Jeff Jarvis, (London) Guardian; US media companies try to resurrect 'hot news' to protect content: Long-dormant legal notion used in court case involving theflyonthewall.com:
"Struggling news companies from the US to Europe have been floating a variety of creative ideas for government protection: direct subsidies, new tax status, restrictions on public-media competitors, antitrust exemptions enabling consolidation or price fixing, extensions of copyright, and restrictions on fair use.
In the US, the most creative and perhaps dangerous defence yet is an attempt to resurrect the doctrine of "hot news" to prevent rivals from repeating news until it has cooled. It began in 1918: after reporting on British war losses, Hearst's International News Service was barred from using Allied telegraph lines. So INS rewrote Associated Press news for west coast newspapers. AP sued and won.
Now the long-dormant legal notion is resurrected in the case of four Wall Street firms v theflyonthewall.com, a website that published ratings from the brokers' analysts. The brokers argue the ratings belong to them, at least for a few hours; the site argues it is merely reporting news of them. The site lost and on appeal, friend-of-the-court briefs have been filed on one side by Google and Twitter and on the other by 14 news giants, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, AP, and Agence France-Presse. The news companies are latching on to hot news in the hope of restricting aggregators.
But the idea of hot news is laughably antiquated. Tom Glocer, the head of Thomson Reuters, has said his news is hot for "milliseconds". The Google/Twitter brief says: "In a world of modern communications technology, where anyone with a cell phone may disseminate news throughout the world even as it is occurring, the notion that a single media outlet should have a monopoly on time-sensitive facts is not only contrary to law, it is, as a practical matter, futile."
In their brief, the legacy companies argue hot news is "necessary to protect the news industry's incentive to gather and report news … " They protest that "free riders" may repeat their news at lower cost. "One of the greatest concerns among news originators," they say, "is inexpensive technology that allows easy aggregation of news." The legacy companies nowhere acknowledge the economic value of links to their content.
The news companies complain of papers going bankrupt, not acknowledging that that was largely a result of debt and mismanagement. They say they are not objecting to use of each other's facts in occasional stories – as they all do it – but instead the "systematic" (read: Googley) gathering of their news. They do not make reference to the tools that enable them to block search engines and aggregators, as News Corp has done at the Times.
On the other side, Google and Twitter cite a 1991 case, Feist Publications v Rural Telephone, in which the court said: "The first person to find and report a particular fact has not created the fact; he or she has merely discovered its existence."
The internet companies say the Feist court rejected "the notion that 'sweat of the brow' can itself create intellectual property rights. They add: "The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labour of authors but to 'promote the progress of science and useful arts'."
Facts have never been subject to copyright; they cannot be owned. "Facts," Google and Twitter say, "must remain in the public domain, free from any restraint or encumbrance." And: "Allowing the first publisher to prevent others from copying such information would defeat the objectives of copyright by impeding rather than advancing the progress of knowledge." Isn't the progress of knowledge the business of news? On a practical level, Google and Twitter argue that the fear of litigation would "chill the lawful dissemination of important news by fostering uncertainty among news outlets as to how long they must 'sit' on a story before they are free of a potential 'hot news' claim".
It is nothing short of shocking that news organisations are endorsing a form of court-supervised prior restraint and that they would restrict fair use yet they all depend upon it. Google and Twitter say "the modern ubiquity of multiple news platforms renders 'hot news' misappropriation an anachronism, aimed at muzzling all but the most powerful media companies. In a world of citizen journalists and commentators, online news organisations, and broadcasters who compete 24 hours a day, news can no longer be contained for any meaningful amount of time."
That is what we mean when we say news wants to be free: Facts must remain free to comment on, build upon, and pass along."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/jul/05/hot-news-media-companies-legal
Monday, July 5, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
The Recording Industry, on the Ropes; New York Times, 7/4/10
Devin Leonard, New York Times; The Recording Industry, on the Ropes:
"WHEN I started covering the music industry for Fortune nearly a decade ago, I often heard people gleefully predict that the demise of the big record companies was just around the corner.
Thanks to the Internet, my label-hating sources predicted, bands would be able to bond directly with their fans online, bypassing greedy record labels intent on cheapening the product. Supposedly, the results would be less crassly commercial music from acts like New Kids on the Block and more wondrous sounds from bands like Radiohead.
Only those with ears of tin wouldn’t wish for that. And I have to admit that I heard this argument so often that I started to believe it.
Fast-forward to the present. The recording industry has indeed been decimated by the Internet, as Fred Goodman vividly describes in “Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis” (Simon & Schuster, 323 pages). “It is the first commercial medium to feel the gale force of cyberspace,” he writes. “The entire business, including the Warner Music Group, has been blown off its foundation.”
Is this a good thing? I have had numerous conversations with musicians — both famous and obscure, but all of them doing important work — who lament that they are making much less money now that the major labels are on the ropes. Even Lady Gaga, the most popular singer in the world today, is feeling the pain. Her album sales are a fraction of the numbers that Britney Spears posted in the late 1990s at the height of her career.
Mr. Goodman says the major labels have made their share of mistakes, like suing college students to stamp out illegal downloading and sometimes treating artists like chattel. But he worries that if companies like Warner Music can’t rejuvenate themselves in the digital age, we may never see another “Abbey Road.”
In “Fortune’s Fool,” Mr. Goodman uses Mr. Bronfman’s career to tell the story of the industry’s implosion and its uncertain future. A contributor to Rolling Stone and author of “The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce,” Mr. Goodman was able to gain extensive access to Mr. Bronfman and many other important industry executives. His book is full of colorful anecdotes and astonishing quotes from his subjects.
At times, I wish that Mr. Goodman would have delved more deeply into the cultural implications of Warner Music’s tribulations and spent less time on music industry politics. But for the most part, “Fortune’s Fool” is a great read.
Mr. Bronfman is a strangely sympathetic character. The grandson of Samuel Bronfman, who built his liquor empire by selling Canadian whisky to bootleggers during Prohibition, he was anointed by his family to run the Seagram conglomerate in 1995. He raised eyebrows by steering it into the entertainment business, acquiring a movie studio and a record company.
In 2000, Mr. Bronfman naïvely engineered the sale of Seagram to Vivendi in a $33 billion stock swap. Soon, Vivendi was embroiled in an accounting scandal. The price of the company’s shares plummeted, and the value of the Bronfman family’s holdings tumbled by $3 billion. And that, many people assumed, was the end of his business career.
Yet, six years ago, he orchestrated a comeback as breathtaking as Mariah Carey’s return to the top 10 after her “Glitter” debacle. He and a team of private equity investors bought Warner Music for $2.6 billion, and he became its C.E.O. And he showed that he had a knack for hiring the right executives.
His choice for the company’s North American recorded music unit was Lyor Cohen, a former rap music promoter, whom his former clients affectionately nicknamed “Lansky,” after the legendary gangster Meyer Lansky.
“Fortune’s Fool” truly takes off when Mr. Goodman brings Mr. Cohen onstage and describes how he clawed his way up from managing tours for emerging rap acts like the Beastie Boys to landing in the executive suite at Warner Music.
Together, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Bronfman set out to show that the music industry wasn’t dead yet. They have faced innumerable challenges — the implosion of Tower Records, a generation of young consumers who refuse to pay for digital music, and technology company executives intent on capitalizing on the music industry’s troubles. By the way, these were the same people who told me that music industry executives like Mr. Bronfman were Sith lords and that they themselves were the Jedi.
By the end of “Fortune’s Fool,” Warner Music has outperformed most of its peers. But Mr. Goodman fears that the company’s long-term survival remains in question.
This is not a hagiography. Mr. Goodman obviously likes Mr. Bronfman and Mr. Cohen, but he also chronicles their missteps and occasionally boorish behavior. Remember those lawsuits against college kids? Mr. Bronfman was a huge supporter of those efforts.
In a lengthy epilogue, Mr. Goodman assails members of the “technorati” who urge artists to give their music away online and make up the difference by selling more concert tickets and T-shirts. Fair enough, but I was waiting for a more impassioned defense of the record labels themselves. Sure, they have released mountains of Top 40 schlock. But it paid the bills and enabled them to put out less-profitable music with real cultural value, like jazz, opera and all sorts of esoteric rock ’n’ roll.
They can’t afford to do that anymore. Now it’s pretty much all Lady Gaga all the time. No offense to her ladyship, but is that really progress?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/media/04shelf.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=devin&st=cse
"WHEN I started covering the music industry for Fortune nearly a decade ago, I often heard people gleefully predict that the demise of the big record companies was just around the corner.
Thanks to the Internet, my label-hating sources predicted, bands would be able to bond directly with their fans online, bypassing greedy record labels intent on cheapening the product. Supposedly, the results would be less crassly commercial music from acts like New Kids on the Block and more wondrous sounds from bands like Radiohead.
Only those with ears of tin wouldn’t wish for that. And I have to admit that I heard this argument so often that I started to believe it.
Fast-forward to the present. The recording industry has indeed been decimated by the Internet, as Fred Goodman vividly describes in “Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis” (Simon & Schuster, 323 pages). “It is the first commercial medium to feel the gale force of cyberspace,” he writes. “The entire business, including the Warner Music Group, has been blown off its foundation.”
Is this a good thing? I have had numerous conversations with musicians — both famous and obscure, but all of them doing important work — who lament that they are making much less money now that the major labels are on the ropes. Even Lady Gaga, the most popular singer in the world today, is feeling the pain. Her album sales are a fraction of the numbers that Britney Spears posted in the late 1990s at the height of her career.
Mr. Goodman says the major labels have made their share of mistakes, like suing college students to stamp out illegal downloading and sometimes treating artists like chattel. But he worries that if companies like Warner Music can’t rejuvenate themselves in the digital age, we may never see another “Abbey Road.”
In “Fortune’s Fool,” Mr. Goodman uses Mr. Bronfman’s career to tell the story of the industry’s implosion and its uncertain future. A contributor to Rolling Stone and author of “The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce,” Mr. Goodman was able to gain extensive access to Mr. Bronfman and many other important industry executives. His book is full of colorful anecdotes and astonishing quotes from his subjects.
At times, I wish that Mr. Goodman would have delved more deeply into the cultural implications of Warner Music’s tribulations and spent less time on music industry politics. But for the most part, “Fortune’s Fool” is a great read.
Mr. Bronfman is a strangely sympathetic character. The grandson of Samuel Bronfman, who built his liquor empire by selling Canadian whisky to bootleggers during Prohibition, he was anointed by his family to run the Seagram conglomerate in 1995. He raised eyebrows by steering it into the entertainment business, acquiring a movie studio and a record company.
In 2000, Mr. Bronfman naïvely engineered the sale of Seagram to Vivendi in a $33 billion stock swap. Soon, Vivendi was embroiled in an accounting scandal. The price of the company’s shares plummeted, and the value of the Bronfman family’s holdings tumbled by $3 billion. And that, many people assumed, was the end of his business career.
Yet, six years ago, he orchestrated a comeback as breathtaking as Mariah Carey’s return to the top 10 after her “Glitter” debacle. He and a team of private equity investors bought Warner Music for $2.6 billion, and he became its C.E.O. And he showed that he had a knack for hiring the right executives.
His choice for the company’s North American recorded music unit was Lyor Cohen, a former rap music promoter, whom his former clients affectionately nicknamed “Lansky,” after the legendary gangster Meyer Lansky.
“Fortune’s Fool” truly takes off when Mr. Goodman brings Mr. Cohen onstage and describes how he clawed his way up from managing tours for emerging rap acts like the Beastie Boys to landing in the executive suite at Warner Music.
Together, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Bronfman set out to show that the music industry wasn’t dead yet. They have faced innumerable challenges — the implosion of Tower Records, a generation of young consumers who refuse to pay for digital music, and technology company executives intent on capitalizing on the music industry’s troubles. By the way, these were the same people who told me that music industry executives like Mr. Bronfman were Sith lords and that they themselves were the Jedi.
By the end of “Fortune’s Fool,” Warner Music has outperformed most of its peers. But Mr. Goodman fears that the company’s long-term survival remains in question.
This is not a hagiography. Mr. Goodman obviously likes Mr. Bronfman and Mr. Cohen, but he also chronicles their missteps and occasionally boorish behavior. Remember those lawsuits against college kids? Mr. Bronfman was a huge supporter of those efforts.
In a lengthy epilogue, Mr. Goodman assails members of the “technorati” who urge artists to give their music away online and make up the difference by selling more concert tickets and T-shirts. Fair enough, but I was waiting for a more impassioned defense of the record labels themselves. Sure, they have released mountains of Top 40 schlock. But it paid the bills and enabled them to put out less-profitable music with real cultural value, like jazz, opera and all sorts of esoteric rock ’n’ roll.
They can’t afford to do that anymore. Now it’s pretty much all Lady Gaga all the time. No offense to her ladyship, but is that really progress?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/media/04shelf.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=devin&st=cse
U.S. shuts websites offering pirated movies; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 7/4/10
Richard Verrier, Los Angeles Times via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; U.S. shuts websites offering pirated movies:
"Adding some swashbuckling to its tough talk on fighting piracy, the federal government last week seized several websites that had offered downloads of pirated movies such as "Toy Story 3" and "Iron Man 2" within hours of their release in theaters.
Federal authorities announced that they had seized domain names from nine websites engaged in the "criminal theft of American movies and television." The websites include TVShack.net, PlanetMoviez.com, ThePirateCity.org and Ninjavideo.net. Combined, the sites drew 6.7 million visitors a month, authorities said.
Officials also seized assets from 15 bank, investment and advertising accounts and executed residential search warrants in North Carolina, New York, New Jersey and Washington, according to a statement from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which coordinated its investigation with the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.
The crackdown, which involved 100 agents working in 11 states and the Netherlands, was part of a renewed campaign dubbed Operation in Our Sites by federal authorities to curb Internet counterfeiting and piracy. The announcement came more than a week after the Obama administration unveiled a detailed plan on how to tackle global piracy, including targeting illegal websites.
ICE chief John Morton, speaking at a Walt Disney Studios sound stage where he was joined by movie studio executives and union representatives, trumpeted the bust as the beginning of a "long-term effort to turn the tables on these thieves." The targeted websites, he added, are "run by people who have no respect for creativity and innovation."
The studios say they lose hundreds of millions annually to piracy.
Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement the actions were necessary to protect the jobs and livelihoods of "ordinary working people" and warned others engaged in similar websites.
"If your business model is piracy, your story will not have a happy ending," Mr. Bharara said."
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10185/1069785-60.stm#ixzz0skYnv7UI"
"Adding some swashbuckling to its tough talk on fighting piracy, the federal government last week seized several websites that had offered downloads of pirated movies such as "Toy Story 3" and "Iron Man 2" within hours of their release in theaters.
Federal authorities announced that they had seized domain names from nine websites engaged in the "criminal theft of American movies and television." The websites include TVShack.net, PlanetMoviez.com, ThePirateCity.org and Ninjavideo.net. Combined, the sites drew 6.7 million visitors a month, authorities said.
Officials also seized assets from 15 bank, investment and advertising accounts and executed residential search warrants in North Carolina, New York, New Jersey and Washington, according to a statement from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which coordinated its investigation with the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.
The crackdown, which involved 100 agents working in 11 states and the Netherlands, was part of a renewed campaign dubbed Operation in Our Sites by federal authorities to curb Internet counterfeiting and piracy. The announcement came more than a week after the Obama administration unveiled a detailed plan on how to tackle global piracy, including targeting illegal websites.
ICE chief John Morton, speaking at a Walt Disney Studios sound stage where he was joined by movie studio executives and union representatives, trumpeted the bust as the beginning of a "long-term effort to turn the tables on these thieves." The targeted websites, he added, are "run by people who have no respect for creativity and innovation."
The studios say they lose hundreds of millions annually to piracy.
Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement the actions were necessary to protect the jobs and livelihoods of "ordinary working people" and warned others engaged in similar websites.
"If your business model is piracy, your story will not have a happy ending," Mr. Bharara said."
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10185/1069785-60.stm#ixzz0skYnv7UI"
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Court Orders US Copyright Group To Work With Time Warner, EFF To Craft More Informative Letter To Those Being Sued; TechDirt.com, 7/1/10
Mike Masnick, TechDirt.com; Court Orders US Copyright Group To Work With Time Warner, EFF To Craft More Informative Letter To Those Being Sued:
"The saga of US Copyright Group (really DC-based law firm Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver) continues. As you may recall, the firm is filing lawsuits against tens of thousands of people accused of file sharing certain movies, such as Uwe Boll's Far Cry and the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker. The lawsuits lump thousands of "John Does" into a single suit located conveniently (for Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver) in Washington, DC. Time Warner Cable has been resisting the demands to identify so many of its subscribers, and EFF, Public Citizen and the ACLU joined forces to point out that it isn't legal to lump together so many different totally unrelated defendants into a single case in an unrelated jurisdiction. US Copyright Group defended the lumping together by claiming that since BitTorrent worked by different people sharing little bits, perhaps all of the thousands of people shared together. The judge seemed skeptical.
However, rather than throw out the lawsuits against all but one of the defendants, the judge is asking the various parties -- US Copyright Group, Time Warner Cable, EFF, Public Citizen and the ACLU to all work together to craft a note that can be sent to individuals targeted in these lawsuits. The idea is that this note, unlike the one people get directly from USCG, will inform people of their rights, including the right to challenge the jurisdiction of the lawsuit (and, I assume, the fact that they're randomly lumped in with other people).
My guess is that the judge is still uncomfortable with all these lawsuits being lumped together, but realized that none of the parties in the court room are really the right ones to be challenging the specifics of the lawsuit. That needs to come from someone actually being sued. Thus, this agreed-upon letter could still lead to a lawsuit that says such joining of massive lawsuits into one is not allowed.
Still, given USCG's statements in the lawsuits to date, and the text of the current letters it sends, I'm guessing that there's going to be a lot of disagreement about what goes into this new mutually agreed-upon letter."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100701/00293210033.shtml
"The saga of US Copyright Group (really DC-based law firm Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver) continues. As you may recall, the firm is filing lawsuits against tens of thousands of people accused of file sharing certain movies, such as Uwe Boll's Far Cry and the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker. The lawsuits lump thousands of "John Does" into a single suit located conveniently (for Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver) in Washington, DC. Time Warner Cable has been resisting the demands to identify so many of its subscribers, and EFF, Public Citizen and the ACLU joined forces to point out that it isn't legal to lump together so many different totally unrelated defendants into a single case in an unrelated jurisdiction. US Copyright Group defended the lumping together by claiming that since BitTorrent worked by different people sharing little bits, perhaps all of the thousands of people shared together. The judge seemed skeptical.
However, rather than throw out the lawsuits against all but one of the defendants, the judge is asking the various parties -- US Copyright Group, Time Warner Cable, EFF, Public Citizen and the ACLU to all work together to craft a note that can be sent to individuals targeted in these lawsuits. The idea is that this note, unlike the one people get directly from USCG, will inform people of their rights, including the right to challenge the jurisdiction of the lawsuit (and, I assume, the fact that they're randomly lumped in with other people).
My guess is that the judge is still uncomfortable with all these lawsuits being lumped together, but realized that none of the parties in the court room are really the right ones to be challenging the specifics of the lawsuit. That needs to come from someone actually being sued. Thus, this agreed-upon letter could still lead to a lawsuit that says such joining of massive lawsuits into one is not allowed.
Still, given USCG's statements in the lawsuits to date, and the text of the current letters it sends, I'm guessing that there's going to be a lot of disagreement about what goes into this new mutually agreed-upon letter."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100701/00293210033.shtml
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
May a library lend e-book readers?; LibraryLaw Blog, 6/20/10
Peter Hirtle, LibraryLaw Blog; May a library lend e-book readers?:
"A recent post at the Citizen Media Law Project about one’s First Sale rights with e-books got me thinking about libraries. CMLP noted that with e-books, one has no first sale rights because they are usually governed by licenses instead. First sale, however, is fundamental to the business of libraries. It allows us to loan to others copies of printed books we have purchased without violating the copyright owner’s rights to distribute the work. Some libraries have started lending e-book readers to faculty and students, including the Lewis Music Library at MIT and the NCSU Library, which are both loaning iPads. Is this legal?...
I hope, therefore, that libraries that are experimenting with lending e-book readers have thoroughly vetted their program with an attorney. Mostly, I hope they are working with Apple, Amazon, etc. to create new library-friendly licenses. We need licenses that will allow libraries to purchase e-books that can then either be copied directly onto patron-owned devices or copied onto library devices that are then lent to patrons. If e-books become as important as people predict and libraries do not have the legal right to lend those e-books, the traditional role of the library as a free source of reading matter will fade away."
http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2010/06/may-a-library-lend-e-book-readers.html
"A recent post at the Citizen Media Law Project about one’s First Sale rights with e-books got me thinking about libraries. CMLP noted that with e-books, one has no first sale rights because they are usually governed by licenses instead. First sale, however, is fundamental to the business of libraries. It allows us to loan to others copies of printed books we have purchased without violating the copyright owner’s rights to distribute the work. Some libraries have started lending e-book readers to faculty and students, including the Lewis Music Library at MIT and the NCSU Library, which are both loaning iPads. Is this legal?...
I hope, therefore, that libraries that are experimenting with lending e-book readers have thoroughly vetted their program with an attorney. Mostly, I hope they are working with Apple, Amazon, etc. to create new library-friendly licenses. We need licenses that will allow libraries to purchase e-books that can then either be copied directly onto patron-owned devices or copied onto library devices that are then lent to patrons. If e-books become as important as people predict and libraries do not have the legal right to lend those e-books, the traditional role of the library as a free source of reading matter will fade away."
http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2010/06/may-a-library-lend-e-book-readers.html
Geist: Developing world opposition mounts to anti-counterfeiting agreement; Toronto Star, 6/28/10
Michael Geist, Toronto Star; Geist: Developing world opposition mounts to anti-counterfeiting agreement:
"Just as the G8-G20 meetings conclude in Muskoka and Toronto, another round of negotiations on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement resumes in Switzerland.
In the aftermath of the last round of discussions, a draft version of the ACTA text was publicly released, temporarily quieting criticism about the lack of transparency associated with an agreement that currently touches on all forms of intellectual property, including patents, trademark and copyright.
While the transparency concerns are no longer in the spotlight, mounting opposition to the agreement from the developing world, particularly powerhouse economies such as India, China and Brazil, is attracting considerable attention. The public opposition from those countries – India has threatened to establish a coalition of countries against the treaty – dramatically raise the political stakes and place Canada between a proverbial rock and hard place, given its close ties to the U.S. and ambition to increase economic ties with India and China.
India and China formally raised their complaints earlier this month at the World Trade Organization, where they identified five concerns with the agreement..."
http://www.thestar.com/news/sciencetech/technology/lawbytes/article/828525--geist-developing-world-opposition-mounts-to-anti-counterfeiting-agreement
"Just as the G8-G20 meetings conclude in Muskoka and Toronto, another round of negotiations on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement resumes in Switzerland.
In the aftermath of the last round of discussions, a draft version of the ACTA text was publicly released, temporarily quieting criticism about the lack of transparency associated with an agreement that currently touches on all forms of intellectual property, including patents, trademark and copyright.
While the transparency concerns are no longer in the spotlight, mounting opposition to the agreement from the developing world, particularly powerhouse economies such as India, China and Brazil, is attracting considerable attention. The public opposition from those countries – India has threatened to establish a coalition of countries against the treaty – dramatically raise the political stakes and place Canada between a proverbial rock and hard place, given its close ties to the U.S. and ambition to increase economic ties with India and China.
India and China formally raised their complaints earlier this month at the World Trade Organization, where they identified five concerns with the agreement..."
http://www.thestar.com/news/sciencetech/technology/lawbytes/article/828525--geist-developing-world-opposition-mounts-to-anti-counterfeiting-agreement
Canada's copyright laws show Britain's digital legislation is no exception; (London) Guardian, 6/29/10
Cory Doctorow, (London) Guardian; Canada's copyright laws show Britain's digital legislation is no exception: It's not just our government that can be bullied into voting against the public interest by big content's power-brokers:
"A few months ago, Britain's archivists, educators, independent artists and technologists were up in arms over the digital economy bill, a dreadful piece of legislation that ignored all the independent experts' views on how to improve Britain's digital economy; instead, it further rewarded the slow-moving entertainment companies that refused to adapt to the changing marketplace and diverted even more public enforcement resources to shoring up their business-models.
The bill was passed despite enormous public outcry, without real parliamentary debate, in a largely empty house, hours before parliament dissolved for the election. Despite reassuring promises to their constituents, huge numbers of MPs just didn't bother to show up for work that day, allowing the bill to slip through (my own MP, Meg Hillier, sent me a letter to tell me that she was "concerned" that the bill was up for a vote without debate, but she voted for it anyway).
Well, here's some good news for Britons: you're not the only country whose laws are for sale to oligarchs from the entertainment industry. In my native Canada, a farce worthy of the worst moments of the Digital Economy Act is playing out even as I type these words.
Some background: there have been two recent attempts to reform Canadian copyright law. Both failed, due in large part to an unwillingness on the part of lawmakers to conduct public review or consultation on their proposals (though they were happy to have closed-door meetings with lobbyists representing offshore entertainment giants). The minority Tory government is now fielding a third attempt, called Bill C32 (Canadian bills have much less interesting names than their UK counterparts; here, we'd probably call it The Enhancement of Digital Life Through Extreme Punishments for Naughty Pirates Bill of 2010).
C32 follows the widest-ever public consultation on Canadian copyright. More than 8,300 Canadians filed comments in the consultation, and they spoke with near unanimity: "We don't want a US-style copyright regime."
The US's copyright law was last reformed in 1998, with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which provided for near-total protection for "digital locks" (also called "DRM," "TPM," "copy prevention," "copy protection" – this explosion of names being the legacy of two decades' worth of attempts to rebrand an unpopular idea in the hopes of making it stick). In the US version of the law, breaking a digital lock is itself a crime – even if you're breaking it for a perfectly legitimate reason.
For example, Apple uses digital locks to make sure that the only programs you can run on your iPad and iPhone come from its own App Store. The App Store has lots of conditions on it that are ripe for competitive challenge – it scoops a hefty 30% commission from software creators, and imposes prudish conditions on the presentation of "adult" content (previously, Apple has rejected an ebook reader because it could be used to call up the Kama Sutra, a dictionary because it contained "naughty" words, the Pulitzer-winning political cartoons of Mark Fiore because they "ridiculed public figures" and a comic book adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses because you could see the characters' willies – in each case, they reversed themselves after public outcry).
But breaking the digital locks on your iPad so that you can buy apps from someone other than Apple is against the law – even though there is no copyright infringement taking place. Quite the contrary: marketplaces where creators exchange their works for money is the kind of thing you'd expect copyright law to encourage, rather than prohibit.
Nearly all of the respondents to the Canadian copyright consultation said that they didn't want to repeat America's 12-year-old mistake. Yes, they said, let us have protection for digital locks, but only if you're breaking them in order to commit an act of actual copyright infringement. Protecting the locks themselves is bad policy.
I was one of those Canadians. As a Canadian author (my latest novel, For the Win, is presently on the Canadian bestseller lists), I believe that I should have the major say in the destiny of my copyrighted works.
If I want to authorise a reader to break a digital lock to move her copies of my books from a Kindle to a competing ebook reader, that should be my call. Certainly, the mere act of putting my works into a digital locker shouldn't give a company the right to usurp my copyright: copyright protects authorship, not assembling electronics in Pacific Rim sweatshops.
Only 46 of the 8,306 commenters thought otherwise. These 46 commenters advocated replicating America's failed experiment in Canada; everyone else thought the idea was daft. You'd think that with numbers like 46:8260, the government would go with the majority, right? Wrong.
When minister of industry Tony Clement, and minister of heritage James Moore, published the text of their long-awaited copyright bill, Canadians were floored to discover that the ministers had replicated the American approach to digital locks. Actually, they made it worse – the Americans conduct triennial hearings on proposed exemptions to the rule; Moore and Clement didn't bother with even this tiny safeguard.
The ministers have been incapable of explaining the discrepancy. When confronted on it, they inevitably point to the fact that their bill also establishes numerous "user rights" for everyday Canadians (for example, the right to record a TV show in order to watch it later), and suggest that this is the "balance" that Canadians asked for. When critics say, "Yes, you've created some user rights, but if a digital lock prevents their exercise, it's against the law to break the lock, right?" the ministers squirm and change the subject.
It's enough to leave you wondering whether the ministers understand their own bill. Indeed, Clement recently appeared on the public broadcaster TVOntario show Search Engine and promised that his law allows journalists to break a digital lock for the purposes of investigative reporting (according to lawyers, scholars and everyone else who's read the bill, he's wrong).
If they don't understand their bill, perhaps it's because they weren't really in charge of what went into it. According to the former head of staff for minister of foreign affairs Maxime Bernier: "The prime minister's office's position was, move quickly, satisfy the US; we don't care what you do, as long as the US is satisfied."
It's clear the US government has made a top priority out of ensuring other countries cut their throats just as stupidly as America did with the DMCA's digital locks rules. Last week, the Obama administration's newly minted IP enforcement czar, Victoria Espinel, reiterated America's priority to use its trade muscle to force countries into adopting US-style copyright rules.
American industry is pleased by this. A shadowy new Canadian "citizens' group", Balanced Copyright For Canada, looks to be the work of the big-four labels, with a membership composed of employees and executives of the labels' Canadian subsidiaries (the membership lists were taken offline hastily after this was publicised).
Moore seems to be cracking under the strain of supporting the unsupportable. He has publicly denounced opponents of his bill as "radical extremists" (these "extremists" include the Canadian Bookseller Association, the Retail Council of Canada, the Canadian Library Association, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and MPs from all the other parties). He then denied having made the remarks, blocked voters from following him on Twitter when they asked him about it, and has remained silent on the subject since videos of him making the remarks surfaced.
So, Britain, rejoice. It's not just our government that can be bullied into voting against the public interest by big content's power-brokers – Canada's just as weak and pitiful."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/29/canada-copyright-digital-economy
"A few months ago, Britain's archivists, educators, independent artists and technologists were up in arms over the digital economy bill, a dreadful piece of legislation that ignored all the independent experts' views on how to improve Britain's digital economy; instead, it further rewarded the slow-moving entertainment companies that refused to adapt to the changing marketplace and diverted even more public enforcement resources to shoring up their business-models.
The bill was passed despite enormous public outcry, without real parliamentary debate, in a largely empty house, hours before parliament dissolved for the election. Despite reassuring promises to their constituents, huge numbers of MPs just didn't bother to show up for work that day, allowing the bill to slip through (my own MP, Meg Hillier, sent me a letter to tell me that she was "concerned" that the bill was up for a vote without debate, but she voted for it anyway).
Well, here's some good news for Britons: you're not the only country whose laws are for sale to oligarchs from the entertainment industry. In my native Canada, a farce worthy of the worst moments of the Digital Economy Act is playing out even as I type these words.
Some background: there have been two recent attempts to reform Canadian copyright law. Both failed, due in large part to an unwillingness on the part of lawmakers to conduct public review or consultation on their proposals (though they were happy to have closed-door meetings with lobbyists representing offshore entertainment giants). The minority Tory government is now fielding a third attempt, called Bill C32 (Canadian bills have much less interesting names than their UK counterparts; here, we'd probably call it The Enhancement of Digital Life Through Extreme Punishments for Naughty Pirates Bill of 2010).
C32 follows the widest-ever public consultation on Canadian copyright. More than 8,300 Canadians filed comments in the consultation, and they spoke with near unanimity: "We don't want a US-style copyright regime."
The US's copyright law was last reformed in 1998, with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which provided for near-total protection for "digital locks" (also called "DRM," "TPM," "copy prevention," "copy protection" – this explosion of names being the legacy of two decades' worth of attempts to rebrand an unpopular idea in the hopes of making it stick). In the US version of the law, breaking a digital lock is itself a crime – even if you're breaking it for a perfectly legitimate reason.
For example, Apple uses digital locks to make sure that the only programs you can run on your iPad and iPhone come from its own App Store. The App Store has lots of conditions on it that are ripe for competitive challenge – it scoops a hefty 30% commission from software creators, and imposes prudish conditions on the presentation of "adult" content (previously, Apple has rejected an ebook reader because it could be used to call up the Kama Sutra, a dictionary because it contained "naughty" words, the Pulitzer-winning political cartoons of Mark Fiore because they "ridiculed public figures" and a comic book adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses because you could see the characters' willies – in each case, they reversed themselves after public outcry).
But breaking the digital locks on your iPad so that you can buy apps from someone other than Apple is against the law – even though there is no copyright infringement taking place. Quite the contrary: marketplaces where creators exchange their works for money is the kind of thing you'd expect copyright law to encourage, rather than prohibit.
Nearly all of the respondents to the Canadian copyright consultation said that they didn't want to repeat America's 12-year-old mistake. Yes, they said, let us have protection for digital locks, but only if you're breaking them in order to commit an act of actual copyright infringement. Protecting the locks themselves is bad policy.
I was one of those Canadians. As a Canadian author (my latest novel, For the Win, is presently on the Canadian bestseller lists), I believe that I should have the major say in the destiny of my copyrighted works.
If I want to authorise a reader to break a digital lock to move her copies of my books from a Kindle to a competing ebook reader, that should be my call. Certainly, the mere act of putting my works into a digital locker shouldn't give a company the right to usurp my copyright: copyright protects authorship, not assembling electronics in Pacific Rim sweatshops.
Only 46 of the 8,306 commenters thought otherwise. These 46 commenters advocated replicating America's failed experiment in Canada; everyone else thought the idea was daft. You'd think that with numbers like 46:8260, the government would go with the majority, right? Wrong.
When minister of industry Tony Clement, and minister of heritage James Moore, published the text of their long-awaited copyright bill, Canadians were floored to discover that the ministers had replicated the American approach to digital locks. Actually, they made it worse – the Americans conduct triennial hearings on proposed exemptions to the rule; Moore and Clement didn't bother with even this tiny safeguard.
The ministers have been incapable of explaining the discrepancy. When confronted on it, they inevitably point to the fact that their bill also establishes numerous "user rights" for everyday Canadians (for example, the right to record a TV show in order to watch it later), and suggest that this is the "balance" that Canadians asked for. When critics say, "Yes, you've created some user rights, but if a digital lock prevents their exercise, it's against the law to break the lock, right?" the ministers squirm and change the subject.
It's enough to leave you wondering whether the ministers understand their own bill. Indeed, Clement recently appeared on the public broadcaster TVOntario show Search Engine and promised that his law allows journalists to break a digital lock for the purposes of investigative reporting (according to lawyers, scholars and everyone else who's read the bill, he's wrong).
If they don't understand their bill, perhaps it's because they weren't really in charge of what went into it. According to the former head of staff for minister of foreign affairs Maxime Bernier: "The prime minister's office's position was, move quickly, satisfy the US; we don't care what you do, as long as the US is satisfied."
It's clear the US government has made a top priority out of ensuring other countries cut their throats just as stupidly as America did with the DMCA's digital locks rules. Last week, the Obama administration's newly minted IP enforcement czar, Victoria Espinel, reiterated America's priority to use its trade muscle to force countries into adopting US-style copyright rules.
American industry is pleased by this. A shadowy new Canadian "citizens' group", Balanced Copyright For Canada, looks to be the work of the big-four labels, with a membership composed of employees and executives of the labels' Canadian subsidiaries (the membership lists were taken offline hastily after this was publicised).
Moore seems to be cracking under the strain of supporting the unsupportable. He has publicly denounced opponents of his bill as "radical extremists" (these "extremists" include the Canadian Bookseller Association, the Retail Council of Canada, the Canadian Library Association, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and MPs from all the other parties). He then denied having made the remarks, blocked voters from following him on Twitter when they asked him about it, and has remained silent on the subject since videos of him making the remarks surfaced.
So, Britain, rejoice. It's not just our government that can be bullied into voting against the public interest by big content's power-brokers – Canada's just as weak and pitiful."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/29/canada-copyright-digital-economy
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