” chief librarian Troy Myers said Monday.

For instance, the library had paid $28 for the novel 77 Shadow Street by Dean Koontz, but that price jumped in March to $85. Tom Brokaw’s Time of Our Lives was $26, but Random House is now charging $85. And Louis L’Amour’s westerns have more than tripled to $20.97, from $5.99.

This is getting ridiculous. Penguin has prevented sales of e-books and audiobooks to libraries. Personally I wouldn’t want to antagonise librarians. Who knows what can happen? And who is still reading Louis L’Amour, for heaven’s sake?

[Quote]:

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). In fact, it was caught strong-arming its suppliers into supporting the act, which has since been stalled by massive online protests. In an email, NBC asked those suppliers to sign on to the CreativeAmerica movement in defense of the bill:

We are writing to ask you for help on an issue that is one our top business priorities – content theft on the Internet, which is a major threat to the strength of our business. Our major guilds and unions are joining us in the fight to keep our businesses strong so that the tidal wave of content theft does not kill jobs. But if the current trend continues, it’s not too strong to say that this threat could adversely affect our business relationship with you.

NBC plays the sympathy card, saying that ‘theft’ is a major threat to its business and the jobs that it supports. But the moment that it is more expedient for it to just swipe a graphic from the internet to use on a public facing page that may be seen my many thousands of applicants and visitors, all of that goes out of the window.

The thing is, there is likely nothing malicious about NBC using the Xcode icon. It’s probably a casual thing that isn’t representative of its overall web design policies. But it is being used in a context where it is aiding NBC in making money for itself by starting up a new property.

This kind of casual copyright infringement, with no malicious intent, is exactly the kind of thing that SOPA was after. If people are outright stealing from content providers and selling their wares elsewhere, hey, that’s wrong. But SOPA covered so many cases of fair use, remixing, commentary and satire that it would have made a good number of the websites in the world immediately vulnerable to being taken down at the whim of ‘content creators’ like NBC.

[Quote]:

Apple has launched a new patent assault on its competitors, one that appears to unleash the nukes that Steve Jobs reportedly told his biographer Walter Isaacson he was going to drop on Google’s Android.

“I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product,” the late Apple cofounder told the author of the überpopular authorized biography Steve Jobs in a 2010 interview. “I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

[..]

The patent being asserted by Sewell and his crew is USPTO Patent #1,042,012, first granted to the American Mathematical Society in October 1912, subsequently renewed, then acquired by Apple at an unknown date.

The first entry among the patent’s Claims describes “A quadrilateral having all four interior angles of 90°, opposite sides that are parallel, and congruent diagonals that bisect each other.”

[Quote]:

He added that the lawsuits were used to extort settlements from people who are neither subject to the courts’ personal jurisdiction nor responsible for copyright violation, but do not want to be dragged into a court in the lawsuit that might seek disclosure of the contents of their PCs.

Sokath, his eyes opened.

[Quote]:

In an amusing twist in the ongoing Elsevier saga, Elsevier are attempting to shut down the twitter account @FakeElsevier for trademark violation.

background info

[Quote]:

Last week a large, profitable company sued a small start-up business for patent infringement. As a non-legal person, I can only guess that this sort of thing must happen fairly often. I would also guess that the large companies, which have the means to hire crackerjack legal teams and drag cases out, must often win. And while I guess I feel bad for the small businesses, I’ve never really cared before now.

Because this time, the stakes are high.

This time, it’s my daughter’s voice on the line. Literally.

[Quote]:

“Today, yet another British citizen is betrayed by the British Government,” she said.

[Quote]:

So the Australian government organized a secret meeting, but doesn’t know who attended? If that’s true, it suggests a stunning level of incompetence that ought to require heads to roll; and if it’s not true, then heads should still roll, for being economical with the truth.

But perhaps the most outrageous aspect of the response to the FOI request is the underlying justification for providing a content-free non-reply:

“Disclosure of the documents while the negotiations are still in process, would, in my view, prejudice, hamper and impede those negotiations to an unacceptable degree,” wrote [Attorney-General’s Department senior legal officer] Purcell. That would, in my view, be contrary to the interests of good government — which would, in turn, be contrary to the public interest.”

What this really means is: “All hell will break loose when the public finds out what is being discussed behind closed doors. So what we’re going to do is to come up with an agreement in secret, and then present it as a fait accompli, without offering citizens any options to change anything substantive. By contrast, to release the documents, and allow the public to have a say in how they should be allowed to use a critical 21st-century technology, would be contrary to the interests of this very good government, which by definition is identical with the public interest.”

[Quote]:

Print magazines are still a better experience than their digital counterparts.

If you’re going to successfully evolve into a new medium you can’t just add gimmicks, you have to substantially upgrade the user experience. If you asked anyone 15 years ago what the future of music looked like they would have told you that it was about fidelity, listening to an album would sound like you were at a concert or in the center of the orchestra pit. But that hasn’t been the case, in fact the overall quality of the music we listen to has gone down. The experience of being able to fit your entire music collection in your pocket, or stream any song to your phone leapfrogged any fidelity improvements other formats like DVD audio could make.

We never saw this kind of improvement in magazines, if fact the experience has gotten worse. Looking at a magazine on an iPad at its best leaves you wondering if you’ve seen all the content and at its worse feels like your reading a broken PDF. I subscribe to two magazines that have free iPad downloads for subscribers and have never download the digital version, reading the dead tree version is just easier.

How can magazines improve? They are no longer limited to releasing content on a monthly or weekly basis that was necessary with print. They can now put their content out in a format that is really easy to share and build reader loyalty. They can now get back to their roots, magazines like Rolling Stone were founded by people who ate, breathed and crapped music. I’m sure there are folks working there now who love music but we haven’t seen that kind of passion in the magazine in decades.

I know what you’re thinking: we’ve seen all this before, it’s called a blog. Yep, exactly.

It’s taken time, but blogs have become what magazines should have been evolving into.

This is a compelling argument except for the fact that blogging doesn’t generate a ton of revenue. It may be a classic example of Innovator’s Dilemma, but that dilemma isn’t a false one. It’s hard to retool your industry to work on much, much, much less income.

[Quote]:

Even though the ACTA text is now finalized, getting details from national governments about what exactly happened during the negotiations is proving extremely difficult, with information still trickling out slowly.

For example, as the Netzpolitik blog explains (German original), the European Commission tried to counter accusations that the negotiations were lacking in transparency by pointing out that the German government had a representative present during all the sessions (that’s transparency?). This was news to people, since the German government had somehow omitted to mention this fact.

A natural question was therefore: who exactly took part? A German freedom of information request was put in to find out, and refused on rather remarkable grounds: that it might place the German officials who had been present during the negotiations at risk, because of the “emotional discussions” about ACTA that have taken place recently. The German government even claimed that threats of physical violence had been made against those who had taken part in ACTA, and so it couldn’t endanger the persons involved by naming them.

This all seems pretty far fetched. I don’t recall hearing about anyone threatening ACTA officials with physical violence, but I suppose it’s possible that someone, somewhere in Germany, say, wrote something to this effect. However, the Germany government is really missing the point here.

The fact that such “emotional discussions” have taken place demonstrates how deeply frustrated people are at the continuing lack of transparency surrounding the ACTA negotiations. Using that previous failure to provide information to justify further withholding of details is only likely to exacerbate things. It’s time for the German government, and the other signatories, to stop playing these bureaucratic games and to start engaging with their citizens through the release of more details about what exactly happened behind ACTA’s closed doors.

[Quote]:

“Einstein could not patent his celebrated law that E = mc2; nor could Newton have patented the law of gravity,” he wrote.

The basis for Prometheus’s invention, Justice Breyer said, was also a law of nature — “namely, relationships between concentrations of certain metabolites in the blood and the likelihood that a dosage of a thiopurine drug will prove ineffective or cause harm.”

The question for the court was whether the use that Prometheus made of this relationship was eligible for patent protection. In general, Justice Breyer wrote, an inventor must do more than “recite a law of nature and then add the instruction ‘apply the law.’ ”

“Einstein, we assume, could not have patented his famous law by claiming a process consisting of simply telling linear accelerator operators to refer to the law to determine how much energy an amount of mass has produced (or vice versa),” he wrote.

[Quote]:

One of the more amazing things about the recent moves by the entertainment industry to put in place stricter laws around the globe to attack file sharing, is that they still don’t realize how pointless this is compared to the only real solution, which is to offer more of what consumers actually want, rather than trying to force them into some old way of doing business. For every “victory” the industry declares, we see more and more evidence that the file sharing just moves further away from what the industry can control (and keeps growing). The Pirate Bay, of course, has always been one of the leaders in mocking the legacy entertainment industry as it continues to operate, despite years-long efforts to shut it down. And even as there are reports of new raids pending, the organization has shifted to magnet links, meaning that taking it down will be even more meaningless than in the past.

Even so, the folks involved in TPB are still trying to go further. As highlighted on TorrentFreak, the latest plan from TPB is to see if it can serve the site from GPS-controlled drones flying over international waters

[Quote]:

The country’s largest Internet service providers haven’t given up on the idea of becoming copyright cops.

Last July, Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers announced that they had agreed to adopt policies designed to discourage customers from illegally downloading music, movies and software. Since then, the ISPs have been very quiet about their antipiracy measures.

But during a panel discussion before a gathering of U.S. publishers here today, Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, said most of the participating ISPs are on track to begin implementing the program by July 12.

Supporters say this could become the most effective antipiracy program ever.

And for those of you who believe that, they also have a few prime bridges for sale.

[Quote]:

Face Britain, a world-record breaking attempt supported by the Prince Charles’s Foundation for Children and the Arts, has gathered some 70,000 self portraits from youngsters since it was launched.

But the children are required to surrender “all intellectual property rights” when they upload their handmade images. The young artists can then buy back their creations in the form of mugs, mouse mats and T-shirts – but don’t appear to get a penny back for the commercial exploitation.

[Quote]:

There can hardly be an adult in the world who didn’t enjoy being read a story as a child and for many of us recollection of these tales means reliving some of our earliest memories.

But rather than being scared of the big bad wolf, kids in Belgium have a new foe – the country’s evil copyright overlords.

In quite possibly their lowest move yet, rights group SABAM are now trying to attach a price to children’s reading sessions taking place in libraries up and down the country.

More often associated with music-related collections, SABAM have been contacting libraries that hold sessions where children can listen to stories read out by library staff. These, the group insists, are events held in public and are therefore chargeable.

One target for SABAM is a library in Dilbeek that has been holding a twice-monthly reading hour for children.

“Each time a dozen or so children attend,” library worker Alexandra Vervaecke told DeMorgen. “A while ago we were suddenly contacted by SABAM and told that we have to pay. I have done the calculations: for us it would amount to 250 euro per year.”

[Quote]:

For the last 20 years a little pub in Southampton, England, has been serving beer to the local community and all that time it’s had the same name – The Hobbit. But Saul Zaentz, the producer behind movies such as The English Patient and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, has sent in the lawyers to do something about that.

Zaentz owns the merchandising rights to The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and his lawyers have warned that if the pub doesn’t change its name and remove all references to Tolkien-related items by the end of May, its owners will be sued for infringement.

[Quote]:

A California judge ruled last week that Kaleidescape, the company behind a line of high-end home media servers, violated the terms of its DVD licensing agreement by allowing consumers to rip DVDs.

The DVD Copy Control Association sets rules that all manufacturers of DVD players must follow. The organization objected to the DVD-ripping functionality of Kaleidescape’s products and went to court to force them off the market. On Thursday, Judge William Monahan issued a broad injuncton barring Kaleidescape from selling its DVD-streaming products.

The case is a useful reminder that, thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, major content companies continue to enjoy veto power over the design of digital media devices. Include a digital lock in your spec and the DMCA keeps anyone from bypassing it, even if the intended use might well be legal. Hollywood is using this power to prevent “DVD jukebox” products from reaching consumers.

[Quote]:

Let’s just pay them the money! They’ve made it very clear that they consider digital copies to be just as valuable as the original. That makes it a lot easier to pay them back in two ways: a. We can email them scanned images of dollar bills instead of bulky paper and b. We don’t have to worry about the hassle of shipping huge quantities of cash.

[Quote]:

But if you want to sell it to me, you’re doing it my way.