The political proposals in the book are also the ones carried by the Green group in the European Parliament, though they originate with the Pirate Party.

Extratorrent did a story on the book, and Reddit got a story linked there with a title saying “Copyright protection is suggested to be cut from 70 to 20 years from publication”. (Which is factually wrong – the proposal is to reduce from life plus 70 to a baseline five years, extendable to 20 through registration, limiting the monopoly to commercial uses only – but still.)

What strikes me as odd, and indefensible, are the reactions of resignation in the Reddit thread.

This is a selection of the highest-voted comments:

- Nice, but it won’t happen. Publishing companies would scream bloody murder.

- This would be fantastic but will never happen because companies have a vested interest in maintaining their ability to collect royalties indefinitely.

- They can suggest anything they like, but I really see no reason why the RIAA or MPAA would listen to anything but making it longer.

I am absolutely flabbergasted that this seems to be the prevailing view. When did people forget that legislators, and not corporations, have the final say over our laws?

The copyright industry is not a stakeholder in the copyright monopoly. They are a beneficiary. Of course they’ll want more benefits.

Who gives a rat’s ass what the copyright industries want?

Their interest is not the public interest. The only reason they have been getting their way in lawmaking is that legislators have believed – up until pretty much now – that this issue is completely peripheral in public opinion, so they haven’t cared about it at all, and they have ignored this field of policymaking to let it be run by easily-lobbied public servants.

To see people confuse corporations for legislators to this degree frustrates me. There is absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t hold legislators accountable for every single button they press – and let them know that it is us, not a special interest, that determine whether they keep or lose their job.

Failing that, one can also replace them entirely, as I set out to do with a movement that has now spread to 50+ countries. That also gets their attention. Guaranteed.

But no matter what, don’t ever accept the resigned position that the copyright industries determine law. They don’t. They’ve gotten away with wishlists because politicians haven’t cared. They do care when tens of thousands of people make noise, and we can do that. We know absolutely well that we’re capable of that and much more.

If the copyright industry collapses – who cares?

The job of every entrepreneur is to make money given the current constraints of society. They don’t get to dismantle civil liberties if they fail to make money – especially if they fail to make money. No entrepreneur has the right to shape society to guarantee themselves a profit.

There will always be culture, and the artists are doing better than ever. It’s more than time to rid our economy and our net of the burden of these parasitic middlemen – and don’t ever dare think you’re powerless to do exactly that.

Source: Why Are People Resigning Before The Copyright Industries’ Will?

The problem recently is that civil servants, not politicians, have been tasked with upholding the copyright monopoly. These people are not only unaccountable, but also easily accessible to copyright industry lobbyists, and these civil servants provide background material to the actual decision-making politicians. And if you control the background material, you also control the decision’s outcome. Long story short, these civil servants don’t care about the costs to society of enforcing the copyright monopoly in a changed communications environment: it’s literally not their job.

If the issue had been properly politicized, then politicians would be forced to look at more than just the necessary methods for enforcing today’s monopoly laws – they would also have to look at the overall cost of society to using those methods, and simply question if those laws are really worth the sacrifices required to uphold them. This is the discussion that needs to happen on the political level, and which the Pirate parties are trying to make happen.

For when I send a piece of music in an e-mail to somebody, I typically violate the copyright monopoly. When I drop a video clip in a private chat channel, same thing. If I use some other protocol, maybe BitTorrent, same thing again. If you are to enforce the copyright monopoly in the connected environment, then you cannot do that without abolishing the right to private communications as a concept. And that’s exactly what the copyright industry is trying to do.

Let me explain. If there is a list of bitpatterns that are illegal to transmit – and such a list could indeed be constructed with today’s laws – then the only way to find those bitpatterns is to eavesdrop on all the ones and zeros that leave my computer, assemble them by protocol to analyze my communications in the clear, and then sort my transmissions into “legal” and “illegal”. But you can’t do this without breaking and abolishing the postal secret. There is no way to tell one from the other without looking at them in the first place. So, out goes the postal secret, the right to communicate in private.

At this point in the discussion, the copyright industry will complain that they only take action for the illegal bitpatterns found, and that there is no infraction on the right to legal communications. And in doing so, they put themselves in the exact same spot as the old East German Stasi, which also steamed open all letters sent in the mail – but only took action on those with illegal content, just like the copyright industry describes as their preferred scenario. Stasi, too, sorted legal from illegal, and left the legal alone.

With the loss of the right to communicate in private, we also lose several other important rights. We lose reporters’ right to protect their sources (since such communication happens in the same digitized private space). We lose a large portion of the ability for attorneys to communicate in private with their clients. These are considered cornerstones in the construction of checks and balances in the powers of our society, and yet an industry of entertainment middlemen expect to strike them out with a pen in order to uphold a crumbling distribution monopoly?

It goes even further. With a loss of private communications, you lose the ability to safely confide in people – the mere suspicion of somebody else eavesdropping on your communications will lead you to stay silent, in case the communication would later be used against you. (This effect has already been observed on a large scale: over half of the population are now thinking twice whether to communicate in ways that could later be used against them by a third party, regarding everything from contacting suicide helplines to divorce counseling.) So, without the ability to confide in people, you even lose your very ability to form an identity. How are you going to come out of the closet, for example, if you can’t talk to a trusted friend first?

The bottom line is that the fight for basic civil liberties and the fight against the copyright monopoly are one and the same. They are not two identical fights; they are one and the same fight.

When our parents sent a letter in the mail, they alone determined whether they wanted to be identified as sender, and nobody had the right to open the letter in transit just to check that the contents were legal. When our parents sent a letter in the mail or placed a phone call, they had an expectation of privacy – considered a fundamental human right. It is entirely reasonable that our children get the same rights – completely regardless of whether that means that an obsolete distribution industry will go out of business or not.

Perhaps the policy of FreeNet, the darknet project, worded most clearly how a copyright monopoly on today’s level simply cannot coexist with freedom of speech (my highlights):

“You cannot guarantee free speech and enforce the copyright monopoly. Therefore, any technology designed to guarantee freedom of speech must also prevent enforcement of the copyright monopoly.”

Source: The Fight Against Copyright Enforcement & The Fight For Civil Liberties Are The Same

The Australian Financial Review and the BBC’s Panorama programme combined to publish a four-year investigation into the operations of News Corporation subsidiaries, unveiling damaging claims of a plot to facilitate and encourage piracy with the aim of crippling pay-television rivals.

The allegations cast shadows across the main-stream media landscape, with implications for the conduct of news outlets and the arguments of anti-piracy lobby groups through to the structure of the pay-television landscape itself.

The reaction of News Corporation’s 81-year-old Australian founder and CEO was swift. Rupert Murdoch used his new love of micro-blogging platform Twitter to rubbish the claims, the publishers and make implied threats of legal action against those raising the allegations.

Murdoch’s sensitivity is understandable. The negative publicity generated by earlier phone hacking scandals could be alleviated in part by suggesting that if immoral – even illegal – activity had taken place, it occurred during the pursuit of journalism, however tawdry or overzealous.

Using piracy as a corporate weapon to damage competitors contains no such narrow mountain trail to the moral high ground. Worse, it undermines a global campaign against piracy led by Hollywood lobby groups such as the MPAA, of whom News Corporation is a major member via its entertainment subsidiary, FOX.

In Australia, the web becomes more tangled, ensnaring a current consultation process to control and limit file-sharing. Leading up to a secretive series of meetings held between the Australian Attorney-General’s department, copyright monopoly lobby groups and internet service providers, News Corporation unleashed an attack on media piracy via its local publications, as noted at the time by Torrentfreak.

The articles were backed by a study commissioned by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), of whom News Corporation is a member, again via its subsidiary FOX.

AFACT now has the onerous task of keeping a straight face during the closed-door discussions while it argues for the criminalisation of not-for-profit piracy as a major backer and publicity partner is embroiled in a corporate piracy scandal.

The Australian pay-television market is small compared to its foreign counterparts. Until last week it contained only two major players whom largely broadcast the same limited number of channels. The tiny size of the industry has been blamed on everything from over regulation to rampant file-sharing. The new piracy allegations suggest a more sinister story.

Last Friday, dominant player Foxtel, part owned by News Corporation, came a step closer to acquiring its smaller rival Austar in a $AU1.9 billion take-over which will deliver Foxtel a virtual monopoly of the cable-television market in Australia.

Moves from internet outsiders such as FetchTV, Netflix and local Netflix-clone Quickflix have made inroads into the medium, but all offer limited content and Netflix currently requires Australians to circumnavigate geoblocking. Television content sold via platforms such as Itunes is also routinely geoblocked and/or suffers from unexplained inflated pricing.

The US Embassy in Canberra views limited options for accessing content as a driver of piracy in Australia. Australia’s stunted pay-television market is part of this problem. Many popular television series appear months or years late, or not at all. The free-to-air television market has suffered decades of audience and revenue decline and can no longer afford to regularly syndicate high-cost content.

Australians are left in a shifting half-light of what is globally popular, forever reading about new content online, watching the trailers, inadvertently seeing spoilers in social media – while often being left with no legal way of participating.

The allegations against News Corporation in Australia have not been heard in any court, and may never be – the Australian Federal Police are reluctant to get involved, despite Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy urging the claims to be investigated.

If the Panorama and Australian Financial Revue’s claims are substantiated and it is proved one of the largest media corporations in the world engaged in predatory piracy to damage rivals, the fallout will be large. News Corporation bases much of its content sales on securing paywalls and selling entry. Competitors, audiences and governments will not be happy if it is established that News Corporation’s other business model was predicated on coldly and clinically facilitating the piracy of the content of rivals.

About The Author

Myles Peterson is an Australian Journalist & Writer.

Source: The Hypocritical Use of Piracy As a Corporate Weapon

Having this gatekeeper position – having had this gatekeeper position – teaches somebody what power is, in the worst sense of the word. If you can determine what culture, knowledge, and ideas are available to people – if you are in a position to say yes or no to publishing an idea – then it goes much beyond the power of mere publishing. It puts you in a position to select. It puts you in a position where you get to decide people’s frame of reference. It literally gives you the power to decide what people discuss, feel, and think.

The ability to share ideas, culture, and knowledge without permission or traceability is built into the foundations of the net, just as it was when the Postal Service was first conceived. When we send a letter in the mail, we and we alone determine whether we identify ourselves as sender on the outside of the envelope, on the inside for only the recipient to know, or not at all; further, nobody may open our sealed letters in transit just to check up on what we’re sending.

The Internet mimics this. It is perfectly reasonable that our children have the same rights as our parents did here. But if our children have those same rights, in the environment where they communicate, it makes a small class of industries obsolete. Therefore, this is what the copyright industry tries to destroy.

They are pushing for laws that introduce identifiability, even for historic records. The copyright industry has been one of the strongest proponents of the Data Retention Directive in Europe, which mandates logging of our communications – not its contents, but all information about whom we contacted when and how – for a significant period of time. This is data that used to be absolutely forbidden to store for privacy reasons. The copyright industry has managed to flip that from “forbidden” to “mandatory”.

They are pushing for laws that introduce liability on all levels. A family of four may be sued into oblivion by an industry cartel in a courtroom where presumption of innocence doesn’t exist (a civil proceeding), and they’re pushing for mail carriers to be liable for the contents of the sealed messages they carry. This goes counter to centuries of tradition in postal services, and is a way of enforcing their will extrajudicially – outside the courtroom, where people still have a minimum of rights to defend themselves.

They are pushing for laws that introduce wiretapping of entire populations – and suing for the right to do it before it becomes law. Also, they did it anyway without telling anybody.

They are pushing for laws that send people into exile, cutting off their ability to function in society, if they send the wrong things in sealed letters.

They are pushing for active censorship laws that we haven’t had in well over a century, using child pornography as a battering ram (in a way that directly causes more children to be abused, to boot).

They are pushing for laws that introduce traceability even for the pettiest crimes, which specifically includes sharing of culture (which shouldn’t be a crime in the first place). In some instances, such laws even give the copyright industry stronger rights to violate privacy than that country’s police force.

With these concepts added together, they may finally – finally! – be able to squeeze out our freedom of speech and other fundamental rights, all in order to be able to sustain an unnecessary industry. It also creates a Big Brother nightmare beyond what people could have possibly imagined a decade ago. My undying question is therefore why people waltz along with it instead of smashing these bastards in the face with the nearest chair.

On July 12, for instance, we hear that ISPs in the United States of America will start to serve the copyright industry in the treatment of its own customers, up until and including a possible exile of them as citizens, and most likely scrapping their right to anonymity for the already-going industry game of sue-a-granny.

This is bound to become a textbook example of bad customer relationships in future marketing books: making sure that your customers can be sued into oblivion by entire industry organizations in a rigged game where they’re not even innocent until proven guilty. Seriously, what were the ISPs thinking?

Today, we exercise our fundamental rights – the right to privacy, the right to expression, the right to correspondence, the right to associate, the right to assemble, the right to a free press, and many other rights – through the Internet. Therefore, anonymous and uncensored access to the Internet has become as fundamental a right itself as all the rights we exercise through it.

If this means that a stupid industry that makes thin round pieces of plastic can’t make money anymore, they can go bankrupt for all I care, or start selling mayonnaise instead.

That’s their problem.

Source: How The Copyright Industry Drives A Big Brother Dystopia

“We encourage the Indian film industry to reject as we have, the false argument that you cannot be pro-technology and pro-copyright at the same time,” he continued.

In framing “content theft” as a problem affecting the county’s middle-classes and alongside a clear dig at the likes of Google and Wikipedia, Dodd’s words could have been pulled verbatim from any pro-SOPA speech. But unlike the United States, India doesn’t need new legislation to allow site blocking – they already have it – and Dodd must be as jealous as hell.

Indian film companies have previously obtained court orders to have sites blocked at the ISP level but in recent weeks the IMI, the RIAA-like Indian Music Industry trade group, has shown the movie industry how it’s really done.

In a series of court actions at the Calcutta High Court, 142 music companies of the IMI have succeeded in obtaining orders to force every ISP in India – 387 in total – to block 104 sites (list here) the industry accuses of online piracy.

And when it comes to implementing the blocks, there are no half-measures. ISPs have been ordered to implement DNS and IP address blockades and for those thinking of using a DNS outside India, Deep Packet Inspection will step in to ensure the domains remain blocked.

“This decision is a victory for the rule of law online and a blow to those illegal businesses that want to build revenues by violating the rights of others,” said IFPI CEO Frances Moore in a statement.

But in a clear signal that for the music and movie industries even the toughest of anti-piracy measures are never enough, Moore says that current developments are a good start.

“The court ruled that blocking is a proportionate and effective way to tackle website piracy,” Moore noted, adding that the Indian government should now “build on this progress” by advancing further legislation to tackle digital piracy.

As tough as the Indian court orders are, already their weaknesses are being probed. One of the key sites on the lists – Songs.pk – has already circumvented the blockade by resurfacing with the new URL of Songspk.pk since the blockade was incapable of physically taking the Czech-hosted site offline.

But although the Indian labels have taken the nuclear option in blocking huge numbers of sites, Apurv Nagpal, CEO of Saregama, one of India’s largest music labels says that they don’t want to destroy their opponents. Interestingly, Saregama acknowledges the pirate sites’ “passion for music” and says the industry wants to befriend them.

“We don’t want these sites to be shut down, we want them to pay a license fee and flourish as a business,” Saregama said. “There are legitimate businesses in operation too. The scope is there, and we want these sites to be legal.”

It would be a cold day in hell before Westerners heard the likes of Chris Dodd or Frances Moore make a statement as radical as that. But if the stick is to work long-term it has to be backed up with a sizable carrot, and if the pirate sites really do only want money, surely that’s their Achilles’ heel right there.

Source: Court Orders SOPA-style Blackout of 100+ Music Sites

But when the big rightsholders feel under threat, they’re happy to crush those very same people in pursuit of money. Cue an awful story today from the UK’s Daily Echo.

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.

Understandably its owners are upset. They can’t afford to fight the studio but their pub’s very identity is now at risk. People supporting a Facebook campaign against the studio’s threats is growing quickly.

But even more worrying is that this action by Zaentz against a local pub doesn’t sit in isolation.

In November 2011, Zaentz sent his lawyers to threaten the owners of a small cafe in Birmingham, England, near to where Tolkien was born. The sandwich bar, known as The Hungry Hobbit, was accused of copyright infringement despite operating under the name for the last 6 years. The current owners are first-time business owners of less than a year’s standing.

In a letter titled “Unauthorized Use of Hobbit” – Zaentz’s lawyers ordered the owners of the cafe to stop using the word Hobbit or face legal action, claiming that the sandwich bar’s use of the term would be detrimental to the brand and would leave people to believe that the outlet is endorsed by Zaentz.

But the threats don’t even stop there. A small company in Scotland making wooden lodges dared to refer to one of their products as “hobbit houses” on their website. Of course, Zaentz sent in the lawyers and the company were forced to comply.

But let’s step back for a moment to see what the origin of the word ‘Hobbit’ actually is. Was this something conjured up from the depths of Tolkien’s imagination in 1937, a product of his mind and his mind only? That’s up for debate.

In 1895, folklorist Michael Aislabie Denham listed a massive collection of interesting creatures in his publication ‘The Denham Tracts Vol 2‘ which included “. . . nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants..”

And, of course, ‘Hobbits’.

It seems absolutely ridiculous that 125+ years after an imaginary creature was reported somehow a company can come along and turn the lives of normal people upside down over the use of its name.

Trademarks may have to be protected, but being a heartless bully can’t be the answer.

Source: Hollywood Lawyers Threaten ‘Hobbit’ Pub

First and foremost is that I was trying to provide my viewers with history and context. I wanted to inform their positions and decisions, rather than hand them a ready-made set. Secondly, it just seemed like a really uncinematic way to close the series, almost like a premature credit roll. I find the topic ill-suited to an audio-visual treatment.

A much better way to discuss it is right here in good old-fashioned text. So consider this an addendum to Everything is a Remix, a brief overview of what we can do and what we should push for. Some of these are attainable, some probably aren’t, and they’re all offered with a dose of humility. This is pure opinion, a discussion piece, not a manifesto. It’s food for thought from someone who spent a year-and-a-half living in this topic, both as my subject and as my creative technique.

This was written fairly swiftly, so if there are any factual errors or poor arguments, I would appreciate your help in correcting or improving them.

Copyright Classic

The hard truth is that most creations are worthless immediately. Most books, films, albums, computer applications, or whatever else are met with not just indifference but disuse. They basically aren’t read, aren’t viewed, aren’t used. Of the lucky ones that find a modest audience, almost all of those fall into obscurity within a few decades. Only a slim minority of works have commercial value after that and current copyright legislation is clearly written for this tiny group. Copyleft activists sometimes refer to this segment as the “lottery winners.”

Prior to 1976 the American copyright term was 28 years with the option to renew for another 28. Two big changes happened after that. Firstly, the term was dramatically extended to lifetime plus 70 years. Secondly, the option to renew was removed, automatically granting all rights holders the maximum term. Neither of these changes had any benefit to anyone but the lottery winners.

Lifetime plus 70 years is a wildly excessive copyright duration for almost all creations. According to Laurence Lessig, 85 percent of copyright owners failed to renew their copyright after 28 years. That means for 85 percent of them, their creation had little or no commercial value by then – 28 years of protection was plenty.

If I could wave a magic wand, I would wind copyright back to its pre-1976 state: 28 years of protection, with the option for a 28-year renewal. This would put the majority of works into the public domain in 28 years. Those who renew would get 56 years of copyright protection, probably enough to last a lifetime. If this system was in effect now, a vast amount of 20th century material would be ours to use and share freely. Just imagine what Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, YouTube or Google Books would be in this world. They’d be resources unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

The sad reality is that a reduction in the length of copyright’s duration seems enormously unlikely. A more winnable battle will be defeating another extension come 2023, at which point there will undoubtedly be another lobbying effort by the ever-dwindling segment of lottery winners.

If You’re American, Use Your Fair Use

Fair use is a limitation on US copyright protection that allows works to be re-used for purposes like commentary, criticism, and education. Copyleft activists tend to denigrate fair use because it doesn’t prevent anyone from clobbering you with a massive lawsuit. This is unfortunately true. Even with a solid fair use defense, you can get dragged into court and even if you win the case, your legal defense might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and the emotional toll will be massive.

So the boundaries of fair use need clarification, but the fact remains that fair use is employed reliably and without incident countless times every day. Watch a newscast, a documentary or The Daily Show and you’ll see fair use at work throughout. The high-profile lawsuits we hear about are the exceptions and they over-shadow just how effective and powerful fair use is. (And let’s not forget that should you employ fair use and find yourself in a lawsuit, there are now a variety of public interest organizations that can provide pro bono legal defense.)

The various codes of best practices that have emerged in recent years are a demonstration of how powerful fair use can be when adopted by a community. A superb and under-appreciated resource here is Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi’s Reclaiming Fair Use, which also happens to be an excellent short history of the copyleft movement.

For those of you outside US and thus without fair use, well, you have the benefit of living in a much less litigious culture.

De Minimis Definitions Needed

This is an example of how fair use needs stronger boundaries. In copyright law “de minimis” refers to uses that are too small to be considered infringing – they would be considered fair use. However, the bizarre Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films suit made it unclear if de minimis even exists anymore. In this losing case a two-second snippet of Funkadelic was unrecognizably used in “100 Miles and Runnin’” by NWA. (And the defendant wasn’t even NWA or their record company, but a film distributor that happened to use the song in a film.) If any case is a signpost for the era of IP dystopia, this is it. Every re-use of even the tiniest fragment of published work now seems vulnerable.

We need some distinct thresholds below which copyright protection doesn’t apply. Maybe it’s two seconds of recorded music. Maybe its five seconds of video footage. These are arbitrary, but whatever these standards are, they’ll make more sense than copyright protection covering subliminal-scale slices of media.

Abolish Software and Business Method Patents

I’m not going to go deep into patents because it’s a complicated realm that incorporates vastly different industries. Real patent reform would need to address this disparity. A patent for a drug that cost a billions dollars to bring to market should be treated differently from a patent for a novelty invention created in a couple weeks by one guy.

What can be stated simply is that patents for software and business methods (which are mostly software) have done nothing to incentivize innovation and plenty to de-incentivize it. We’ve seen a massive arms race of patent holdings in the smart computing realm, an untold number of small companies being exploited by trolls, and the unabashed weaponization of these instruments. It’s so abundantly clear that software patents do not “promote the progress of useful arts,” that the most sensible route isn’t reform but abolition.

The other three episodes of Everything Is a Remix can be found here.

Source: Thoughts on IP Reforms and Best Practices for Creators

A boycott against Big Monopoly will not work. Any noticeable drop in profits will cause them to throw a tantrum at policymakers and complain how their profits are dropping due to piracy, and request harder enforcement of their copyright monopolies at the expense of our civil liberties and the freedom of the net.

Buying more of their products (yeah, right) will not work. Any noticeable raise in profits will cause them to commission reports to policymakers illustrating their grandiose importance to the economy as a whole, suggesting that they are the direct reason for at least several hundred per cent of the gross national product. Therefore, they will argue, they need additional protection as a national interest.

Doing nothing will not work either, as we are constantly on the retreat in civil liberties.

There is no course of action or nonaction that the net or its individuals can take that would cause Big Monopoly to behave differently from today.

Attacking Big Monopoly is simply barking up the wrong tree. It’s a complete waste of effort.

Also, I’m quite concerned at the overall attitude. I see many on the net somehow trying to please the copyright industries – if they weren’t as obnoxious, would the copyright industry perhaps show a more lenient attitude…?

As if!

This attitude, I fear, is one of the most dangerous of all, for it puts the individual in a subservient position to the corporations. Reality is quite different, but we are only as powerful as we believe ourselves to be. Those who see themselves in shackles will behave with restraint. On the other side of that coin, those who refuse to accept any limitation placed upon them will find that most, if not all, limitations can be broken.

Obviously, the copyright industry’s dream is having us – the people – seek its consent for everything we do, just like they have trained politicians to do for over a century. When you discuss boycotts, you are playing straight into their game of thinking that it is the copyright industry’s desires that matter for the task of building a sustainable society.

They don’t. Their desires are irrelevant. As are they.

They are just one entrepreneur among many. The role of any entrepreneur is to construct a use case and a business case that allow them to make money, given the current constraints of technology and society. They don’t get to dismantle civil liberties, even if they can’t make money otherwise.

The target for any action isn’t the copyright industry. That’s just playing into their hands as imagined kings of the hill.

Rather, the target is – and must be – the policymakers. They are the ones who are actually cutting down on our civil liberties, not Big Monopoly. Normally, they see issues like the copyright monopoly and freedom of the net as totally peripheral to policymaking; the topics du jour are the same as they’ve been in the past 50 years: healthcare, schools, energy and defense.

This is both a problem and a blessing.

It is a problem, as they don’t realize the gravity of the situation. Most governments in the West would be completely baffled to realize that people are actually holding rallies for freedom of speech: they would not understand why. As in, “we have that already”. In their minds, we do. In ours, however, it’s being cut away.

But it is also a blessing, as they’re not politically entrenched on the issue, thinking it is peripheral. As most political parties haven’t identified themselves with one side or the other, thinking everybody were in agreement already, the policymakers can be made to turn quickly at little internal cost of prestige.

At the end of the day, there’s just one single thing that politicians care about, and that is their job. Their job must be put on the line over our freedoms of speech, or change will not happen. This was the (very successful) formula behind founding the Pirate Party in 2006.

This is also what we saw with the SOPA/PIPA battle in the United States, as politicians realized that there were a serious amount of votes to be lost or harnessed over freedoms of speech on the net. As that realization sunk in, the copyright industry’s efforts were dead in the water.

In Europe, 250 million people preserving and sharing contemporary culture in disrespect of an immoral and overreaching copyright monopoly is not “a business problem that you can put an end to”. It is a power base of 250 million voters. This is the message that policymakers must be sent in the loud and clear.

Once the policymakers get that message, the copyright industry can make their money any legal way they can or go bankrupt in the process, and nobody will care whichever way they go, not any more than you would care about the tire industry or the glass blowing industry.

Source: The Target Isn’t Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA, Or MAFIAA: It’s The Policymakers

Gray is obviously black, says the District Court.

These liability cases can take a long time with a very uncertain outcome. It is not uncommon for court cases concerning the copyright monopoly to go all the way to the Supreme Court, and yet, the suppressing industries would have us believe that it is clear-cut as day, and that anything they don’t like is, well, so obviously illegal that a low-level customer representative can call the shots.

In reality, things are not black and white, but rather, many expressions are somewhere on a scale of gray. But the effect of these “safe harbor” provisions is that no companies want to risk liability, and so, they choose to succumb for an expression that is even in the slightest doubt of not being perfectly crystalline white as snow.

After all, who knows what the courts will say?

Gray is obviously white, says the Appeals Court.

The effect is a corporatization of the very concept of free speech, where politicians have abdicated their job as ultimate guards of our civil liberties. For corporations don’t care about morally right and wrong — they care about not risking a loss in court. (There is nothing wrong with this; the role of corporations is to make money, and the role of politicians is to safeguard our liberties. The fault here lies squarely with the politicians and their abdication of responsibility.)

Therefore, these corporations will choose not to go to court, and will suppress free speech on behalf of the suppressing industries. They would rather call 1,000 gray cases black in error than calling one single gray case white in error.

The result is that any expression that even risks falling into a light gray area is suppressed as non-free speech or questionable speech. The entire field of gray turns to black. And as it does, over a decade or so, what was once pristine white has become a new scale of grayshades, as the suppressing industries yell and scream about how citizens are exercising their rights unfairly to their bottom line and aspirations of controlling our artistry.

Gray is obviously a complex swirling pattern of gray, says the Supreme Court. The district courts will sort it out.

And so, the cycle begins anew. It takes a decade or less for things that were obviously legal — light-light-light gray — to become suppressed by these “safe harbor” laws, after which the suppressing industries can claim that only a few criminals exhibit this still-perfectly-legal behavior of expressing themselves. New laws, claimed to codify existing practice, actually codify the changed landscape after the scale has shifted. It may indeed be “existing practice”, but one that is due to chilling effects from suppression of speech.

And then, new “safe harbors” are written into law proposals, to shift the border for free speech a great deal further in favor of the suppressing industries.

And again, corporations would rather err on the side of caution, preferring to throw a thousand users to the wolves in error than becoming liable for one shielded in error.

The DMCA was, and is, an abomination. So is the habit of letting corporations guard our right to free speech. It must be unconditional, and it isn’t when there is any kind of intermediary liability. The suppressing industries understand this, and therefore, drive this development.

That’s why we need to turn the tables. Civil liberties, not copyright industries. And never, ever, any kind of intermediary liability under the disguise of “safe harbor”.

Source: Why “Safe Harbor” Laws Are Disastrous For Free Speech

I outlined in 2007 how we could expect to see outright censorship, crackdowns on anonymity and free speech, erosion of privacy and of due process, annulment of whistleblower protections, and at length, cutbacks in the very right to form an identity. I spoke in 2007 of how child pornography was being used as a strategic excuse by the copyright lobby to create a battering ram against our fundamental liberties, even if it hurts children (which they don’t care about).

Five years later, practically all of this has either come true already or is in the pipeline. “Copyright Regime vs Civil Liberties“, indeed.

I went into politics for two reasons. The first is that the copyright monopoly is being taken care of by civil servants today. These people have three characteristics: they are not charged with seeing the whole picture, but just taking care of their lawn; they are completely unaccountable; and they are frequently lobbied by the copyright monopoly, for the two previous reasons. In contrast, a politician can say that “naw, this costs too much and upsets the balance of fundamental rights, let’s scrap it”, something a civil servant cannot.

The second reason I went into politics is that the only way to take this issue away from those same civil servants is to politicize it, and the only way to do that in turn is to take votes from the established politicians. At the end of the day, that is the only thing they care about — any other way of trying to influence policymaking is just another day at the job for them. You have to attack their job security directly. That creates change, and only that.

The most puzzling part is how senior politicians are pretending to embrace the democratizing aspects of the net as long as those aspects don’t happen in their own country. For some reason, it is perfectly possible for a politician to say that the copyright industry must be protected by dismantling the net and our civil liberties, and at the same time, say that the net must be protected against those who would rather keep their power. For anybody else, this means a choice. I made mine in 2006.

The copyright industry is a business like any other. They get to compete for money based on what they offer. They don’t get to dismantle civil liberties even if they can’t make money otherwise, and perhaps especially if they can’t make money otherwise. For some reason, the copyright industry has gotten away with doing exactly this: dismantling civil liberties.

In the United States, authorities are seizing domains on the net without any due process whatsoever, breaking the DNS namespace. This does not just stifle free speech and political speech — it also creates a wiretapping scenario as they see who is coming to visit the domain. Both of these actions would normally require a warrant, which if I were presiding, would never be granted. But they take it on word of mouth from the copyright industry.

In the United Kingdom, courts are giving themselves the right to break the net by ordering certain domains censored. They are even specifically ordering Internet Service Providers to use the previously-installed child pornography filter to censor infractions of the copyright monopoly. See? There is a reason the copyright industry loves child porn so much. If you search for the Swedish word for child porn on the copyright lobby’s Swedish site Netopia, you come up with no less than 62 articles. Unless you knew the reason for this very strong correlation between the copyright industry and child pornography, you would be very puzzled indeed.

At the same time in the United States, China and Iran are held as shining examples of countries which still have a working freedom of speech despite having given the copyright industry the privileges they want. (Even I could not have made this up; it is just too far out) And to applause from the Senate, no less. This was in the SOPA/PIPA debate, and I would have a hard time finding a better example of how completely incompatible the copyright monopoly is with fundamental rights.

In Sweden, there is hard evidence that the copyright industry and the United States was pushing for Data Retention — a fine word for logging all our communications and movements so they can be used against us in the future. This also kills reporters’ right to protect their sources, which I spoke of in 2007.

There is no shortage of further examples. I am sure you could add your own story in the comments field.

Indeed, it is copyright regime or civil liberties. Make your bets and pick your sides.

Source: Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties

It started around 1905, when the self-playing piano was becoming popular. Sellers of note sheet music proclaimed that this would be the end of artistry if they couldn’t make a living off of middlemen between composers and the public, so they called for a ban on the player piano. A famous letter in 1906 claims that both the gramophone and the self-playing piano will be the end of artistry, and indeed, the end of a vivid, songful humanity.

In the 1920s, as broadcast radio started appearing, another copyright industry was demanding its ban because it cut into profits. Record sales fell from $75 million in 1929 to $5 million four years later — a recession many times greater than the record industry’s current troubles. (Speaking of recession, the drop in profits happened to coincide with the Great Depression.) The copyright industry sued radio stations, and collecting societies started collecting part of the station profits under a blanket “licensing” scheme. Laws were proposed that would immunize the new radio medium from the copyright industry, but they did not pass.

In the 1930s, silent movies were phased out by movies with audio tracks. Every theater had previously employed an orchestra that played music to accompany the silent movies, and now, these were out of a job. It is quite conceivable that this is the single worst technology development for professional performers. Their unions demanded guaranteed jobs for these performers in varying propositions.

In the 1940s, the movie industry complained that the television would be the death of movies, as movie industry profits dropped from $120 million to $31 million in five years. Famous quote: “Why pay to go see a movie when you can see it at home for free?”

In 1972, the copyright industry tried to ban the photocopier. This push was from book publishers and magazine publishers alike. “The day may not be far off when no one need purchase books.”

The 1970s saw the advent of the cassette tape, which is when the copyright industry really went all-out in proclaiming their entitlement. Ads saying “Home taping is killing music!” were everywhere. The band Dead Kennedys famously responded by subtly changing the message in adding “…industry profits”, and “We left this side [of their tape] blank, so you can help.”

The 1970s also saw another significant shift, where DJs and loudspeakers started taking the place of live dance music. Unions and the copyright industry went ballistic over this, and suggested a “disco fee” that would be charged at locations playing disco (recorded) music, to be collected by private organizations under governmental mandate and redistributed to live bands. This produces hearty laughter today, but that laughter stops sharp with the realization that the disco fee was actually introduced, and still exists.

The 1980s is a special chapter with the advent of video cassette recorders. The copyright industry’s famous quote when testifying before the US Congress – where the film lobby’s highest representative said that “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone” — is the stuff of legend today. Still, it bears reminding that the Sony vs so-called Betamax case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and that the VCR was as near as could be from being killed by the copyright industry: The Betamax team won the case by 5-4 in votes.

Also in the late 1980s, we saw the complete flop of the Digital Audio Tape (DAT). A lot of this can be ascribed to the fact that the copyright industry had been allowed to put its politics into the design: the cassette, although technically superior to the analog Compact Cassette, was so deliberately unusable for copying music that people rejected it flat outright. This is an example of a technology that the copyright industry succeeded in killing, even though I doubt it was intentional: they just got their wishes as to how it should work to not disrupt the status quo.

In 1994, Fraunhofer Institute published a prototype implementation of its digital coding technique that would revolutionize digital audio. It allowed CD-quality audio to take one-tenth of the disk space, which was very valuable in this time, when a typical hard drive would be just a couple of gigabytes. Technically known as MPEG-1 Audio Layer III, it was quickly shortened to “MP3” in everyday speak. The copyright industry screamed again, calling it a technology that only can be used for criminal activity. The first successful MP3 player, the Diamond Rio, saw the light in 1998. It had 32 megabytes of memory. Despite good sales, the copyright industry sued its maker, Diamond Multimedia, into oblivion: while the lawsuit was struck down, the company did not recover from the burden of defending. The monopoly middlemen tried aggressively to have MP3 players banned.

The century ended with the copyright middlemen pushing through a new law in the United States called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which would have killed the Internet and social media by introducing intermediary liability — essentially killing social technologies in their cradle. Only with much effort did the technology industry manage to stave off disaster by introducing so-called “safe harbors” that immunizes the technical companies from liability on the condition that they throw the end-users to the wolves on request. The internet and social media survived the copyright industry’s onslaught by a very narrow escape that still left it significantly harmed and slowed.

Right after the turn of the century, the use of Digital Video Recorders was called “stealing” as it allowed for skipping of commercials (as if nobody did that before).

In 2003, the copyright industry tried to have its say in the design of HDTV with a so-called “broadcast flag” that would make it illegal to manufacture devices that could copy movies so flagged. In the USA, the FCC miraculously granted this request, but was struck down in bolts of lightning by courts who said they had way overstepped their mandate.

What we have here is a century of deceit, and a century revealing the internal culture inherent in the copyright industry. Every time something new appears, the copyright industry has learned to cry like a little baby that needs more food, and succeeds practically every time to get legislators to channel taxpayer money their way or restrict competing industries. And every time the copyright industry succeeds in doing so, this behavior is further reinforced.

It is far past due that the copyright industry is stripped of its nobility benefits, every part of its governmental weekly allowance, and gets kicked out of its comfy chair to get a damn job and learn to compete on a free and honest market.

Source: The Copyright Industry – A Century Of Deceit

Last year at the Forum d’Avignon she noted that if media companies want to tackle piracy, they should look beyond “corporatist self-interest.”

During this year’s speech titled Who Feeds the Artists, Kroes went even further by admitting that the current path copyright is taking is the wrong one.

Kroes started by saying that it is essential that creativity is recognized and stimulated in Europe. She agreed that artists have to be rewarded financially for their efforts, but doubts whether the current copyright system is the right tool for that.

“Let’s ask ourselves, is the current copyright system the right and only tool to achieve our objectives? Not really, I’m afraid. We need to keep on fighting against piracy, but legal enforceability is becoming increasingly difficult; the millions of dollars invested trying to enforce copyright have not stemmed piracy,” Kroes said.

“Meanwhile citizens increasingly hear the word copyright and hate what is behind it. Sadly, many see the current system as a tool to punish and withhold, not a tool to recognize and reward.

“Speaking of economic reward: if that is the aim of our current copyright system, we’re failing here too.”

Kroes explained that most artists in Europe can’t make a decent living from what they do, and gave the example that 97.5 percent of German musicians earn less than 1000 euros a month. Implicitly, she hereby argues that the restrictive copyright system we have now is benefiting multi-million euro companies, but not necessarily the artists at large as recent examples illustrate.

The commissioner wants that to change.

“We need to go back to basics and put the artist at the centre, not only of copyright law, but of our whole policy on culture and growth. In times of change, we need creativity, out-of-the-box thinking: creative art to overcome this difficult period and creative business models to monetise the art,” she said.

“And for this we need flexibility in the system, not the straitjacket of a single model. The platforms, channels and business models by which content is produced, distributed and used can be as varied and innovative as the content itself.”

Being the Digital Chief of Europe, Kroes sees an important role for the technology sector in helping out artists to get the most out of their careers.

“ICT can help here. In all sorts of sectors, ICT can help artists connect with their audience, directly and cheaply. And it can help audiences find and enjoy material that suits their specific needs, interests and tastes,” she said.

“Look at Cloud computing: it presents a totally new way of purchasing, delivering and consuming cultural works – music, books, films – which will certainly raise new questions about how licensing should function in an optimal way.”

Aside from using technology to benefit, instead of repress, Kroes says the industry has to reconsider whether their old business models are still in tune with the present days and age. Licensing issues in the music industry and delaying the distribution of movies and TV-shows through windowing are two examples she highlights in this regard.

“A system of rewarding art, in all its dimensions, must be flexible and adaptable enough to cope with these new environments. Or else we will kill innovation and damage artists’ interests,” Kroes noted.

As a take-home message, Kroes says that the key issue is to provide all the tools to make sure that artists can flourish. In other words, do what is necessary to ensure that artists make a decent income, instead of protecting the revenues of major companies.

“So that’s my answer: it’s not all about copyright. It is certainly important, but we need to stop obsessing about that. The life of an artist is tough: the crisis has made it tougher. Let’s get back to basics, and deliver a system of recognition and reward that puts artists and creators at its heart.”

Source: Copyright is Failing, Who Feeds the Artists? Asks EU Commissioner

This latest bill in the United States, named SOPA (a Swedish word meaning “piece of utter garbage”, and I am not making that up), would essentially eliminate due process of law and right to defense. It would create a j’accuse!-style justice system, where anybody in the copyright industry could kill any company on the planet they don’t like.

Here’s how it is intended to work: The copyright industry gains the right to “notify” payment processors such as Visa that a company looks bad. Visa then gets the choice of cutting it off from payments, or becoming liable themselves in case the looking-bad company actually turns out to be doing something bad. This is a very sneaky, effective and outright evil method of extrajudicial justice.

Rather than risk liability, the payment processors would choose to lie flat and just drop these customers. It is not in Visa’s mission to push civil liberties at the expense of shareholder value. This is not wrong in itself; it is the legislators who shall make sure that extrajudicial punishment as proposed here is impossible, and the legislators are not doing their job at all.

You will note that everybody in the proposed system is completely rightsless. At the pointing of a finger, a business is dead.

Similarly, SOPA contains provisions for killing domains in the centralized DNS namespace, which was built on the assumption that bad guys don’t exist in the system and that everybody can be trusted. If it’s something we have learned by now, it is that the net must be resilient against bad guys on the wire.

What’s interesting here is that the copyright industry attacks chokepoints in the system — single points of failure that our civil liberties depend on. Perhaps we should be grateful that the copyright industry, in their distorted sense of entitlement to the world, are pointing out these weaknesses to us through this kind of despicable mail-order legislation.

Because, if there’s anything that entrepreneurs hate, as in thoroughly detest, loathe and despise, it is the situation where somebody else holds a master-key to your business and can take it over at an unknown point in the future when the entrepreneur has spent ten years of their life building it. That situation is fixed first, and only then is the business built. This fix has happened a few times before, when a united hive-mind-like industry has discarded a master-key liability like a bad habit and built something else to replace it.

In the early 1990s, a system of hyperlinked pages on the internet had become popular. People would browse those interconnected pages for information on everything from universities to businesses to people. Then, in 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it reserved the right to charge for commercial use of this protocol, Gopher, at some point in the future. It was dropped by everybody like a bad habit and replaced by HTML and the Web, which did a worse job initially but quickly replaced and outgrew Gopher.

The exact same thing happened with the standard format for image files, a format called Graphics Interchange Format, first used on BBSes and then moving on to the early Net. When UNISYS claimed that they somehow “owned” this format and would start suing people who used it, it was dropped from every usage all over the net in the blink of an eye and replaced by a fresh-new format named Portable Network Graphics.

Can you imagine the net collectively just dropping the use of JPEG today, in a consensus hive mind decision? That’s how large these watershed events are. Much larger than, say, Facebook replacing MySpace.

What’s preventing this from happening, in general, is the scenario where something works “well enough”. If something does its job miserably but is entrenched through the entire ecosystem, as long as it doesn’t kill you and you can build a business on it, it tends to remain because of network effects. It is only when it threatens each and every entrepreneur that the industry acts as a hive mind and throws it out.

Because there’s no doubt that MasterCard, Visa and Paypal are terrible for business. A middleman that skims between three and five per cent of every transaction? And, on top, makes it impossible to charge fractions of cents in this day and age? There isn’t an entrepreneur on the planet who wouldn’t love to throw them into the water at night with a pair of knee-high cement shoes. But, like a cancer, they have spread to every corner of the ecosystem. They work terribly, but “well enough”.

SOPA would change that. It would no longer work well enough; it would be a threat to the future existence of every business. Therefore, all of a sudden, we have a market incentive from the most entrepreneurial people on the planet to build a decentralized, unseizable, unstoppable financial infrastructure that lets them get paid — and lets everybody else transfer money anonymously, invisibly and unstoppable. It would be a dictator’s nightmare. And the copyright industry’s.

What SOPA does is to make sure that the net and sharing can’t coexist with Visa, MasterCard and PayPal. This means that only the stronger of the two groups will survive, and the copyright industry has their perception of the strength balance entirely wrong. The net and the human characteristic of sharing culture and knowledge are immensely stronger.

SOPA will neither kill the net nor the sharing of culture and knowledge. But it would kill Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, and it would kill centralized breakable DNS.

“But could this really happen?”, I hear people ask in scepticism. “Visa, MasterCard and PayPal are everywhere! Everywhere!” Yeah. They are. So were Gopher and GIF.

Dictators, too, depend on these single points of failure in the net for repressing the people in their countries. We see it everywhere, and it is spreading to the West at a much faster pace than I would like or had anticipated.

Perhaps the copyright industry deserves some credit for pointing out the single points of failure in the infrastructure supporting our civil liberties, so we can rebuild those parts.

That would be a trait they would share with the world’s worst dictators. Don’t get me wrong, I think the copyright industry is plain evil and that these proposed laws are abominations. Nothing new under the sun, there. But odd as it may sound, I would rather have the copyright industry prod the weaknesses of the infrastructure defending our civil liberties, than a future repressive regime doing so. At such a dystopic point in the future, it would be much harder to fix those weaknesses.

After all, the copyright industry can’t yet drag us off in black bags in the night.

Source: Perhaps The Copyright Industry Deserves Some Credit For Pointing Out Our Single Points Of Failure

Increasingly, however, copyright law is being privatized. Its meaning and application are determined not by governmental actors but by private parties, and in particular by deep-pocketed copyright owners. Increasingly, the balance between private rights and public interests is set by private lawmaking.

My new book, Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law, shows how copyright owners, unhappy with the scope of protections that Congress has given them, routinely grab more rights than they are entitled to under the law. They do this at the expense of consumers and of the public at large.

One example is the widespread use of contractual provisions that enhance the rights of copyright owners. Many works, especially works delivered in digital form, are made available only to people who agree to give to the provider broader rights of ownership than copyright law itself actually confers.

For instance, the Copyright Act protects the right of fair use but in contracts accompanying digital works consumers waive the right to make any use of the work without the copyright owner’s permission. Copyright law permits consumers to give, lend, or sell their copy of a work after they are done using it. However, terms of use imposed by the supplier prohibit any transfer at all.

While copyright law permits reverse engineering of software to develop interoperable products, contractual terms imposed upon the customer prohibit all reverse engineering. Some contracts even require the customer to agree not to contest the content provider’s claim of copyright ownership, raising the possibility that works that are not even protected by copyright are subject to limitations that mirror those available for works that truly are copyrighted.

Beyond altering the content of copyright law, private individuals and entities also play an increasing role in law enforcement. The MPAA supplies investigators to police departments to determine whether DVDs are pirated. Customs agents routinely defer to information supplied by copyright owners in seizing and destroying imported goods. VeriSign, the manager of .com Internet addresses has asked ICANN for permission to shut down domain names when asked to do so by law enforcement without the need for any sort of judicial review.

Recently, White House officials, including Copyright Czar Victoria Espinel, were involved in negotiations between the recording and movie industries and ISPs to interrupt Internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law. These negotiations, which take the form of private agreements between content providers and ISPs, have vast implications for consumers.

The traditional role of courts in determining whether infringement has occurred and punishment should be imposed is also increasingly privatized. Thousands of people targeted by the RIAA for file sharing have paid out penalties not because a court has found infringement but because it has seemed easier just to settle the dispute over the telephone with a credit card number. When this happens, the strength of the copyright owner’s case is never tested.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the companion bill to the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act, would further privatize adjudication and punishment. Title I of that law (dubbed the E-PARASITE Act) creates a “market-based system to protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. funding of sites dedicated to theft of U.S. property.” It achieves this by empowering copyright owners who have a “good faith belief” that they are being “harmed by the activities” of a website to send a notice to the site’s payment providers (e.g. PayPal) and Internet advertisers to end business with the allegedly offending site.

The payment providers and advertisers that receive the notice must stop transactions with the site. No judicial review is required for the notice to be sent and for the payments and advertising curtailed—only the good faith representation of the copyright owner. Damages are also not available to the site owner unless a claimant “knowingly materially” misrepresented that the law covers the targeted site, a difficult legal test to meet. The owner of the site can issue a counter-notice to restore payment processing and advertising but services need not comply with the counter-notice.

There is also a catch: a site owner who issues a counter-notice automatically consents to being sued in U.S. courts (a strong disincentive for sites based abroad). With few checks at all, SOPA gives copyright owners a sharp tool to disrupt and shut down websites. Based on their past conduct, there is no reason to think that copyright owners will use this tool with any measure of restraint.

Copyright law that is made by private parties evades constitutional constraints that apply to actions undertaken by the government. For example, the Supreme Court has suggested that protections for fair use of copyrighted works may be constitutionally required; if Congress were to suddenly abolish fair use by statute, the change would be immediately challenged as violating the First Amendment. Fair use extinguished through private contract, however, is not easily subjected to constitutional scrutiny.

Likewise, when government agencies conduct investigations, Fourth Amendment limitations on searches and seizures and warrant requirements apply. MPAA–run investigations, by contrast, proceed free from these constitutional restrictions. So, too, before courts may impose fines for infringement or order websites shut down, there must be notice, a hearing, and other procedural requirements that comport with due process. Private adjudication and punishment proceed without any of these protections.

The biggest misperception about SOPA is that it is somehow unprecedented or extraordinary. It is not. SOPA represents just the latest example of copyright law defined and controlled not by the government but by private entities. Copyright owners will deploy SOPA in the same way they have behaved in the past: to extend out their rights. They will disrupt sites that do not infringe a copyright, interfere with fair uses of copyrighted works, and take other steps that evade the limits that the Copyright Act sets on a copyright owner’s actual rights.

Much of what will happen under SOPA will occur out of the public eye and without the possibility of holding anyone accountable. For when copyright law is made and enforced privately, it is hard for the public to know the shape that the law takes and harder still to complain about its operation.

—

Jason Mazzone is a law professor at Brooklyn Law School and the author of the new book, Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law (Stanford University Press, 2011). The website for the book is www.copyfraud.com.

Source: The Privatization of Copyright Lawmaking

The printing press.

To deal with the challenges at hand, Sir Thomas Talfourd drafted a new bill under which the copyright term for books would be extended to sixty years after the author’s death.

For years the bill was heavily debated in the House of Commons, and after it failed to pass in 1837, 1838, 1839 and 1840, it was once again brought up for a vote in 1841. That year the House witnessed one of the most intriguing standoffs in copyright history, and one that is still very relevant today.

On the one side there was Sir Thomas Talfourd calling for a lengthy extension, and on the other was Baron Thomas Macaulay arguing that this would be a dramatic mistake. On February 5th 1841 the House of Commons gathered to vote on the bill, but not before Macaulay gave a final speech.

Below we will accentuate a few critical paragraphs from that historic but forgotten speech, most of which are still very relevant today.

“It is painful to me to take a course which may possibly be misunderstood or misrepresented as unfriendly to the interests of literature and literary men. It is painful to me, I will add, to oppose my honourable and learned friend on a question which he has taken up from the purest motives, and which he regards with a parental interest.”

“These feelings have hitherto kept me silent when the law of copyright has been under discussion. But as I am, on full consideration, satisfied that the measure before us will, if adopted, inflict grievous injury on the public, without conferring any compensating advantage on men of letters, I think it my duty to avow that opinion and to defend it.”

Above is how Macaulay started his argument, addressing the House of Commons, and his “honourable friend” Sir Talfourd in particular.

“I believe, Sir, that I may with safety take it for granted that the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad. And I may with equal safety challenge my honourable friend to find out any distinction between copyright and other privileges of the same kind; any reason why a monopoly of books should produce an effect directly the reverse of that which was produced by the East India Company’s monopoly of tea, or by Lord Essex’s monopoly of sweet wines.”

“Thus, then, stands the case. It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.”

Macaulay argued that copyright is a monopoly by definition, and that while authors should be compensated for their works, a copyright term of sixty years after the author’s death would do more harm than good.

“Now, I will not affirm that the existing law is perfect, that it exactly hits the point at which the monopoly ought to cease; but this I confidently say, that the existing law is very much nearer that point than the law proposed by my honourable and learned friend. For consider this; the evil effects of the monopoly are proportioned to the length of its duration. But the good effects for the sake of which we bear with the evil effects are by no means proportioned to the length of its duration.”

“A monopoly of sixty years produces twice as much evil as a monopoly of thirty years, and thrice as much evil as a monopoly of twenty years. But it is by no means the fact that a posthumous monopoly of sixty years gives to an author thrice as much pleasure and thrice as strong a motive as a posthumous monopoly of twenty years. On the contrary, the difference is so small as to be hardly perceptible.”

Baron Macaulay then went on to argue that the extension would offer very few advantages for the authors themselves. On the other hand, he explained that these restrictions would do harm to the public’s access to classic works.

After giving various examples of the extension’s potentially negative effects, Macaulay closes with the theory that the Act would in fact change the meaning of copyright to the general public.

“I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind.”

“Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains.”

“No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.”

It could even make piracy morally acceptable.

“On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim’s Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?”

“Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions.”

“The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.”

Fast forward 170 years and politicians are still debating over the same topics.

The language is different, the players have changed and so has technology, but in essence they deal with the very same issues. To a certain degree Macaulay predicted how the public’s opinion towards piracy would be hindered when more restrictions are put into place. This is something we still witness today.

In 1841, Macaulay’s speech made quite an impression in the House of Commons. The Copyright bill was rejected by 45 votes to 38, and a year later it finally passed as the Copyright Act 1842, without the sixty year extension he argued against.

Baron Macaulay’s critique on the lengthy copyright extension was at the foundation of copyright law in the U.K. and U.S. for decades, until Walt Disney came along.

Source: Piracy and Copyright Challenges in 1841 Mirror Those of Today

Let’s take a look at two of these stories that surfaced recently, starting with the BBC.

When the BBC reported on the riots in London, it frequently used pictures that were shared by Twitter users witnessing the events. This wouldn’t be that bad as the BBC would at least credit the people who took the pictures. Yet, in its reporting, the BBC completely failed to attribute any of the images it used, instead attributing them to Twitter.

When a complaint was made, the first response back included the following outrageous statement:

I understand you were unhappy that pictures from Twitter are used on BBC programmes as you feel it may be a breach of copyright. Twitter is a social network platform which is available to most people who have a computer and therefore any content on it is not subject to the same copyright laws as it is already in the public domain.  The BBC is aware of copyright issues and is careful to abide by these laws. (emphasis added)

Everyone reading this knows that to be untrue and the BBC did too, as Chris Hamilton (BBC News Social Media Editor) later admitted.

It’s not the position of BBC News, he said, adding that that the BBC tries to clear photos before using them but if there are time constraints that may not be possible. Unfortunately, UK law doesn’t allow fair dealing exceptions for this at present. So time constraints or not, it’s still a copyright violation.

And the BBC is not the only major news outfit to bend the copyright rules this month, the Daily Mail has been at it as well. This time, though, they probably picked the worst target possible, the wife of OpenRightsGroup founder and noted blogger Cory Doctorow.

In reporting on a story about Gap and their anorexic lines of jeans, the Daily Mail contacted Doctorow’s wife, Alice Taylor, asking for permission to use her work. She then offered the photos in exchange for £250 to a charity of her choice but the Mail declined this offer as ‘too expensive’.

Instead of buying it The Mail simply lifted the picture from the Washington Post, to whom Taylor had licensed it for use on their own site.

Only after numerous emails and an outraged crowd of commenters the newspaper promised to send a £1000 donation to the OpenRightsGroup and another £1000 to a charity dealing with eating disorders. We’ll wait to see if that happens.

This isn’t an isolated incident though. The net is awash with cases of the Daily Mail infringing copyright, and one photo agency is even suing them for more than £1M in damages.

The Digital Economy Act could have made a big difference here. Under the Act, after a certain number of accusations a website could have been taken offline. Thankfully, that’s now been taken out of consideration, but how much of that was down to judicial proportionality and feasibility, and how much was down to pressure from groups like the BBC and the Daily Mail (who belatedly realised that a major aspect of their business could be quite easily curtailed by the legislation) remains unclear.

The BBC is certainly no innocent in this, as it repeatedly pushed for strong punishments for copyright violators, even noting in some consultations that even more needs to be done than is being proposed. And who can forget the piece on a prime time BBC show, where they ‘reported‘ on a study, that we had poked major holes in weeks earlier, and yet had only ‘Industry’ participants. A complaint to the BBC had the response that it was “balanced”.

The issue is that few individuals can afford to pay for lawyers to file a copyright lawsuit, especially against large media companies such as the BBC. In effect, current copyright law is a tool for the rich allowing major companies to infringe frequently for commercial gain, yet face little sanction.

It would seem that in the end, we’re left with one question. Is copyright just for the Big Guys?

Source: Is Copyright Only For the Big Guys?

“A very balanced proposal,” said the copyright monopolists in an entitled tone of voice. “Shameless mail-order legislation,” said everybody else.

On arriving in parliament, the proposal was thrown unceremoniously into the wastepaper basket, sponsored by no one.

The copyright industry just wants more, more, and more, and they don’t think twice about ruining our hard-won fundamental civil liberties to prop up their crumbling monopoly and control. When one tough measure doesn’t work — and they never do — the copyright industry keeps demanding more.

A few centuries ago, the penalty for unauthorized copying was breaking on the wheel. It is a term we’re not very familiar with these days, but it was a form of prolonged torturous death penalty where the convict first had every bone in his body broken, and then was weaved into the spokes of a wagon wheel and set up on public display. The cause of death was usually thirst, a couple of days later.

The copy monopoly in those days concerned fabric patterns. It was in France, prior to the revolution. Some patterns were more popular than others, and to get some additional revenue to the crown’s tax coffers, the King sold a monopoly on these patterns to selected members of the nobility, who in turn could charge an arm and a leg for them (and did so).

But the peasants and commoners could produce these patterns themselves. They could produce pirated copies of the fabrics, outside of the nobility’s monopoly. So the nobility went to the King and demanded that the monopoly they had bought with good money should be upheld by the King’s force.

The King responded by introducing penalties for pirating these fabrics. Light punishments at first, then gradually tougher. Towards the end, the penalty was death by public torture, drawn out over several days. And it wasn’t just a few poor sods who were made into public examples: sixteen thousand people, almost entirely common folk, died by execution or in the violent clashes that surrounded the monopoly. In practice, everybody knew somebody who had been horribly executed for pirating.

Here’s the fascinating part:

Capital punishment didn’t even make a dent in the pirating of the fabrics. Despite the fact that some villages had been so ravaged that everybody knew somebody personally who had been executed by public torture, the copying continued unabated at the same level.

So the question that needs asking is this:

When will the copyright industry stop demanding harsher punishments for copying, since we learn from history that no punishment that mankind is capable of inventing has the ability to deter people from sharing and copying things they like?

— — —

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: And When Even The Death Penalty Doesn’t Deter Copying — What Then?

However, the movie industry itself is no stranger to infringing on the rights of others. In fact, in 1902 Thomas Edison himself copied Georges Méliès’ film A Trip to the Moon without permission to show it in US theaters. This act of piracy eventually resulted in the bankruptcy of the French filmmaker.

In the century that followed, and even today, the movie industry is often accused of copyright infringement, most recently by the best-selling author Joe Quirk. Quirk published his first novel titled The Ultimate Rush in 1998, and recently found out that Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures are planning to release a new movie that appears to be copied from his work.

Aside from the titles, Quirk’s book and the upcoming film Premium Rush are strikingly similar, which prompted the author to start a lawsuit earlier this week.

“A comparison of THE ULTIMATE RUSH novel and a copy of the PREMIUM RUSH screenplay shows that PREMIUM RUSH is plagiarized in substantial part from Quirk’s novel, THE ULTIMATE RUSH,” the complaint filed at the U.S. District Court of California reads.

In addition to Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures, the lawsuit also targets the production company Pariah and screenplay writers John Kamps and David Koepp. All defendants are accused of several copyright-related offenses as they allegedly turned Quirk’s book into a movie script without permission.

The complaint includes two dozen pages littered with examples of similarities in the plot, characters, various scenes and even dialogues.

Through the lawsuit Joe Quirk hopes to be compensated for damages the alleged pirating of his book by the prominent movie studios have and will cost. The author also seeks a halt to the distribution of the film and all related materials.

Quirk further seeks to recover all profits that the movie studios will make from the “unlawful exploitation” of his book.

Premium Rush has finished filming and is currently in the post-production stage. The film is scheduled to be released on January 13 next year, but it’s now up to the District Court to decide whether this will go ahead.

Source: Hollywood Studios Sued For Pirating A Movie Script

Last year, for example, the U.S Copyright Group ripped off the website of a competitor. They copied the design and code of the Copyright Enforcement Group and passed it off as their own. Only when we called them out on it did they remove all “infringing” content.

But the US Copyright Group are not the only infringing lawyers, there are plenty more.

The most recent example uncovers the copyright disregard of one the most active anti-piracy lawyers, John Steele. In less than a year Steele and his partner filed dozens of mass-lawsuits targeting thousands of BitTorrent users, but apparently their targets aren’t the only ones with a habit of copying content without permission.

In the settlement letters that Steele sends to alleged copyright infringers there’s a frequently asked questions section. Contrary to what one might expect, these questions were not written by Steele himself. Like the U.S. Copyright Group, Steele went for the lazy option and simply ripped off the FAQ section penned by the Copyright Enforcement Group.

Below is a comparison of the questions ‘stolen’ by Steele, which clearly reveals that they are identical.

TorrentFreak contacted the Copyright Enforcement Group to ask whether Steele has permission to use their copyrighted text, and we were told that he doesn’t. In fact, the Copyright Enforcement Group told us that they may take steps to prevent Steele from blatantly ‘stealing’ their work in the future.

So there we have it.

A notorious anti-piracy lawyer who claims to have spent as much as $250,000 to develop a BitTorrent tracking tool, doesn’t even bother to write his own settlement letters. In theory one could argue that he’s profiting from infringing the work of others, something that’s not taken lightly by the courts nowadays.

A quick search further reveals that Steele and his partner are not the only one who ripped off the FAQ from the Copyright Enforcement Group. Another group, operating under the name Copyright Action Network has done the same, again without permission from the copyright holders.

Oh the irony…

Source: Anti-Piracy Lawyers Rip Off Work From Competitor

The church was founded in 1886 and since its 100th anniversary 25 years ago it has been using a trademarked cross logo to identify its products and services. In 2010 the logo’s copyright was officially registered in the hope of preventing third parties from abusing the church’s faith.

It now appears the registration came just in time. The Church of God logo is now the subject of a lawsuit filed by the church against several parties linked to the making and distribution of the movie Salvation Boulevard which premiered in U.S. theaters last Friday.

Salvation Boulevard covers the story of pastor Dan, played by Pierce Brosnan, who turns his church into a business empire using rather unconventional methods. Much to the displeasure of the Church of God, however, pastor Dan’s church uses a logo that is clearly inspired by theirs.

In the complaint obtained by TorrentFreak the Church of God accuses the defendants of copyright infringement, trademark infringement and unfair competition by using a mirrored version of the church’s logo in the film. Sony Pictures, Mandalay Pictures, IFC Films and Comcast (as distributor) are listed as defendants in the lawsuit that was filed at the U.S District Court of Eastern Tennessee last week.

“Defendants are using a certain ‘cross’ design to promote the Salvation Boulevard film. The design also appears within the film to identify a ‘religious group’ at the center of the film’s storyline,” the complaint reads.

“Exemplary frames from a promotional trailer of the Salvation Boulevard film are shown below, wherein Defendants’ Cross Design is shown on the upper left of the ‘church’ appearing in the frame on the left and on the vest apparel item in the frame to the right.”

Through the lawsuit the Church of God hopes to stop the distribution of Salvation Boulevard and the ‘burning’ of all copies, promotional material and merchandise relating to the film. In addition the Church of God demands compensation for the substantial and irreparable harm the misuse of the logo has caused them.

This is the second time this year that the makers of a prominent movie have been sued for copyright-related offenses. Previously Mike Tyson’s tattooist sued Warner Bros. because it used a copy of his artwork in The Hangover II. This case was settled last month for an undisclosed amount.

The Church of God, however, is hoping to stop the distribution of Salvation Boulevard as soon as possible and has faith that the District Court Judge will hear their prayers for relief.

Source: Church of God Sues Sony Pictures and Comcast for Copyright Infringement

“My friends,” Schlüter said. “We must filter the Internet to win over online file sharing. But politicians don’t understand that file sharing is bad, and this is a problem for us. Therefore, we must associate file sharing with child pornography. Because that’s something the politicians understand, and something they want to filter off the Internet.”

“We are developing a child pornography filter in cooperation with the IFPI and the MPA so we can show politicians that filtering works,” he said. “Child pornography is an issue they understand.” Schlüter grinned broadly.

I couldn’t believe my ears as I heard this the first time. But the strategy has been set into motion worldwide.

Schlüter’s plan worked like clockwork. Denmark was the first country to censor AllOfMP3.com, the (fully legal) Russian music store, and is now censoring The Pirate Bay off the internet. The copyright industry is succeeding in creating a fragmented Internet.

This is why you see the copyright lobby bring up child pornography again and again and again. They are using it as a battering ram for censoring any culture outside of their own distribution channels. You can Google the term together with any copyright lobby organization and see them continuously coming back to it.

In Sweden, the copyright industry lobbyist Per Strömbäck has publicly admitted it being one of his best arguments. Try Googling for the Swedish word for child pornography on the lobby site and see if you get any hits in any articles (over 40).

The reasoning is simple and straightforward. Once you have established that someone who is in a position to censor other people’s communication has a responsibility to do so, the floodgates open and those middlemen can be politically charged with filtering anything that somebody objects to being distributed.

It is not hard to see why the copyright lobby is pursuing this avenue so ferociously.

It doesn’t really matter that filters at the DNS level are ridiculously easy to circumvent. The idea is to create a political environment where censorship of undesirable information is seen as something natural and positive. Once that principle has been established, the next step is to force a switch to more efficient censorship filters at the IP or even the content level.

News reached us this week that Internet Service Providers in the United States have now entered an agreement with the copyright lobby to police the net. This arrangement, it turns out, also stems from the copyright industry’s love of child pornography.

“We pointed out to [the governor] that there are overlaps between the child porn problem and piracy,” Mr. Sherman [The RIAA president] said, “because all kinds of files, legal and otherwise, are traded on peer-to-peer networks.”

Sound familiar? It should. It’s a page right out of the 2007 scene where the Danish Mr. Schlüter talked about the copyright lobby’s policymaking strategy of associating non-monopolistic distribution of culture with the rape of small defenseless children.

This association strategy has now worked in the United States, too.

Just when you think the copyright lobby can’t sink any lower, they surprise you again. And it gets worse. Much worse.

In Europe, the copyright lobby is now pushing Commissioner Malmström to create a similar censorship regime, despite clear setbacks from the European Court of Justice defending human rights and freedom to communicate.

But taking one step back, would censorship of child pornography be acceptable in the first place? Is the copyright industry perhaps justified in this particular pursuit, beyond their real goal of blocking non-monopolistic distribution?

There are two layers of answers to that. The first is the principal one, whether pre-trial censorship is ever correct. History tells us that it plainly isn’t, not under any circumstance.

But more emotionally, we turn to a German group named Mogis. It is a support group for adult people who were abused as children, and is the only one of its kind. They are very outspoken and adamant on the issue of censoring child pornography.

Censorship hides the problem and causes more children to be abused, they say. Don’t close your eyes, but see reality and act on it. As hard as it is to force oneself to be confronted emotionally with this statement, it is rationally understandable that a problem can’t be addressed by hiding it. One of their slogans is “Crimes should be punished and not hidden”.

This puts the copyright industry’s efforts in perspective. In this context they don’t care in the slightest about children, only about their control over distribution channels. If you ever thought you knew cynical, this takes it to a whole new level.

The conclusion is as unpleasant as it is inevitable. The copyright industry lobby is actively trying to hide egregious crimes against children, obviously not because they care about the children, but because the resulting censorship mechanism can be a benefit to their business if they manage to broaden the censorship in the next stage. All this in defense of their lucrative monopoly that starves the public of culture.

It’s hard to comprehend that there are people who are so shameless that they would actually do this. But there are. Every time you think the copyright lobby has sunk as morally low as is humanly possible, they prove you wrong.

— — —

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: The Copyright Lobby Absolutely Loves Child Pornography

But as argued before, the solution will most likely lie somewhere in the middle.

In the past, several people have indicated that the best strategy for copyright holders to dissolve piracy might not be based in legislation. Harsh anti-piracy measures will only distance consumers even further from their products and it is doubtful whether they will deter many copyright infringers. Instead, it might be wise for copyright holders to examine why people use file-sharing networks and see if they can come up with a competing offer that makes the official product more appealing that its pirated counterpart.

As it turns out, the above view is not the sole preserve of a small group of digital revolutionaries and stuffy academics. In the most recent issue of the Ericsson Business Review, Rene Summer, Director of Government and Industry Relations at Ericsson, offers some similar suggestions. Speaking for Ericsson, Summer states that copyright holders should stop their calls for harsher anti-piracy legislation, and focus their attention on giving consumers what they really want.

“Current restrictions have forced European consumers into a digital exile. Seeking an appropriate way to access legal digital content, and unable to satisfy this legitimate desire through a legitimate digital alternative, many resort to illegal file-sharing. Economic rights holders spare little expense in pursuing and prosecuting these individuals, and do not hesitate to ask courts or policymakers to mandate Internet service providers (ISPs) and other intermediaries to police such behavior,” Summer writes.

“ISPs are being forced to act as digital security agents on behalf of economic rights holders by listening in, screening, surveying and filtering the exchange of information between consumers. Such strict enforcement further damages the prospects of legal digital alternatives by introducing the principle of innovation by permission. It also carries unwelcome echoes of the old Eastern-bloc surveillance societies that modern Europe has decisively rejected.”

Aside from stressing that pushing for draconian anti-piracy measures at the political level might not be the best strategy, Summer also believes that copyright holders themselves might be one of the main reasons that piracy exists in the first place. Unnecessary restrictions and virtual barriers take away fundamental freedoms and breed pirates, he argues.

“File-sharing is a symptom of a problem, rather than a problem in itself. This problem is the inadequate availability of legal, timely, competitively priced and wide-ranging choices of affordable digital-content offerings. Consumers also expect to be able to make decisions freely regarding when and how to consume the content of their choice. By clinging to outdated business methods such as windowing and territoriality, economic-rights holders are in fact creating the consumer behavior against which they so violently protest,” Summer writes.

“How can we, as good Europeans, accept this state of affairs? The success of our European project is founded upon freedom of movement – for persons, goods, services and capital. Why should digital content be an exception? How can policymakers continue to endorse the vested interests of economic rights holders at the expense of the promises of the single market and our fundamental freedoms?”

So how does Ericsson suggest that the divide between consumers and copyright holders may be bridged? The answer is very simple…

“Ericsson is calling for full consumer access to legal, timely, competitively priced and wide-ranging compelling content offerings, and a free choice of when, where and how this legal digital content can be consumed. We call for an end to regulatory barriers and deliberate non-availability through windowing and territoriality.

“We call – a full 60 years after the Treaty of Paris – for a digital single market that not only meets the requirements of today’s and future European consumers, but also the requirements of European history,” Summer writes.

“This is a pan-European issue, and as such, it must be addressed uniformly across the continent. To date, efforts to revise legislation have focused on protecting existing practices and content-distribution models, which has unfortunately reinforced the underlying problem and hence its symptoms.

“Instead, targeted policy reforms that stimulate the growth of a well-functioning supply of legal digital content available on-demand for multiple screens are needed if actors at all stages of the value chain are to develop products that successfully meet the evolving needs of consumers.”

Indeed, Ericsson is calling for an end to extensive lobbying for harsher and more restrictive copyright legislation. Instead, the entertainment industry should take it upon themselves to meet the demands of consumers. No more DRM, no more artificial delays, and global availability in all formats possible. In other words, offer products that can compete with piracy instead of attempting to make piracy go away through repressive legislation.

Rene Summer’s words may sound familiar to many TorrentFreak readers, but we don’t often hear them being voiced by a director of a billion dollar company. Let’s hope the right people are listening to pick them up.

“Ericsson, Taking You Forward“

Source: Ericsson: File-sharing Is a Symptom Not the Problem

Similarly, the developing movie and music industries could not have envisioned their hefty inflammable film reels and cumbersome wax phonograph cylinders being subjected to the same treatment. Times and capabilities change, and with that come new challenges for existing business models.

While the movie industry frets over modern-day illicit digital access to its movies, another relatively small but important front has just opened – the unauthorized amateur creation of related merchandising. These items aren’t being mass-produced by sweat-shops in the Far East, but by creative individuals utilizing the latest in cutting-edge replication equipment – 3D printers.

One such individual, Todd Blatt, a mechanical engineer from Baltimore, offers some rather interesting items featured in the movie Inception, such as the spinning top used by lead character Cobb to test reality.

Blatt makes digital models of the items he sees in movies and sends them off to 3D printing site Shapeways. They recreate the items in a range of materials from plastic to metal and offer them for sale online.

But while the Inception items appear to have flown under the radar, a model Blatt made of another movie prop grabbed the attention of a rather large movie studio.

On June 8th Blatt announced on theRPF.com movie prop fansite that he was recreating the distinctive cube-shaped items from the Stephen Spielberg movie ‘Super 8‘. On June 9th he uploaded the files to Shapeways.

By June 10th, Blatt had received unwelcome contact from Hollywood lawyers and all his posts on theRPF were quickly edited out. [Art Andrews, owner of theRPF asked us to point out that Blatt edited his own posts, the site's operators had no part in that]

“Paramount Pictures’ lawyers sent me a cease and desist letter on Friday for a model I uploaded on Thursday night, and told me to take it down,” Blatt explained.

“It was a replica white funky cube shaped object from their new movie. I complied. I don’t want to sit in a courtroom for the rest of the year. I am no longer offering these for sale, and am complying with Paramount’s demands.”

“It’s purely just a fan creation and only one exists, which I ordered for myself before receiving the C&D letter,” Blatt explains. “There is a company called Quantum Mechanix (QMx) which will be selling licensed replicas soon, and if you’re a fan you should order one from them.”

Sending a cease and desist for this kind of item produced in this fashion is certainly unusual, but it raises interesting points. Currently only creative people like Todd Blatt who are skilled at design by trade are easily able to replicate a complex design. Equally, only companies like Shapeways can pull off the hardware side with the required cost-effective ease.

However, just as technology eventually morphed to allow physical film reels and waxy cylinders to be transmitted and reproduced by anyone, in their own homes and with close to zero training, history tells us that we should be prepared for further surprises.

We will all have 3D printers connected to our computers in the not too distant future but when Star Trek-style replicators have already whetted the appetite, man won’t be happy until science-fiction becomes science fact.

Hollywood created the replicator, but will they and other rightsholders be able to kill it? Only stricter copyright laws can provide the solution, or so they would have us believe.

Source: Paramount Cease and Desist Targets 3D Printer ‘Pirate’

Some people, and corporations in particular, claim that the purpose of the copyright monopoly is for a certain profession to make money. That was never the case, and frankly, the idea is revolting to any democracy and functioning market. Bricklayers don’t have laws guaranteeing they make money, marketers don’t, plumbers don’t, and nobody else does, either.

However, the means of achieving the maximization of the available culture has been to give some creators a monopoly on the opportunity — not the right, but the opportunity — to make money off of a creative work. This has been the means to maximize culture for the public at large, and never the end in itself.

This also means that the only legitimate stakeholder in copyright legislation is the public. The monopoly is indeed a balance, but not the “balance” between corporate profits and human rights that the copyright industry likes to paint and pretend. In fact, the copyright industry is not part of the balance at all.

The copyright monopoly legislation is a balance between the public’s interest of having access to culture, and the same public’s interest of having new culture created.

That’s it. Those are the two values that go into determining the wording of the copyright monopoly.

The copyright industry always demands to be regarded as a stakeholder in this monopoly. But to give them that status would be to royally confuse the means of the copyright monopoly with its end.

If they were a stakeholder, they would never agree to anything that went against their interests. But the copyright industry is not a stakeholder. They are merely a beneficiary of the copyright monopoly. Just because you benefit from something, you don’t get to affect its future.

Actually, it goes even further: particularly if you benefit from something, you don’t get to affect its future.

Let’s take an analogy. Blackwater Security benefits from United States foreign policy. Does that mean that Blackwater is a stakeholder in the US foreign policy, and should get a seat at the drafting table? Of course it doesn’t. The notion would be horrifying, with quite predictable outcomes. Yet, we accept this horrendous construction in the case of the copyright monopoly, with just the outcomes predicted.

Using a similar analogy from Europe, there are many regiment towns that would disappear if the regiment was closed. That doesn’t mean that town get to influence the national defense policy. The issue that some thousands of people would be unemployed in the case of closing the regiment would have to be solved by job market policy — but not by giving the regiment town a seat when drafting the national defense policy, and for all intents and purposes, give them a veto against killing their own current jobs.

Imagine if Blackwater Security had a veto against ending a particular war. Next, imagine if the copyright industry had a veto of giving the public more access to public culture.

So in the same way, it’s totally insane to give the copyright industry the same kind of veto against reductions in legislation that benefit them.

The copyright industry is not a legitimate stakeholder in the legislation of the copyright monopoly.

— — —

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: Why The Copyright Industry Isn’t a Legitimate Stakeholder in Copyright

This law firm might ring a bell or two with readers. The Canadian Recording Industry Association’s Graham Henderson began his career there, going on to become a partner in 1992. It’s no secret that McCarthy Tétrault works with the CRIA and that James Gannon has been accused of being linked to them and their lobbyists.

In addition to his regular work, Gannon has been writing some file-sharing related articles on his blog in recent times. One in particular caught our eye this week. We could have simply quoted the most interesting parts of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy and then offered some analysis. But we decided against it.

We thought that you, our readers, might like to do that instead. He’s previously locked horns with Michael Geist, now it’s your turn……

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy

After years of reading intellectual property law blogs from some of the greatest legal minds, I’m finally ready to admit that I was wrong. The fight against illegal copying is one that cannot be won. I can no longer deny the simple truth that it is ultimately futile to try to create artificial scarcities in what would otherwise be non-scarce goods. The digital revolution has allowed us to copy and share media for free and we should not let our antiquated laws stop us from enjoying these incredible technologies. It is time to fully embrace the digital revolution.

To be clear, I’m not talking about using P2P programs, cyber-lockers, illegal streaming or any other file-sharing technology.

I’m going to start printing my own money.

Gutenberg did not invent the printing press so that it would be controlled in the hands a few rich and powerful central bankers who desperately cling to outdated business models. With the advent of digital technologies, everyone can and should be free to copy their own money.

New Business Models

Don’t get me wrong. I love the bank notes that are created by the Bank of Canada (BoC). In fact, I consider myself to be one of their biggest fans. Even though the BoC will try to stop me if I try to make my own copies of their bills, they should really be flattered.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and I only want to share their work with my friends and family. By allowing me to make copies of their works, my friends might become fans of their currency too. Everyone knows the value of a currency is based on its demand so why not try to get as many fans as possible?

It’s really the BoC’s fault for failing to adapt to the digital age and come up with new business models for their currency. It’s completely unrealistic of them to expect all of their fans to keep getting only BoC copies of Canadian bills when the technology to make our own copies is found in everyone’s living room. The big central banks need to adapt to the digital age and find new ways to monetize their monetary expertise. The era of monetary monopolies is over.

Why can’t they just go on tour and give lectures on monetary policy? Or they could start selling Mark Carney t-shirts – I know I’d buy one. The point is that they shouldn’t stop people from making their own copies of their works and just think of it as promotion for their tour or other revenue model. If they let fans copy their existing bills, they will all rush out to get the new ones when they come out with new designs anyway. This would encourage central banks to keep innovating and coming up with newer, more modern bills.

Personal Use

I completely understand why the government would want to shut down large-scale currency counterfeiters. If everyone is using counterfeit money and nobody is trying to actually earn the original anymore, the Canadian dollar would probably hyperinflate since everyone would just be printing money instead of providing any goods or services. That’s not at all what I’m talking about.

When I start making my own copies of Canadian bills, it’s going to be strictly for my own personal use. Buying gas and groceries, paying bills, a nice restaurant or two maybe. Perhaps I’d share the bills with a few friends or family, but I definitely wouldn’t be producing counterfeit bills on a commercial scale with the intent of re-selling them. That would be wrong and hurtful to the economy, and that’s what anti-counterfeit officers should really focus their efforts on. I find it appalling that the government would want to go after poor university students who are just making personal copies of currency in their dorms to share with their friends.

If the Canadian government is thinking of reforming our counterfeiting laws, they need to understand that private counterfeiting is a victimless crime. It doesn’t hurt the original creators in any way if I make my own personal copies of their bills. If I can’t print for myself $1 million in Canadian $20’s, it’s not like I would have actually gone out and earned that money otherwise. This notion the big bankers have that every illegally printed dollar represents an economic loss is completely unrealistic. Plus, there are so many terrible foreign currencies out there these days, it’s only right that I should be able to try them out before I buy them.

Banker Are Already Millionaires

Whenever the big central banks try to convince us not to make copies of their bills, we always hear these stories about the starving economists that are losing jobs because of this counterfeiting. I understand that printing quality money can be hard and that a lot of economists and bankers work hard to balance our economy against recession and inflation. But these stories of starving bureaucrats are completely exaggerated.

Last year, Mark Carney made over $400,000 dollars, it’s on the public record. He also flies around all over the world to attend fancy G7 and G20 summits – all paid for by the BoC. So, do I really feel bad for Carney when I decide to make copies of BoC bills? Absolutely not, and neither should you.

Let’s also be honest here – the whole idea of a “central bank” is really outdated in the digital age. All a person needs is a colour scanner and printer and they can easily make their own money that’s just as good quality as the BoC stuff. In fact, when I go to stores and use my homemade Canadian money, I’ve yet to have anyone tell the difference. I really think the whole currency printing industry is going through a big democratization phase where every amateur monetarist can just make his own high-quality currency with a very basic setup. Getting rid of these dinosaur central banks is really just the natural evolution of the currency industry.

Copy Protections Simply Don’t Work

A lot of people don’t know this but for many yeas the BoC has been embedding technologies in its bills designed to prevent people from making illegal copies. Some of these anti-counterfeiting measures include things like holograms or using special polymer materials. I’m strongly opposed to this practice and I think it only harms the consumer when banks use these technologies. What about the consumer protection implications of having a central bank place these technologies on bills that consumers have legally earned? Banks have no right to try to control our use of bills that we legally acquired.

Did you know that it’s even illegal to own the tools to bypass these anti-counterfeiting measures? Even if you don’t intend to do any illegal printing, just having circumvention tools is against s.458 of the Criminal Code. What if I just want to make backups of my bills in case my wallet gets stolen?

Here’s another thing that might surprise you – even copying devices have technologies that prevent counterfeit bill printing! So not only are there protection technologies on the media itself, but programs like Adobe Photoshop contain technological protections at the device level! Regardless of what you think of using protection measures on the bills themselves, I think we can all agree that device-level protections against counterfeit bills are completely unacceptable. What if I want to film a movie and need some fake money for a mob scene? As long as I can think of one legal example where I would want to copy bank bills, then there is no justification for the use of technological measures to stop me from doing so.

Michael Geist once said: “The truth is that you can compete with free if you provide value” and he’s absolutely right. Central banks need to start adapting right now to the Internet and digital age and give me one reason why I should earn their bills when I can easily make my own personal copies for free at home.

Original article here.

Source: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy

Copyright laws keep on being ‘copied’, even though there are seemingly better solutions out there. The industries that depend on copyright are not in favor of change because this would mean that they would lose authority and power, and possible revenue. The worst consequence of this “path dependence” is that copyright interests gain at the expense of everyone’s privacy.

Let me explain how.

To grasp the internal path dependence of copyright is to try to grasp a bigger, more complex development. As most people know, there is a lot of inconsistency between online behavior and copyright regulation. So, when a EU directive like the one on ”The Information Society” criminalises more actions in relation to copyright, when the directive on Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement breaks down the privacy of the Internet users, and when three-strikes laws for copyright violators are discussed widely across Europe, it all says something about the bigger trend, about the ‘path’ that’s chosen.

It is not a surprise that the law is in many aspects very dependent on its history. However, historical and old-fashioned concepts and principles tend to create paths that also lock in future legal directions. The problems occur when laws relate to the past in a manner that fails to include or to grasp important changes in society – such as the Internet and digitalization. Sometimes laws are so locked in that they cannot even consider alternatives that might be more appropriate in these ‘new times.’

Copyright is interesting in this regard because it has ended up in a seemingly insurmountable conflict between social and legal norms, making this path dependence analysis all the more relevant. As mentioned above, the path dependence of European copyright serves as a strong argument for those who benefit from its conservation.

The entertainment industry doesn’t want to change, it’s not in their interest that the regulation gets more in tune with society – instead, the industry wants even stricter copyright laws. Longer copyright lifetimes, stronger protections, more intrusive methods for detecting copyright violations. They are fighting for their monopoly. But let’s not forget that the reason the industry has become powerful in the first place, is that the legal development had time to get established and mature before the Internet came along.

Now, what’s the problem?

There are several problems with this out-of-tune-with-reality-legislation. Firstly, the special interest of copyright has become so strong that it gets tangled up with several other types of legislation, including legislation meant to fight terrorism. And it’s not only the file-sharers and copyright violators who suffer the consequences. Everyone’s Internet traffic will monitored more as a result.

Secondly, neutral intermediaries such as ISPs are increasingly being targeted to choose sides in the copyright ‘conflict’. In Europe, we can see this in the Enforcement Directive, and the Telecoms Reform Package. The recently negotiated Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) is also a good example where the same is happening on a global scale. Along the same lines, a recent report from the European Commission discusses (PDF page 7) that the currently available legislative and non-legislative instruments are not powerful enough to combat ”online infringements of intellectual property rights” effectively, which leads to the conclusion that ISPs should be targeted for their role as data carriers.

Thirdly, the key role of ISPs is also part of a bigger issue that concerns the basic fundamentals of the Internet as we know it. Old copyright principles are now used to define what the Internet is. This means that the development of copyright, in a broad sense, not only rebuilds the Internet in terms of traceability and accessibility (gated communities), but also legal enforcement in terms of mass-surveillance.

It is important to realize that the development of a general mass surveillance of the entire population is not an issue to be taken lightly or a development that should be allowed to pass unscrutinised.

In summary we can say that the copyright path is reproduced (copied) and strengthened in various legislative efforts. The path dependence of European copyright serves as a strong argument for those who benefit from its preservation, signalling that there are strong power structures behind it. As a result, copyrights take precedence over other rights, such as privacy and sometimes even property.

The path dependence of copyright leads to an imbalance of principal importance between the interests at stake. The entertainment industries and other copyright profiteers define to a large degree what the public can and cannot do, and the copyright interest gain at the expense of the privacy of everyone. We really have to wonder whether that’s a good thing..

—

Stefan Larsson is a researcher in sociology of law and co-founder of the research group Cybernorms at Lund University, that recently ran a survey on file sharing at The Pirate Bay.

Read more in a longer academic article on the path dependence of European Copyright that Stefan recently published in ScriptEd, a journal of University of Edinburgh’s School of Law.

Source: Copyright Is Like QWERTY: Locked-In and Retrospective

That problem is based in the difference in perception of the courts from an entrepreneur’s perspective, and therefore, from the economy as a whole.

Let’s say we had a copyright monopoly holder who observed an activity of sharing they regarded as violating their monopoly. From a legal perspective, it might be an actual monopoly violation or one that falls outside the monopoly; nobody knows that at this point. Let’s say the holder of this copyright monopoly decides that the sharing individual owes them some amount of money for the ongoing activity, say €100 per year, and sends out a demand for this money.

Lawyers react to such letters as perfectly natural claims to sort out in court to establish the boundaries of the law.

But when I get such a nastygram as an entrepreneur, my reasoning is different. I don’t really care about sorting out details in the law, I care about money, I care about making my ends meet. When I read that nastygram, I read that I have two options: I could either pay €100 per year, or go to court and challenge the claim (let’s assume here that it has turned out to be an obviously frivolous claim).

What is the cost of the entrepreneur’s other option, going to court?

Let’s assume for the moment that the costs are ridiculously low. Let’s say going to court over this claim will just cost €5,000, and that my chances of winning have been judged to be a solid 90%. That means the cost of this option is €5,000 plus €10 yearly (10% of €100).

So as an entrepreneur, I have two options moving ahead. I select options not from a legal perspective, but from an economic one of returns on investment. In this example, the breakeven point if I choose the upfront investment of going to court is 55 years out. I am not going to see that investment recoup its cost in my lifetime. Therefore, as an entrepreneur, my choice is obvious — I select the lower running costs.

Money is all that matters when you’re running a business. Specifically, establishing case-law does not.

And so, another “license” is paid up, and copyright lawyers use it as proof to politicians that licenses are paid and the system works. It’s circular reasoning at its most insidious.

The danger here lies in the difference of perspective: lawyers and politicians regard court proceedings as having zero cost, as basically being a correspondence or a negotiation. In the reality entrepreneurs live in, however, the court cost of a monopoly lawsuit can easily hit a million euros.

The reality of this entrepreneur applies to every person running a business, and therefore, to the economy as a whole. (Possibly excepting legal firms specializing in monopoly arbitration.)

If this were not done within the legal framework, we would arrest the copyright monopoly or patent monopoly holders for extortion and throw them in jail. It was never “I think you owe me license money for your use of this, do you wish to have a court arbitrate our conflict?”, but always “Pay me a small ongoing stream of protection money, or I will ruin your business”.

So the next time the monopoly laws need revision and redrafting, the politicians go to the monopoly lawyers with demonstrated understanding of the substance matter. Politicians note that the lawyers have been correct in their predictions that license money would start to flow, and take it as proof the system works; they can’t see or know money is flowing for all the wrong reasons.

And so, the monopoly lawyers get to expand and revise those laws yet again, when it was nothing but a legalized extortion racket from the start. The cycle continues.

— — —

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: Monopoly Lawyers Shouldn’t Write Monopoly Laws

The legislation was brought up again quite unexpectedly this week, despite massive opposition and public outrage that delayed it last year. But this time around there was little room for protest, as it was just a matter of hours before the Bill passed.

As is often the case when politicians decide on copyright-related matters, their very own actions with regard to copyright are being carefully scrutinized. This can lead to awkward situations, something Member of Parliament Melissa Lee found out herself this week.

Just hours before giving a speech in support of the three-strikes law which is supposed to protect the copyright holders, she sent out the following tweet:

So, while Lee was condemning today’s youth and their lack of respect for copyright, she more than likely infringed on the rights of several K-Pop musicians. After all, making a music compilation and handing it over to a friend is not allowed under New Zealand’s copyright law.

Surprised by the call-out, Lee defended herself by saying that the songs were downloaded legally and paid for. But unfortunately for her that doesn’t mean much. As the National Business Review points out, when a friend makes a copy of songs that were legally bought, the recipient of the ‘gift’ is still guilty of copyright infringement.

So it appears that Lee got her first strike already, and since the burden of proof is on the alleged infringer under the new legislation, it’s up to her to prove that she’s innocent. That’s only fair, right?

Although it’s easy to call Lee’s mistake out as hypocrisy, it might be even worse than that. What if she truly believes that copying a legally bought song for a friend is okay? That would mean that even legislators who vote on copyright legislation don’t fully grasp what they’re doing.

In her speech Lee said that it’s perfectly legal to share a DVD or music album with a friend. But does she know that it’s not that straightforward? The laws she helped to pass state that people can’t share a legally bought MP3 with someone, unless they share the entire device it is bought on.

Back to copyright school we say!

Source: Kiwi MP Called Out As Pirate After Passing Anti-Piracy Law

They target schools and kids’ community centers, charge charities for the singing of Christmas carols without a license, and even crash weddings if they have to.

While these copyright collectors are very strict in forcing their rules onto others, they often fail to live up to their own standards. This attitude was brilliantly exposed by the Belgian TV-show Basta who exposed local music royalty collecting agency SABAM for charging people to pay non-existent artists.

This week SABAM made the headlines once again, this time claiming money from truck drivers who listen to music in their cabs. Since a truck’s cab is a place of work the drivers are obliged to pay royalty fees, they argue. Those are simply the rules according to the copyright police, but not everyone agrees.

“It’s utter nonsense,” said Maggie De Block, member of the Belgian Parliament in a response to the claim. “The truck drivers don’t need the radio so much for playing music, but for their safety. So it is illogical that they should pay for it.”

Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne is not backing the theory of the copyright police either. He said that listening to radio is essential for truckers and noted that above all, a truck’s cab is an intimate space.

Angered by the responses from these politicians, SABAM said that they have the right to claim money from anyone who listens to music while working. The copyright collectors refer to an agreement they have with Minister Van Quickenborne which allows them to charge anyone, anytime. Whether they are in an office or a truck cab makes no difference, they say.

The safety argument doesn’t impress SABAM either, as they claim truck drivers still profit from listening to ‘free’ music when the radio is on.

Although SABAM might be right while following the letter of the law, the above example and numerous others where small businesses or non-profits have been hunted down in the past do not help them to maintain a good public image. We also wonder if the artists are very happy with such a strict copyright regime.

But then again, someone has to pay for the luxurious furniture at the SABAM offices, and the generous salaries these copyright crusaders enjoy. Piggybacking on the creations of musicians is big business after all.

Source: Copyright Police Want Truck Drivers To Have Licensed Cab Music

There is a blind trust in authority here that is alarming. The ever-increasing desire to know what we talk about and to whom is cause for more than concern, and that desire is displayed openly by corporations and politicians alike. To make matters worse, it is not just a matter of eavesdropping: corporations and politicians openly want – and get – the right to silence us.

The copyright industry is demanding the right to kill switches of our very communications. If we talk about matters disruptive enough, disruptive according to authorities or to the copyright industry, the line goes silent. Just twenty years ago, this would have been an absolutely horrifying prospect; today, it is reality. Don’t believe me? Try talking about a link to The Pirate Bay on MSN or on Facebook and watch as silence comes through. The copyright industry is fighting for this to become more pervasive. So are some politicians with agendas of their own.

While the copyright industry and repressive Big Brother politicians may not share the same ultimate motives, they are still pushing for exactly the same changes to society and control over our communications.

At the same time, citizens’ physical movements are tracked to street level by the minute and the history recorded.

How would you revolt with all this in place, when all you said just fell silent before reaching the ears of others, and the regime could remotely monitor who met whom and where, when they could kill all your equipment with the push of a button?

The West hardly has any high moral ground from where to criticize China or the regimes that are falling in the Arab world.

And yet, in all this darkness, there is a counter-reaction that is growing stronger by the day.

Activists are working through the night in defeating the surveillance and monitoring to ensure free speech by developing new tools in a cat-and-mouse game. These are the heroes of our generation. By ensuring free speech and free press, they are ensuring unmonitored, unblockable communications. Therefore, they are also defeating the copyright monopoly at its core, perhaps merely as a by-product.

Free and open software is at the core of the counter-reaction to Big Brother. It is open to scrutiny for any and all kill switches and wiretapping, and it can spread like wildfire when necessary. Moreover, it renounces the copyright monopoly to the point where popular development methods are actively fighting the monopoly, again making the connection between copyright enforcement and repression. Free operating systems and communications software are at the heart of all our future freedom of speech, as well as for the freedom of speech for regimetopplers right this day.

The software that is being built by these hero activists is a guarantee for our civil liberties. Software like Tor and FreeNet and I2P, like TextSecure and RedPhone. That criminals can evade wiretapping is a cheap price to pay for our rights: tomorrow, we might be considered the criminals for subversion. These are tools used by the people revolting against corrupt regimes today. We should learn something from that.

At the same time and by necessity, this free software makes the copyright monopoly unenforceable, as it creates the untappable, anonymous communication needed to guarantee our civil liberties. Mike Masnick of Techdirt recently noted that “piracy and freedom look remarkably similar”.

Perhaps Freenet’s policy expresses it the most clearly:

“You cannot guarantee free speech and enforce the copyright monopoly. Therefore, any technology designed to guarantee freedom of speech must also prevent enforcement of the copyright monopoly.”

The fights for basic freedoms of speech and for defeat of the copyright monopoly are one and the same.

Therefore, the revolutions will happen using tools that are not just in lack of the copyright monopoly, but actively defeat it. The revolution will not be properly licensed.

– — –

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other Friday. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: The Revolution Will Not Be Properly Licensed

Obsoleting scribes was not a popular development with the Catholic Church, who tried to ban the printing press with increasingly harsh punishments, up to and including the death penalty for using a printing press to copy books.

“How will the monks get paid?”, they argued to justify this. Still, even the death penalty couldn’t stop the copying.

Of course, it wasn’t about payment of monks. The Catholic Church couldn’t have cared less, really. It was about control over knowledge and culture. Once most of the populace had learned to read, the Church lost its grip permanently.

England chose a different route. Seeing how even the death penalty hadn’t worked, Queen Mary I needed an ally within the printing industry. She awarded a printing monopoly to London’s printing guild, the London Company of Stationers, in return for being able to censor anything before publication.

The monopoly was awarded on May 4, 1557. It was called copyright.

This alliance between industry and government worked well to suppress dissent. Fast forward 138 years, and censorship wasn’t really all that modern anymore. The British Parliament let the copyright monopoly expire in 1695, and the Stationers lost a very lucrative monopoly. They begged to get it back for 15 years.

Eventually, Parliament was persuaded. The printers and distributors complained that nothing would get printed or distributed without a monopoly. (Note how this is very, very different from nothing being created without a monopoly.) But they suggested that this monopoly originate with the author and be classified as property, so it could be sold to a printer.

In doing this, the printers killed three birds with one stone. One, they met Parliament’s requirement that there would be no more central point which enabled censorship, so they would reconsider the monopoly. Two, the printers would still have a de facto monopoly as authors would be forced to sell the monopoly to printers. Three, classifying the monopoly artificially as “property” would write it into Common Law rather than case law, giving it much stronger legal status.

The copyright monopoly was re-enacted in this form in 1709, and took effect on April 10, 1710, in the so-called Statute of Anne.

The United States adopted a similar passage in its constitution later, but with much clearer justification — that the only legitimate beneficiary of the copyright monopoly is the public.

Fast forwarding to the advent of libraries, the monopolist publishers — now strong in their almost religious belief that they had a right to dictate how people could read — tried to ban the lending of books. You couldn’t allow people to read without paying for their own copy, they argued. When politicians considered public libraries, the monopolist publishers went stratospheric.

“You can’t let anybody read any book for free! Not a single book will be sold ever again! Nobody will be able to live off their writing! No author will write a single book ever again if you pass this law!”

Parliament in the 1800s was much wiser than today, however, and saw the copyright monopolists’ tantrum for what it was. They decided that the public’s access to knowledge and culture had a greater value to society than a monopolist being paid every time a book was opened, and so, the first public library in the UK opened in 1850. And as we all know, not a single book has indeed been written since. Oh, wait. There are more books being written than ever in history. I mean, the argument is as bogus when used today as it was then.

After the copyright monopoly internationalized in 1886, music became more and more interesting. The record industry was invited to Rome in 1933 by Confederazione Generale Fascista dell’Industria Italiana in order to try to corporatize the copyright monopoly a bit further. IFPI was formed in this Rome meeting. The ambition succeeded, with the advent of the Rome Convention in 1961, where the record industry was granted copyright-identical monopolies called “neighboring rights”.

One notes here that the record industry’s monopoly is as recent as 1961. Not the image they paint.

Currently, the United States is trying to bully every other country to respect the copyright monopoly’s stronger and stronger privileges. They issue a “Special 301 list” every year, which is supposed to be a blacklist of the world’s worst “offenders”. A majority of the world’s population is on the list. Spain and Canada made the list this year, too. A personal political goal for me is to put Sweden back on that list.

To summarize, the battle over who controls knowledge and culture has raged for well over 500 years. The same justifications have been used all through those 500 years. But learning from history, we can see how the choke hold of the Catholic Church was defeated. We should repeat that course of action against the copyright monopoly today. Teach everybody to share. Make everybody experience what it’s like to have all of humanity’s knowledge and culture at their fingertips. It can’t be unexperienced, just like people 500 years ago couldn’t unlearn to read.

– — –

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other Friday. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

Source: Nothing New Under The Copyright-Eclipsed Sun

Aside from nuclear issues, Iran has gained a bad reputation for censoring the public in its own country. These censorship issues reached new highs last year during the election protests, where the Government went as far as cutting citizens’ Internet access.

For copyright holders worldwide, the Iranian Government poses a significant threat. The country’s copyright law is set up to protect all copyrighted works produced by Iranians, but not those by creators from other countries.

Since 2001 Iran has been a member of the WIPO, and has acceded to several WIPO intellectual property treaties. However, the Iranian Government never signed the WIPO copyright treaty and other international copyright agreements that would make copying of foreign products unlawful.

This means that Iranians can share movies, music and applications as much as they like, as long as the copyright is not owned by an Iranian. In fact, even Government agencies actively help to distribute these works among the public, most notably the Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology (IROST).

From a publicly accessible FTP-server Iranian citizens have free access to a wide range of software, including multiple versions of Microsoft Office (97 to 2010) and Adobe’s Photoshop (5.5 to CS3). All the ‘pirated’ files come complete with serials, cracks and keygens and can be downloaded for free.

To make the search for new warez even more convenient, all the files are neatly categorized in folders. Those looking for image editing software should take a look in the ‘Graphics’ folder which includes Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere and dozens of other titles.

Iranian web-designers should definitely take a look in the ‘Web Design’ folder, and the ‘Multimedia’ folder is of interest to those looking to play, burn or convert video and audio files. TorrentFreak’s personal recommendation is the ‘Screensaver’ folder, which includes beautiful waterfall and aquarium animations.

Again, all of this is perfectly legal to download, for Iranians at least. Luckily Iran is full of bright and young people who are eager to learn but don’t always have the means to pay for software. For some of them free software is the path to a better life for them and their families

Whether Adobe, Microsoft and other copyright holders will be happy with the software giveaway is another question. We doubt that it’s worth another war though.

Update: A few minutes after we published the article the public FTP was passworded. So much for free warez…. This still works though…

Update: Now all folders seem to be secured… For non-Iranians at least.

Update: Here’s the public FTP of the Tehran Polytechnic University.

Source: Iranian Government Runs Public Warez Server

It’s when independent experts say that extending terms hurts the economy and stifles innovation that people should sit up and take notice. All too often though, such experts are ignored because they are just people that know the subject, rather than fund politicians campaign contributions. Moreover, they focus on facts and case histories, rather than vague associations or made-up figures.

Two such experts are Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, economists at the Washington University in St Louis. Boldrin, chairman of the university economics department, points out that what goes by the name ‘Intellectual Property’ is in fact “an intellectual monopoly that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps.”

“From a public policy view, we’d ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether,” says Levine, the John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics. “There’s plenty of protection for inventors and plenty of protection and opportunities to make money for creators. It’s not that we see this as some sort of charitable act that people are going to invent and create things without earning money. Evidence shows very strongly there are lots of ways to make money without patents and copyright.”

In a short video clip, Levine states that copyright shouldn’t been seen as a charitable act, which is a lesson Commissioner McCreevy needs to learn. Also, he states that Intellectual Monopoly is the more appropriate term, and that the property label is a recently-given propaganda title, a subject Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation has covered in the past.

The views of the economists are presented in their new book, “Against Intellectual Monopoly”, where they suggest that the copyright and patent systems in the US should at least be brought back into line with their constitutional establishment – that of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. In the book, they put the case quite simply – “In the decades to come, sustaining economic progress will depend, more and more, on our ability to progressively reduce and eventually eliminate intellectual monopoly.”

It might be that the Pirate Party has some intellectual support for their positions, and perhaps a Missouri party will soon be in the making.

Source: Economists: Abolish Copyright & Patents to Save the Economy

That’s where many lawyers, such as Davenport Lyons can make a tidy profit. As has happened in some of the cases they are involved with, many will admit wrongdoing, and even pay ‘damages’ where no actions (wrong or otherwise) have occurred. It has led to a general feeling that a claim of copyright infringement by a large powerful company will get the actions they desire, irrespective of facts, through fear of litigation. This was the situation last week, when Toyota ordered wallpaper site Desktop Nexus to remove all images featuring Toyota vehicles, even those with copyright belonging to others.

However, sometimes a company can be pressured into accepting mistakes, and this is the case here. With a large amount of negative publicity (a selection of which can be found on DesktopNexus’ blog) Toyota today contacted TorrentFreak and DesktopNexus, expressing their apologies for the incident.

From: Scott DeYager
Date: Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 12:52 AM
Subject: Desktopnexus Toyota Wallpapers
To: tips@torrentfreak.com

Dear Torrentfreak.com,

The recent request Toyota made to have certain photos of Toyota vehicles removed from the public wallpaper site, DesktopNexus, was the result of an internal miscommunication.

To protect the legal rights and agreements we have with the photographers we hire, we ask that the photographs not be used for direct consumer advertising, sales brochures and the like.

If people wish to post their own photos of one of their own vehicles, that’s their right. In fact, we’re pleased that people would want to show their Toyota vehicles to the world. So have at it. Consider the wallpapers on DesktopNexus to be fair game for personal use.

Please let your readers know that we offer a sincere apology to the DesktopNexus site and its users for any inconvenience or disruption this miscommunication may have caused.

Thanks for your understanding,

Scott DeYager
Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.
Corporate Communications

DesktopNexus told TorrentFreak that they will be releasing a statement on this shortly.

Source: Toyota Admits Wrongdoing in Wallpaper Case

This ‘Way’ is probably not communicated to its lawyers in great detail, which is why Desktopnexus, a site that provides desktop backgrounds, has been contacted by them. In perhaps one of the most wildly arrogant demands in DMCA history, Toyota’s lawyers are demanding the withdrawal of all wallpapers that feature a Toyota, Scion, or Lexus. The site’s owner, Harry Maugans contacted Toyota to clarify. He was told that all images featuring Toyota vehicles should be removed, even images with copyright belonging to others.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, Maugans said: “Their lawyer, Garrett Biggs, told us that if we wanted them to specifically identify their images, we would have to pay for them to do so”. Maugans also said he was afraid it would come to a lawsuit, fearing the attrition effect that is so common now in copyright disputes. Toyota, with cash assets of over $23Billion can surely afford to spin out the legal costs in an attempt to bankrupt the site – the same strategy that is often used to ‘encourage‘ a settlement in RIAA cases.

Yet, Toyota has also been cagey. These demands have not been sent in the form of a DMCA notice. While sending such a notice would require the takedown, it also requires that the person sending the notice legally certify that they are legal representatives for the copyright holders at issue. Making a false statement is ‘punishable under penalty of perjury‘, which is not taken lightly in US courts.

That copyright holders should be properly identified is also not lost on Mr. Maugans. “What if Toyota comes back and says “yes, we own the copyright to all of those [Toyota images on site]“. How can we know if they’re lying to get us to take them all down? How can we prove they do in fact own the copyrights on those wallpapers? Some are very hard to believe, such as this which looks more like Fan Art than a professionally designed marketing photo. Or this one which they’re claiming they own, but it has a “Created by:” line at the bottom by someone who doesn’t seem to have any connection to the actual Toyota company.”

The ‘huh what?’ value of Toyota’s position has been noticed by others as well. On the FreeCulture News site, one comment questions the action saying “What are they trying to accomplish by attacking free advertising?” Indeed, this is what it comes down to. Instead of embracing free advertising and word of mouth, Toyota seems desperate to control and micromanage every aspect of it’s publicity.

At the end of the day, the best question is that asked by Mr Maugans, “Has DMCA abuse really gotten this bad?”

At the time of press, Toyota Inc. did not respond to requests for comment.

Thanks to Conley at FCnews for the tip

Source: Toyota Claims Ownership of Fan Wallpapers

However, recently the PRS has been getting more and more aggressive in its quest to funnel cash to its paymasters. It now sees every UK organization – commercial or otherwise – as a legitimate target to intimidate with threats of legal action, should they dare to play a radio, TV or DVD within earshot of the public without a license. Small businesses playing the radio for personal entertainment to pass the working day, charities, tea rooms, corner shops and even community centers are being targeted by this outfit. Bizarrely, they are currently going after the British police, who have been refusing to pay. It’s clear, they care about just one thing – money.

To get this money the PRS go after people like the 61 year-old mechanic Paul Wilson, who has worked alone at his garage for 23 years since he was 15. He can’t afford the PRS license, so now he has to work in silence. “When I was first contacted by the PRS I thought somebody was having a laugh with me,” he said. But really, this is no laughing matter. After the demands for money, Mr Wilson told the PRS to take his radio to prove he wasn’t listening to it, but the PRS warned that the police could come round to do spot checks. Meanwhile, the garage next door to Mr Wilson also received a PRS letter, so they are maintaining radio silence too. Just regular people trying to earn a living, being chased down for money to listen to a radio at work. It’s astonishing.

When the small guy gets hit by these type of issues it really annoys people in the copyright debating community. However, if you really want to widen the debate and spread some really bad PR, it’s going to take tactics which show how low you are prepared to go. For instance, you could go after a charity trying to raise funds via a tea-room, discover their staff radio can be overheard, and demand money from them.

But it is possible to further outrage people. And this is what these type of collection outfits are doing, by widening their campaigns to start going after the softest most impressionable target in the country – kids. Last week we reported how the MPLC, a Hollywood royalty collection outfit, (illegally) demanded money from kindergartens in Ireland, so that the kids could watch DVDs there.

But going after children isn’t exclusively an MPLC tactic, the PRS are doing it too. Part of the claim against the tea-rooms mentioned above was that the kids there needed to be licensed to sing carols in front of the public and now, to add insult to injury, the PRS ‘non-profit’ copyright cop is going after a kid’s non-profit community center in Glasgow, Scotland. The Yoker Resource Center is faced with a £3,000 bill, it if wants to carry on using its TV, radio or CD player, that is.

Elizabeth Busby, the after-school supervisor at the center said: “We can’t afford to pay this money. Although we have a TV license for the center, under these rules we cannot let all the kids watch it.”

Wondering (like the rest of us in the sane world) why people have to pay twice or more for using the same product, Ms Busby added: “If the children are watching a DVD then I have gone out and paid for it, so whether it is one person or twenty-five I still paid for it. It’s not as if I’m buying pirate copies or downloading them illegally. Soon it will be the Halloween party and what do we do for music?”

Asked to comment, the PRS declined. I’d like to think that the silence is down to shame, but I doubt it. I’ll leave you with some comments from Steve Pendlebury, writing in The Bolton News:

“Radio stations pay large amounts of money to licensing organizations PRS and PPL for the music they play, and music has been on the radio for many years. During the war, there were programmes like Workers Playtime and Music While You Work. Now, many radio stations have features about workplaces. If the PRS force people to switch their radios off then how are these stations going to survive?

Music has to be heard before people go out and buy it.”

Source: Copyright Cops Target Kids’ Schools and Community Centers

In some ways, Ghana could be the US of the future. Like America, they have a presidential election at the end of the year to replace a president that can not run again, having had two 4-year terms in office. They were once a colony of the UK, and politicians reportedly take bribes, just like the US. At the same time, they are quick to crack down on anything that seems to affect their backers, as a push to deal with counterfeit goods and ‘piracy’ has been proposed by the government.

“This insidious crime of product counterfeiting has become a global phenomenon; it’s no longer the canker of the under-developed or developing world,” president John Agyekum Kufuor said in a recent statement“The developed world is also battling with counterfeiting products albeit at a scale lower than in our part of the world”.

It would also seem that the president had been reading the recent BSA report, and following its (severely flawed) economics, when he noted “that counterfeit products denied genuine products of the rightful market share, costing governments significant amounts in lost tax revenues as well as threatening jobs”. Perhaps he missed how money spent locally stays in the local economy, but money spent on outside goods leaves the country. This money can’t be used elsewhere to generate MORE tax, and keeping jobs going.

What, though, is their ‘solution’? As the Ghana News Agency (GNA) put it in a July 23rd report, the Criminal Investigation Department of the police, will “handle counterfeiting and piracy crimes as drug trafficking.”

As anyone that lives in the real world knows, decades of treating drug trafficking as drug trafficking hasn’t exactly limited it. Moreover, while ownership of something like cocaine is illegal pretty much anywhere in the world, and has a distinctive smell, counterfeit goods by their nature look like legitimate items. Piracy is even worse, in that what some consider criminal, others consider a civil offence, and yet others see no problem at all. In some instances what may be an infringement of copyright, may be a legitimate fair use, depending on circumstance.

Can it succeed? As already noted, the approach hasn’t worked for a rigidly defined area such as narcotics, why should it in the legal miasma that is copyright and patent law. What it appears to be is another attempt to treat the symptoms, and although that works in some cases (Cholera for instance), it doesn’t in this case.

Source: African Drug Cops to Go After Pirates

Many have condemned these actions, others have supported them. The depth of public feeling in this is great, as are the potential risks and rewards from these actions , both directly, and indirectly through function-creep and precedent.

The ISP/BPI deal has been characterized as being ‘forced” onto the ISPs by the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR). Now, in what could be a classic example of ‘closing the stable door after the horse has bolted’, the government has opened a public consultation on file-sharing.

The government wants to know from the public how it should deal with illicit file-sharing. Is it really that big of a threat to the entertainment industry? Should ISPs be obligated to police the Internet? Is it a good option to block P2P traffic, or install piracy filters? Answers to these and more questions will help to shape future anti-piracy legislation.

Perhaps most critically, the documentation does state that any proposals for government intervention should be “evidence based”. Queries to the BERR asking if claims cited as evidence need to be substantiated had not been returned at press time. Unlike many consultations, this is open to the public, so if you posted one of the 200+ comments we’ve had on this topic, perhaps submitting your thoughts to the BERR would be something to think about.

It is consultation season though, so if you’re more interested in television than file-sharing, there’s always the Public Consultation on Implementing the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which could impact how many British programs appear on our weekly Top10 lists.

The deadline for responses is October 30, 2008. For those that have yet to see the memorandum signed by the 6 ISPs, it’s included in annex D of the PDF.

Source: UK Government Opens Filesharing Consultation

Perhaps the biggest incongruity that came from the announcements about it, is the feeling that session musicians, after being paid for the last 50 years for a single days work, need, all of a sudden to get another 45 years of payment.

You can bet the guy that put paper in the printer, that spat out the plans for McCreevy’s house hasn’t gotten paid for the last 50 years. I’ll bet the architect hasn’t either. However there is some reason that musicians, particularly jobbing musicians without the talent or ambition to head off on their own, should be paid for work of decades past. The press materials put out by the commission tries to spin a brave face on this, with the likes of frequently asked questions, and number 7 asks the question we all have:

7. Have performers not earned enough in the 50 years of protection?

Most performers or singers and session musicians start their career in their early 20′s or even before. That means that the current 50 year protection ends when they will be in their 70′s. Current life expectancy in the EU stands at 75.1 years for men and 81.2 years for women and it is usual for persons to live well into their 80′s and 90′s. Once protection has ended, performers no longer receive any income from their sound recordings. For session musicians and lesser known artists this means that income stops when performers are retired – the most vulnerable period of their lives.

Alas, they have overlooked one important fact. When someone retires, they cease getting paid for their work, since they are NO LONGER WORKING. That is what retirement means. If these session musicians haven’t worked since 1967, they have been retired for the last 40 years. Can we look forward to the Commissioner putting forth more legislation allowing nurses, gardeners, factory workers, mechanics, lorry drivers etc. to retire at 30 as well, safe in the knowledge that they will have their money woes cared for?

However, there was not all doom and gloom as a result of today’s meeting. Two other proposals were also passed that were in some way, better for the artist AND the consumer. First, part of the provision of extending the copyright is a requirement dubbed ‘use it or lose it’. It allows musicians to recover their copyrights from labels, if the label no longer wishes to market the recording. If, after a year of no commercial availability, then the copyright will be rescinded. This could be seen as an attempt to force recordings back into the market, but it will remain to be seen how effective this will be, or how it will be enforced. If selling copies only at a small back street shop in a small town would qualify, for instance.

Of course, of greatest interest to us, is the actions to deal with the royalty collection groups. Until now, they’ve had country monopolies. You play a song in public, and as long as it’s under copyright, you’ve had to pay a fee, regardless of the artist wishing the collection group to do so. As the final shake up of copyright reform, the national franchises such groups have enjoyed (like cable TV companies) will be broken up, and artists will be able to sign with any agency they desire, bringing about, the commission hopes, competition.

However, none of this is binding yet, as it has to be approved by the Parliament. It is worth noting however, that the proposal document lists the history behind the proposal. That in 2004, they issues a call for comments, and later had meetings with certain stakeholders. Stakeholders in the EU context means businesses involved with the subject, not citizens. Tellingly, the proposal itself lists where it seems to have gone wrong

Summary of responses and how they have been taken into account
Responses in favour of term extension came from performers’ associations, the recording
industry, collecting societies, music publishers, performing artists and music managers. Those
against term extension were telecoms, libraries, consumers and public domain companies.
The arguments of those against term extension were addressed in the analysis of impacts of
the various options.
• Collection and use of expertise
There was no need for external expertise.

From first looks at the impact study, it would appear that it only concerned itself with those who have created and published music in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cost difference between public domain, and copyrighted music. A study that had it’s conclusion written into the brief, and hardly representative of the real facts.

Euro-sceptics have disliked the EU for years, and with the increasing evidence that, in this case at least, commissioners are being lead by their wallets, rather than by common sense and the interests of Europe, it’s a sad state of affairs for a body described as “the only body paid to think European”. Clearly, ‘European’ is a euphemism for ‘greedy’, or possibly ‘short-sighted’.

Source: EU to Extend Copyright, Break Royalty Monopolies

The proposal is supposed to secure the pensions of long forgotten artists. In a statement, McCreevy said “I am not talking about featured artists like Cliff Richard or Charles Aznavour. I am talking about the thousands of anonymous session musicians who contributed to sound recordings in the late fifties and sixties. They will no longer get airplay royalties from their recordings. But these royalties are often their sole pension.”

According to the Financial Times, the proposal could come up to vote as early as this Wednesday, July 16th. Also up for discussion would be a plan to split up rights societies by the antitrust arm of the commission, potentially making rights societies compete against each other for the rights to collect royalties from artists.

While this would certainly be a better way to curb their less than philanthropic actions, if it comes at the cost of greater copyright, is it that beneficial to the 500 million citizens of Europe? There is a glimmer of hope though. Two commissioners are opposed to the extension plan; telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding and commissioner Antonio Tajan.

The copyright extension plans met initial scorn back when they were first announced in February, with groups like the Open Rights Group and the EFF launching a petition to have it blocked, as well as a website to deal with the issue. Nevertheless, McCreevy kept on going, and the proposal is now ready to be voted on.

McCreevy himself has his pension already planned from a former partnership in a chartered accountancy firm (and he has been in politics since 1977, so he clearly planned early). It is left to wonder then why he feels the need to legislate some sort of speciality pension for artists. If they decide to stop work at 25, why should they be paid for it past 75? If that has been their only source of income, why could they not have done as the hundreds of millions of other EU citizens, myself included, and planned for their retirement?

Commissioner McCreevy had not replied to a request for comment at the time of publication.

Source: EU to Extend Music Copyright to 95 Years

His urge to share received quite a lot of attention after Coelho started a weblog with the name Pirate Coelho a few months ago. His motivation? He wanted people to have the opportunity to ‘try’ his books for free, but he knew some of his publishers wouldn’t agree right away. So, he took matters into his own hands and put his own books onto BitTorrent, FTP sites and Rapidshare.

“There was a strong reaction when I mentioned the site at Digital Life Design, back in January 2008,” Coelho explains. “The blog was out there for a while, but it seems that nobody from the publishing world was paying attention to it. When I spoke about it, all eyes were aimed at the site. From that moment on, based on actual numbers, the publishers not only accepted it, but helped me.”

“Harper Collins, for example, decided to offer a new book of mine every month, for free reading.” This, together with the pirated copies worked out really well, and the book sales went up. “If you go to the New York Times Bestseller list, you’ll see that the Alchemist jumped to the #6, and the Witch of Portobello is in the extended list.”

BitTorrent is one of the filesharing networks Coelho uses to share his books. “I am using it now, while doing this interview,” he says, and he encourages other authors to follow his lead. “The ultimate goal of a writer is to be read. Money comes later.” This is of course easy to say for an author who has already sold millions of copies, but Coelho goes even further, and argues that ‘sharing’ books will actually help upcoming authors to sell more books. It is a win-win situation.

“I do think that when a reader has the possibility to read some chapters, he or she can always decide to buy the book later,” Coelho says, indicating that it is not a lost sale. On the other hand, the Internet makes it easier for new authors to publish content, and get people to read their work. “Nowadays, people are being encouraged to write, and start blogs, the book industry already found a few new talents on Internet,” Coelho says.

When we asked Paulo about the difference between book piracy and the unauthorized copying of music and movies, he told us that it is difficult to compare, since it is easier to consume movies and music digitally. Most people still prefer to read a real book however, pirated ebooks are more often used to preview. This can always change in the future, but for now Coelho is not impressed by the ebook reading devices that are out there, and many of his readers seem to agree.

“A (real) book is easy to carry, easy to read anywhere. Reading a book on a monitor on the other hand is very tiresome, and it would be even more expensive to print (considering cartridge prices) than to buy a paperback,” he says. What the movie and music industry can learn from Coelho, however, is that availability is of the essence, and restrictions will only lead to reactance.

Coelho fully adopted all the possibilities the Internet offers, as he uses his weblog, Myspace, FaceBook, Flickr and even Twitter to interact with his readers. “I want to share everything I write, from my books to my blogs.”

He recently started a new experiment, as he encouraged his readers to make a movie based on one of his books. When “The Witch of Portobello” was released, Hollywood came rushing in with movie deals, but Coelho told his agent: “it is time to start a new adventure!”

Source: Best-Selling Author Turns Piracy into Profit

At a preview of his new Change Congress project at the ETech conference, the Creative Commons founder responded to a question about the US Pirate Party, saying “I’m skeptical of the utility of something like the Pirate Party in the United States.” He went on to comment about the naming, referring to the ‘honest business fighting illegitimate thieves‘ battle that Hollywood portrays with “Call your party the Pirate Party, and you’ll reinforce that. The branding is not one that I would embrace here in the United States.”

Naturally, the Pirate Party of the US disagrees. “As a professor, he should know better than to advocate judging a book by it’s cover” says Andrew Norton, head of the US Pirate Party. “It’s also unusual that the man that fought Hollywood’s increase of copyright, should find fault with a party that only seeks to represent the general public, and what better title than the name that Hollywood is using for all citizens.” referring to a recent study,(pdf) which suggested that everyone violates copyright, and are thus pirates, every day.

“It may, however, be that he feels since we are called ‘The Pirate Party’, that at some point we may advocate Piracy, or at least copyright infringement. We do not, and will not, promote the breaking of any law, criminal or civil,” added Norton. “We, like Prof. Lessig, stand squarely behind the political process, and hope that people will use their ability to vote, to vote for the candidates they want, rather than the so-called ‘tactical voting’ which has turned current US politics into the sham it is. In this, we are willing and eager to work with the Change Congress campaign in any way we can.”

These sentiments regarding the political process in the US have suddenly come to a head, with Independent Presidential Candidate Ralph Nader condemning the current political setup. On an appearance on the hugely popular Daily Show Tuesday, he commented “The two parties have shut out the people in Washington. It’s corporate occupied territory.”

He later went on to comment about how the two parties have rigged things so it’s hard for any other party to even get on the ballot, which the Pirate Party knows only too well. “Many states bury their party registration requirements in vast amounts of legalese,” says Norton. “Other states don’t publish it clearly, and don’t respond to requests for information on it. Government is supposed to exist for the benefit of the people, but right now, it’s benefiting the lawyers, and those that can pay for them.”

Can Lessig really ‘Change Congress’? It all depends if he will see past names, to the actual issues they hide.

Source: Lessig Questions Pirate Party’s Existence

In addition the IFPI was also looking for an extension of copyright, supposedly to help artists whose works will fall into the public domain in their lifetime, which is great for the artist but bad for culture. The extension was said to try and bring Europe closer to the protections available in the United States.

According to Danny OBrien at the EFF, the extensions wouldn’t make any sense: “..five Nobel-prize winning economists concluded that “copyright term extension is unjustified both as a protection to current artists (who rarely earn much from far future extensions), or as an economic positive for society as a whole. Yet the music industry, fearful of losing tight control of its own back catalog, still continues to advocate for more copyright, no matter the cost.”

Now, in what will be a huge blow to the IFPI, Danny O’Brien says that the proposals have been defeated.

He says: “Just got word from the European Parliament all three of the filtering/copyright extension amendments were defeated or withdrawn in the committee vote. We’re still waiting on the official record, but if that’s true, it’s an amazing victory — one was originally proposed by the original author of the report, Guy Bono himself, one was voted in by the powerful industry committee, and one was drafted by an EPP-ED member, the largest bloc in the parliament.”

In December we reported that the IFPI had already convinced several European politicians to support the proposals. However, The Committee on Culture and Education from the European parliament made a wise decision not to turn the proposed amendments into European policy.

Source: IFPI Fails to Force ISPs to Become Anti-Piracy Enforcers

The message from the Moderate Party MPs to their AntipiratbyrÃ¥n supporting colleagues was “be careful, they will never be satisfied”, drawing parallels to the earlier attempts to ban MP3 players, and VCRs, both areas in which, having failed to ban, industry groups are now making a profit from selling content.

Karl Sigfrid told TorrentFreak that the APB proposals make no practical sense. “I think it could be solved in theory. However, in reality, you would need such a surveillance system to achieve this that it would be all out of proportion. So I don’t think there’s a feasilbe way of stopping individuals copying. The cause for file sharing is basically that it’s possible. People have always done it to the extent that they’ve been able to. With cassette tapes 20 years ago and electronically today. Copyright laws preventing individuals from sharing information have never been legitimate in the eyes of most people.”

When asked about if it was down to content industries being slow to change their business practices, he replied: “It’s hard to say what would have happened if the content industries had been quicker releasing their material online, before the P2P networks grew mainstream. Probably the illegal filesharing would be less extensive, but it’s possible that it would still have been increasingly difficult for iTunes and such services to compete with free downloading. The change needed might be so radical that it’s no longer about selling copies of immaterial products at all.”

Rickard Falkvinge, of the Swedish Pirate Party was understandably upbeat about it. “Karl Sigfrid’s taking a stand marks a major turning point. For the first time, an established politician shows deep-down understanding of the real conflict, instead of cluelessly humming along with a technophobical luddite industry. Some other Swedish mainstream politicians have previously talked in terms of how it’s unreasonable to declare war on an entire generation. Sigfrid is the first to understand why.” His enthusiasm is understandable as, one Swedish torrent user put it “a bunch of members of The Conservative Party have started listening to the policies of The Pirate Party, and they want to jump on their bandwagon, as it’s gaining popularity”.

Gaining popularity it is, as yesterday, thirteen members of Parliament joined in another attack (Swedish only, no English translation at present) on the likes of the APB, and recording industries, saying “The record labels are obviously opposed to a development that makes them obsolete.” However, not everyone has been celebrating. Pirate Bay administrator Brokep was skeptical, saying “I’m intrigued that the debate is sparking up again. There’s been a lot of lies from the politicians. Promises and nothing has happened, so at least this will put the debate back on the map.”

The initial seven MPs were Karl Sigfrid. Margareta Cederfelt. Ulf Berg. Lena Asplund. Staffan Appelros. Lisbeth Grönfeldt Bergman and Göran Montan. Tuesdays additions were Marie Weibull Kornias,Finn Bengtsson, Ann-Charlotte Hammar Johnsson, Sven Yngve Persson, and Anders Hansson.

**UPDATE** Sorry, forgot to add this translation of the second piece, available here

Source: Swedish Politicians Strike Blows at Copyright Lobby

The Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) in conjunction with the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) have been pressurizing Australian Internet Service Providers to take action against those it accuses of infringing its copyrights.

They have informed ISPs that they require them to send warning notices to their customers informing them of their infringing behavior and warning of the likely consequences. They have also issued demands that ISPs disconnect their customers from the internet, should they be accused of sharing copyright works.

According to The Age, Sabiene Heindl – General Manager of MIPI – is signaling a new strategy after Australian ISPs dug their heels in and refused to co-operate with MIPI’s demands. The Internet Industry Association (IIA) wrote to MIPI and explained that they felt they weren’t responsible for the actions of its customers and should not be required to monitor them, effectively refusing to become the industry’s copyright police.

In a letter, the IIA suggested that copyright holders should look for their rights to be enforced by using the existing tools provided by the Australian courts and copyright law.

The IIA quite rightly believes that the labeling of someone as an infringer should only be done by the courts, not by an organization such as MIPI or AFACT, a point outlined in its letter: “The distinction between an infringer and an alleged infringer has been raised as an important legal standard which ought not be undermined by us.”

In response, Heindl explained: “We would hope that the ISPs and the record companies could come up with an alternative solution. That said, if that solution cannot be reached, and at this stage it’s because of the ISPs refusing to play ball, then we may have no alternative other than to take legal action.”

Originally created to curtail physical piracy, 2004 saw MIPI involved in high drama when it raided the offices and home addresses of people involved with Sharman Networks and Brilliant Digital Entertainment. Two universities and 4 ISPs were also raided during the search for evidence to support their case against KaZaA.

In 2005, MIPI was restructured to concentrate on educating the public about file-sharing, although this didn’t stop them raiding an ISP in their quest to get a BitTorrent hub shut down.

It’s likely that 2007/8 will see MIPI ‘educating’ file-sharers with the threat of lawsuits which are hugely expensive, have been tried extensively in the United States and generally, do not work.

Source: Australians Next on the P2P Lawsuit Hitlist

With the focus on the mine collapse in Utah high in the news right now, cynics might say that this is nothing more than a cheap attempt to gain publicity, at the expense of others. To that, Ray Jenson, the interim administrator for the Utah party responded “We’ve actually been working for quite a long time on this–over a month–and the timing really couldn’t be helped. It was ready when it was ready. If it had been two days, or two weeks from now, I’m sure we still would have had the same result.” He also added, “It’s a tragedy. Our best wishes are with those miners and their families, wherever they might be.”

Utah is, of course, no stranger to debate on copyright and its infringement. Some of the most controversial statements and proposals on dealing with it have come from Utah Senator Orrin Hatch. Mr Jenson commented “In general, he seems as though he sincerely believes what he’s doing is the right thing. I hope that some education on the issue can alert him to the fact that what he’s been proposing is not always in the best interests of the public.” Indeed, it’s hard to say how destroying people’s computers could be in the public interest, especially when there is no way of definitively proving, even after months of court discovery, that someone was infringing, and as we all know, it turned out that his campaign site was itself infringing copyright.

Mr Jenson has no plans, however, for running for any offices at this time, saying “one step at a time, we’re concentrating on getting the party and it’s issues recognized at the present”.

More details can be found here

Source: US Pirate Party Starts in Utah

“Extending copyright term is good for musicians and consumers too. It’s good for musicians because it would reduce the disparity between the length given to composers and that granted to producers and performers.” Cameron stated, “and extending copyright term will also be good for consumers. If we increase the copyright term, so the incentive is there for you working in the industry to digitise both older and niche repertoire which more people can enjoy at no extra cost.”

Clearly, Mr Cameron has not thought this through, since he appears to be oblivious to the fact that when it falls into the public domain, anyone can digitise the old media, at no cost, not just no-extra cost, if the record company decides to.

Mr Cameron also makes the case for the poor performers, saying some 7,000 of them will lose royalties to their songs over the next ten years. How or why these 7,000 are more important than the 7,000 or so that have lost their royalties in the last ten years was not something that was commented on. Nor was it stated why these people, who have known about the impending end of their royalty payments for some time now, suddenly need an extra hand, an extra twenty years of income. If any other group of workers squandered away their wages, would they be getting government promises to make things better?

Finally, in his push to secure the support of the British Phonographic Institute (BPI), the honourable member of Parliament for Witney showed his lack of knowledge. “Let me also speak about one final responsibility too: that of Internet Service Providers. They are the gatekeepers of the internet. Some ISPs claim there is nothing they can do to stop illegal downloading of music. But last month alone, there were eight sites that hosted more than 25,000 illegal downloads. That is clear and visible internet traffic. ISPs can block access and indeed close down offending file-sharing sites. They have already established the Internet Watch Foundation to monitor child abuse and incitement to racial hatred on the internet. They should be doing the same when it comes to digital piracy.”

The problem is one of degree , whilst racial hatred is always illegal, as is child abuse, is all music you can download infringing copyright? How can an ISP determine if that song you’re getting is licensed to you, or to its distributor or not. How can they tell if it even requires a license or not. The short answer is, they can’t, unless Mr Cameron is promoting an agenda by which all music file transfers are blocked by ISPs , a move the music industry would love. Preventing people using the internet for distributing their own works, and forcing them to use the music industry would resuscitate the flagging business models of the record industry.

Statements by politicians supporting the BPI and its ilk are not uncommon, unfortunately. In 2005, Arlene McCarthy (MEP for North West England) claimed sales of pirate DVDs in European cities financed the World Trade Center bombings in 1993. She subsequently blamed it on ‘the data she was given’. Of course, the only politicians not likely to pander to these special interest groups, will be those elected from the various Pirate Parties around the world.

Mr Cameron MP was contacted but had not responded at the time of press

Source: UK Conservatives Plan to Extend Copyright

As usual, the Adobe products will only be filtered out if the user has chosen to block copyrighted material during installation by checking the ‘Enable Content Filtering’ option.

According to the company, such deals are being signed in hope that fewer consumers will be sued for using the program. They say this is “a significant step toward a positive relationship with software producers and means a safer peer-to-peer process for LimeWire users.”

The company has clearly been trying to go legit, but at the same time not charge users for anything but the Pro version. This became apparent when they added a pop-up message that notified users that a license for the song/file they were downloading could not be found and asked them if they were sure they wanted to download it anyway.

LimeWire was sued by the RIAA earlier this year after the company announced that it was planning to integrate BitTorrent support in the program. The RIAA demanded $150,000 per song “wilfully uploaded.” This did not stop them from going ahead and implementing it anyway.

Source: LimeWire to filter out Adobe products

The Business Software Association, an international software body, claimed that in the year 2005 piracy in Australia cost them $361 million. The draft says these figures are “unverified and epistemologically unreliable.” It even goes so far as to call some of the stats used by copyright holders “absurd,” and adds that “of greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law.”

According to the draft, the RIAA’s Australian arm, the MIPI did not know how they calculated piracy stats, because the IPFI never told them. Strange? Maybe that’s just how things work with international organisations.

The reasoning behind the statements in the draft is that anti-piracy organisations calculate losses by counting each pirated good that is sold. They are making the assumption that each person who buys a pirated CD, for example, would have bought an original one instead. This cannot be backed up, as many of those people might not have been able to buy, or might not have bought the original CD.

The draft concluded with a statement asking for statistics that cannot be verified to be withdrawn. “Either these statistics must be withdrawn or the purveyors of these statistics must supply valid and transparent substantiation.”

The truth on the other hand: Why Most Artists Profit from Piracy!

Source: Australian govt draft says piracy stats are made up

Copying CDs and DVDs for personal use would have little impact on copyright holders according to the “institute for public policy research” (IPPR). It is useless to criminalize the majority of your customers, if they simply want to transfer a song from a CD they bought to their MP3 player.

IPPR Deputy Director Ian Kearns said:

“Millions of Britons copy CDs onto their home computers breaking copyright laws everyday. British copyright law is out of date with consumer practices and technological progress.”

A recent survey among 2135 British adult consumers shows that most people don’t even know that they are breaking the law. Of all the people that participated in the survey, 55% said that they have ever copied CDs onto other equipment. However, only 19% actually knows that this behavior is illegal.

The IPPR hopes that their report will aid in the construction of more realistic intellectual property laws.

Source: Legalize Copying of CDs and DVDs for Personal Use