Viacom focused on PR war win with latest YouTube doc dump; Ars Technica, 4/16/10

Matthew Lasar, Ars Technica; Viacom focused on PR war win with latest YouTube doc dump:

"Viacom and Google's fight for public sympathy in their copyright lawsuit continues with Viacom's release of more "smoking gun" documents. The media company says the latest show that Google "made a deliberate, calculated business decision" to profit from copyright infringement after its purchase of YouTube in 2006. Nonsense, says Google in response.

This battle for hearts and minds is heating up following the publication of key court filings in Viacom's $1 billion infringement suit against YouTube and its owner Google in a New York federal district court. "

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/04/viacom-focused-on-pr-war-win-with-latest-youtube-doc-dump.ars

Free at last! Official ACTA text coming next week; Ars Technica, 4/16/10

Nate Anderson, Ars Technica; Free at last! Official ACTA text coming next week:

"After more than a year of sustained pressure, the countries negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) have decided that the time is right to release the draft text of their work.

The official announcement came today after the conclusion of negotiations in New Zealand. "There was a general sense from this session that negotiations have now advanced to a point where making a draft text available to the public will help the process of reaching a final agreement," says the official announcement.

"For that reason, and based on the specific momentum coming out of this meeting, participants have reached unanimous agreement that the time is right for making available to the public the consolidated text coming out of these discussions, which will reflect the substantial progress made at this round."

The draft text will be released this upcoming Wednesday, April 21.

The announcement also shows just how carefully the European Union, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, the US, and others have been watching public opinion. It goes out of its way to say that the treaty will not oblige "participants to require border authorities to search travelers' baggage or their personal electronic devices for infringing materials." This is a clear attempt to rebut the "but customs will start searching my iPod!" madness we've seen in relation to ACTA.

The announcement also says that "no participant is proposing to require governments to mandate a 'graduated response' or 'three strikes' approach to copyright infringement on the Internet." As we've reported before, the leaked draft text does demand that ISPs have some plan in place to deter infringers, and a footnote made it clear that booting them off the Internet would be a great way to handle this—but the language in the draft came straight from the existing DMCA in the US and does not mandate any specific approach.

The announcement is certainly good news for fans of transparency, but it's not all sunshine and unicorns. For one thing, the participants plan to strip out their "respective positions." In other words, we are going to get a consolidated draft text that provides no information about who has been arguing for what position.

Not that it really matters, since massive leaks have already revealed negotiating positions and a complete draft text from January. It's disappointing that the negotiating countries refused to release more information about the process along the way; their decision to do so now has limited meaning, since the complete text is already leaked.

Still, it should allow negotiators to start answering public questions about the treaty and responding to public criticism. That's a good thing, but it comes quite late in the process. After a couple years of negotiations, the existence of a "consolidated text" shows that most of the tough negotiating has already been done. Changes could still be made at this point, but it's late in the process and today's announcement reminds us that the aim is to wrap up this treaty "as soon as possible in 2010."

The next meeting takes place in Switzerland in June."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/free-at-last-official-acta-text-coming-next-week.ars

Digital Economy Act: This means war; (London) Guardian, 4/16/10

Cory Doctorow, (London) Guardian; Digital Economy Act: This means war:

Baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell:

"With the rushed passage into law of the Digital Economy Act this month, the fight over copyright enters a new phase. Previous to this, most copyfighters operated under the rubric that a negotiated peace was possible between the thrashing entertainment giants and civil society.

But now that the BPI and its mates have won themselves the finest law that money can buy – a law that establishes an unprecedented realm of web censorship in Britain, a law that provides for the disconnection of entire families from the net on the say-so of an entertainment giant, a law that shuts down free Wi-Fi hotspots and makes it harder than ever to conduct your normal business on the grounds that you might be damaging theirs – the game has changed.

I came to the copyfight from a pretty parochial place. As a working artist, I wanted a set of just copyright rules that provided a sound framework for my negotiations with big publishers, film studios, and similar institutions. I worried that the expansion of copyright – in duration and scope – would harm my ability to freely create. After all, creators are the most active re-users of copyright, each one of us a remix factory and a one-person archive of inspirational and influential materials. I also worried that giving the incumbent giants control over the new online distribution system would artificially extend their stranglehold over creators. This stranglehold means that practically every media giant offers the same awful terms to all of us, and no kinder competitor can get our works into the hands of our audiences.

I still worry about that stuff, of course. I co-founded a successful business – Boing Boing, the widely-read website – that benefits enormously from not having to pay fealty to a distributor in order to reach its readers (by contrast, the old print edition of Boing Boing folded when its main distributor went bankrupt while owing it a modest fortune and holding onto thousands of dollars' worth of printed materials that we never got back). My novels find their way onto the bestseller list by being distributed for free from my website simultaneous with their mainstream bookstore sales through publishers like Macmillan and HarperCollins and Random House.

My whole life revolves around the digital economy: running entrepreneurial businesses that thrive on copying and that exploit the net's powerful efficiencies to realise a better return on investment.

Parliament has just given two fingers to me (and every other small/medium digital enterprise) by agreeing to cripple Britain's internet in order to give higher profits to the analogue economy represented by the labels and studios.

But today, my bank-balance is the least of my worries. The entertainment industry's willingness to use parliament todi impose censorship and arbitrary punishment in the course of chasing a few extra quid is so depraved and terrible that it has me in fear for the very underpinnings of democracy and civil society.

In the US, the MPAA and RIAA (American equivalents of the MPA and the BPI) just submitted comments to the American Intellectual Property Czar, Victoria Espinel, laying out their proposal for IP enforcement. They want us all to install spyware on our computers that deletes material that it identifies as infringing. They want our networks censored by national firewalls (U2's Bono also called for this in a New York Times editorial, averring that if the Chinese could control dissident information with censorware, our own governments could deploy similar technology to keep infringement at bay). They want border-searches of laptops, personal media players and thumb-drives.

They want poor countries bullied into diverting GDP from humanitarian causes to enforcing copyright. And they want their domestic copyright enforcement handled, free of charge, by the Department of Homeland Security.

Elements of this agenda are also on display (or rather, in hiding) in the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a treaty being drafted between a member's club of rich nations. They've turned their back on the United Nations to negotiate in private, without having to contend with journalists or public interest groups. By their own admission, they intend to impose this treaty on poor countries as a condition of ongoing trade, and in the US, the Obama administration has announced its intention to pass ACTA without Congressional debate.

I'm not such a techno-triumphalist that I believe that the free and open internet will solve all our socio-economic problems. But I am enough of a techno-pessimist to believe that baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell.

Chekhov wrote that a gun on the mantelpiece in act one is sure to go off by act three. The entertainment industry's blinkered pursuit of its own narrow goals has the potential to redesign our technology to be the perfect tools and excuses for oppression."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/apr/16/digital-economy-act-cory-doctorow

5 Ways The Google Book Settlement Will Change The Future of Reading; io9.com, 4/2/10

io9.com; 5 Ways The Google Book Settlement Will Change The Future of Reading:

"1. It may become harder to get information online about books from writers you love...

2. You will find yourself reading free books online, by authors who have disappeared. And Google will make money when you do...

3. Google will be competing with Apple and Amazon and everybody else to be your favorite online bookseller...

4. Google will be competing with Apple and Amazon and everybody else to be your favorite online bookseller...

5. Pulp science fiction will make a comeback in ways you might not expect."

http://io9.com/5501426/5-ways-the-google-book-settlement-will-change-the-future-of-reading

[Podcast] American Readers, Waiting Impatiently For 'The Girl'; NPR, 4/5/10

[Podcast, 4 min. 38 sec.] NPR; American Readers, Waiting Impatiently For 'The Girl':

"All this online book-buying did not escape the attention of book sellers, like David Thompson of Murder By the Book mystery bookstore in Houston. Thompson says the store wanted to honor the U.S. release date, but it kept getting harder and harder.

"We had gotten several very loyal customers who just absolutely needed the third book because the second one ends with such a cliffhanger you really, really want to read that third one right away," Thompson says. "And so we felt that it was really important to serve our customers and import these books that there was a desperate demand for."

Eventually Knopf found out that Thompson's store and others were importing copies of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and selling them to their customers. Knopf asked the booksellers to stop the practice, because says Bogaards, "it's a violation of copyright law."

But even online booksellers like Amazon.com are supposed to honor the U.S. release dates, which Bogaards says consumers may not know.

"What I would say to readers is, I would encourage them to shop at their local bookseller here in the United States or their online bookseller in the United States, where no laws are being broken and you are supporting the continuing discovery of world literature," Bogaards says."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125499739

Copyright and wrong; Economist, 4/8/10

Economist; Copyright and wrong: Why the rules on copyright need to return to their roots:

"WHEN Parliament decided, in 1709, to create a law that would protect books from piracy, the London-based publishers and booksellers who had been pushing for such protection were overjoyed. When Queen Anne gave her assent on April 10th the following year—300 years ago this week—to “An act for the encouragement of learning” they were less enthused. Parliament had given them rights, but it had set a time limit on them: 21 years for books already in print and 14 years for new ones, with an additional 14 years if the author was still alive when the first term ran out. After that, the material would enter the public domain so that anyone could reproduce it. The lawmakers intended thus to balance the incentive to create with the interest that society has in free access to knowledge and art. The Statute of Anne thus helped nurture and channel the spate of inventiveness that Enlightenment society and its successors have since enjoyed.

Over the past 50 years, however, that balance has shifted. Largely thanks to the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists, copyright’s scope and duration have vastly increased. In America, copyright holders get 95 years’ protection as a result of an extension granted in 1998, derided by critics as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”. They are now calling for even greater protection, and there have been efforts to introduce similar terms in Europe. Such arguments should be resisted: it is time to tip the balance back.

Annie get your gun

Lengthy protection, it is argued, increases the incentive to create. Digital technology seems to strengthen the argument: by making copying easier, it seems to demand greater protection in return. The idea of extending copyright also has a moral appeal. Intellectual property can seem very like real property, especially when it is yours, and not some faceless corporation’s. As a result people feel that once they own it—especially if they have made it—they should go on owning it, much as they would a house that they could pass on to their descendants. On this reading, protection should be perpetual. Ratcheting up the time limit on a regular basis becomes a reasonable way of approximating that perpetuity.

The notion that lengthening copyright increases creativity is questionable, however. Authors and artists do not generally consult the statute books before deciding whether or not to pick up pen or paintbrush. And overlong copyrights often limit, rather than encourage, a work’s dissemination, impact and influence. It can be difficult to locate copyright holders to obtain the rights to reuse old material. As a result, much content ends up in legal limbo (and in the case of old movies and sound recordings, is left to deteriorate—copying them in order to preserve them may constitute an act of infringement). The penalties even for inadvertent infringement are so punishing that creators routinely have to self-censor their work. Nor does the advent of digital technology strengthen the case for extending the period of protection. Copyright protection is needed partly to cover the costs of creating and distributing works in physical form. Digital technology slashes such costs, and thus reduces the argument for protection.

The moral case, although easy to sympathise with, is a way of trying to have one’s cake and eat it. Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. From 1710 onwards, it has involved a deal in which the creator or publisher gives up any natural and perpetual claim in order to have the state protect an artificial and limited one. So it remains.

The question is how such a deal can be made equitably. At the moment, the terms of trade favour publishers too much. A return to the 28-year copyrights of the Statute of Anne would be in many ways arbitrary, but not unreasonable. If there is a case for longer terms, they should be on a renewal basis, so that content is not locked up automatically. The value society places on creativity means that fair use needs to be expanded and inadvertent infringement should be minimally penalised. None of this should get in the way of the enforcement of copyright, which remains a vital tool in the encouragement of learning. But tools are not ends in themselves."

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15868004

U.K. Approves Crackdown on Internet Pirates; New York Times, 4/8/10

Eric Pfanner, New York Times; U.K. Approves Crackdown on Internet Pirates:

"The British Parliament on Thursday approved plans to crack down on digital media piracy by authorizing the suspension of repeat offenders’ Internet connections.

Following the House of Commons late Wednesday, the House of Lords on Thursday approved the bill after heavy lobbying from the music and movie industries, which say they suffer huge losses from unauthorized copying over the Internet.

The law makes Britain the second large European country, after France, to approve a so-called graduated response system, under which online copyright violators face temporary suspensions of their Internet accounts if they ignore warning letters to stop.

“The U.K. has today joined the ranks of those countries who have taken decisive and well-considered steps to address the issue,” John Kennedy, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, said in a statement. “We hope this will prompt more focus and urgency for similar measures in other countries where debate is under way.”

The anti-piracy plan is part of a broader bill aimed at stimulating the development of the digital economy in Britain."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/technology/09piracy.html?hpw