David Pogue, New York Times; No Easy Answers in the Copyright Debate:
"You'd think it'd be pretty easy to live within the copyright laws, or at least to understand them: If you want something of value, you pay for it.
Different people have drastically different ideas about pirated sheet-music.
But two things happened this week that are enough to rattle anyone who thinks it's that simple.
First, I was alerted to a blog post by Jason Robert Brown. He's a songwriter and the composer of Broadway musicals like "13," "The Last Five Years" and "Parade." (I knew him when he was just starting out and I was still working on Broadway.) He became alarmed at how many pieces of sheet music to his songs were available for free, illegal download online. And after tolerating it for years, he finally tried an experiment.
He contacted each person on the download board like this: "Hey there! Can I get you to stop trading my stuff? It's totally not cool with me. Write me if you have any questions; I'm happy to talk to you about this."
You can read the full story here. But in short, one articulate young lady decided to push back, explaining her rationale for downloading his songs. What follows is a lengthy, sometimes testy back-and-forth-and an even lengthier, more passionate torrent of discussion in the comments for his post.
In the end, I side with Mr. Brown. One of his songs costs $4 in sheet-music form; that doesn't seem unreasonable. His teenaged challenger's argument is that her parents don't support her singing career -- but I don't see why it's Mr. Brown's obligation to sacrifice on her behalf.
I was pretty sure of myself -- until I heard from my friend Michael Hawley, formerly of the M.I.T. Media Lab, now a digital-media researcher, award-winning pianist and polymath. After reading Mr. Brown's account, he wrote to explain why he thinks sheet-music pirating is O.K., or even necessary.
Here's what he says:
=====
I play the piano. Over the years, I have collected 15,000 piano scores in PDF form, covering about 400 years of classical keyboard works.
It's like lint in the drier of the Internet. Much of it is not available anywhere for purchase, or even findable in libraries for circulation. Max Reger's arrangement for two pianos of Wagner's overture, for instance? Well, the Max Reger Institute in Karlsruhe, Germany has a copy...
The last classical sheet music store in New York, Patelson's, went out of business recently. The recession finished them off. It was THE place to go to buy piano music. When I was in high school, I used to go there for hard-to-find scores by Granados or Medtner, and then hit the Carnegie Deli for some pastrami. Amazing, isn't it? New York City doesn't have an independent store that sells classical music scores.
Fortunately, over the last ten or fifteen years, amateur pianists have been scanning the contents of their grandmother's piano benches, and... voilà. A million monkeys typing don't get you Shakespeare, but a million monkeys scanning -- that makes a dent. I began collecting this stuff as a hobby. One day, I looked at my pile of music score bits. In those days, 15 gigabytes was most of my hard drive. But it was all there. All of Bach. All of Scriabin. All of Rachmaninoff.
At the Van Cliburn piano competition, a couple years ago, I gave tiny thumb drives to some of the winners and said, "Enjoy." Each thumb drive was smaller than my pinky but contained was the whole 15 GB trove. It blew their minds. Basically, every significant piano piece is in the pile.
What happened is, the classical piano sheet music publishing world plotzed a long time ago. But thanks to the monkeys, a lot of DNA has been preserved and is more available now than ever before. The monkeys aren't as well organized as the Wikipedia minions, but someday they will be.
When the publishers, composers, music stores have long since gone out of business, when the libraries don't have the stuff, the internet quickly becomes the Sargasso sea for catching this stuff. Not saying that your songwriter friend's points aren't completely valid -- of course they are. As slippery as digital rights are, the fact is that digital publishing probably gives people more ways to make more money and reach far wider audiences than the paper-based music publishing racket ever did.
But copyright, like the people who originate the material and the industries that promulgate it, has a lifespan. I think the classical piano sheet music world gives a glimpse of the end state -- out of the ashes of the music business, comes the rebirth of the musician business (as John Perry Barlow once said). It also, more importantly, shows what happens when a society does a poor, random job of preserving their cultural heritage to nurture future generations.
Generally, I side with the teenagers.
====
I still think that if something is available for sale legitimately, you should pay for it (books, music, photos, movies, sheet music). A lot of the Bach, Scriabin and Rachmaninoff in Mr. Hawley's collection is certainly available, and handing it to friends on a flash drive is absolutely depriving the publishers of their revenue. True, the composers are long dead, but editing and publishing sheet music is still worth something.
It's those obscure, out-of-print, not-available-anywhere items in his collection that make a tougher case. How many hours are you obligated to research and dig just to find out if something is available for sale? In this case, the barriers to a legitimate purchase are ridiculously high. Isn't digital piracy justified in that case?
Let me know what you think in the Comments at nytimes.com/pogue."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/technology/personaltech/08pogue-web.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
Friday, July 9, 2010
Stanford Ushers In The Age Of Bookless Libraries; NPR, 7/8/10
Laura Sydell, NPR; Stanford Ushers In The Age Of Bookless Libraries:
"The periodical shelves at Stanford University’s Engineering Library are nearly bare. Library chief Helen Josephine says that in the past five years, most engineering periodicals have been moved online, making their print versions pretty obsolete — and books aren't doing much better.
According to Josephine, students can now browse those periodicals from their laptops or mobile devices.
For years, students have had to search through volume after volume of books before finding the right formula — but no more. Josephine says that "with books being digitized and available through full text search capabilities, they can find that formula quite easily."
In 2005, when the university realized it was running out space for its growing collection of 80,000 engineering books, administrators decided to build a new library. But instead of creating more space for books, they chose to create less.
The new library is set to open in August with 10,000 engineering books on the shelves — a decrease of more than 85 percent from the old library. Stanford library director Michael Keller says the librarians determined which books to keep on the shelf by looking at how frequently a book was checked out. They found that the vast majority of the collection hadn't been taken off the shelf in five years.
Keller expects that, eventually, there won't be any books on the shelves at all.
"As the world turns more and more, the items that appeared in physical form in previous decades and centuries are appearing in digital form," he says.
Given the nature of engineering, that actually comes in handy. Engineering uses some basic formulas but is generally a rapidly changing field — particularly in specialties such as software and bioengineering. Traditional textbooks have rarely been able to keep up.
Jim Plummer, dean of Stanford's School of Engineering, says that's why his faculty is increasingly using e-books.
"It allows our faculty to change examples," he says," to put in new homework problems ... and lectures and things like that in almost a real-time way."
A New Trend In Libraries?
For the moment, the Engineering Library is the only Stanford library that's cutting back on books. But Keller says he can see what's coming down the road by simply looking at the current crop of Stanford students.
"They write their papers online, and they read articles online, and many, many, many of them read chapters and books online," he says. "I can see in this population of students behaviors that clearly indicate where this is all going."
And while it's still rare among American libraries to get rid of such a large amount of books, it's clear that many are starting to lay the groundwork for a different future. According to a survey by the Association of Research Libraries, American libraries are spending more of their money on electronic resources and less on books.
Cornell University's Engineering Library recently announced an initiative similar to Stanford's — but the move to electronic books is also meeting some resistance. An effort by Arizona State University to use Amazon's Kindle to distribute electronic textbooks was met with a lawsuit because the device wasn't fully accessible to the visually impaired.
Meanwhile, back at Stanford's new Engineering Library, librarians are looking forward to spending less time with books and more time with people.
"That's what we're so [excited about]," Josephine says, "the idea of actually offering more services, offering more workshops, offering more one-on-one time with students."
But some Stanford students express mixed feelings about the shift. Engineering student Sam Tsai is checking out some old-fashioned paper books.
"To read a book on the screen is kind of tiring for me," Tsai says, "so I sometimes like [the] paper form. But if I can access books online, it's much more convenient for me, so I would actually prefer that as well."
For now, at least, Tsai can have the option of both."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128361395&ps=cprs
"The periodical shelves at Stanford University’s Engineering Library are nearly bare. Library chief Helen Josephine says that in the past five years, most engineering periodicals have been moved online, making their print versions pretty obsolete — and books aren't doing much better.
According to Josephine, students can now browse those periodicals from their laptops or mobile devices.
For years, students have had to search through volume after volume of books before finding the right formula — but no more. Josephine says that "with books being digitized and available through full text search capabilities, they can find that formula quite easily."
In 2005, when the university realized it was running out space for its growing collection of 80,000 engineering books, administrators decided to build a new library. But instead of creating more space for books, they chose to create less.
The new library is set to open in August with 10,000 engineering books on the shelves — a decrease of more than 85 percent from the old library. Stanford library director Michael Keller says the librarians determined which books to keep on the shelf by looking at how frequently a book was checked out. They found that the vast majority of the collection hadn't been taken off the shelf in five years.
Keller expects that, eventually, there won't be any books on the shelves at all.
"As the world turns more and more, the items that appeared in physical form in previous decades and centuries are appearing in digital form," he says.
Given the nature of engineering, that actually comes in handy. Engineering uses some basic formulas but is generally a rapidly changing field — particularly in specialties such as software and bioengineering. Traditional textbooks have rarely been able to keep up.
Jim Plummer, dean of Stanford's School of Engineering, says that's why his faculty is increasingly using e-books.
"It allows our faculty to change examples," he says," to put in new homework problems ... and lectures and things like that in almost a real-time way."
A New Trend In Libraries?
For the moment, the Engineering Library is the only Stanford library that's cutting back on books. But Keller says he can see what's coming down the road by simply looking at the current crop of Stanford students.
"They write their papers online, and they read articles online, and many, many, many of them read chapters and books online," he says. "I can see in this population of students behaviors that clearly indicate where this is all going."
And while it's still rare among American libraries to get rid of such a large amount of books, it's clear that many are starting to lay the groundwork for a different future. According to a survey by the Association of Research Libraries, American libraries are spending more of their money on electronic resources and less on books.
Cornell University's Engineering Library recently announced an initiative similar to Stanford's — but the move to electronic books is also meeting some resistance. An effort by Arizona State University to use Amazon's Kindle to distribute electronic textbooks was met with a lawsuit because the device wasn't fully accessible to the visually impaired.
Meanwhile, back at Stanford's new Engineering Library, librarians are looking forward to spending less time with books and more time with people.
"That's what we're so [excited about]," Josephine says, "the idea of actually offering more services, offering more workshops, offering more one-on-one time with students."
But some Stanford students express mixed feelings about the shift. Engineering student Sam Tsai is checking out some old-fashioned paper books.
"To read a book on the screen is kind of tiring for me," Tsai says, "so I sometimes like [the] paper form. But if I can access books online, it's much more convenient for me, so I would actually prefer that as well."
For now, at least, Tsai can have the option of both."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128361395&ps=cprs
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery; New York Times, 7/6/10
Trip Gabriel, New York Times; To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery:
"Anti-plagiarism services requiring students to submit papers to be vetted for copying is a booming business. Fifty-five percent of colleges and universities now use such a service, according to the Campus Computing Survey.
The best-known service, Turnitin.com, is engaged in an endless cat-and-mouse game with technologically savvy students who try to outsmart it. “The Turnitin algorithms are updated on an on-going basis,” the company warned last month in a blog post titled “Can Students ‘Trick’ Turnitin?”
The extent of student cheating, difficult to measure precisely, appears widespread at colleges. In surveys of 14,000 undergraduates over the last four years, an average of 61 percent admitted to cheating on assignments and exams.
The figure declined somewhat from 65 percent earlier in the decade, but the researcher who conducted the surveys, Donald L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers, doubts there is less of it. Instead, he suspects students no longer regard certain acts as cheating at all, for instance, cutting and pasting a few sentences at a time from the Internet.
Andrew Daines, who graduated in May from Cornell, where he served on a board in the College of Arts and Sciences that hears cheating cases, said Internet plagiarism was so common that professors told him they had replaced written assignments with tests and in-class writing.
Mr. Daines, a philosophy major, contributed to pages that Cornell added last month to its student Web site to bring attention to academic integrity. They include a link to a voluntary tutorial on avoiding plagiarism and a strongly worded admonition that “other generations may not have had as many temptations to cheat or plagiarize as yours,” and urging students to view this as a character test.
Mr. Daines said he was especially disturbed by an epidemic of students’ copying homework. “The term ‘collaborative work’ has been taken to this unbelievable extreme where it means, because of the ease of e-mailing, one person looking at someone else who’s done the assignment,” he said.
At M.I.T., David E. Pritchard, a physics professor, was able to accurately measure homework copying with software he had developed for another purpose — to allow students to complete sets of physics problems online. Some answered the questions so fast, “at first I thought we had some geniuses here at M.I.T.,” Dr. Pritchard said. Then he realized they were completing problems in less time than it took to read them and were copying the answers — mostly, it turned out, from e-mail from friends who had already done the assignment.
About 20 percent copied one-third or more of their homework, according to a study Dr. Pritchard and colleagues published this year. Students who copy homework find answers at sites like Course Hero, which is a kind of Napster of homework sharing, where students from more than 3,500 institutions upload papers, class notes and past exams.
Another site, Cramster, specializes in solutions to textbook questions in science and engineering. It boasts answers from 77 physics textbooks — but not Dr. Pritchard’s popular “Mastering Physics,” an online tutorial, because his publisher, Pearson, searches the Web for solutions and requests they be taken down to protect its copyright.
“You can use technology as well for detecting as for committing” cheating, Dr. Pritchard said.
The most popular anti-cheating technology, Turnitin.com, says it is now used by 9,500 high schools and colleges. Students submit written assignments to be compared with billions of archived Web pages and millions of other student papers, before they are sent to instructors. The company says that schools using the service for several years experience a decline in plagiarism.
Cheaters trying to outfox Turnitin have tried many tricks, some described in blogs and videos. One is to replace every “e” in plagiarized text with a foreign letter that looks like it, such as a Cyrillic “e,” meant to fool Turnitin’s scanners. Another is to use the Macros tool in Microsoft Word to hide copied text. Turnitin says neither scheme works.
Some educators have rejected the service and other anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.
Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”
For similar reasons, some students at the University of Central Florida objected to the business school’s testing center with its eye-in-the-sky video in its early days, Dr. Ellis said.
But recently during final exams after a summer semester, almost no students voiced such concerns. Rose Calixte, a senior, was told during an exam to turn her cap backward, a rule meant to prevent students from writing notes under the brim. Ms. Calixte disapproved of the fashion statement but didn’t knock the reason: “This is college. There is the possibility for people to cheat.”
A first-year M.B.A. student, Ashley Haumann, said that when she was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, “everyone cheated” in her accounting class of 300 by comparing answers during quizzes. She preferred the highly monitored testing center because it “encourages you to be ready for the test because you can’t turn and ask, ‘What’d you get?’ ”
For educators uncomfortable in the role of anti-cheating enforcer, an online tutorial in plagiarism may prove an elegantly simple technological fix.
That was the finding of a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January. Students at an unnamed selective college who completed a Web tutorial were shown to plagiarize two-thirds less than students who did not. (The study also found that plagiarism was concentrated among students with lower SAT scores.)
The tutorial “had an outsize impact,” said Thomas S. Dee, a co-author, who is now an economist at the University of Virginia.
“Many instructors don’t want to create this kind of adversarial environment with their students where there is a presumption of guilt,” Dr. Dee said. “Our results suggest a tutorial worked by educating students rather than by frightening them.”
Only a handful of colleges currently require students to complete such a tutorial, which typically illustrates how to cite a source or even someone else’s ideas, followed by a quiz.
The tutorial that Bowdoin uses was developed with its neighbor colleges Bates and Colby several years ago. Part of the reason it is required for enrollment, said Suzanne B. Lovett, a Bowdoin psychology professor whose specialty is cognitive development, is that Internet-age students see so many examples of text, music and images copied online without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism.
As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/education/06cheat.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=turnitin&st=cse&scp=1
"Anti-plagiarism services requiring students to submit papers to be vetted for copying is a booming business. Fifty-five percent of colleges and universities now use such a service, according to the Campus Computing Survey.
The best-known service, Turnitin.com, is engaged in an endless cat-and-mouse game with technologically savvy students who try to outsmart it. “The Turnitin algorithms are updated on an on-going basis,” the company warned last month in a blog post titled “Can Students ‘Trick’ Turnitin?”
The extent of student cheating, difficult to measure precisely, appears widespread at colleges. In surveys of 14,000 undergraduates over the last four years, an average of 61 percent admitted to cheating on assignments and exams.
The figure declined somewhat from 65 percent earlier in the decade, but the researcher who conducted the surveys, Donald L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers, doubts there is less of it. Instead, he suspects students no longer regard certain acts as cheating at all, for instance, cutting and pasting a few sentences at a time from the Internet.
Andrew Daines, who graduated in May from Cornell, where he served on a board in the College of Arts and Sciences that hears cheating cases, said Internet plagiarism was so common that professors told him they had replaced written assignments with tests and in-class writing.
Mr. Daines, a philosophy major, contributed to pages that Cornell added last month to its student Web site to bring attention to academic integrity. They include a link to a voluntary tutorial on avoiding plagiarism and a strongly worded admonition that “other generations may not have had as many temptations to cheat or plagiarize as yours,” and urging students to view this as a character test.
Mr. Daines said he was especially disturbed by an epidemic of students’ copying homework. “The term ‘collaborative work’ has been taken to this unbelievable extreme where it means, because of the ease of e-mailing, one person looking at someone else who’s done the assignment,” he said.
At M.I.T., David E. Pritchard, a physics professor, was able to accurately measure homework copying with software he had developed for another purpose — to allow students to complete sets of physics problems online. Some answered the questions so fast, “at first I thought we had some geniuses here at M.I.T.,” Dr. Pritchard said. Then he realized they were completing problems in less time than it took to read them and were copying the answers — mostly, it turned out, from e-mail from friends who had already done the assignment.
About 20 percent copied one-third or more of their homework, according to a study Dr. Pritchard and colleagues published this year. Students who copy homework find answers at sites like Course Hero, which is a kind of Napster of homework sharing, where students from more than 3,500 institutions upload papers, class notes and past exams.
Another site, Cramster, specializes in solutions to textbook questions in science and engineering. It boasts answers from 77 physics textbooks — but not Dr. Pritchard’s popular “Mastering Physics,” an online tutorial, because his publisher, Pearson, searches the Web for solutions and requests they be taken down to protect its copyright.
“You can use technology as well for detecting as for committing” cheating, Dr. Pritchard said.
The most popular anti-cheating technology, Turnitin.com, says it is now used by 9,500 high schools and colleges. Students submit written assignments to be compared with billions of archived Web pages and millions of other student papers, before they are sent to instructors. The company says that schools using the service for several years experience a decline in plagiarism.
Cheaters trying to outfox Turnitin have tried many tricks, some described in blogs and videos. One is to replace every “e” in plagiarized text with a foreign letter that looks like it, such as a Cyrillic “e,” meant to fool Turnitin’s scanners. Another is to use the Macros tool in Microsoft Word to hide copied text. Turnitin says neither scheme works.
Some educators have rejected the service and other anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.
Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”
For similar reasons, some students at the University of Central Florida objected to the business school’s testing center with its eye-in-the-sky video in its early days, Dr. Ellis said.
But recently during final exams after a summer semester, almost no students voiced such concerns. Rose Calixte, a senior, was told during an exam to turn her cap backward, a rule meant to prevent students from writing notes under the brim. Ms. Calixte disapproved of the fashion statement but didn’t knock the reason: “This is college. There is the possibility for people to cheat.”
A first-year M.B.A. student, Ashley Haumann, said that when she was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, “everyone cheated” in her accounting class of 300 by comparing answers during quizzes. She preferred the highly monitored testing center because it “encourages you to be ready for the test because you can’t turn and ask, ‘What’d you get?’ ”
For educators uncomfortable in the role of anti-cheating enforcer, an online tutorial in plagiarism may prove an elegantly simple technological fix.
That was the finding of a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January. Students at an unnamed selective college who completed a Web tutorial were shown to plagiarize two-thirds less than students who did not. (The study also found that plagiarism was concentrated among students with lower SAT scores.)
The tutorial “had an outsize impact,” said Thomas S. Dee, a co-author, who is now an economist at the University of Virginia.
“Many instructors don’t want to create this kind of adversarial environment with their students where there is a presumption of guilt,” Dr. Dee said. “Our results suggest a tutorial worked by educating students rather than by frightening them.”
Only a handful of colleges currently require students to complete such a tutorial, which typically illustrates how to cite a source or even someone else’s ideas, followed by a quiz.
The tutorial that Bowdoin uses was developed with its neighbor colleges Bates and Colby several years ago. Part of the reason it is required for enrollment, said Suzanne B. Lovett, a Bowdoin psychology professor whose specialty is cognitive development, is that Internet-age students see so many examples of text, music and images copied online without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism.
As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/education/06cheat.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=turnitin&st=cse&scp=1
Men at Work flautist has heard the thunder; Sydney Morning Herald, 7/7/10
Patrick Donovan, Sydney Morning Herald; Men at Work flautist has heard the thunder:
"THE man at the centre of Men at Work's copyright dispute is shattered that the famous song and his reputation have been tarnished.
''It has destroyed so much of my song,'' flute player Greg Ham said.
His refrain in Down Under was found to have reproduced a ''substantial part'' of the Guides' campfire anthem Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.
''It will be the way the song is remembered and I hate that,'' he said. ''I'm terribly disappointed that that's the way I'm going to be remembered - for copying something.''
Justice Peter Jacobsen yesterday ordered the song's composers, Colin Hay and Ron Strykert, and its publisher EMI to pay publisher Larrikin Music 5 per cent of Down Under's future profits, as well as royalties dating back to 2002.
Larrikin Music holds the copyright for the original Kookaburra melody, which was written more than 75 years ago by Toorak teacher Marion Sinclair.
The ruling is for substantially less than the 50 per cent royalty cut sought by Larrikin.
Mr Ham, who receives a small percentage of the song's royalties, said the decision ''could have been worse''.
''If it had been backdated to the '80s that would have been wrist slashing stuff,'' he said.
''I'll never see another cent out of that song again. We'll face massive legal costs.
''At the end of the day, I'll end up selling my house.''
He said he was still ''flabbergasted'' by the ruling of plagiarism.
''No one detected it - I didn't detect it and I played the f---ing thing.''
''I was looking for something that sounded Australiana - that's what came out - it was never Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.
''Music's always been about referring to what's already in our culture.''
He attacked the case as a ''massive waste of money and energy'' and said publishers would now be less likely to take on young songwriters.
''This whole copyright issue needs to be dealt with.
''Musicians are unaware of their rights, and they need to be able to cover themselves.''"
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/men-at-work-flautist-has-heard-the-thunder-20100706-zyzu.html
"THE man at the centre of Men at Work's copyright dispute is shattered that the famous song and his reputation have been tarnished.
''It has destroyed so much of my song,'' flute player Greg Ham said.
His refrain in Down Under was found to have reproduced a ''substantial part'' of the Guides' campfire anthem Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.
''It will be the way the song is remembered and I hate that,'' he said. ''I'm terribly disappointed that that's the way I'm going to be remembered - for copying something.''
Justice Peter Jacobsen yesterday ordered the song's composers, Colin Hay and Ron Strykert, and its publisher EMI to pay publisher Larrikin Music 5 per cent of Down Under's future profits, as well as royalties dating back to 2002.
Larrikin Music holds the copyright for the original Kookaburra melody, which was written more than 75 years ago by Toorak teacher Marion Sinclair.
The ruling is for substantially less than the 50 per cent royalty cut sought by Larrikin.
Mr Ham, who receives a small percentage of the song's royalties, said the decision ''could have been worse''.
''If it had been backdated to the '80s that would have been wrist slashing stuff,'' he said.
''I'll never see another cent out of that song again. We'll face massive legal costs.
''At the end of the day, I'll end up selling my house.''
He said he was still ''flabbergasted'' by the ruling of plagiarism.
''No one detected it - I didn't detect it and I played the f---ing thing.''
''I was looking for something that sounded Australiana - that's what came out - it was never Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.
''Music's always been about referring to what's already in our culture.''
He attacked the case as a ''massive waste of money and energy'' and said publishers would now be less likely to take on young songwriters.
''This whole copyright issue needs to be dealt with.
''Musicians are unaware of their rights, and they need to be able to cover themselves.''"
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/men-at-work-flautist-has-heard-the-thunder-20100706-zyzu.html
Senate Candidate Angle Accuses Senator Reid Of Copyright Infringement For Displaying Angle's Website; TechDirt.com, 7/6/10
Mike Masnick, TechDirt.com; Senate Candidate Angle Accuses Senator Reid Of Copyright Infringement For Displaying Angle's Website:
"The internet never forgets, but apparently, someone involved in the Senate election campaign for Sharron Angle was unaware of this fact. It appears that Angle and her staff are also quite unaware of The Streisand Effect. As you may or may not know, Angle is running for US Senator in Nevada, where she's challenging current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Reid, apparently, has been using images from Angle's primary campaign website against her. Angle apparently totally revamped her website after winning the primary, apparently to tone down some of the rhetoric on the website. So, she's not very pleased that Reid is showing off her old website -- which his staff apparently reposted at a new domain.
So, what does she do? She sends a cease-and-desist to Reid for publishing her own website claiming that it infringed on her copyright. No, seriously. You can read the cease & desist here and laugh along with it. Her lawyers claim that Reid only did this to capture email addresses under false pretenses, but it seems pretty clear that Reid's campaign just wanted to highlight some of Angle's more incendiary comments from the primary campaign, which she's now trying to back away from.
And, of course, because of all of this, Angle and her lawyers handed the Reid campaign a perfect peg to highlight exactly those statements."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100706/03574110080.shtml
"The internet never forgets, but apparently, someone involved in the Senate election campaign for Sharron Angle was unaware of this fact. It appears that Angle and her staff are also quite unaware of The Streisand Effect. As you may or may not know, Angle is running for US Senator in Nevada, where she's challenging current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Reid, apparently, has been using images from Angle's primary campaign website against her. Angle apparently totally revamped her website after winning the primary, apparently to tone down some of the rhetoric on the website. So, she's not very pleased that Reid is showing off her old website -- which his staff apparently reposted at a new domain.
So, what does she do? She sends a cease-and-desist to Reid for publishing her own website claiming that it infringed on her copyright. No, seriously. You can read the cease & desist here and laugh along with it. Her lawyers claim that Reid only did this to capture email addresses under false pretenses, but it seems pretty clear that Reid's campaign just wanted to highlight some of Angle's more incendiary comments from the primary campaign, which she's now trying to back away from.
And, of course, because of all of this, Angle and her lawyers handed the Reid campaign a perfect peg to highlight exactly those statements."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100706/03574110080.shtml
Reid Republishes Angle's Old Website, Defying Cease And Desist Order; HuffingtonPost.com, 7/6/10
Sam Stein, HuffingtonPost.com; Reid Republishes Angle's Old Website, Defying Cease And Desist Order:
"Less than 24 hours after removing a version of Sharron Angle's original unvarnished campaign website, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is defying a cease and desist order from his Tea Party opponent and republishing the site.
The Nevada Democrat's re-election campaign unveiled (for the second time) its website The Real Sharron Angle on Tuesday afternoon. The site is basically the same platform Angle used when running in the Nevada Republican primary, though Reid's staff tinkered with its presentation to ensure it could withstand a legal challenge from the Angle campaign.
The move is a show of defiance from the Majority Leader. Hours after launching her new website -- in which many of her more provocative positions have been scrubbed -- Angle filed a legal objection to Reid's publishing of her old campaign website material, claiming misuse of copyrighted materials. The Tea Party favorite was able to win temporary relief, with Reid agreeing to pull down the old site over the July 4th weekend. But the Senate Majority Leader's legal team clearly feels there is no standing for Angle's objections. At the very least, the advantages of highlighting Angle's now- former positions and statements outweighs the potential cost in legal fees from the back-and-forth sparring over copyright law.
"While we disagree with the assertions in Angle's "Cease and Desist" letter, we took the website down temporarily to make crystal clear the intent is solely to point out how far Sharron Angle is running from her own embarrassing record," read a statement from Brandon Hall, Reid's campaign manager. "We are not attempting to deceive anyone. Unfortunately, that point was lost on Angle's campaign, as evidenced by the threat of legal action to get her own website taken down. We made minor changes to address her frivolous concerns and now hope the new Sharron Angle will focus on explaining why the old Sharron Angle's views are so unacceptable."
Reid has made changes in his presentation of Angle's old website. The new version does not contain the sections soliciting donations and email addresses, in an effort to disabuse the claim that he is trying to steal the names of her supporters."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/06/reid-republishes-angles-o_n_637018.html
"Less than 24 hours after removing a version of Sharron Angle's original unvarnished campaign website, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is defying a cease and desist order from his Tea Party opponent and republishing the site.
The Nevada Democrat's re-election campaign unveiled (for the second time) its website The Real Sharron Angle on Tuesday afternoon. The site is basically the same platform Angle used when running in the Nevada Republican primary, though Reid's staff tinkered with its presentation to ensure it could withstand a legal challenge from the Angle campaign.
The move is a show of defiance from the Majority Leader. Hours after launching her new website -- in which many of her more provocative positions have been scrubbed -- Angle filed a legal objection to Reid's publishing of her old campaign website material, claiming misuse of copyrighted materials. The Tea Party favorite was able to win temporary relief, with Reid agreeing to pull down the old site over the July 4th weekend. But the Senate Majority Leader's legal team clearly feels there is no standing for Angle's objections. At the very least, the advantages of highlighting Angle's now- former positions and statements outweighs the potential cost in legal fees from the back-and-forth sparring over copyright law.
"While we disagree with the assertions in Angle's "Cease and Desist" letter, we took the website down temporarily to make crystal clear the intent is solely to point out how far Sharron Angle is running from her own embarrassing record," read a statement from Brandon Hall, Reid's campaign manager. "We are not attempting to deceive anyone. Unfortunately, that point was lost on Angle's campaign, as evidenced by the threat of legal action to get her own website taken down. We made minor changes to address her frivolous concerns and now hope the new Sharron Angle will focus on explaining why the old Sharron Angle's views are so unacceptable."
Reid has made changes in his presentation of Angle's old website. The new version does not contain the sections soliciting donations and email addresses, in an effort to disabuse the claim that he is trying to steal the names of her supporters."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/06/reid-republishes-angles-o_n_637018.html
Monday, July 5, 2010
ACTA slouches on, will be final within 6 months; ArsTechnica.com, 7/2/10
Nate Anderson, ArsTechnica.com; ACTA slouches on, will be final within 6 months:
"The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement rolls on. Negotiators have just wrapped up another round of talks this week in Lucerne, Switzerland, and more than two years into the ACTA process, have actually started to meet with civil society groups to talk about the actual ACTA draft text. (Many governments have previously asked for comments on ACTA, but before releasing the full text.)
"On the first day of the negotiations, in the interest of transparency, the Swiss Government hosted meetings at which ACTA negotiators met with representatives of civil society who have expressed an interest in ACTA to exchange views," says the official announcement...
Stung by years of criticism over the lack of transparency and ACTA's clear emphasis on enforcement (without much interest in limits and exceptions), the negotiators stress that "ACTA is not intended to include new intellectual property rights or to enlarge or diminish existing intellectual property rights. ACTA will not interfere with a signatory’s ability to respect fundamental rights and liberties."
"ACTA will not oblige border authorities to search travelers' baggage or their personal electronic devices for infringing materials."
ACTA's negotiations next come to the US, in what is meant as one of the final rounds on the agreement. The goal is to wrap ACTA up in 2010."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/acta-slouches-on-will-be-final-within-6-months.ars
"The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement rolls on. Negotiators have just wrapped up another round of talks this week in Lucerne, Switzerland, and more than two years into the ACTA process, have actually started to meet with civil society groups to talk about the actual ACTA draft text. (Many governments have previously asked for comments on ACTA, but before releasing the full text.)
"On the first day of the negotiations, in the interest of transparency, the Swiss Government hosted meetings at which ACTA negotiators met with representatives of civil society who have expressed an interest in ACTA to exchange views," says the official announcement...
Stung by years of criticism over the lack of transparency and ACTA's clear emphasis on enforcement (without much interest in limits and exceptions), the negotiators stress that "ACTA is not intended to include new intellectual property rights or to enlarge or diminish existing intellectual property rights. ACTA will not interfere with a signatory’s ability to respect fundamental rights and liberties."
"ACTA will not oblige border authorities to search travelers' baggage or their personal electronic devices for infringing materials."
ACTA's negotiations next come to the US, in what is meant as one of the final rounds on the agreement. The goal is to wrap ACTA up in 2010."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/acta-slouches-on-will-be-final-within-6-months.ars
US media companies try to resurrect 'hot news' to protect content; (London) Guardian, 7/5/10
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
"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
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
Bad Times, Worse Times: Led Zeppelin Sued for Copyright Infringement; New York Times, 6/30/10
Dave Itzkoff, New York Times; Bad Times, Worse Times: Led Zeppelin Sued for Copyright Infringement:
"Led Zeppelin historians have chronicled the creation of that rock band’s early classic “Dazed and Confused” for so long it’s understandable if fans can no longer tell what’s true about its authorship. One thing is for certain: Jake Holmes, a folk singer who asserts he recorded a similar song, also called “Dazed and Confused,” in 1967, says that he is the song’s creator and has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Led Zeppelin and its guitarist, Jimmy Page, as well as the band’s record labels and Mr. Page’s publishing company.
According to court documents filed on Monday in United States District Court in California and reported by TMZ.com, lawyers for Mr. Holmes say his “Dazed and Confused” was first copyrighted in July 1967, and its copyright renewed in December 1995. The song was later covered by the Yardbirds, the blues-rock band in which Mr. Page performed before Led Zeppelin, and the Zeppelin song was recorded in 1968 and released on the band’s self-titled debut album in 1969. (The group broke up in 1980.)
Mr. Holmes’s suit says Mr. Page copied the song “without authorization or permission” and “knowingly and willfully” infringes on his copyrights. A management company listed for Mr. Page said it no longer represented him, and a press representative for Led Zeppelin at Atlantic Records did not immediately reply to a request for comment."
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/bad-times-worse-times-led-zeppelin-sued-for-copyright-infringement/?scp=3&sq=copyright&st=cse
"Led Zeppelin historians have chronicled the creation of that rock band’s early classic “Dazed and Confused” for so long it’s understandable if fans can no longer tell what’s true about its authorship. One thing is for certain: Jake Holmes, a folk singer who asserts he recorded a similar song, also called “Dazed and Confused,” in 1967, says that he is the song’s creator and has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Led Zeppelin and its guitarist, Jimmy Page, as well as the band’s record labels and Mr. Page’s publishing company.
According to court documents filed on Monday in United States District Court in California and reported by TMZ.com, lawyers for Mr. Holmes say his “Dazed and Confused” was first copyrighted in July 1967, and its copyright renewed in December 1995. The song was later covered by the Yardbirds, the blues-rock band in which Mr. Page performed before Led Zeppelin, and the Zeppelin song was recorded in 1968 and released on the band’s self-titled debut album in 1969. (The group broke up in 1980.)
Mr. Holmes’s suit says Mr. Page copied the song “without authorization or permission” and “knowingly and willfully” infringes on his copyrights. A management company listed for Mr. Page said it no longer represented him, and a press representative for Led Zeppelin at Atlantic Records did not immediately reply to a request for comment."
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/bad-times-worse-times-led-zeppelin-sued-for-copyright-infringement/?scp=3&sq=copyright&st=cse
Playboy Sues Drake for Copyright Infringement; New York Times, 6/29/10
Joseph Plambeck, New York Times; Playboy Sues Drake for Copyright Infringement:
"The rapper Drake’s breakthrough single, “Best I Ever Had,” which went from a mixtape to a popular EP, didn’t get to be the best all on its own, according to a copyright infringement suit filed by Playboy Enterprises.
In the suit, which Playboy filed in a California federal court on June 25, the company says that Drake, whose real name is Aubrey Graham, used material from the 1975 song “Fallin’ in Love,” by Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds. Playboy owns the rights to that song. Cash Money Records, Universal Music Group and Universal Music Group Distribution are also named as defendants in the suit. Representatives for Playboy Enterprises, Drake and Universal had no comment.
Drake’s single peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and brought him a pair of 2010 Grammy nominations. The EP called “So Far Gone” that includes the single has sold almost 500,000 copies. Drake’s first full album, ”Thank Me Later” (Aspire/Young Money/Cash Money), sold 447,000 copies in its first week earlier this month."
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/playboy-sues-drake-for-copyright-infringement/?scp=1&sq=copyright&st=cse
"The rapper Drake’s breakthrough single, “Best I Ever Had,” which went from a mixtape to a popular EP, didn’t get to be the best all on its own, according to a copyright infringement suit filed by Playboy Enterprises.
In the suit, which Playboy filed in a California federal court on June 25, the company says that Drake, whose real name is Aubrey Graham, used material from the 1975 song “Fallin’ in Love,” by Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds. Playboy owns the rights to that song. Cash Money Records, Universal Music Group and Universal Music Group Distribution are also named as defendants in the suit. Representatives for Playboy Enterprises, Drake and Universal had no comment.
Drake’s single peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and brought him a pair of 2010 Grammy nominations. The EP called “So Far Gone” that includes the single has sold almost 500,000 copies. Drake’s first full album, ”Thank Me Later” (Aspire/Young Money/Cash Money), sold 447,000 copies in its first week earlier this month."
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/playboy-sues-drake-for-copyright-infringement/?scp=1&sq=copyright&st=cse
ACTA Risks Long-Term Damage To Democratic Public Policymaking, NGOs Say; Intellectual Property Watch, 6/30/10
Kaitlin Mara and Monika Ermert; Intellectual Property Watch; ACTA Risks Long-Term Damage To Democratic Public Policymaking, NGOs Say:
"An international agreement on intellectual property rights enforcement now under negotiation in Lucerne, Switzerland runs the risk of ushering in a new and undemocratic precedent for international policymaking that could have long-term damaging effects on critical public policy issues, non-negotiating government representatives and civil society advocates said this week.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, they said, could have a chilling effect on access to medications, including the potential to criminalise makers of active pharmaceutical ingredients who are critical to the generics industry, and could cause serious problems for internet freedom.
The 28 June event in Geneva was cosponsored by Knowledge Ecology International and IQsensato.
More worrying, they added, is that while currently an initiative of a few countries, its ultimate aim seems to be to become universal. The negotiating process seems to follow on the heels of the trend of countries shopping for easy fora through which to push the same increasing intellectual property enforcement agenda. Denied enforcement actions in places such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Customs Organization and elsewhere, these countries are now creating their own forum under ACTA.
This platform can then be used to foist burdensome enforcement strategies on the rest of the world through bilateral and regional agreements. If such a strategy is allowed to succeed, they argue, it could have follow-on effects far outside the intellectual property sphere.
While it is probably too late to stop, the ACTA could be saved if its real targets act, said Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa and a staunch critic of the ACTA process to date.
At the “end of the day, ACTA is about Brazil, India” and other emerging economies, Geist said. If those countries “who are the targets [and] who have for too long sat on the sidelines and said they weren’t part of the process … are willing to stand up and be more aggressive,” then ACTA could be turned into something that would not risk upsetting a balanced IP regime.
ACTA’s ninth negotiating session is taking place in this week in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Negotiators in Lucerne on Monday met with nongovernmental organisations and later the Pirate Party. For one and a half hours the Berne Declaration and several other nongovernmental organisations presented their concerns to the delegations of Australia, Canada, European Union, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States who are negotiating the agreement."
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/06/30/acta-risks-long-term-damage-to-democratic-public-policymaking-ngos-say/
"An international agreement on intellectual property rights enforcement now under negotiation in Lucerne, Switzerland runs the risk of ushering in a new and undemocratic precedent for international policymaking that could have long-term damaging effects on critical public policy issues, non-negotiating government representatives and civil society advocates said this week.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, they said, could have a chilling effect on access to medications, including the potential to criminalise makers of active pharmaceutical ingredients who are critical to the generics industry, and could cause serious problems for internet freedom.
The 28 June event in Geneva was cosponsored by Knowledge Ecology International and IQsensato.
More worrying, they added, is that while currently an initiative of a few countries, its ultimate aim seems to be to become universal. The negotiating process seems to follow on the heels of the trend of countries shopping for easy fora through which to push the same increasing intellectual property enforcement agenda. Denied enforcement actions in places such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Customs Organization and elsewhere, these countries are now creating their own forum under ACTA.
This platform can then be used to foist burdensome enforcement strategies on the rest of the world through bilateral and regional agreements. If such a strategy is allowed to succeed, they argue, it could have follow-on effects far outside the intellectual property sphere.
While it is probably too late to stop, the ACTA could be saved if its real targets act, said Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa and a staunch critic of the ACTA process to date.
At the “end of the day, ACTA is about Brazil, India” and other emerging economies, Geist said. If those countries “who are the targets [and] who have for too long sat on the sidelines and said they weren’t part of the process … are willing to stand up and be more aggressive,” then ACTA could be turned into something that would not risk upsetting a balanced IP regime.
ACTA’s ninth negotiating session is taking place in this week in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Negotiators in Lucerne on Monday met with nongovernmental organisations and later the Pirate Party. For one and a half hours the Berne Declaration and several other nongovernmental organisations presented their concerns to the delegations of Australia, Canada, European Union, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States who are negotiating the agreement."
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/06/30/acta-risks-long-term-damage-to-democratic-public-policymaking-ngos-say/
ACTA A Sign Of Weakness In Multilateral System, WIPO Head Says; Intellectual Property Watch, 6/30/10
Catherine Saez, Intellectual Property Watch; ACTA A Sign Of Weakness In Multilateral System, WIPO Head Says:
"The plurilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and other such regional negotiations are a “bad development” for multilateral agencies, the World Intellectual Property Organization director general has told Intellectual Property Watch.
Asked about this week’s ACTA negotiation in Lucerne, Switzerland (IPW, Enforcement, 26 June 2010), Gurry said it is an example of the difficulty of the United Nations and the rest of the multilateral system have providing swift answers to international problems.
WIPO Director General Francis Gurry told UN journalists on 29 June that the inability to provide answers could lead to member states taking matters into their own hands to seek solutions outside of the multilateral system to the detriment of inclusiveness of the present system.
There is an increasing number of issues that can only be addressed internationally, which is bringing a challenge to the whole UN system, highlighting its inability to address them, Gurry said. Despite that “surge for international agreements, we are not seeing international agreements flowing out very easily,” he said.
If “you look across the system, in all organisations, you are not seeing agreements being concluded on a daily basis,” even if the speed with which interconnection has intensified would suggest that agreements are needed, he said. But he did not offer clear ideas on how to solve the delays.
“A number of countries feel [there is] an important area of public policy they are not able to address in a multilateral forum, and so have gone outside the multilateral framework to satisfy their desire for creating some form of ‘international’ cooperation,” Gurry told Intellectual Property Watch in an interview last week. “That’s the challenge, for us. And whether it concerns enforcement, ACTA, or any other area, that, on the whole, is a bad development for a multilateral agency, that member states start to do things outside.”
“Either the machinery works, or it doesn’t,” he said. “That I think is the real significance of ACTA.
The frustration it has caused is a consequence of practical issues not being addressed, he said, citing recent difficult discussions in the Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights on increased access for visually impaired persons. “Can anyone not subscribe to that principle, as a general rule?” he asked, with visually impaired readers only obtaining access to about five percent of all published work in reasonable time.
“Can anyone stand up and say that they should not have more [access], that we should not do something about it?” It is such an obvious question, he said “but we are not getting an agreement” although the last meeting showed genuine involvement of member countries.
“This is the frustration that we are all feeling,” he said, and it leads to other ways to reach solutions."
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/06/30/acta-a-sign-of-weakness-in-multilateral-system-wipo-head-says/
"The plurilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and other such regional negotiations are a “bad development” for multilateral agencies, the World Intellectual Property Organization director general has told Intellectual Property Watch.
Asked about this week’s ACTA negotiation in Lucerne, Switzerland (IPW, Enforcement, 26 June 2010), Gurry said it is an example of the difficulty of the United Nations and the rest of the multilateral system have providing swift answers to international problems.
WIPO Director General Francis Gurry told UN journalists on 29 June that the inability to provide answers could lead to member states taking matters into their own hands to seek solutions outside of the multilateral system to the detriment of inclusiveness of the present system.
There is an increasing number of issues that can only be addressed internationally, which is bringing a challenge to the whole UN system, highlighting its inability to address them, Gurry said. Despite that “surge for international agreements, we are not seeing international agreements flowing out very easily,” he said.
If “you look across the system, in all organisations, you are not seeing agreements being concluded on a daily basis,” even if the speed with which interconnection has intensified would suggest that agreements are needed, he said. But he did not offer clear ideas on how to solve the delays.
“A number of countries feel [there is] an important area of public policy they are not able to address in a multilateral forum, and so have gone outside the multilateral framework to satisfy their desire for creating some form of ‘international’ cooperation,” Gurry told Intellectual Property Watch in an interview last week. “That’s the challenge, for us. And whether it concerns enforcement, ACTA, or any other area, that, on the whole, is a bad development for a multilateral agency, that member states start to do things outside.”
“Either the machinery works, or it doesn’t,” he said. “That I think is the real significance of ACTA.
The frustration it has caused is a consequence of practical issues not being addressed, he said, citing recent difficult discussions in the Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights on increased access for visually impaired persons. “Can anyone not subscribe to that principle, as a general rule?” he asked, with visually impaired readers only obtaining access to about five percent of all published work in reasonable time.
“Can anyone stand up and say that they should not have more [access], that we should not do something about it?” It is such an obvious question, he said “but we are not getting an agreement” although the last meeting showed genuine involvement of member countries.
“This is the frustration that we are all feeling,” he said, and it leads to other ways to reach solutions."
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/06/30/acta-a-sign-of-weakness-in-multilateral-system-wipo-head-says/
Stores See Google as Ally in E-Book Market; New York Times, 6/30/10
Brad Stone, New York Times; Stores See Google as Ally in E-Book Market:
"Independent bookstores were battered first by discount chains like Barnes & Noble, then by superefficient Web retailers like Amazon.com.
Darin Sennett of Powell’s said a Google deal would make the store independent of the e-readers sold by the big booksellers.
Now the electronic book age is dawning. With this latest challenge, these stores will soon have a new ally: the search giant Google.
Later this summer, Google plans to introduce its long-awaited push into electronic books, called Google Editions. The company has revealed little about the venture thus far, describing it generally as an effort to sell digital books that will be readable within a Web browser and accessible from any Internet-connected computing device.
Now one element of Google Editions is coming into sharper focus. Google is on the verge of completing a deal with the American Booksellers Association, the trade group for independent bookstores, to make Google Editions the primary source of e-books on the Web sites of hundreds of independent booksellers around the country, according to representatives of Google and the association.
The partnership could help beloved bookstores like Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore.; Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, Calif.; and St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York. To court the growing audience of people who prefer reading on screens rather than paper, these small stores have until now been forced to compete against the likes of Amazon, Apple and Sony.
The Google deal could give them a foothold in this fast-growing market and help them keep devoted customers from migrating elsewhere.
“Google has shown a real interest in our market,” said Len Vlahos, chief operating officer of the booksellers association, which has over 1,400 member bookstores. “For a lot of reasons, it’s a very good fit.”
Google will probably face an uphill battle in its effort to enter the already crowded e-books field. The company has little experience as a retailer. It also has far fewer consumer credit card numbers in its database than either Amazon or Apple, and its online payment system, Google Checkout, has not been widely adopted."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/business/30books.html?hpw
"Independent bookstores were battered first by discount chains like Barnes & Noble, then by superefficient Web retailers like Amazon.com.
Darin Sennett of Powell’s said a Google deal would make the store independent of the e-readers sold by the big booksellers.
Now the electronic book age is dawning. With this latest challenge, these stores will soon have a new ally: the search giant Google.
Later this summer, Google plans to introduce its long-awaited push into electronic books, called Google Editions. The company has revealed little about the venture thus far, describing it generally as an effort to sell digital books that will be readable within a Web browser and accessible from any Internet-connected computing device.
Now one element of Google Editions is coming into sharper focus. Google is on the verge of completing a deal with the American Booksellers Association, the trade group for independent bookstores, to make Google Editions the primary source of e-books on the Web sites of hundreds of independent booksellers around the country, according to representatives of Google and the association.
The partnership could help beloved bookstores like Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore.; Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, Calif.; and St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York. To court the growing audience of people who prefer reading on screens rather than paper, these small stores have until now been forced to compete against the likes of Amazon, Apple and Sony.
The Google deal could give them a foothold in this fast-growing market and help them keep devoted customers from migrating elsewhere.
“Google has shown a real interest in our market,” said Len Vlahos, chief operating officer of the booksellers association, which has over 1,400 member bookstores. “For a lot of reasons, it’s a very good fit.”
Google will probably face an uphill battle in its effort to enter the already crowded e-books field. The company has little experience as a retailer. It also has far fewer consumer credit card numbers in its database than either Amazon or Apple, and its online payment system, Google Checkout, has not been widely adopted."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/business/30books.html?hpw
Court to Consider Breaking Up Mass BitTorrent Lawsuits; Wired.com, 6/29/10
David Kravets, Wired.com; Court to Consider Breaking Up Mass BitTorrent Lawsuits:
"If you’ve used BitTorrent to snag unauthorized copies of independent films you should be interested in the arguments unfolding in Wednesday in federal court in Washington, D.C.
At issue is a mass-litigation campaign, in which the fledgling US Copyright Group is suing about 15,000 users whose IP addresses were detected harvesting films like Steam Experiment, Far Cry, Uncross the Stars, Gray Man and Call of the Wild 3D.
Several digital rights groups will argue Wednesday on behalf of the account holders behind the IP addresses that each defendant should be sued individually in courts near where the defendants reside. Currently, they’ve all been lumped together in handful of lawsuits filed in the nation’s capital in March.
If U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer agrees with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Citizen, the US Copyright Group could find its legal campaign almost impossible to continue on such a grand scale.
The issue is important if you live in California and have to answer to a lawsuit across the country. Copyright Act violations carry fines of up to $150,000.
A similar brouhaha came up during the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuit campaign against file sharers using Kazaa, Limewire and other networks. The association preferred suing hundreds of alleged downloaders at once, but in many instances were forced to drop the large-scale actions and sue each defendant separately.
In all, the RIAA sued thousands of individuals spread out over the past six years — and was backed by the deep pockets of the nation’s recording labels. If the US Copyright Group loses Wednesday’s courtroom showdown, it would be required to spend at least $350 per IP address to re-file an individual case against a sole defendant. Its lawyers likely would have to appear in courtrooms across the country, perhaps simultaneously.
The RIAA’s lawsuits against 20,000 alleged music pirates were focused on old-school file sharing systems like Kazaa and Limewire. BitTorrent file sharing is more complicated, with downloaders and uploaders collecting in transient swarms of so-called seeders and leechers. The US Copyright Group claims that, because of the swarming element of the BitTorrent protocol, the infringing activity of all the defendants likely had some nexus with the District of Columbia, even if a defendant’s computer was outside the district.
The indie filmmakers are taking a different tactic from their commercial counterparts. The Motion Picture Association of America, for the most part, has limited its lawsuits to BitTorrent sites themselves — like The Pirate Bay, TorrentSpy and Isohunt.
The allegedly offending IP address were sniffed out by Guardaley IT, a German peer-to-peer–surveillance firm."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/bittorrent-lawsuits/#ixzz0sNl95RKe:
"If you’ve used BitTorrent to snag unauthorized copies of independent films you should be interested in the arguments unfolding in Wednesday in federal court in Washington, D.C.
At issue is a mass-litigation campaign, in which the fledgling US Copyright Group is suing about 15,000 users whose IP addresses were detected harvesting films like Steam Experiment, Far Cry, Uncross the Stars, Gray Man and Call of the Wild 3D.
Several digital rights groups will argue Wednesday on behalf of the account holders behind the IP addresses that each defendant should be sued individually in courts near where the defendants reside. Currently, they’ve all been lumped together in handful of lawsuits filed in the nation’s capital in March.
If U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer agrees with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Citizen, the US Copyright Group could find its legal campaign almost impossible to continue on such a grand scale.
The issue is important if you live in California and have to answer to a lawsuit across the country. Copyright Act violations carry fines of up to $150,000.
A similar brouhaha came up during the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuit campaign against file sharers using Kazaa, Limewire and other networks. The association preferred suing hundreds of alleged downloaders at once, but in many instances were forced to drop the large-scale actions and sue each defendant separately.
In all, the RIAA sued thousands of individuals spread out over the past six years — and was backed by the deep pockets of the nation’s recording labels. If the US Copyright Group loses Wednesday’s courtroom showdown, it would be required to spend at least $350 per IP address to re-file an individual case against a sole defendant. Its lawyers likely would have to appear in courtrooms across the country, perhaps simultaneously.
The RIAA’s lawsuits against 20,000 alleged music pirates were focused on old-school file sharing systems like Kazaa and Limewire. BitTorrent file sharing is more complicated, with downloaders and uploaders collecting in transient swarms of so-called seeders and leechers. The US Copyright Group claims that, because of the swarming element of the BitTorrent protocol, the infringing activity of all the defendants likely had some nexus with the District of Columbia, even if a defendant’s computer was outside the district.
The indie filmmakers are taking a different tactic from their commercial counterparts. The Motion Picture Association of America, for the most part, has limited its lawsuits to BitTorrent sites themselves — like The Pirate Bay, TorrentSpy and Isohunt.
The allegedly offending IP address were sniffed out by Guardaley IT, a German peer-to-peer–surveillance firm."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/bittorrent-lawsuits/#ixzz0sNl95RKe:
If The Public Library Was Invented Today, Would The Gov't Call It Organized Crime And Shut It Down?; TechDirt.com, 6/30/10
Mike Masnick, TechDirt.com; If The Public Library Was Invented Today, Would The Gov't Call It Organized Crime And Shut It Down?:
"We've seen authors in the past complaining that libraries are engaged in book theft, which is an argument that is pretty laughable -- though, has, at times been suggested by various publishing groups. But, in general, most people recognize the public service a library does by helping to educate people. So when some folks in Bulgaria decided to try to set up a user-generated online library of sorts, you wouldn't think that the site would get raided by the police, be declared "damaging to culture," and have its organizers described as an organized crime syndicate. But, that's what happened.
The site, Chitanka.info let anyone upload works for a Bulgarian audience -- so there definitely were some infringing works on the site. However, the site was quick to take down any material upon request. The effort was strictly non-commercial, with no ads appearing anywhere on the site. In fact, many authors uploaded their own works, as they realized what a great resource it was.
However, the Bulgarian Book Association flipped out, and once it flipped out, the Bulgarian government had its organized crime law enforcement group raid the site, and describe the organizers as a "gang." Users of the site also took issue with the claim that the site was in any way damaging. They said it was regularly used like a library, but since you could only read the books on a computer, it likely resulted in more sales (or visits to physical libraries)...
Either way, all of this makes you wonder: if traditional public libraries were just being founded today, how much effort do you think publishers would go through to shut them down by claiming they were illegal and violations of copyright law?"
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100630/12152310025.shtml
"We've seen authors in the past complaining that libraries are engaged in book theft, which is an argument that is pretty laughable -- though, has, at times been suggested by various publishing groups. But, in general, most people recognize the public service a library does by helping to educate people. So when some folks in Bulgaria decided to try to set up a user-generated online library of sorts, you wouldn't think that the site would get raided by the police, be declared "damaging to culture," and have its organizers described as an organized crime syndicate. But, that's what happened.
The site, Chitanka.info let anyone upload works for a Bulgarian audience -- so there definitely were some infringing works on the site. However, the site was quick to take down any material upon request. The effort was strictly non-commercial, with no ads appearing anywhere on the site. In fact, many authors uploaded their own works, as they realized what a great resource it was.
However, the Bulgarian Book Association flipped out, and once it flipped out, the Bulgarian government had its organized crime law enforcement group raid the site, and describe the organizers as a "gang." Users of the site also took issue with the claim that the site was in any way damaging. They said it was regularly used like a library, but since you could only read the books on a computer, it likely resulted in more sales (or visits to physical libraries)...
Either way, all of this makes you wonder: if traditional public libraries were just being founded today, how much effort do you think publishers would go through to shut them down by claiming they were illegal and violations of copyright law?"
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100630/12152310025.shtml
Monday, June 28, 2010
Heedlessly Hijacking Content; New York Times, 6/28/10
David Carr, New York Times; Heedlessly Hijacking Content:
"Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal was not the only one who had a tough week at the office.
Last Monday, the word got out that Rolling Stone had a stunning piece about General McChrystal, in which he and his aides were critical of the White House. It’s the kind of scoop that thrills magazine editors, and no doubt they couldn’t wait to get their issue on the stands.
The problem was, nobody else could wait either. On Tuesday morning, a PDF of the piece the magazine had lovingly commissioned, edited, fact-checked, printed and distributed, was posted in its entirety on not one but two Web sites, for everyone to read without giving Rolling Stone a dime.
It was a clear violation of copyright and professional practice, and it amounted to taking money out of a competitor’s pocket. What crafty guerrilla site or bottom-feeder would do such a thing?
Turns out it was Time.com and Politico, both well-financed, reputable news media organizations, that blithely stepped over the line and took what was not theirs.
Both companies said that a frenzy involving a significant national issue was under way and that because Rolling Stone itself did not post the article on its site, they took matters into their own hands. Each said that when Rolling Stone protested, it was taken down, and that when the magazine put up the piece at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, their sites linked to that instead.
Content-makers had a rough week across the board. A federal judge granted summary judgment to Google, whose subsidiary, YouTube, had been sued by Viacom for $1 billion for copyright infringement. Judge Louis Stanton of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that even though thousands of clips of Viacom shows had been uploaded to the site, YouTube was shielded from damage claims because of “safe harbor” provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Google was busy elsewhere, filing an amicus brief in a New York case against an aggregator called Theflyonthewall.com, for its appropriation of proprietary bank research. Lawyers for Google, along with Twitter, asked a federal appeals court to reverse a decision upholding the so-called hot news doctrine, which gives the publishers of up-to-the-minute news the sole rights to that content. They called that doctrine obsolete.
News organizations, including The New York Times, The Associated Press, Gannett and others, filed a brief of their own in the case, suggesting that, “unless generalized free-riding on news originators’ efforts is restrained, originators will be unable to recover their costs of news gathering and publication, the incentive to engage in the news business will be threatened and the public will ultimately have fewer sources of original news.”
In the Rolling Stone case, it wasn’t tech companies arguing for the right to appropriate content, but content-makers themselves.
The magazine delivered an advance copy to The A.P. on Monday afternoon (many magazines try to promote coming articles that way) with some restrictions. When The A.P. article ran with some highlights and excerpts, other news outlets, including networks and major newspapers, asked for a copy. Politico and Time Inc. did not receive copies from Rolling Stone directly.
Some party, probably a news outlet seeking comment, gave copies to both the subject and the White House — a pretty naughty move in and of itself. And by some point on Tuesday morning, the Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings had become a piece of electronic samizdat, passed around and, eventually, published.
Several commentators suggested that Rolling Stone brought this on itself by not immediately publishing the McChrystal article on its own site (the magazine had planned to publish online but on its own schedule).
“That’s like saying, ‘She had it coming,’ ” Eric Bates, executive editor of Rolling Stone, said in an interview on Thursday. “The decision about when to publish our material is ours and ours alone. It was completely inappropriate.”
Reached by e-mail on a plane, Jim VandeHei, executive editor and a founder of Politico, suggested that the imperatives of the news cycle superseded questions of custody. “Our reporters got the article from sources with no restrictions,” he wrote. “It was being circulated and widely discussed among insiders, and our team felt readers should see what insiders were reading and reacting to. Rolling Stone raised a reasonable objection once they posted the story, so we quickly agreed to link to their URL.”
Time Inc. is in the print magazine business, and Ann Moore, its chief executive, has been a vigorous public defender of copyright. Last year, in an interview with The Telegraph of London, she said, “Who started this rumor that all information should be free, and why didn’t we challenge this when it first came out?”
The folks running Time.com apparently missed the memo, but they are now in receipt of its message.
“Time.com posted a PDF of the story to help separate rumor from fact at the moment this story of immense national interest was hitting fever pitch and the actual piece was not available,” a spokeswoman for Time wrote in an e-mail message. “We always had the intention of taking it down as soon as Rolling Stone made any element of the story publicly available, and we did. It was a mistake; if we had it do over again, we would only post a headline and an abstract.”
(A spokeswoman for Ms. Moore said Ms. Moore believed it was a mistake and that it would not happen again.)
Publishing a PDF of somebody else’s work is the exact opposite of fair use: these sites engaged in a replication of a static electronic document with no links to the publication that took the risk, commissioned the work and came up with a story that tilted the national conversation. The technical, legal term for what they did is, um, stealing.
Media organizations can file all the briefs they want about protecting their work product from free-riders and insurgent hordes of digital pilot fish, but once they break their own rules and start feeding on one another, the game is sort of over.
These were decisions made in the midst of a white-hot news cycle, and perhaps cooler heads will prevail the next time around. But if some of the biggest names in the business are not above cut-and-paste journalism when it suits their needs, how can they point a finger at others?
“This is not about our slow-footedness on the Web, but our right to publish on a schedule we chose. To me, this was really a transitional moment,” said Mr. Bates of Rolling Stone. “We’ve had fan sites that have published the text of some stories, but what these two big media organizations did was really off the charts. They took something that was in a prepublished form, sent out to other media organizations with specific restrictions, and just put it up.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/business/media/28carr.html?scp=1&sq=david%20carr%20rolling%20stone&st=cse
"Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal was not the only one who had a tough week at the office.
Last Monday, the word got out that Rolling Stone had a stunning piece about General McChrystal, in which he and his aides were critical of the White House. It’s the kind of scoop that thrills magazine editors, and no doubt they couldn’t wait to get their issue on the stands.
The problem was, nobody else could wait either. On Tuesday morning, a PDF of the piece the magazine had lovingly commissioned, edited, fact-checked, printed and distributed, was posted in its entirety on not one but two Web sites, for everyone to read without giving Rolling Stone a dime.
It was a clear violation of copyright and professional practice, and it amounted to taking money out of a competitor’s pocket. What crafty guerrilla site or bottom-feeder would do such a thing?
Turns out it was Time.com and Politico, both well-financed, reputable news media organizations, that blithely stepped over the line and took what was not theirs.
Both companies said that a frenzy involving a significant national issue was under way and that because Rolling Stone itself did not post the article on its site, they took matters into their own hands. Each said that when Rolling Stone protested, it was taken down, and that when the magazine put up the piece at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, their sites linked to that instead.
Content-makers had a rough week across the board. A federal judge granted summary judgment to Google, whose subsidiary, YouTube, had been sued by Viacom for $1 billion for copyright infringement. Judge Louis Stanton of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that even though thousands of clips of Viacom shows had been uploaded to the site, YouTube was shielded from damage claims because of “safe harbor” provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Google was busy elsewhere, filing an amicus brief in a New York case against an aggregator called Theflyonthewall.com, for its appropriation of proprietary bank research. Lawyers for Google, along with Twitter, asked a federal appeals court to reverse a decision upholding the so-called hot news doctrine, which gives the publishers of up-to-the-minute news the sole rights to that content. They called that doctrine obsolete.
News organizations, including The New York Times, The Associated Press, Gannett and others, filed a brief of their own in the case, suggesting that, “unless generalized free-riding on news originators’ efforts is restrained, originators will be unable to recover their costs of news gathering and publication, the incentive to engage in the news business will be threatened and the public will ultimately have fewer sources of original news.”
In the Rolling Stone case, it wasn’t tech companies arguing for the right to appropriate content, but content-makers themselves.
The magazine delivered an advance copy to The A.P. on Monday afternoon (many magazines try to promote coming articles that way) with some restrictions. When The A.P. article ran with some highlights and excerpts, other news outlets, including networks and major newspapers, asked for a copy. Politico and Time Inc. did not receive copies from Rolling Stone directly.
Some party, probably a news outlet seeking comment, gave copies to both the subject and the White House — a pretty naughty move in and of itself. And by some point on Tuesday morning, the Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings had become a piece of electronic samizdat, passed around and, eventually, published.
Several commentators suggested that Rolling Stone brought this on itself by not immediately publishing the McChrystal article on its own site (the magazine had planned to publish online but on its own schedule).
“That’s like saying, ‘She had it coming,’ ” Eric Bates, executive editor of Rolling Stone, said in an interview on Thursday. “The decision about when to publish our material is ours and ours alone. It was completely inappropriate.”
Reached by e-mail on a plane, Jim VandeHei, executive editor and a founder of Politico, suggested that the imperatives of the news cycle superseded questions of custody. “Our reporters got the article from sources with no restrictions,” he wrote. “It was being circulated and widely discussed among insiders, and our team felt readers should see what insiders were reading and reacting to. Rolling Stone raised a reasonable objection once they posted the story, so we quickly agreed to link to their URL.”
Time Inc. is in the print magazine business, and Ann Moore, its chief executive, has been a vigorous public defender of copyright. Last year, in an interview with The Telegraph of London, she said, “Who started this rumor that all information should be free, and why didn’t we challenge this when it first came out?”
The folks running Time.com apparently missed the memo, but they are now in receipt of its message.
“Time.com posted a PDF of the story to help separate rumor from fact at the moment this story of immense national interest was hitting fever pitch and the actual piece was not available,” a spokeswoman for Time wrote in an e-mail message. “We always had the intention of taking it down as soon as Rolling Stone made any element of the story publicly available, and we did. It was a mistake; if we had it do over again, we would only post a headline and an abstract.”
(A spokeswoman for Ms. Moore said Ms. Moore believed it was a mistake and that it would not happen again.)
Publishing a PDF of somebody else’s work is the exact opposite of fair use: these sites engaged in a replication of a static electronic document with no links to the publication that took the risk, commissioned the work and came up with a story that tilted the national conversation. The technical, legal term for what they did is, um, stealing.
Media organizations can file all the briefs they want about protecting their work product from free-riders and insurgent hordes of digital pilot fish, but once they break their own rules and start feeding on one another, the game is sort of over.
These were decisions made in the midst of a white-hot news cycle, and perhaps cooler heads will prevail the next time around. But if some of the biggest names in the business are not above cut-and-paste journalism when it suits their needs, how can they point a finger at others?
“This is not about our slow-footedness on the Web, but our right to publish on a schedule we chose. To me, this was really a transitional moment,” said Mr. Bates of Rolling Stone. “We’ve had fan sites that have published the text of some stories, but what these two big media organizations did was really off the charts. They took something that was in a prepublished form, sent out to other media organizations with specific restrictions, and just put it up.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/business/media/28carr.html?scp=1&sq=david%20carr%20rolling%20stone&st=cse
Saturday, June 26, 2010
ASCAP Assails Free-Culture, Digital-Rights Groups; Wired.com, 6/25/10
David Kravets, Wired.com; ASCAP Assails Free-Culture, Digital-Rights Groups:
"The association representing 380,000 composers, songwriters, lyricists and others associated with the music industry has begun a fund-raising campaign to stifle groups that support free culture and digital rights.
The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers is urging the membership to donate money to battle the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and even Creative Commons.
In a letter sent to members this week, ASCAP said those groups and unnamed “technology companies” are “mobilizing to promote ‘Copyleft’ in order to undermine our ‘Copyright.’ ”
The letter continues, saying “the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. Their mission is to spread the word that our music should be free.”
The fund-raising campaign came a day after Victoria Espinel, the nation’s copyright czar, outlined an intellectual-property enforcement plan that did not include a call to push internet service providers to adopt policies to cut service to repeat copyright scofflaws. Such a policy, referred to as “three strikes” or “graduated response,” was strongly backed by the motion picture and recording industries, and opposed by EFF and Public Knowledge.
Instead, Espinel said the nation’s “intellectual property-enforcement efforts should be focused on stopping those stealing the work of others, not those who are appropriately building upon it.”
The ASCAP, which also distributes royalties, said those groups are “influencing Congress against the interests of music creators. If their views are allowed to gain strength, music creators will find it harder and harder to make a living as traditional media shifts to online and wireless services. We all know what will happen next: the music will dry up, and the ultimate loser will be the music consumer.”
ASCAP did not return messages seeking comment.
ASCAP’s attack on EFF and Public Knowledge are farfetched. Those groups do not suggest music should be free, although they push for the liberalization of copyright law.
But the attack on Creative Commons is more laughable than ASCAP’s stance against EFF and Public Knowledge.
While lobby groups EFF and Public Knowledge advocate for liberal copyright laws, Creative Commons actually creates licenses to protect content creators.
The non-profit has issued various licenses to approximately 350 million pieces of content to writers, musicians, scholars and others. Flickr, for example, is filled with pictures licensed by Creative Commons.
The licenses allow the works in the public domain, with various rules regarding attribution, commercial use and remixing.
The group’s creative director, Eric Steuer, said nobody forces anybody to adopt the Creative Commons credo. “I think it’s false to claim that Creative Commons works to undermine copyright,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s an opt-in system.”
Following Wednesday’s fund-raising letter from Paul Williams, ASCAP’s president, Steuer said several ASCAP members who also use Creative Commons licenses have donated money to Creative Commons."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/ascap-assails-free-culture-digital-rights-groups/#ixzz0s13zbKVN"
"The association representing 380,000 composers, songwriters, lyricists and others associated with the music industry has begun a fund-raising campaign to stifle groups that support free culture and digital rights.
The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers is urging the membership to donate money to battle the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and even Creative Commons.
In a letter sent to members this week, ASCAP said those groups and unnamed “technology companies” are “mobilizing to promote ‘Copyleft’ in order to undermine our ‘Copyright.’ ”
The letter continues, saying “the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. Their mission is to spread the word that our music should be free.”
The fund-raising campaign came a day after Victoria Espinel, the nation’s copyright czar, outlined an intellectual-property enforcement plan that did not include a call to push internet service providers to adopt policies to cut service to repeat copyright scofflaws. Such a policy, referred to as “three strikes” or “graduated response,” was strongly backed by the motion picture and recording industries, and opposed by EFF and Public Knowledge.
Instead, Espinel said the nation’s “intellectual property-enforcement efforts should be focused on stopping those stealing the work of others, not those who are appropriately building upon it.”
The ASCAP, which also distributes royalties, said those groups are “influencing Congress against the interests of music creators. If their views are allowed to gain strength, music creators will find it harder and harder to make a living as traditional media shifts to online and wireless services. We all know what will happen next: the music will dry up, and the ultimate loser will be the music consumer.”
ASCAP did not return messages seeking comment.
ASCAP’s attack on EFF and Public Knowledge are farfetched. Those groups do not suggest music should be free, although they push for the liberalization of copyright law.
But the attack on Creative Commons is more laughable than ASCAP’s stance against EFF and Public Knowledge.
While lobby groups EFF and Public Knowledge advocate for liberal copyright laws, Creative Commons actually creates licenses to protect content creators.
The non-profit has issued various licenses to approximately 350 million pieces of content to writers, musicians, scholars and others. Flickr, for example, is filled with pictures licensed by Creative Commons.
The licenses allow the works in the public domain, with various rules regarding attribution, commercial use and remixing.
The group’s creative director, Eric Steuer, said nobody forces anybody to adopt the Creative Commons credo. “I think it’s false to claim that Creative Commons works to undermine copyright,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s an opt-in system.”
Following Wednesday’s fund-raising letter from Paul Williams, ASCAP’s president, Steuer said several ASCAP members who also use Creative Commons licenses have donated money to Creative Commons."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/ascap-assails-free-culture-digital-rights-groups/#ixzz0s13zbKVN"
In Documentary, Wall of Sound Meets Wall of Law; New York Times, 6/27/10
John Anderson, New York Times; In Documentary, Wall of Sound Meets Wall of Law:
"BETWEEN recording sessions here in 1973, John Lennon called Phil Spector and told him to come back down to the studio. “Someone’s ripped you off, Phil,” Mr. Lennon said. When Mr. Spector arrived, a projector had been set up, a film began to roll, several familiar drumbeats were heard and then, the wail of the Ronettes.
The song was “Be My Baby,” the movie was “Mean Streets,” and no one had told Mr. Spector anything about it.
“I said, ‘Who is this guy Skeezy?’ ” Mr. Spector recalls during “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector,” which opens Wednesday at the Film Forum in Manhattan. “I called my lawyers, I said, ‘Kill it!’ ” Martin Scorsese had used his music without permission, and “I never give permission for anything.”
Only Lennon’s intercession stopped Mr. Spector from seeking an injunction that could have pulled the movies out of theaters. They may not have known it at the time, but Mr. Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel came close to having their careers derailed by Mr. Spector — the creator of rock’s fabled “Wall of Sound,” the Svengali of the ’60s girl groups and the producer of the Beatles’ “Let It Be.”
The anecdote is perhaps the most startling contained in “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector,” a documentary by Vikram Jayanti, and not only because it’s being told by a man who, for 50 years, has avoided the news media like the plague. Built around interviews at Mr. Spector’s home during his first murder trial in 2007 — he was convicted in the shooting death of the actress Lana Clarkson after a second trial in 2009 — the film employs a greatest-hits collection of 21 Spector songs, played or performed in their entirety. And it does so without having obtained Mr. Spector’s written permission. Thus the film could become the latest flashpoint in the debate over what’s generally known as fair use, and copyright law. (Fair use refers to the right, under certain circumstances, like criticism, to use copyrighted material without permission. But the exact amount one can legally use remains a murky proposition.)
Mr. Jayanti, however, isn’t expecting any legal trouble, even though Mr. Spector twice sued his (former) friend and lawyer, Robert Shapiro, to reclaim a $1 million retainer and was appeased by Mr. Scorsese only when he promised to pay for future music use.
“Phil wanted the film made, he wanted the music given freely, he was cooperative about making it,” said Mr. Jayanti, who sat with Mr. Spector during most of the 2007 trial in Los Angeles.
Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Spector’s wife, Rachelle, said she hadn’t seen the film and didn’t think her husband had either. (He is serving 19 years to life at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran.) Mr. Jayanti disagrees. “Of course he’s seen the film,” he said. “We made sure he had a copy. We gave his lawyers copies of the film. And I don’t think if he looked at it in a rational state of mind, he’d have any problem with it. I think it does what he dreamed it would do.” Namely, to rewrite the lead of his obituary: from “convicted murderer” to “musical genius.”
Anthony Wall has produced the documentary program “Arena” for nearly 35 years, out of the BBC offices at Bush House, and it was Mr. Wall who asked Mr. Jayanti to direct the Spector film. They’d previously made “James Ellroy’s Feast of Death” together. Separately Mr. Jayanti has directed films like "Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine" and was an executive producer on “When We Were Kings.”
“Running a program like this, you have your particular heroes or favorites,” Mr. Wall said. “The Top 3 for me were always Dylan, the Beatles and Phil Spector. I thought it would be difficult to get any of them, but that we’d never get Phil, because he has so resolutely refused to even give a newspaper interview. He just doesn’t do it.” The weird thing, Mr. Wall said, was that he had so few expectations, adding, “When Vikram asked me one day whether I’d actually written to him to give him the chance to say no, I hadn’t.”
Mr. Jayanti overnighted a letter to Mr. Spector and got a positive response three days later. Mr. Wall and Mr. Jayanti went to the Spectors’ home in Alhambra, Calif. — where a sign outside reads “Phil Spector’s Pyrenees Castle” — and did two days of interviews. A planned five-day shoot was interrupted by Mr. Spector’s trial preparation; a subsequent gag order on Mr. Spector ended all communication between subject and director. But Mr. Jayanti decided he had everything he needed — except, perhaps, that signed release.
For safety’s sake BBC lawyers looked at a possible fair use defense and decided the film was defensible. “It was an exploratory process that we entered into quite innocently,” Mr. Wall said.
“But what we’re looking at, in terms of it possibly being a precedent, is the law bending to reflect what’s really going on,” he said, meaning the Internet, the global marketplace and disparate views of copyright. “What we need is a new rule book. What it’s about is control, whether the Internet can be controlled, and the way our lives are controlled. It’s been a long time, after all, since ‘Steamboat Willie.’ ”
Mr. Wall’s reference to Walt Disney’s original Mickey Mouse cartoon points up a nettlesome issue in the realm of United States copyright law: Each time the 1928 “Willie” has been poised to enter public domain, Congress has extended copyright protection. But the larger point for rights activists is whether a culture can survive without being able to feed upon itself.
“Can you imagine the original guy who told the story of King Lear?” Mr. Jayanti asked. “What if he had been able to block Shakespeare, who picked up a story that was simply in the air? I’m not saying I’m Shakespeare, or that Phil Spector is doing what Shakespeare did with King Lear, but if we don’t have the ability to harvest and process and sample our own culture, then I think the culture dries up.”
The fair use issue is close to the heart of Patricia Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media at American University, which has developed the Code of Best Practices in Fair-Use, a documentary-industry standard. “One of the things that is not O.K. is to use music as soundtrack, for ambience or aesthetic,” Dr. Aufderheide said. But Mr. Jayanti’s argument — that Mr. Spector’s records cannot be appreciated or assessed except in their entirety — “is a nonaesthetic, nonsoundtrack reason,” and is quite plausible, she said.
There’s another side to the issue of course. “Filmmakers pay for actors, they pay for film stock, they pay for electricity,” said Robert Clarida, a partner with Cowan, Liebowitz, Latman, who is representing the recording industry in the continuing file-sharing case Arista Records et al. v. LimeWire. “Why shouldn’t they pay for music?”
Mr. Clarida conceded the merits of fair use in some instances, but said the use of an entire work, like a song, has rarely held up and cited two relatively recent and disparate decisions, one involving Elvis Presley and the other a 1947 performance by the singer Lily Pons, used on the cable program “Classic Arts Showcase.”
Mr. Jayanti said he hopes any discussion of copyright issues doesn’t overwhelm his motivations in making the movie in the first place, namely the celebration of what Mr. Spector achieved before calamity struck, and his directorly obsession with “geniuses under duress.”
“I’ve always wanted to do two documentaries that can’t be done: Napoleon on St. Helena and the trial of Oscar Wilde,” he said. “With Phil, I got to do both.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/movies/27spector.html
"BETWEEN recording sessions here in 1973, John Lennon called Phil Spector and told him to come back down to the studio. “Someone’s ripped you off, Phil,” Mr. Lennon said. When Mr. Spector arrived, a projector had been set up, a film began to roll, several familiar drumbeats were heard and then, the wail of the Ronettes.
The song was “Be My Baby,” the movie was “Mean Streets,” and no one had told Mr. Spector anything about it.
“I said, ‘Who is this guy Skeezy?’ ” Mr. Spector recalls during “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector,” which opens Wednesday at the Film Forum in Manhattan. “I called my lawyers, I said, ‘Kill it!’ ” Martin Scorsese had used his music without permission, and “I never give permission for anything.”
Only Lennon’s intercession stopped Mr. Spector from seeking an injunction that could have pulled the movies out of theaters. They may not have known it at the time, but Mr. Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel came close to having their careers derailed by Mr. Spector — the creator of rock’s fabled “Wall of Sound,” the Svengali of the ’60s girl groups and the producer of the Beatles’ “Let It Be.”
The anecdote is perhaps the most startling contained in “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector,” a documentary by Vikram Jayanti, and not only because it’s being told by a man who, for 50 years, has avoided the news media like the plague. Built around interviews at Mr. Spector’s home during his first murder trial in 2007 — he was convicted in the shooting death of the actress Lana Clarkson after a second trial in 2009 — the film employs a greatest-hits collection of 21 Spector songs, played or performed in their entirety. And it does so without having obtained Mr. Spector’s written permission. Thus the film could become the latest flashpoint in the debate over what’s generally known as fair use, and copyright law. (Fair use refers to the right, under certain circumstances, like criticism, to use copyrighted material without permission. But the exact amount one can legally use remains a murky proposition.)
Mr. Jayanti, however, isn’t expecting any legal trouble, even though Mr. Spector twice sued his (former) friend and lawyer, Robert Shapiro, to reclaim a $1 million retainer and was appeased by Mr. Scorsese only when he promised to pay for future music use.
“Phil wanted the film made, he wanted the music given freely, he was cooperative about making it,” said Mr. Jayanti, who sat with Mr. Spector during most of the 2007 trial in Los Angeles.
Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Spector’s wife, Rachelle, said she hadn’t seen the film and didn’t think her husband had either. (He is serving 19 years to life at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran.) Mr. Jayanti disagrees. “Of course he’s seen the film,” he said. “We made sure he had a copy. We gave his lawyers copies of the film. And I don’t think if he looked at it in a rational state of mind, he’d have any problem with it. I think it does what he dreamed it would do.” Namely, to rewrite the lead of his obituary: from “convicted murderer” to “musical genius.”
Anthony Wall has produced the documentary program “Arena” for nearly 35 years, out of the BBC offices at Bush House, and it was Mr. Wall who asked Mr. Jayanti to direct the Spector film. They’d previously made “James Ellroy’s Feast of Death” together. Separately Mr. Jayanti has directed films like "Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine" and was an executive producer on “When We Were Kings.”
“Running a program like this, you have your particular heroes or favorites,” Mr. Wall said. “The Top 3 for me were always Dylan, the Beatles and Phil Spector. I thought it would be difficult to get any of them, but that we’d never get Phil, because he has so resolutely refused to even give a newspaper interview. He just doesn’t do it.” The weird thing, Mr. Wall said, was that he had so few expectations, adding, “When Vikram asked me one day whether I’d actually written to him to give him the chance to say no, I hadn’t.”
Mr. Jayanti overnighted a letter to Mr. Spector and got a positive response three days later. Mr. Wall and Mr. Jayanti went to the Spectors’ home in Alhambra, Calif. — where a sign outside reads “Phil Spector’s Pyrenees Castle” — and did two days of interviews. A planned five-day shoot was interrupted by Mr. Spector’s trial preparation; a subsequent gag order on Mr. Spector ended all communication between subject and director. But Mr. Jayanti decided he had everything he needed — except, perhaps, that signed release.
For safety’s sake BBC lawyers looked at a possible fair use defense and decided the film was defensible. “It was an exploratory process that we entered into quite innocently,” Mr. Wall said.
“But what we’re looking at, in terms of it possibly being a precedent, is the law bending to reflect what’s really going on,” he said, meaning the Internet, the global marketplace and disparate views of copyright. “What we need is a new rule book. What it’s about is control, whether the Internet can be controlled, and the way our lives are controlled. It’s been a long time, after all, since ‘Steamboat Willie.’ ”
Mr. Wall’s reference to Walt Disney’s original Mickey Mouse cartoon points up a nettlesome issue in the realm of United States copyright law: Each time the 1928 “Willie” has been poised to enter public domain, Congress has extended copyright protection. But the larger point for rights activists is whether a culture can survive without being able to feed upon itself.
“Can you imagine the original guy who told the story of King Lear?” Mr. Jayanti asked. “What if he had been able to block Shakespeare, who picked up a story that was simply in the air? I’m not saying I’m Shakespeare, or that Phil Spector is doing what Shakespeare did with King Lear, but if we don’t have the ability to harvest and process and sample our own culture, then I think the culture dries up.”
The fair use issue is close to the heart of Patricia Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media at American University, which has developed the Code of Best Practices in Fair-Use, a documentary-industry standard. “One of the things that is not O.K. is to use music as soundtrack, for ambience or aesthetic,” Dr. Aufderheide said. But Mr. Jayanti’s argument — that Mr. Spector’s records cannot be appreciated or assessed except in their entirety — “is a nonaesthetic, nonsoundtrack reason,” and is quite plausible, she said.
There’s another side to the issue of course. “Filmmakers pay for actors, they pay for film stock, they pay for electricity,” said Robert Clarida, a partner with Cowan, Liebowitz, Latman, who is representing the recording industry in the continuing file-sharing case Arista Records et al. v. LimeWire. “Why shouldn’t they pay for music?”
Mr. Clarida conceded the merits of fair use in some instances, but said the use of an entire work, like a song, has rarely held up and cited two relatively recent and disparate decisions, one involving Elvis Presley and the other a 1947 performance by the singer Lily Pons, used on the cable program “Classic Arts Showcase.”
Mr. Jayanti said he hopes any discussion of copyright issues doesn’t overwhelm his motivations in making the movie in the first place, namely the celebration of what Mr. Spector achieved before calamity struck, and his directorly obsession with “geniuses under duress.”
“I’ve always wanted to do two documentaries that can’t be done: Napoleon on St. Helena and the trial of Oscar Wilde,” he said. “With Phil, I got to do both.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/movies/27spector.html
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