Michael Liedtke, AP via HuffingtonPost.com; Viacom Loses To YouTube In Landmark Copyright Case:
"A federal judge handed Google Inc. a major victory Wednesday by rebuffing media company Viacom Inc.'s attempt to collect more than $1 billion in damages for the alleged copyright abuses of Google's popular YouTube service.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in New York embraces Google's interpretation of a 12-year-old law that shields Internet services from claims of copyright infringement as long as they promptly remove illegal content when notified of a violation.
That so-called "safe harbor" helped persuade Google to buy YouTube for $1.76 billion in 2006, even though some of the Internet search leader's own executives had earlier branded the video-sharing service as "a 'rogue enabler' of content theft," according to documents unearthed in the copyright infringement case.
Stanton "blessed the current state of play on the Internet," said Eric Goldman, a Santa Clara University associate professor who specializes in high-tech law. The affirmation was cheered by Internet service providers and free-speech groups who believe the Digital Millennium Copyright Act helps give more people an outlet to express themselves.
"Without this decision, user-generated content would dry up and the Internet would cease to be a participatory medium," said David Sohn, a lawyer for the Center for Democracy & Technology."
Viacom, the owner of popular cable channels such as MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, called Stanton's decision "fundamentally flawed" and vowed to appeal. That virtually ensures a legal brawl that already has dragged on for more than three years will spill into 2011 and perhaps beyond.
"Copyright protection is essential to the survival of creative industries," said Michael Fricklas, Viacom's general counsel. "It is and should be illegal for companies to build their businesses with creative material they have stolen from others."
The bitter battle revolves around Viacom's allegations that YouTube built itself into the Internet's most watched video site by milking unlicensed use of copyright-protected clips stolen from professionally produced show such as Viacom's "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show."
The pirated material came from the millions of people who have uploaded clips to YouTube since its 2005 inception. About 24 hours of new video is posted to YouTube every minute.
YouTube's whirlwind success led to the Google sale that generated huge windfalls for the video channel's founders, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.
Citing e-mail exchanges among those founders, Viacom depicted the founders and other YouTube employees as video pirates who were more interested in getting rich quick than adhering to copyright laws.
But Stanton concluded YouTube's actions outweighed the words of the YouTube founders.
In dismissing the lawsuit before a trial, Stanton noted that Viacom had spent several months accumulating about 100,000 videos violating its copyright and then sent a mass takedown notice on Feb. 2, 2007. By the next business day, Stanton said, YouTube had removed virtually all of them.
Stanton said there's no dispute that "when YouTube was given the (takedown) notices, it removed the material."
Since it was sold to Google, YouTube has developed a system that helps flag copyright violations when videos are posted. Viacom argues those copyright detection tools prove YouTube could have done more to keep illegal content off its site.
Kent Walker, Google's general counsel, said the company is confident Stanton's decision will hold up. The 30-page ruling is "thoughtful, thorough and well-considered," Walker said in an interview. He also hailed the decision as "a victory for a new generation of creators and artists eager to showcase their work online," Walker said.
Facebook, eBay Inc. and Yahoo Inc. were among the Internet companies that had backed Google in its battle with Viacom.
The evidence that accumulated before Stanton reached his decision proved embarrassing for both sides.
An early e-mail exchange among Hurley, Chen and Karim showed at least one of them may have knowingly violated copyrights as they posted video clips during the service's early stages.
"Jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site," Chen wrote in the July 19, 2005, e-mail. "We're going to have a tough time defending the fact that we're not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn't put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it."
Other documents showed Viacom had hoped to buy YouTube before getting trumped by Google, making it seem as if the media company's later claims of copyright abuse may have been a case of sour grapes.
A July 2006 e-mail from Fricklas, Viacom's top lawyer, even disputed that YouTube was engaged in rampant copyright infringement. "Mostly YouTube behaves," Fricklas wrote."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/23/youtube-viacom-lawsuit-se_n_623256.html
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
File-sharing has weakened copyright—and helped society; Ars Technica, 6/21/10
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica; File-sharing has weakened copyright—and helped society:
"Has file-sharing helped society? Looked at from the narrow perspective of existing record labels, the question must seem absurd; profits have dropped sharply in the years since tools like Napster first appeared. But a pair of well-known academics argue peer-to-peer file sharing has weakened copyright in the US... and managed to benefit all of us at the same time.
"Consumer welfare increased substantially due to new technology," write Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas. "Weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society.""
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/file-sharing-has-weakened-copyrightand-helped-society.ars
"Has file-sharing helped society? Looked at from the narrow perspective of existing record labels, the question must seem absurd; profits have dropped sharply in the years since tools like Napster first appeared. But a pair of well-known academics argue peer-to-peer file sharing has weakened copyright in the US... and managed to benefit all of us at the same time.
"Consumer welfare increased substantially due to new technology," write Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas. "Weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society.""
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/file-sharing-has-weakened-copyrightand-helped-society.ars
Monday, June 21, 2010
Court Reduces ‘Shocking’ File Sharing Award; Wired.com, 1/22/10
David Kravets, Wired.com; Court Reduces ‘Shocking’ File Sharing Award:
"A federal judge on Friday reduced a $1.92 million file sharing verdict to $54,000 after concluding the award for infringing 24 songs was “shocking.”
A federal jury in June found Jammie Thomas-Rasset liable in what at the time was the nation’s only Recording Industry Association of America file sharing case against an individual to go to trial. The Minnesota federal jury dinged her $1.92 million for infringing 24 songs. She asked the judge to set aside or reduce that $80,000 per song in damages.
U.S. District Judge Michael Davis agreed on Friday, and said the RIAA may have a retrial if it does not accept his ruling.
“The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music,” Davis wrote. “Moreover, although plaintiffs were not required to prove their actual damages, statutory damages must bear some relation to actual damages.”
The decision came days after the Obama administration supported $675,000 in damages a jury levied against a Boston file sharer in the nation’s second and only other file sharing case against an individual to go to trial. Among other things, the administration said the large July award would “deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe they will go unnoticed.”
Davis added that $1.92 million in damages “for stealing 24 songs for personal use is simply shocking.”
The new damages amount to three times the minimum of $750 damages the Copyright Act allows. The maximum is $150,000 per infringement, at a judge or jury’s discretion.
Thomas-Rasset, now 32, said she doesn’t have the money to pay even that reduced judgment, and that her house in Brainerd, Minnesota is homesteaded and protected from a judgment. The mother of four said she is a “very low- to middle-income” earner who works for a local Native American tribe.
“It’s not like I have a money tree in the backyard,” she said during a brief telephone interview.
The RIAA said it was reviewing the decision and was not prepared to comment.
Here’s Thomas-Rasset’s original $1.92 million playlist.
The decision, if it survives, may not have much weight in the file sharing world.
More than a year ago, the record labels announced they were winding down their nearly 6-year-old litigation campaign against individuals and instead were lobbying internet service providers to adopt a program to disconnect music file sharers.
One case in Boston still on the books concerns Joel Tenenbaum, the nation’s only other individual to go to trial against the RIAA. Most of the 30,000 cases the RIAA brought against individuals were settled out of court for a few thousand dollars.
Among other things, he is urging the federal judge in his case to reduce the $675,000 July jury verdict to $22,500, the minimum of $750 for 30 tracks.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who is presiding over Tenenbaum’s case, is not obligated to follow Judge Davis’ decision."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/judge-reduces-shocking-file-sharing-award/#ixzz0rXeYuqXF"
"A federal judge on Friday reduced a $1.92 million file sharing verdict to $54,000 after concluding the award for infringing 24 songs was “shocking.”
A federal jury in June found Jammie Thomas-Rasset liable in what at the time was the nation’s only Recording Industry Association of America file sharing case against an individual to go to trial. The Minnesota federal jury dinged her $1.92 million for infringing 24 songs. She asked the judge to set aside or reduce that $80,000 per song in damages.
U.S. District Judge Michael Davis agreed on Friday, and said the RIAA may have a retrial if it does not accept his ruling.
“The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music,” Davis wrote. “Moreover, although plaintiffs were not required to prove their actual damages, statutory damages must bear some relation to actual damages.”
The decision came days after the Obama administration supported $675,000 in damages a jury levied against a Boston file sharer in the nation’s second and only other file sharing case against an individual to go to trial. Among other things, the administration said the large July award would “deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe they will go unnoticed.”
Davis added that $1.92 million in damages “for stealing 24 songs for personal use is simply shocking.”
The new damages amount to three times the minimum of $750 damages the Copyright Act allows. The maximum is $150,000 per infringement, at a judge or jury’s discretion.
Thomas-Rasset, now 32, said she doesn’t have the money to pay even that reduced judgment, and that her house in Brainerd, Minnesota is homesteaded and protected from a judgment. The mother of four said she is a “very low- to middle-income” earner who works for a local Native American tribe.
“It’s not like I have a money tree in the backyard,” she said during a brief telephone interview.
The RIAA said it was reviewing the decision and was not prepared to comment.
Here’s Thomas-Rasset’s original $1.92 million playlist.
The decision, if it survives, may not have much weight in the file sharing world.
More than a year ago, the record labels announced they were winding down their nearly 6-year-old litigation campaign against individuals and instead were lobbying internet service providers to adopt a program to disconnect music file sharers.
One case in Boston still on the books concerns Joel Tenenbaum, the nation’s only other individual to go to trial against the RIAA. Most of the 30,000 cases the RIAA brought against individuals were settled out of court for a few thousand dollars.
Among other things, he is urging the federal judge in his case to reduce the $675,000 July jury verdict to $22,500, the minimum of $750 for 30 tracks.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who is presiding over Tenenbaum’s case, is not obligated to follow Judge Davis’ decision."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/judge-reduces-shocking-file-sharing-award/#ixzz0rXeYuqXF"
First RIAA File Sharing Trial Morphs Into Groundhog Day; Wired.com, 6/21/1
David Kravets, Wired.com; First RIAA File Sharing Trial Morphs Into Groundhog Day:
"The nation’s first file sharing copyright infringement trial has morphed into a legal Groundhog Day.
In a bid two avoid a third trial — after two mistrials — the Minnesota federal judge presiding over the 4-year-old Jammie Thomas-Rasset case wants the Recording Industry Association of American and the defendant to negotiate a settlement.
But, as Thomas-Rasset’s attorney, Joe Sibley, said in a telephone interview Monday, a settlement is not likely to happen. The reason is both sides are a universe apart on what it would take to avoid a third trial.
That’s why there were two trials: neither party would budge during court-ordered negotiations: Under the latest failed negotiations, Thomas refused in January to pay anything. The RIAA wanted $25,000 for the 24 tracks two federal juries concluded she pilfered on Kazaa. That offer came after a second Minnesota jury had awarded $1.92 million, and the judge reduced it to $54,000 a year ago.
“There is nothing we have to offer they would be willing to accept,” Sibley said Monday. He added that Thomas-Rasset might agree to settle for the statutory minimum $750 a track.
“We’ve always hoped Ms. Thomas would accept responsibility and join us at the settlement table — especially after a judge and two different juries affirmed her clear liability. But her approach so far … does not make for productive settlement discussions,” RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said via an e-mail.
The Copyright Act allows a jury to award damages of up to $150,000 per purloined download. The Obama administration supported the nearly $2 million judgment.
U.S. District Judge Michael [Davis] [sic] declared the $1.92 million verdict “shocking” and said damage awards “must bear some relation to actual damages.”
Davis’ decision was the first time a judge has reduced the amount of damages in a Copyright Act case.
A third trial, scheduled for Oct. 4, would involve a jury assuming the woman’s liability and affixing a new damages figure.
Because of the posture of the case, the parties could not directly appeal the judge’s decision last year lowering the jury’s verdict. Assuming the judge reduces the damages again after the October trial, the appeals courts would be more inclined to take the case to avoid another day of legal ground hog, legal experts said.
Among the big bones of contention that would be addressed on appeal, Sibley claims damages under the Copyright Act are unconstitutionally excessive. The RIAA claims the judge did not have the power to lower a Copyright Act jury award.
Thomas-Rasset, of Brainerd, Minnesota, famously lost her first trial in 2007, resulting in a $222,000 judgment. But months after the four-day trial was over, Judge Davis declared a mistrial, saying he’d incorrectly instructed the jury that merely making copyrighted work available on a file sharing program constituted infringement, regardless of whether anybody downloaded the content.
He ordered both sides to the settlement table, where no deal was reached.
The only other file sharing case to have gone to trial resulted in a Boston jury in July awarding the RIAA $675,000 for 30 songs. A decision is pending on whether that award should be reduced.
Most of the thousands of RIAA file sharing cases against individuals settled out of court for a few thousand dollars."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/filesharing-groundhog-day/#ixzz0rXbVpz00:
"The nation’s first file sharing copyright infringement trial has morphed into a legal Groundhog Day.
In a bid two avoid a third trial — after two mistrials — the Minnesota federal judge presiding over the 4-year-old Jammie Thomas-Rasset case wants the Recording Industry Association of American and the defendant to negotiate a settlement.
But, as Thomas-Rasset’s attorney, Joe Sibley, said in a telephone interview Monday, a settlement is not likely to happen. The reason is both sides are a universe apart on what it would take to avoid a third trial.
That’s why there were two trials: neither party would budge during court-ordered negotiations: Under the latest failed negotiations, Thomas refused in January to pay anything. The RIAA wanted $25,000 for the 24 tracks two federal juries concluded she pilfered on Kazaa. That offer came after a second Minnesota jury had awarded $1.92 million, and the judge reduced it to $54,000 a year ago.
“There is nothing we have to offer they would be willing to accept,” Sibley said Monday. He added that Thomas-Rasset might agree to settle for the statutory minimum $750 a track.
“We’ve always hoped Ms. Thomas would accept responsibility and join us at the settlement table — especially after a judge and two different juries affirmed her clear liability. But her approach so far … does not make for productive settlement discussions,” RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said via an e-mail.
The Copyright Act allows a jury to award damages of up to $150,000 per purloined download. The Obama administration supported the nearly $2 million judgment.
U.S. District Judge Michael [Davis] [sic] declared the $1.92 million verdict “shocking” and said damage awards “must bear some relation to actual damages.”
Davis’ decision was the first time a judge has reduced the amount of damages in a Copyright Act case.
A third trial, scheduled for Oct. 4, would involve a jury assuming the woman’s liability and affixing a new damages figure.
Because of the posture of the case, the parties could not directly appeal the judge’s decision last year lowering the jury’s verdict. Assuming the judge reduces the damages again after the October trial, the appeals courts would be more inclined to take the case to avoid another day of legal ground hog, legal experts said.
Among the big bones of contention that would be addressed on appeal, Sibley claims damages under the Copyright Act are unconstitutionally excessive. The RIAA claims the judge did not have the power to lower a Copyright Act jury award.
Thomas-Rasset, of Brainerd, Minnesota, famously lost her first trial in 2007, resulting in a $222,000 judgment. But months after the four-day trial was over, Judge Davis declared a mistrial, saying he’d incorrectly instructed the jury that merely making copyrighted work available on a file sharing program constituted infringement, regardless of whether anybody downloaded the content.
He ordered both sides to the settlement table, where no deal was reached.
The only other file sharing case to have gone to trial resulted in a Boston jury in July awarding the RIAA $675,000 for 30 songs. A decision is pending on whether that award should be reduced.
Most of the thousands of RIAA file sharing cases against individuals settled out of court for a few thousand dollars."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/filesharing-groundhog-day/#ixzz0rXbVpz00:
E-Reader Prices Are Slashed; New York Times, 6/22/10
Brad Stone, New York Times; E-Reader Prices Are Slashed:
"A price war is brewing in the growing market for electronic reading devices.
Barnes & Noble, the national bookseller, announced Monday that it was dropping the price of its six-month-old Nook e-reader to $199 from $259 and introducing a new version of the device, which connects to the Internet only over Wi-Fi networks, for $149.
Responding rapidly, Amazon.com then cut the price of its popular Kindle e-reader below the Nook, to $189 from $259.
The price cuts were made as manufacturers of e-readers faced a mounting threat from Apple’s iPad. Even though it is far more expensive than the e-readers, the iPad, which starts at $500, performs a range of functions with a versatile, colorful display that contrasts sharply with the static, monochrome screen of e-book readers. Apple said it sold more than two million iPads in the two months since the tablet’s introduction.
“It was obvious that the price of stand-alone e-readers had to come down,” said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, citing the threat by Apple and other tablet makers. “We just never thought it was going to happen this rapidly.”
Analysts had expected the prices of e-readers would gradually fall because of the natural decline in component costs and the increased profitability of e-books themselves...
With recent software upgrades, Barnes & Noble has improved the Nook, which now has features to counter Amazon’s aggressiveness on e-book prices and the brand power of the Kindle. Barnes & Noble allows Nook owners to read entire e-books within stores and lend e-books to friends for up to two weeks. Now, with yet another software upgrade, Nook owners have free access to AT&T’s nationwide Wi-Fi network.
“I don’t see more than two, or maybe three dedicated reading companies in the market for selling e-books,” said William J. Lynch, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, in an interview. “I think you are starting to see a shake-out now.”
Mr. Lynch also predicted that within 12 months, e-reading devices “that people will actually want to buy” could be available for less than $100."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/technology/22reader.html?hpw
"A price war is brewing in the growing market for electronic reading devices.
Barnes & Noble, the national bookseller, announced Monday that it was dropping the price of its six-month-old Nook e-reader to $199 from $259 and introducing a new version of the device, which connects to the Internet only over Wi-Fi networks, for $149.
Responding rapidly, Amazon.com then cut the price of its popular Kindle e-reader below the Nook, to $189 from $259.
The price cuts were made as manufacturers of e-readers faced a mounting threat from Apple’s iPad. Even though it is far more expensive than the e-readers, the iPad, which starts at $500, performs a range of functions with a versatile, colorful display that contrasts sharply with the static, monochrome screen of e-book readers. Apple said it sold more than two million iPads in the two months since the tablet’s introduction.
“It was obvious that the price of stand-alone e-readers had to come down,” said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, citing the threat by Apple and other tablet makers. “We just never thought it was going to happen this rapidly.”
Analysts had expected the prices of e-readers would gradually fall because of the natural decline in component costs and the increased profitability of e-books themselves...
With recent software upgrades, Barnes & Noble has improved the Nook, which now has features to counter Amazon’s aggressiveness on e-book prices and the brand power of the Kindle. Barnes & Noble allows Nook owners to read entire e-books within stores and lend e-books to friends for up to two weeks. Now, with yet another software upgrade, Nook owners have free access to AT&T’s nationwide Wi-Fi network.
“I don’t see more than two, or maybe three dedicated reading companies in the market for selling e-books,” said William J. Lynch, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, in an interview. “I think you are starting to see a shake-out now.”
Mr. Lynch also predicted that within 12 months, e-reading devices “that people will actually want to buy” could be available for less than $100."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/technology/22reader.html?hpw
Friday, June 18, 2010
Spider-Man Is Among the Most Wanted; New York Times, 6/17/10
Marc Lacey, New York Times; Spider-Man Is Among the Most Wanted:
"Spider-Man has successfully taken on the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus and Venom, to name just a few of his foes over the years, but the web-spinning superhero was no match for Mexico’s federal police, who recently manhandled him and easily took him into custody.
Many piñata vendors duplicate popular children’s characters, but some companies want them to pay to do so.
In a crackdown on pirated piñatas some months ago, officials from the attorney general’s office and the federal police seized more than 100 of the papier-mâché party accessories, Spider-Man prime among them, and took into custody several real-life piñata vendors as well. The authorities said the raid was a response to a complaint filed by Marvel Entertainment, which owns the rights to the characters in question. Hulk, another Marvel character, was also overwhelmed by the men in black that day, as was Captain America.
But the story line got a twist when it turned out that the raid might have been as questionable as the piñatas that were seized. The attorney general’s office said it had no record of Marvel’s calling for such an operation, which existing law required before a raid could be conducted, and the company insists it had nothing to do with it. Federal officials later said that it was Televisa, a Mexican television conglomerate, that filed the complaint that led to the raid.
Whatever the raid’s provenance, the lawyer assisting the vendors, Fidel López García, said that it appeared to have been aimed primarily at extorting money from the vendors and commandeering their wares, not an uncommon event in Mexico. Mr. López and the vendors say that, after seizing thousands of piñatas, the police and the officials not only began selling them on the street but offered to sell them back to the vendors.
A spokeswoman for the Mexican federal prosecutors dismissed the vendors’ accusations about the raid, saying simply, “It wasn’t illegal.”
The piñata roundup created a stir in this city’s piñata-selling zones, where Spider-Man, who goes by the name Hombre Araña here, used to hang out on the sidewalk with Snow White, Mickey Mouse, SpongeBob SquarePants and Lightning McQueen, to name a few of the popular piñatas awaiting purchase.
After being forced to pay hefty fines of thousands of dollars to the attorney general’s office, some vendors have eliminated Spider-Man from their shops and others have relegated him to the back. It is not as though proprietary characters have disappeared altogether, though. On a recent afternoon, Darth Vader (Lucasfilm Ltd.) was hanging next to Ben 10 (Cartoon Network), and Princess Tiana (Disney) was in close proximity to Thomas the Tank Engine (Gullane (Thomas) Ltd.), Tigger (Disney) and Shrek (DreamWorks Animation).
Piñatas are one small corner of the counterfeiting business, which is flourishing in Mexico. “The statistics don’t lie, and we had to do something because 8 of every 10 people buy counterfeit products, and 54 percent of the products on the market are falsified,” said Arturo Zamora Jiménez, a lawmaker who advocated for a beefed-up antipiracy law that has since been adopted.
Besides depriving the government of tax revenue and siphoning profits from corporations, piracy helps to fuel organized crime, the authorities say. Mexican drug gangs have embraced the business, the government said, trafficking in such things as pirated movies, computer software and apparel.
Critics of the government maintain that only the poor will suffer from any crackdown on counterfeit goods. “Instead of creating jobs, this government pursues people who have made the decision not to join the criminal element and who look for honest work to bring bread to their homes,” said Gerardo Fernández Noraña, an opposition lawmaker.
Standing amid Dora the Explorers, Barneys and Tinker Bells, some piñata sellers said they saw nothing wrong with providing customers with what they wanted, even without permission from a foreign corporation.
“A piñata is Mexican,” said Eduardo Bejaramo, a vendor who had been detained in the raid. “It’s just newspaper with paint on it. We’re not copying music or films. We’re doing all this by hand. How can we copy if Marvel does not make piñatas?”
Down the street, another piñata vendor, who declined to be identified out of fear that his comments could prompt a follow-up raid, said he would have to go out of business if he had to pay companies to use their characters.
“Traditionally, Mexican piñatas were made in the shape of stars,” he said, meaning celestial bodies, not celebrities. “But with TV, children began wanting a piñata like what they saw on the screen.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/world/americas/17pinata.html?scp=1&sq=pinatas%20spider-man%20mexico&st=cse
"Spider-Man has successfully taken on the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus and Venom, to name just a few of his foes over the years, but the web-spinning superhero was no match for Mexico’s federal police, who recently manhandled him and easily took him into custody.
Many piñata vendors duplicate popular children’s characters, but some companies want them to pay to do so.
In a crackdown on pirated piñatas some months ago, officials from the attorney general’s office and the federal police seized more than 100 of the papier-mâché party accessories, Spider-Man prime among them, and took into custody several real-life piñata vendors as well. The authorities said the raid was a response to a complaint filed by Marvel Entertainment, which owns the rights to the characters in question. Hulk, another Marvel character, was also overwhelmed by the men in black that day, as was Captain America.
But the story line got a twist when it turned out that the raid might have been as questionable as the piñatas that were seized. The attorney general’s office said it had no record of Marvel’s calling for such an operation, which existing law required before a raid could be conducted, and the company insists it had nothing to do with it. Federal officials later said that it was Televisa, a Mexican television conglomerate, that filed the complaint that led to the raid.
Whatever the raid’s provenance, the lawyer assisting the vendors, Fidel López García, said that it appeared to have been aimed primarily at extorting money from the vendors and commandeering their wares, not an uncommon event in Mexico. Mr. López and the vendors say that, after seizing thousands of piñatas, the police and the officials not only began selling them on the street but offered to sell them back to the vendors.
A spokeswoman for the Mexican federal prosecutors dismissed the vendors’ accusations about the raid, saying simply, “It wasn’t illegal.”
The piñata roundup created a stir in this city’s piñata-selling zones, where Spider-Man, who goes by the name Hombre Araña here, used to hang out on the sidewalk with Snow White, Mickey Mouse, SpongeBob SquarePants and Lightning McQueen, to name a few of the popular piñatas awaiting purchase.
After being forced to pay hefty fines of thousands of dollars to the attorney general’s office, some vendors have eliminated Spider-Man from their shops and others have relegated him to the back. It is not as though proprietary characters have disappeared altogether, though. On a recent afternoon, Darth Vader (Lucasfilm Ltd.) was hanging next to Ben 10 (Cartoon Network), and Princess Tiana (Disney) was in close proximity to Thomas the Tank Engine (Gullane (Thomas) Ltd.), Tigger (Disney) and Shrek (DreamWorks Animation).
Piñatas are one small corner of the counterfeiting business, which is flourishing in Mexico. “The statistics don’t lie, and we had to do something because 8 of every 10 people buy counterfeit products, and 54 percent of the products on the market are falsified,” said Arturo Zamora Jiménez, a lawmaker who advocated for a beefed-up antipiracy law that has since been adopted.
Besides depriving the government of tax revenue and siphoning profits from corporations, piracy helps to fuel organized crime, the authorities say. Mexican drug gangs have embraced the business, the government said, trafficking in such things as pirated movies, computer software and apparel.
Critics of the government maintain that only the poor will suffer from any crackdown on counterfeit goods. “Instead of creating jobs, this government pursues people who have made the decision not to join the criminal element and who look for honest work to bring bread to their homes,” said Gerardo Fernández Noraña, an opposition lawmaker.
Standing amid Dora the Explorers, Barneys and Tinker Bells, some piñata sellers said they saw nothing wrong with providing customers with what they wanted, even without permission from a foreign corporation.
“A piñata is Mexican,” said Eduardo Bejaramo, a vendor who had been detained in the raid. “It’s just newspaper with paint on it. We’re not copying music or films. We’re doing all this by hand. How can we copy if Marvel does not make piñatas?”
Down the street, another piñata vendor, who declined to be identified out of fear that his comments could prompt a follow-up raid, said he would have to go out of business if he had to pay companies to use their characters.
“Traditionally, Mexican piñatas were made in the shape of stars,” he said, meaning celestial bodies, not celebrities. “But with TV, children began wanting a piñata like what they saw on the screen.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/world/americas/17pinata.html?scp=1&sq=pinatas%20spider-man%20mexico&st=cse
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Dispute Over File Sharing's Harm to Music Sales Plays Again; Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus, 6/17/10
David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus; Dispute Over File Sharing's Harm to Music Sales Plays Again:
"Last week in Vienna, where Beethoven, Haydn, and Mahler once walked, scholars came together to argue about Radiohead, file sharing, and the economics of music.
At a conference known as Vienna Music Business Research Days, two American economists renewed their long-running dispute about whether or not peer-to-peer file sharing is responsible for the worldwide decline in CD sales.
The quarrel centers on a widely cited paper by Felix Oberholzer-Gee, a professor at the Harvard Business School, and Koleman Strumpf, who now teaches at the University of Kansas. Mr. Oberholzer-Gee and Mr. Strumpf argued that file sharing does not have a net negative effect on the recorded-music industry. They arrived at that conclusion by examining the relationships among American record sales, American file sharing, and school holidays in Germany during the last quarter of 2002. (If file sharing injures CD sales, the paper’s reasoning goes, then American CD sales should suffer especially during weeks when young Germans are home from school because Germany is a major source of files traded on peer-to-peer networks.)
From the time drafts of the paper first circulated in 2005, it has been attacked by Stan J. Liebowitz, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas. (Some of Mr. Liebowitz's work has been financially supported by a music-industry trade group.) In Vienna last week, Mr. Liebowitz reopened the argument with a new line of criticism.
In his Vienna paper, Mr. Liebowitz argued that Mr. Oberholzer-Gee and Mr. Strumpf’s central statistical model seems badly wrong in a way that he had not previously noticed. At one point their paper reports that a one-standard-deviation increase in the number of German students on vacation raised American file-sharing rates by half of their mean level.
But common sense suggests that the effect cannot possibly be so strong, Mr. Liebowitz’s Vienna paper says. If that were true, then “a power failure in a portion of Germany, or any event that caused German students to turn off their computers, would completely eliminate American file sharing. How realistic is that?” (Mr. Liebowitz and other skeptics have not been able to directly replicate Mr. Oberholzer-Gee and Mr. Strumpf’s central analysis, because it is based on a confidential and proprietary data set from a file-sharing company.)
Mr. Olberholzer-Gee did not reply to a request for comment from The Chronicle. But he and Mr. Liebowitz had some heated words during the conference panel, according to an account by John P. Palmer, of the University of Western Ontario.
Later in the conference, Mr. Oberholzer-Gee presented a recent paper by himself and Mr. Strumpf. The new paper makes arguments that are less controversial than the previous one's were. First, they point out that file sharing has generated huge new complementary industries for MP3 players and other products. Second, they note that the amount of new music does not seem to have declined–so there is no strong evidence that file sharing has destroyed muscians’ incentives to create.
But even though they seem to be de-emphasizing the idea that file sharing does not hurt sales, Mr. Liebowitz did not give his colleagues any peace. In his Vienna presentation, he said that their new paper seemed to mischaracterize at least two recent studies of file sharing by other scholars.
On Page 16 of their Vienna paper, for example, Mr. Oberholzer-Gee and Mr. Strumpf cite a 2007 paper in Management Science as one of several that found that “file sharing does not hurt sales at all.” But that phrase is badly misleading, Mr. Liebowitz said, because the paper actually concluded that file sharing reduces the amount of time that many albums spend on the music charts.
“It is not correct to say that our work shows file sharing is unrelated to changes in sales,” said the Management Science paper’s lead author, Sudip Bhattacharjee, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle.
The paper did not look directly at sales, only at chart longevity, also known as chart survival. And “we did report a decrease in survival over all,” said Mr. Bhattacharjee, who is an associate professor of operations and information management at the University of Connecticut."
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Dispute-Over-File-Sharings/24881/
"Last week in Vienna, where Beethoven, Haydn, and Mahler once walked, scholars came together to argue about Radiohead, file sharing, and the economics of music.
At a conference known as Vienna Music Business Research Days, two American economists renewed their long-running dispute about whether or not peer-to-peer file sharing is responsible for the worldwide decline in CD sales.
The quarrel centers on a widely cited paper by Felix Oberholzer-Gee, a professor at the Harvard Business School, and Koleman Strumpf, who now teaches at the University of Kansas. Mr. Oberholzer-Gee and Mr. Strumpf argued that file sharing does not have a net negative effect on the recorded-music industry. They arrived at that conclusion by examining the relationships among American record sales, American file sharing, and school holidays in Germany during the last quarter of 2002. (If file sharing injures CD sales, the paper’s reasoning goes, then American CD sales should suffer especially during weeks when young Germans are home from school because Germany is a major source of files traded on peer-to-peer networks.)
From the time drafts of the paper first circulated in 2005, it has been attacked by Stan J. Liebowitz, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas. (Some of Mr. Liebowitz's work has been financially supported by a music-industry trade group.) In Vienna last week, Mr. Liebowitz reopened the argument with a new line of criticism.
In his Vienna paper, Mr. Liebowitz argued that Mr. Oberholzer-Gee and Mr. Strumpf’s central statistical model seems badly wrong in a way that he had not previously noticed. At one point their paper reports that a one-standard-deviation increase in the number of German students on vacation raised American file-sharing rates by half of their mean level.
But common sense suggests that the effect cannot possibly be so strong, Mr. Liebowitz’s Vienna paper says. If that were true, then “a power failure in a portion of Germany, or any event that caused German students to turn off their computers, would completely eliminate American file sharing. How realistic is that?” (Mr. Liebowitz and other skeptics have not been able to directly replicate Mr. Oberholzer-Gee and Mr. Strumpf’s central analysis, because it is based on a confidential and proprietary data set from a file-sharing company.)
Mr. Olberholzer-Gee did not reply to a request for comment from The Chronicle. But he and Mr. Liebowitz had some heated words during the conference panel, according to an account by John P. Palmer, of the University of Western Ontario.
Later in the conference, Mr. Oberholzer-Gee presented a recent paper by himself and Mr. Strumpf. The new paper makes arguments that are less controversial than the previous one's were. First, they point out that file sharing has generated huge new complementary industries for MP3 players and other products. Second, they note that the amount of new music does not seem to have declined–so there is no strong evidence that file sharing has destroyed muscians’ incentives to create.
But even though they seem to be de-emphasizing the idea that file sharing does not hurt sales, Mr. Liebowitz did not give his colleagues any peace. In his Vienna presentation, he said that their new paper seemed to mischaracterize at least two recent studies of file sharing by other scholars.
On Page 16 of their Vienna paper, for example, Mr. Oberholzer-Gee and Mr. Strumpf cite a 2007 paper in Management Science as one of several that found that “file sharing does not hurt sales at all.” But that phrase is badly misleading, Mr. Liebowitz said, because the paper actually concluded that file sharing reduces the amount of time that many albums spend on the music charts.
“It is not correct to say that our work shows file sharing is unrelated to changes in sales,” said the Management Science paper’s lead author, Sudip Bhattacharjee, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle.
The paper did not look directly at sales, only at chart longevity, also known as chart survival. And “we did report a decrease in survival over all,” said Mr. Bhattacharjee, who is an associate professor of operations and information management at the University of Connecticut."
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Dispute-Over-File-Sharings/24881/
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