Scrapbook  

Between 2011 and 2013, the Silk Road marketplace was able to attract transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars worth of (bitcoin-based) transactions. However, relatively little is known about the geography of this global trade. Although the strong anonymity on darknet markets prohibits any data collection about the geography of consumption, there is a large amount of data available about the sale of such goods and services.This project thus seeks to employ techniques from computational social science and digital geography in order to achieve two primary objectives. First, we seek to scrape all relevant geographic information on darknet markets, building a re-usable data set at the country level (e.g. ‘the number of heroin sellers based in every country’, ‘the total number of vendors selling weapons in every country’ etc.). Second, we seek to map, visualize, and analyse those data: using multiple variables (the various categories of products and services) to ask ‘what is the geography of illicit products and services?’We think this is an interesting question to ask

Source: Economic Geographies of the Darknet — Oxford Internet Institute

The blinding rise of Donald Trump over the past year has masked another major trend in American politics: the palpable, and perhaps permanent, turn against the tech industry. The new corporate leviathans that used to be seen as bright new avatars of American innovation are increasingly portrayed as sinister new centers of unaccountable power, a transformation likely to have major consequences for the industry and for American politics.That turn has accelerated in recent days: Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders both want big tech treated as, in Bannon’s words in Hong Kong this week, “public utilities.” Tucker Carlson and Franklin Foer have found common ground. Even the group No Labels, an exquisitely poll-tested effort to create a safe new center, is on board. Rupert Murdoch, never shy to use his media power to advance his commercial interests, is hard at work.“Anti-trust is back, baby,” Yelp’s policy chief, Luther Lowe, DM’d me after Fox News gave him several minutes to make the antitrust case against Yelp’s giant rival Google to its audience of millions.

Source: There’s Blood In The Water In Silicon Valley

Blockchain’s governance paradox

Distributed ledger technologies “are starting to look an awful lot like some of the more conventional technical solutions that we have,” says Prof. Vili Lehdonvirta, an associate professor and senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, at a recent talk he gave at the Alan Turing Institute.

At the heart of the issue (as always) is who dictates and enforces the rules of the system if and when things go wrong, according to Lehdonvirta. He echoes a point we’ve long made, namely, that what really matters in these systems is how they deal with exceptions rather than norms.

 

Source: Blockchain’s governance paradox | FT Alphaville

PURCHASING AND BORROWING E-BOOKS: EVIDENCE FOR ‘CANNIBALIZATION’? In developing e-lending models, the fear by rights holders of ‘cannibalization’ of sales by lending has been a factor of importance. The fear is based on a series of assumptions including at least these three: profit margins on a sold title are higher than on a title lent out persons borrowing a title will not buy the same title despite protection measures (‘digital rights management’, DRM), titles lent out might be stripped of that protect

Source: WareKennis

Detecting (and Stopping) Robot PiratesPosted by Phil Davis ⋅ Jul 11, 2016 ⋅ 4 CommentsFiled Under piracy, Sci-Hub, Security Pirate SeasPirate Seas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)On the high seas, you can see a pirate approaching for miles. This gives the captain and crew time to prepare themselves against the onslaught, warn other ships, and call the naval authorities for help. On the Internet, pirates act with stealth. Often, you don’t even know that you’ve been boarded until the pirates have left

Source: Detecting (and Stopping) Robot Pirates | The Scholarly Kitchen

U.S. Republican congressional staff said in a report released Wednesday that previous efforts to regulate privacy technology were flawed and that lawmakers need to learn more about technology before trying to regulate it. The 25-page white paper is entitled Going Dark, Going Forward: A Primer on the Encryption Debate and it does not provide any solution to the encryption fight. However, it is notable for its criticism of other lawmakers who have tried to legislate their way out of the encryption debate. It

Source: US Efforts To Regulate Encryption Have Been Flawed, Government Report Finds – Slashdot

1 ReviewsReview ItThis was originally published as two separate blog posts at my blog: part 1 & part 2.If you’re following the world of academic publishing (and the paywalls that keep researchers from doing their jobs) you will have heard of Sci-Hub, which offers an elegant way to get around those paywalls. Often called the PirateBay of Academia, Sci-Hub gives you access to over 48 million paywalled articles, happily ignoring copyright. In my book that’s a great thing to do, after all it’s

Source: The Winnower | Correlating the Sci-Hub data with World Bank Indicators and Identifying Academic Use

In Table 1 the results are presented, both for the overall Utrecht dataset and broken down by publisher. In total, 2878 of 2968 unique DOIs could be resolved, the others giving error messages. Availability Utrecht Sci-Hub downloads through publishers Table 1 – Availability of Utrecht Sci-Hub downloads through publishers Overall, 75% of Utrecht Sci-Hub downloads would have been available either through our library subscriptions (60%) or as Gold Open Access/free from publisher (15%). In so far as thes

Source: Sci-Hub: access or convenience? A Utrecht case study (part 2) | I&M / I&O 2.0

We paid for the research with taxes, and Internet sharing is easy. What’s the hold-up?

Source: Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it?

Depending on whom you ask, Sci-Hub — the piracy network for academic journals — is either the Robin Hood of academic publishing or a parasite preying upon for-profit publishers. A lawsuit filed by Elsevier, the publishing giant, led to the suspension of one of Sci-Hub’s most prominent domain names last week, but the network continues to allow millions of academic articles to be downloaded around the world.What do the authors of the papers think? Do they feel they’ve been ripped off? Are they flattered? After Science revealed the 10 most-downloaded papers on Sci-Hub, The Chronicle spoke to three authors whose articles appeared on the list.There’s no obvious formula for a widely downloaded Sci-Hub article. Topics of popular papers range from wind-turbine tests to iron deficiencies. Publication dates of the 10 articles range from 2000 to 2015, but most of them were published more than five years ago. Some of the papers are kept behind journal paywalls; others, published through open-access models, are already available free.That might raise eyebrows: Why bother to pirate material that is already available free? For some Sci-Hub users, who see piracy of paywalled articles as a financial necessity, it could be the convenience of finding every paper in one place. But many academics whose work has been widely downloaded on the site say they’re not sure what it all means — or whether the popularity of their work on Sci-Hub is anything more than an interesting footnote.Jordan S. Pober, Yale UniversityUntil last month, Jordan S. Pober had never heard of Sci-Hub.In Context: Are Researchers Missing What Matters Most?Download a booklet that is a starting point for discussion of the mission of university research. Inside you’ll find a special package of stories by Paul Basken, a senior reporter at The Chronicle, who examines how scientists can turn their work into societal solutions. Already have an account? Log InMr. Pober, a professor of pathology and translational medicine at Yale University, first learned of the piracy site when a colleague forwarded him an email about the Science article. “It’s flattering, but it’s a dubious honor,” he says. Mr. Pober was one of several authors contacted by The Chronicle who wasn’t aware of the site’s existence until recently. At 67 years old, he generally uses only university libraries to gain access to journal articles. “It’s a generational thing,” he says of Sci-Hub’s success.His article, “Efficient Gene Disruption in Cultured Primary Human Endothelial Cells by CRISPR/Cas9,” was published in the American Heart Association’s Circulation Research journal in the summer of 2015. Mr. Pober’s research determined that the endothelial cells, which are derived from umbilical-cord blood and are non-cancer-forming, could be divided by the genome-editing approach and cloned. This method, he says, is an important advancement in cell therapy and tissue engineering. The paper was downloaded just over 2,000 times from September 2015 through February 2016, making it the ninth-most-downloaded paper on Sci-Hub during that time.What makes the paper so popular? Mr. Pober says he knew his work had gained attention, just not with online pirates. The research was something of a real-world hit too: It was promoted by Circulation Research as one of its 10 most-read articles of 2015, and Mr. Pober says the journal temporarily offered it to the public free.Mr. Pober says the article’s subject matter is likely to have played a big role in its popularity. “In biology there has been this technology revolution of being able to manipulate cells genetically by the use of CRISPR/Cas9, but there have been limitations of this approach,” he says.Mr. Pober says he doesn’t mind that many people download his paper free since he didn’t make money from its publication. In fact, like most academics, he paid to submit his article.”I’m torn in the sense I think it would be better for the science community if findings were made freely available,” he says. “But I’m not sure how to sustain functions of society journals.”Parwiz Abrahimi, Yale UniversityMr. Pober might not have known what to make of his appearance on the Science list, but Parwiz Abrahimi, a medical Ph.D. student in Mr. Pober’s research lab and a co-author of the CRISPR paper, was excited when he came across the article by chance. To him, the paper’s popularity on Sci-Hub was “an honor.” And it made sense: “CRISPR papers are hot right now,” he says.As a researcher attempting to get his work disseminated to as many people as possible, he feels Sci-Hub is actually helping. “I never felt people were pirating my work,” he says. He has never used the piracy site, but he says he has many friends in Iran and Afghanistan for whom it is the only way to read many academic articles.Of course, not everyone who uses the piracy site does so out of that kind of need. Data retrieved by Science show that many downloads come from the United States, and many Americans using the site

Source: What Do the Authors of Sci-Hub’s Most-Downloaded Articles Think About Sci-Hub? – The Chronicle of Higher Education

When publishers lock away the results of research, it hurts us all. On this site, we’ll talk to people in all walks of life who need access to research but can’t get it because of restrictive publishing practices. Here are some of the people we’ll be talking to:

Source: Who needs access? You need access! | Public access to scientific research makes all our lives better

Clearly, two decades of negotiations, talks and diplomacy have led us nowhere. In my opinion, the time to be inclusive has come and passed. Publishers have opted to remain outside of the scholarly community and work against it, rather than with it. Actions of civil disobedience like those of Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan are a logical consequence of two decades of stalled negotiations and failed reform efforts.

Source: bjoern.brembs.blog » Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

Just as spring arrived last month in Iran, Meysam Rahimi sat down at his university computer and immediately ran into a problem: how to get the scientific papers he needed. He had to write up a research proposal for his engineering Ph.D. at Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran. His project straddles both operations management and behavioral economics, so Rahimi had a lot of ground to cover.

Source: Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone | Science | AAAS

Deeper thought and reflections will be much more evident in the many recent articles and posts I’ve linked to below. I’m also mostly concentrating on the most recent Sci-Hub flare up rather than older posts.

Source: The Sci-Hub story so far: Main event or sideshow? – Confessions of a Science Librarian

There is no question that Sci-Hub is illegal. They are keeping the site live despite a legal injunction. Elbaykan is happy to talk to the press and make specious legal arguments, but has never actually had the courage to show up in court. As the OA advocates, librarians, and publishers try to create a more open and collaborative environment, they should condemn this solution and realize the harm their silence will cause.

Source: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to OA | The Scholarly Kitchen

There’s been a lot of concern in some corners of the world about the Finch Report‘s preference for Gold open access, and the RCUK policy‘s similar leaning. Much of the complaining has focussed on the cost of Gold OA publishing: Article Processing Charges (APCs) are very offputting to researchers with limited budgets. I thought it would be useful to provide a page that I (and you) can link to when facing such concerns.This is long and (frankly) a bit boring. But I think it’s important and needs saying.

Source: What does it cost to publish a Gold Open Access article? | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz

**THIS BOOK IS NOT AVAILABLE IN NORTH AMERICA**

This book comprises a curated selection of Lorcan Dempsey’s blog posts that have offered thousands of readers valuable insights into libraries’ future. It shows where libraries have been in the last decade and where they’re heading now.

Source: The Network Reshapes the Library: Lorcan Dempsey on Libraries, Services and Networks

A few thoughts on Sci-Hub. I was just quoted in the NYTimes saying that “Unlawful [open] access gives open access a bad name.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/sunday/should-all-research-papers-be-free.html I’m already taking heat from friends and allies for saying it. But I also said more on the same subject that was not quoted. I’ll clarify a bit here by providing some of what the NYT omitted. But I’m well aware that some friends and allies who disagree with the short formulation will also

Source: A few thoughts on Sci-Hub. I was just quoted in the NYTimes saying that…

We asked the spokesman of the illegal e-book website Sci-Hub about open access, the future of copyright, the money policy of Elsevier and other publishing houses and last, but not least Alexandra Elbakyan’s role as something of a Jeanne d´Arc of piracy. The interview was performed by our visiting author Manuel Bonik. Sci-Hub recently had…

Source: e-book piracy: interview with Alexandra Elbakyan from Sci-Hub

A saving grace for students across the world, Alexandra Elbakyan’s portal, Sci-Hub, pools millions of expensive academic papers published in online journals for free. At the center of a potentially multi-billion dollar court battle with US courts, she has vowed to continue her work. “There should be no obstacles to accessing knowledge, I believe,” she told RT in an email interview, echoing her earlier reference to Article 27 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights: that “everyone has the right

Source: EXCLUSIVE: Robin Hood neuroscientist behind Sci-Hub research-pirate site talks to RT — RT News

If a for-profit business cannot prosper without demanding huge amounts of free labor, then surely the business model needs reinventing. And if enough professors refuse to referee without compensation, the reinvention will begin.

Source: Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No

He says that many colleges have been targeted by Sci-Hub. In one case at Marquette, a professor received an email stating that he or she needed to update his or her university user name and password by following a link. Once on the site, which was actually in New Zealand, the faculty member typed in new credentials, which were then captured by what the publisher later linked to Sci-Hub.”Then you start seeing your downloads going to unusual locations or downloads that are occurring in huge quantities — thousands of downloads,” Mr. Sanchez says.Typically, the publisher notices such irregularities first, notifies the college, and tells it to shut down the problem quickly. At Marquette, additional layers of security were added, the IP addresses of the compromised accounts were given to the publisher, and the faculty member changed the user name and password within 24 hours. But, Mr. Sanchez says, “it puts us in a tough situation.”

Source: Librarians Find Themselves Caught Between Journal Pirates and Publishers – The Chronicle of Higher Education

The majority of academic papers are scarcely cited while a few others are highly cited. A large number of studies indicate that there are many factors influencing the number of citations. An actual re

Source: Factors affecting number of citations: a comprehensive review of the l

We asked the spokesman of the illegal e-book website Sci-Hub about open access, the future of copyright, the money policy of Elsevier and other publishing houses and last, but not least Alexandra Elbakyan’s role as something of a Jeanne d´Arc of piracy. The interview was performed by our visiting author Manuel Bonik.Sci-Hub recently had to change the domain, because the old one was confiscated after the administrator refused to delete all e-books from Elsevier. Sci-Hub is the biggest illegal source for

Source: e-book piracy: interview with Alexandra Elbakyan from Sci-Hub

Operators of Internet repositories that provide illicit free access to millions of research papers seem determined to keep up their services, despite being barred by an injunction.

A New York district court ruled on 28 October that online services such as Sci-Hub and the Library Genesis Project (Libgen) violate US copyright law. The court ruled in favour of academic publisher Elsevier, which in June filed a complaint against the main operators of the sites for unlawfully accessing and distributing its copyrighted papers.

Sci-Hub downloads articles by aping university IP addresses and stores them in a repository that now contains more than 46 million papers.

Access to the site’s web domain was suspended following the injunction. But Sci-Hub, which is advertised as a service “to remove all barriers in the way of science”, has since moved to a different domain. Its revamped site continues to provide unauthorized free access to millions of papers.

Other pirate services, including Libgen, which also allows users to freely download audiobooks, and BookFi, a free repository of more than 2 million books, have also resurfaced on different Internet domains.

Hide and seek

Sci-Hub had an average of 80,000 visitors per day before its previous domain was blocked, says Alexandra Elbakyan, a former neuroscientist who started the site in 2011. The number of users has since dropped to about 30,000 per day, she says.

It is just a matter of time until Sci-Hub’s new domain name, which is administered by a UK-based Internet company, will be suspended, thinks Eli Dourado, who researches Internet governance and intellectual property at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center in Arlington, Virginia.

But the site also has an alternative anonymous address that can be reached by users of the Tor network, a group of servers that encrypts Internet traffic and disguises its origins.  “I could see the site staying up quite a long time through the use of Tor,” Dourado says.

Elbakyan, who was born and educated in Kazakhstan and is now based in Russia, says she doesn’t think that reviving her site violates the New York court ruling, because Sci-Hub is not a US-based company, and she is not a US citizen or resident of New York. That is incorrect, as Sci-Hub infringes US copyright law simply by serving its content to US citizens, says Toby Butterfield, a lawyer with the firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz in New York.

In principle, foreigners can be fined by US courts, Dourado adds — but if they do not have any assets in the United States, there is no simple way for the government to collect the fines.

Copyright clash

“We are definitely not going to stop spreading the knowledge,” says Elbakyan, who believes that any limitation on the free distribution of scientific knowledge is unacceptable. She says she hopes that the case will raise awareness of a lack of access to relevant literature faced by many scientists.

In his October ruling, New York district judge Robert Sweet argued that “Elbakyan’s solution to the problems she identifies, simply making copyrighted content available for free via a foreign website, disserves the public interest”.

In a statement on the case made before the court ruling, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in Washington DC said: “Sci-Hub’s and Libgen’s scheme to reproduce and distribute copyrighted works poses a significant threat to book and journal publishing and to authors and scholarly societies reliant on the royalties derived from sales and subscription income.”  On concerns about lack of access for less privileged researchers, the AAP added that scientific publishers, including Elsevier, grant academic institutions in more than 100 developing countries free or very cheap access to scientific literature.

Sci-Hub’s approach has parallels with people who set up sites to illegally distribute music, notes Butterfield. “Scientific publishers are finding themselves in the same spot that record companies faced a few years ago,” he says. “It was only when iTunes and other services made it swift, easy and cheap to buy individual songs that people began turning away from infringement to get their music. So publishers, like record companies before them, have little choice but to get redress from blatant infringers in whatever ways the courts will allow.”

Asked for comment, an Elsevier spokesperson said that the lawsuit was supported by the wider publishing industry and referred Nature’s news team to the AAP.

Tom Allen, president of the AAP, says that his organization will use all available legal means to block access to pirated papers and that the group will continue to support Elsevier’s New York lawsuit. “We will continue to make domain administrators aware of the Sci-Hub enterprise, and urge all service providers to refrain from supporting the sites, which both the operator has admitted and the court found to be illegal,” Allen says.

Elsevier is not the only publisher whose copyrighted papers are available on Sci-Hub. Nature’s parent company – Springer Nature – is another; it says it does not wish to comment on the case. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of Nature’s research editorial team.)

Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2015.18876

Source: Pirate research-paper sites play hide-and-seek with publishers

Article Sharing Authors who publish in Elsevier journals can share their research by posting a free draft copy of their article to a repository or website. Researchers who have subscribed access to articles published by Elsevier can share too. There are some simple guidelines to follow, which vary depending on the article version you wish to share.

Source: Sharing

STM Consultation on Article Sharing

Introduction

To gain a better understanding of the current landscape of article sharing through scholarly collaboration networks and sites, STM conducted an open consultation across the scholarly community in early 2015. The aim of this consultation was to facilitate discussion by all stakeholders in order to establish a core set of principles that clarify how, where and what content should be shared using these networks and sites, and to improve this experience for all. Our hope for this initiative is for publishers and scholarly collaboration networks to work together to facilitate sharing, which benefits researchers, institutions, and society as a whole.

Source: SCN Article Sharing Consultation 2015 – STM

Two weeks ago, the entire editorial board of the journal Lingua quit and announced they would launch a new journal named Glossa. Lingua’s executive editor Johan Rooryck said the reason for the resignation was that Elsevier, which publishes Lingua, did not comply with the editors’ request to turn the journal into an open access publication. Lingua has existed since 1949 and is among the top-3 linguistic journals on Google Scholar. The Lingua/Glossa case is a good opportunity to reflect upon our understanding of open access.

Source: Is our understanding of Open Access too shortsighted? Rethinking publishing infrastructure and ownership.

In januari van dit jaar heb ik een blogpost geschreven over het aandeel e-books op het aantal uitleningen.Ik merk nu pas dat ik het helemaal verkeerd berekend heb. Ik heb destijds de e-books vergeleken met alle uitleningen. Fout!Ik ga nu alleen uit van het aantal uitgeleende boeken: 72.382.000 fysieke boeken. Volgens de gegevens waren er in totaal 826.557 e-books uitgeleend (exclusief het kleine aantal van de E-book Selectie en de Eregalerij).Volgens niet meer beschikbare bron waren 1,5 miljoen e-books uit de Vakantiebieb 2014 gedownload. Dan kom je uiteindelijk op 2.326.557 e-books over 2014.En dan gaan we rekenen. In totaal zijn er 75.535.114 boeken uitgeleend in de Nederlandse bibliotheken. Fysiek en digitaal. Dan komt het aandeel e-books op 3,08% uit, inclusief de Vakantiebieb.Halen we de Vakantiebieb er vanaf, dan is het percentage 1,13%. 826.557 e-books op het aantal van 73.208.557 boeken.Gaan we het omdraaien, dan blijkt dus dat van de uitgeleende boeken er respectievelijk 96,92% en 98,87% fysiek uitgeleend werd.

Source: Patrick 23 Dingen: E-books een succes in bibliotheken? De cijfers (deel 2)

In recent years, low-cost booksellers have proliferated on the web. But how does a company that’ll sell you a book for a penny make a profit?

Source: A Penny for Your Books

 

Operations like Thriftbooks step in and buy these landfill-bound books, sight unseen, for around 10 cents a pound. Thriftbooks has 10 warehouses across the country, each with its own name. Ward says each of them is “about the size of your typical Walmart,” somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 square feet. The enterprise is still largely a human operation: Between 15 and 18 people at each warehouse sift through the truckloads of books, sending more than 80 percent of the material immediately to the recycling plant. (Hey, it’s better than the dump.) That 80 percent may include stuff that’s obviously garbage: old three-ring binders, notebooks, half of a Bible. Anything that might possibly be sellable is scanned into the company’s database.

Discover Books, another major used bookseller on Amazon, is also based in the Seattle area. Unlike Thriftbooks, Discover Books relies on automated scanners to enter books into its system, which can handle more than 60 books per minute. “If there’s any history of that book online, our system will pick it up,” says Tyler Hincy, Discover Books’ vice president of marketing.

Each company takes pains to pick out any rare books that might be difficult to scan automatically. The systems rely on barcodes and International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs), relatively recent innovations in the history of book publishing. Thriftbooks has a special “vintage” team dedicated to picking out rare, older books, trained to recognized first editions. Discover Books relies on its regular scanning system to pick out potentially valuable vintage books.

From that point on, it’s all about software. Say a new copy of “A Visit From the Goon Squad” is scanned into the database. The software races to figure out how many copies are in stock, how many copies have been sold, how the price has changed over time, what the current average, high and low prices are on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Half.com, AbeBooks, eBay and Alibris, and decides: Do we want this book? If the software’s algorithm decides that this is a book that can be sold and is worth selling, it will be stocked and automatically listed in the online marketplace where it has the best chance to be sold. This all happens tens of thousands of times per day.

This is a game of pennies and lightning-quick readjustment. Buyers have no particular loyalty to any of these sellers; it’s all about what’s cheapest and what’s listed first. Each company, seeking an edge, builds and zealously guards its own software. Ward was the lead developer on Thriftbooks’ software before he became president. He has 12 developers, a full-time data scientist and two financial analysts on his staff. Discover Books’ software is known in-house as Trim2. “We have software that we’ve spent years and a lot of money on,” Hincy says, “tweaking to be as optimal as possible to give that book the best opportunity to be sold.”

Elsevier journals — some facts Update: figures now in from Imperial. See below.Further update: figures in from Nottingham too.Further update: figures now in from Oxford.Final update: figures in from LSE.

Source: Elsevier journals — some facts | Gowers’s Weblog

The dark web actually has promise. In essence, it’s the World Wide Web as it was originally envisioned.

Looking beyond the scaremongering, however, the dark web actually has promise. In essence, it’s the World Wide Web as it was originally envisioned: a space beyond the control of individual states, where ideas can be exchanged freely without fear of being censored. As countries continue to crack down on the web, its dark counterpart is only going to become more relevant as a place to discuss and connect with each other. We shouldn’t let the myth of the dark web ruin that potential.

Source: The Dark Web as You Know It Is a Myth

So, let’s say I’m doing research on issues related to privilege and inequality. Google Scholar tells me there’s a an article on stratification in higher education that’s looks interesting. Here’ another one on how postcolonial theory can inform resistance to neoliberalism in universities. And ooh, this looks really interesting: digital inequality and participation in the political process. How great that academics turn their methods and theories to solving the problem of inequality. Too bad most people won’

Source: Checking Our Library Privilege | Library Babel Fish | Inside Higher Ed

Freedom Technologists: Digital Activism and Political Change in the 21st Century (working title), Chapter 2, Freedom Technologists

This is the twenty-fourth post in the freedom technologists series.
See also Directory of freedom technologists 

This selection of 30 key texts is drawn from a bibliography published here on 7 September 2015 — and subsequently updated — in which I brought together a large set of (mostly academic) references on a specific category of political actor that I am calling ‘freedom technologists’. By this term I refer to those tech-minded individuals, groups and organisations with a keen interest in the democratic and emancipatory potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Freedom technologists combine technological and political abilities to pursue greater Internet and democratic freedoms, which they regard as being inextricably entwined (Postill 2014). Far from being techno-utopians or deluded ‘slacktivists’ (Morozov, 2013, Skoric, 2012), I find that most freedom technologists are in fact techno-pragmatists, that is, people who take a very practical view of the limits and possibilities of new technologies for political change. This reading list is part of current research towards Chapter 2 of my forthcoming book Freedom Technologists: Digital Activism and Political Change in the 21st Century (working title).

 

24. Freedom technologists: a short reading list

IPAF’s survey also reveals that the proportion of consumers using streaming services grew from 26 per cent last year to 32 per cent this year.Of those, 33 per cent were taking advantage of some form of free trial and 66 per cent planned to pay for the service after their trial expired.That has helped drive down the proportion of consumers aged 18 to 24 engaged in piracy, from 54 per cent last year to 46 per cent this year.For consumers aged 25 to 34 the rate has fallen from 48 per cent to 40 per cent. Piracy rates for consumers aged 35 to 49 remain steady.Overall, piracy rates across all age groups have fallen from 29 per cent to 25 per cent.About a third of those pirating less frequently said it was due to the emergence of legal alternatives. About 16 per cent said it was because they feared getting caught or downloading a computer virus.Ms Flekser warned that the biggest challenge continued to be a lack of education and unwillingness by some consumers to perceive online piracy as theft.However, she said recent changes to the legal and regulatory environment around online piracy were starting to have an impact on consumer perceptions.Ms Flekser was referring to the court bid by the film studio behind Dallas Buyers Club to force iiNet to reveal the identities of alleged infringers and new federal laws allowing copyright holders to apply for court orders to block websites promoting copyright infringement.

Source: Netflix no panacea to piracy: IPAF | The Australian

A long piece on pirate libraries’ role in the knowledge economy (in Dutch).
Read the rest of this entry »

This Kat sometimes wonders whether every big copyright dispute these days seems to have a major political or philosophical subtext to it — an example of which can be found below. From guest contributor Emma Perot comes this appraisal of a dispute (reported on TorrentFreak here) between a giant publisher of valuable and useful scholarly material on the one hand, and those who seek access to that same information on the other. Writes Emma: In a Robin Hood-like manner, Sci-Hub.org has been providing academic articles to researchers in the science and technology community free of charge since 2011. Now Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers, is seeking to put an end to this open access model. Elsevier publishes over 2,000 journals and has an income of more than US$1 billion. Wielding its dominance in the research community, Elsevier charges US$30 to access an article. This is a staggering price when you consider how many articles are needed in order to undertake significant research. In the UK, universities generally pay subscriber fees so that students and staff can access journals. However, this is not the case for everyone. Alexandra Elbakyan is one researcher who could not access Elsevier’s journals because the University of Kazakhstan did not subscribe to the service. In order to progress with her research project, she found forums that facilitated the sharing of articles for free. Elbakyan realised that there were many others like herself who were jumping through hoops for their research. From this necessity sprang the creation of Sci-Hub.org which collects journal articles and makes them available to the public without charge. The problem that SciHub is now facing is that the copyright of many of the articles they have published vests in Elsevier. As stipulated by the terms and conditions of publication, authors assign their exclusive rights (s.106 U.S. Copyright Act 1976) to the publisher. As such, Elsevier is entitled to charge whatever access fee they desire, or to restrict access all together. By reproducing these articles without Elsevier’s permission, Sci-Hub is infringing Elsevier’s copyright and is likely to lose the case against it. Nonetheless, Elbakyan is insistent on fighting for continued open access as she believes that “Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation”. The author is sympathetic to Elbakyan’s stance and believes that her moral argument is compelling, if not viable under the current capitalist regime. The history of copyright protection reveals an idealistic beginning which better accords with Elbakyan’s philosophy. Copyright protection in the U.S has a foundation in s.8 of the U.S. Constitution which states that “The Congress shall have power … to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” This clause underpins copyright with utilitarianism by providing an incentive of control to authors. The purpose of this control is to encourage (but not guarantee) the creation of products which will contribute to the growth of society. The main criticism of the incentive theory is that people create works even in the absence of intellectual property protection. This seems apparent on the facts before us as authors who publish with Elsevier surrender their copyright protection at the first possible opportunity. Even if the control incentive (there are many other forms of incentive such as reputation building, money, and pure interest) were necessary to encourage research, the utilitarian philosophy does not bode well in a capitalist society where publishers such as Elsevier operate to make a profit rather than to further the altruistic goal of disseminating information. Pay wall or ordinary wall? They’re all the same to Hubert Different approaches can be taken to overcome the barriers presented by legal paywalls. One such approach is to publish in independent, open access journals. The problem with this is that researchers want the benefit of the prestige associated with well-established, peer-reviewed journals. While this may seem like an egotistical issue, researchers spend years trying to develop a reputation of excellence in order to be presented with more opportunities for advancement. Publishing in a well-respected journal ensures quality control standards have been met, thus validating the article. This is particularly so in the science world where research often requires funding to access lab facilities and equipment. Alternatively, researchers could boycott publishers such as Elsevier with the aim of reducing access fees. The Cost of Knowledge, which encourages publishing in open access journals, is currently doing this and has attracted over 15,000 signatures to date. Signatories agree not to publish or perform editorial work for Elsevier’s journals. The success

Source: The IPKat: Paywalls and Robin Hoods: the tale of Elsevier and Sci-Hub.org

The Kindle, which was joined by other devices like Kobo’s e-reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble and the iPad, drew millions of book buyers to e-readers, which offered seamless, instant purchases. Publishers saw huge spikes in digital sales during and after the holidays, after people received e-readers as gifts.But those double- and triple-digit growth rates plummeted as e-reading devices fell out of fashion with consumers, replaced by smartphones and tablets. Some 12 million e-readers were sold last year, a steep drop from the nearly 20 million sold in 2011, according to Forrester Research. The portion of people who read books primarily on e-readers fell to 32 percent in the first quarter of 2015, from 50 percent in 2012, a Nielsen survey showed.Higher e-book prices may also be driving readers back to paper.As publishers renegotiated new terms with Amazon in the past year and demanded the ability to set their own e-book prices, many have started charging more. With little difference in price between a $13 e-book and a paperback, some consumers may be opting for the print version.On Amazon, the paperback editions of some popular titles, like “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt, are several dollars cheaper than their digital counterparts. Paperback sales rose by 8.4 percent in the first five months of this year, the Association of American Publishers reported.The tug of war between pixels and print almost certainly isn’t over. Industry analysts and publishing executives say it is too soon to declare the death of the digital publishing revolution. An appealing new device might come along. Already, a growing number of people are reading e-books on their cellphones. Amazon recently unveiled a new tablet for $50, which could draw a new wave of customers to e-books (the first-generation Kindle cost $400).It is also possible that a growing number of people are still buying and reading e-books, just not from traditional publishers. The declining e-book sales reported by publishers do not account for the millions of readers who have migrated to cheap and plentiful self-published e-books, which often cost less than a dollar.At Amazon, digital book sales have maintained their upward trajectory, according to Russell Grandinetti, senior vice president of Kindle. Last year, Amazon, which controls some 65 percent of the e-book market, introduced an e-book subscription service that allows readers to pay a flat monthly fee of $10 for unlimited digital reading. It offers more than a million titles, many of them from self-published authors.Some publishing executives say the world is changing too quickly to declare that the digital tide is waning.“Maybe it’s just a pause here,” said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “Will the next generation want to read books on their smartphones, and will we see another burst come?”

Source: The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead – The New York Times

BookwormBookworm is a simple and powerful way to visualize trends in repositories of digitized texts.

Source: Bookworm

A draft report commissioned by the Society of Chief Librarians (SCL) has said £20m should be invested in digital services over the next three years to prevent libraries from becoming “soup kitchens for the written word.”The report, entitled ‘Essential Digital Infrastructure for Public Libraries in England’ and conducted by Bibliocommons, a commercial provider of library software systems, says libraries are “pushing” users away by their lack of investment in digital technology.However, library campaigners including former Waterstones boss Tim Coates has criticised the draft report as “vexacious” for portraying libraries as “no longer being predominantly about books.”The draft document outlines the possibilities of digital development for public libraries in England and is intended to help libraries identify the changes to technology needed to “provide leverage and cohesiveness” for library services, and to meet the demands of users who journey “online and off” to the institutions.The official report will be published in October.

Source: Lack of digital library investment ‘pushing’ users away | The Bookseller

Kids today with their selfies and their Snapchats and their love of literature.Millennials, like each generation that was young before them, tend to attract all kinds of ire from their elders for being superficial, self-obsessed, anti-intellectuals. But a study out today from the Pew Research Center offers some vindication for the younger set. Millennials are reading more books than the over-30 crowd, Pew found in a survey of more than 6,000 Americans.Some 88 percent of Americans younger than 30 said they read a book in the past year compared with 79 percent of those older than 30. At the same time, American readers’ relationship with public libraries is changing—with younger readers less likely to see public libraries as essential in their communities.

Source: Millennials Are Out-Reading Older Generations – The Atlantic

The creator of Popcorn Time, software which lets people watch movies illegally online, has chosen to reveal his identity and speak out about his experiences developing the site.TorrentFreak reports that 29-year-old designer Federico Abad from Argentina revealed his identity in an interview with Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv.Abad explained that he was inspired to create Popcorn Time because internet speeds in Argentina are so bad and because major movies often reach Argentinian cinemas months after they are released in the US.Developer Abad said that he recruited other people around the world using Twitter and Facebook. They worked overnight to create Popcorn Time and eventually “had concentration problems at work because of the project.” Abad said that he worked so hard on the project that his girlfriend left him.Popcorn Time let users illegally stream movies online for free. But it was shut down by Abad in 2014 after authorities put pressure on the site. Since then, other similar sites have launched that that use the same software. There’s even a Popcorn Time app.Popcorn TimeAbad said that he decided to shut down the project when he noticed that a lawyer working for Warner Brothers had viewed LinkedIn profiles belonging to developers working on Popcorn Time.“We do not know how, but he had managed to track us down. We were quite put out. We thought it was a scare tactic,” he said. “And we were frightened. None of us were anonymous anymore. They knew where we worked and where we lived.”

Source: The creator of piracy service ‘Popcorn Time’ has revealed his identity | Business Insider

So I’d been asked to write a book about whatever I wanted, and this editor didn’t even know whether I’d written anything before. It didn’t matter. It would sell its 300 copies regardless. Not to people with an interest in reading the book, but to librarians who would put it on a shelf and then, a few years later, probably bury it in a storeroom.Most academics get these requests. A colleague was recently courted by an editor who, after confessing they only published expensive hardbacks (at around £200), explained that this was an opportunity for my colleague to enhance his academic record. He was told he could give them pretty much anything, like an old report, or some old articles.“I can’t believe anyone would write a book that would be too expensive for anyone to buy,” the colleague told me over the phone. “Just to add a line to your cv.”Another colleague, on discovering his published book was getting widespread attention but was too expensive to buy, tried to get the publishers to rush out a cheaper paperback version. They ignored his request.These may sound like stories of concern to academics alone. But the problem is this: much of the time that goes into writing these books is made possible through taxpayers’ money. And who buys these books? Well, university libraries – and they, too, are paid for by taxpayers. Meanwhile, the books are not available for taxpayers to read – unless they have a university library card.In the US, taxpayers are said to be spending $139bn a year on research, and in the UK, £4.7bn. Too much of that money is disappearing into big pockets.So what are the alternatives? We could stop publishing these books altogether – which may be advisable in a time of hysterical mass publication . Or we publish only with decent publishers, who believe that books are meant to be read and not simply profited from. And if it’s only a matter of making research available, then of course there’s open source publishing, which most academics are aware of by now.So why don’t academics simply stay away from the greedy publishers? The only answer I can think of is vanity.

Source: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy | Higher Education Network | The Guardian

These are heady days for supporters of open access (OA), who argue that the results of publicly-funded research should be made freely available to all, not just those who can afford subscriptions to the scientific journals in which they are published.Earlier this year, the World Bank announced that it would adopt an open access policy for all its research outputs and “knowledge products”, which will be entered into a central repository to be made freely accessible on the internet.Last month, the British government said that, in future, it will require all the research it funds in British universities to be made openly accessible, with authors paying publishers a fee (funded out of research grants) to make this possible – a position already adopted by the influential Wellcome Trust. The move was rapidly followed by an announcement from the European commission that the same rule will apply to all commission-funded research.The UK’s Department of International Development recently announced all its research will be made freely available. And publishers such as BioMed Central are pioneering open access journals in developing regions such as Africa.

Source: Developing world gains open access to science research, but hurdles remain | Global development | The Guardian

But an article published in March by the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology found it was starting to occur, albeit slowly.“Various text-sharing platforms distribute tens of millions of documents online for free,” the study found. “However, these are still unknown to most of academia. Only a handful of articles acknowledge their existence in short passages, and no systematic study of the available collections has been undertaken until now.”

Source: Australian academics seek to challenge ‘web of avarice’ in scientific publishing | Science | The Guardian

Pirate e-book libraries enable historically unprecedented access to the best of scholarly knowledge, which CEE countries are definitely taking advantage of. Who is using these libraries and for what reasons? Unique data on pirate library use helps answer these questions.

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“I think the idea of intellectual property will naturally have to be modified to accommodate the way people exchange ideas and music and information. “The old copyright model has expired. It can no longer exclusively control music.”

Source: Steve Albini: The music industry is a parasite… and copyright is dead – Music Business Worldwide

Hello,We represent the Saint Joseph University of Beirut, Lebanon and we would like to kindly ask you to forbid access to both our IPs (we are sure you can find them otherwise contact us to provide them to you) to the website libgen.org.We have included you in our restricted list in the institution firewall, but students have found ways to bypass it. We hope you could make it radical from your side.Please note that many students have been severely punished for using this website. We are only asking for this, in order to spare the others.We pay yearly subscriptions to many Editors and hope to stay “legal”. We appreciate all your efforts and respect them. We hope to come to an understanding together.Thank you very much.Hoping to hear from you very soon.PS: Move this thread to where it should be if needed, we couldn’t find an appropriate thread for such a request.

Source: Students accessing LG and fair use doctrine

Science departments in Russia’s universities are facing a crisis of information following the decision last week of a Western publisher to lock them out of access to thousands of unique scientific journals and magazines because the government can no longer afford to foot the bill.

According to a spokesperson from the Russian Ministry of Education and Science, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, one of Russia’s state agencies, which is responsible for the development of national science, is unable to pay for subscriptions for scientific journals and magazines published by Springer due to a sharp devaluation of the Russian ruble this year.

Yriy Popov, a former associate professor of the Voronezh State University of Building Technologies and a well-known Russian scientist in the field of building science and technologies, warned that, in addition to Springer, there is a threat that the Russian scientific community may lose access to the magazines of other Western scientific publishers, such as Elsevier.

Matthias Aicher, head of Springer for Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, has confirmed that the company closed the access to scientific publications for Russian universities and research institutes from 12 May.

According to Aicher, the Russian government failed to pay for the subscription for 2014 to the amount of €890,000 (US$1 million).

Vladimir Fortov, head of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said the current problem is very serious as scientific periodicals have so far been the main way for Russian scientists to get information regarding basic and applied sciences.

Fortov said: “Thanks to these journals, Russian scientists are aware of the latest developments and research in global science. Failure of further subscriptions means that Russian scientists will be isolated from global science.

“Springer is a very serious publishing house, and the loss of access to its journals will be a major blow for Russian science, including university science.”

He has not ruled out the possibility that this issue may be resolved after the intervention of the national government. At the same time, according to some sources close to the Russian Academy of Sciences, representatives of some leading Russian universities are considering signing a petition to the Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev asking him to help resolve the problem.

In 2014 the annual subscription for Springer publications in Russia was set at €3.2 million (US$3.6 million).

According to an official spokesperson of Springer, the company extended free subscription to Russian science several times, but eventually due to existing debts decided to close it for an indefinite period.

In the meantime, representatives of the press service of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research said that the agency could not use the same model as before the economic crisis in Russia in December 2014 to January 2015 and devaluation of the local currency.

The seriousness of the current situation is confirmed by recent statements of Alexander Hlunov, board member of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.

He said that Springer sets prices for its journals in Euros but devaluation of the Russian currency has meant that the price in rubles has doubled.

“The Russian budget currently has no available funds for these projects. We currently cannot afford such costs but if there is an increase of scientific spending in the Russian federal budget, this decision could be revised.”

According to Yriy Popov, many Russian scientists and university professors from different areas of science have used Springer journals as guidelines in their research activities.

Source: Universities denied access to West’s science journals – University World News

Today in Science, members of the Facebook data science team released a provocative study about adult Facebook users in the US “who volunteer their ideological affiliation in their profile.” The study “quantified the extent to which individuals encounter comparatively more or less diverse” hard news “while interacting via Facebook’s algorithmically ranked News Feed.”*

Source: multicast » Blog Archive » The Facebook “It’s Not Our Fault” Study

The Man Who Broke the Music Business

The dawn of online piracy.

By Stephen Witt

via The Man Who Broke the Music Business – The New Yorker.

Newsmax reports that according to according to KRC Research about 64 percent of Americans familiar with Snowden hold a negative opinion of him. However 56 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 have a positive opinion of Snowden which contrasts sharply with older age cohorts. Among those aged 35-44, some 34 percent have positive attitudes toward him. For the 45-54 age cohort, the figure is 28 percent, and it drops to 26 percent among Americans over age 55, U.S. News reported. Americans overall say by plurality that Snowden has done "more to hurt" U.S. national security (43 percent) than help it (20 percent). A similar breakdown was seen with views on whether Snowden helped or hurt efforts to combat terrorism, though the numbers flip on whether his actions will lead to greater privacy protections. "The broad support for Edward Snowden among Millennials around the world should be a message to democratic countries that change is coming," says Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "They are a generation of digital natives who don’t want government agencies tracking them online or collecting data about their phone calls." Opinions of millennials are particularly significant in light of January 2015 findings by the U.S. Census Bureau that they are projected to surpass the baby-boom generation as the United States’ largest living generation this yea

via Except For Millennials, Most Americans Dislike Snowden – Slashdot.

Then there are the quieter exclusives; already-released music that appears on one service but not another because of the vagaries of record-label licensing. I had considered switching to Tidal permanently after signing up last week, because the interface is nearly identical to Spotify (what’s missing are social-listening capabilities and a desktop app, though it’s possible both features are on their way), and because I like many of the artists who co-own the platform. But I keep running into gaps in its library; Grimes’s excellent 2012 album Visions, for example, and the well-reviewed new release from Jlin, are on Spotify but not Tidal. So what am I supposed to do? Pay for two services? Make up the important gaps by buying albums on iTunes, even though it’s not clear which gaps will be permanent? These aren’t the most pressing problems in the world, but they are, at least, more pronounced inconveniences than the ones streaming consumers have faced in the past few years.

When the new Beats arrives, this state of affairs may get more hectic. In an interview with Billboard, Jay Z made clear that Jimmy Iovine, the legendary record executive who now works with Apple, had been competing with Tidal for celebrity-musician endorsements. This might explain why big names like Taylor Swift and Drake didn’t join their friends Nicki Minaj and Madonna at last week’s press conference; it’s possible they’re aligned with Beats instead. Apple’s huge market reach and deep pockets also means that record companies have another party to negotiate distribution rights with, which gives labels power to ask for more favorable deals. It seems likely that this will lead to the various services’ catalogues becoming patchier, perhaps fluctuating over time à la Netflix’s Friends-one-month-then-gone-the-next offerings. (Probably not as dramatically, though; it’s in labels’ interest, generally, to have their music as widely available as possible.)

via With Tidal, Beyonce and Rihanna Prove That the Golden Age of Streaming Is Over — The Atlantic.

anonymity

notes from Paula Marie Helm’s talk on “On the Relationship between Addiction, Autonomy and Anonymity”.

Anonymity can help to regain formal autonomy.

1 – works as a crutch to overcome fear
2 – serves as a protection for the collective, it safeguards common values so they will not be corrupted by ego-driven individuals
3 – a performative practice that shapes personalities. anon is an educational and therapeutic instrument, as it teaches people to distance themselves form vain, pride and ego-centrism, and helps them to be more social and less selfish.

Traditional television watching is declining faster than ever as streaming services become a mainstream feature in American homes, according to new research by Nielsen.

Adults watched an average of four hours and 51 minutes of live TV each day in the fourth quarter of 2014, down 13 minutes from the same quarter of 2013, according to Nielsen’s fourth-quarter 2014 Total Audience Report. Viewing was down six minutes between the fourth quarter of 2013 and 2012. And between 2012 and 2011, viewing time actually increased for live TV.

At the same time, more homes turned to online video, with 40 percent of U.S. homes subscribing to a streaming service such as Netflix, Amazon Instant Video or Hulu compared with 36 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to Nielsen. Netflix is by far the most popular streaming service, in 36 percent of all U.S. homes, and Amazon Instant Video is in 13 percent of homes.

The trends have rattled the entertainment industry, with broadcast and cable networks scrambling to take on new competitors on the Web. Cable networks have seen steep ratings declines, which got much worse in the last six months of 2014. Cable ratings among adults fell 9 percent in 2014, three times the rate of decline over 2013, according to Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Moffett Nathanson research.

“It’s hard to ignore our belief that technology is disrupting viewer consumption of linear network programming,” Nathanson wrote in a recent research note.

In response, companies such as HBO, NBC and CBS are launching their own streaming services. The moves could unleash a fast demise of the cable and satellite industries that have fed TV networks with licensing fees.

Television is still king, with viewers of all ages getting the vast majority of their video entertainment and news from live programs and using time-shifted services such as DVRs. But even older viewers — the stalwarts of traditional TV — are spending less time watching live TV and programs saved on DVRs.

Between 2012 and 2014, viewers ages 50 through 64 watched one hour and 12 minutes less of traditional TV each week; they increased viewing of videos over the Internet by 22 minutes. Viewers ages 35 through 49 watched two hours and five minutes less of traditional TV each week and increased viewing of online videos by 35 minutes.

via Americans are moving faster than ever away from traditional TV – The Washington Post.

Welcome to Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries; Valiant Entertainment for Archer & Armstrong, Bloodshot, Harbinger, Shadowman, and X-O Manowar; Hugh Howey’s Silo Saga; Barry Eisler’s John Rain novels; Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines series; and The Foreworld Saga by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Mark Teppo, Eric Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, and Cooper Moo. Licenses for more Worlds are on the way.

via What Is Kindle Worlds?.

New record company figures out of France suggest that artists receive just 68 cents from every €9.99 monthly music streaming subscription – as major labels keep hold of 73% of payouts from the likes of Spotify.

French recorded music trade body SNEP, whose members include Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music,  ran a recent study with Ernst & Young to discover where money paid by a subscriber to the likes of Spotify or Deezer ultimately ends up.

As you can see below, in terms of the turnover that these platforms generate, the major labels (‘producteurs’) take home the lion’s share, pulling in an average of €4.56-per-subscriber every month after tax.

In terms of the total subscription payment, that’s a 46% share of the spoils.

However, further analysis from MBW gives a more interesting split: who takes home what from the revenues paid out by streaming companies to music rights-holders.

If SNEP’s figures are correct, €6.24 of every €9.99 subscription is paid to music rights-holders – that’s what’s left after tax and the digital platforms’ fee.

That would means the labels keep 73% of payouts from Spotify/Deezer etc.

They’re followed by writers/publishers with a 16% share, and then artists – mostly paid by their labels – who get 11%.

Screen shot 2015-02-03 at 16.24.46

Here’s how that €9.99 turnover payout share looks when you divide it up by percentage – both in terms of total revenue, and the recipients of the €6.24 payout by Spotify/Deezer etc.

Majors1 Majors2

How can the majors justify taking home such a huge chunk? Well, SNEP and E&Y’s research doesn’t stop there: they also estimate how much each party brings home in net pre-tax profit.

That means scoping how much major labels, publishers and digital platforms spend on costs – including marketing, making and/or distributing the music in the first place.

Here things get debatable: the net income of labels and digital platforms is, in SNEP/E&Y’s eyes, estimated at just 5% of total revenue.

That, in itself, will be a highly contested figure; many managers would argue that a 95% margin of cost doesn’t ring true on digital platforms devoid of packaging, breakages and returns.

Applying the 5% profit margin to SNEP’s figures changes the percentages of ‘take home’ money quite dramatically, as you can see below.

SNEP and E&Y calculate that labels earn €0.26 net profit for each subscription, while digital platforms earn just €0.10 per €9.99.

These tiny profit margins – if at all accurate – go some way to explaining why even the biggest streaming services find turning a profit no easy task.

It’s also the exact reason why managers want more streaming cash for their artists… and why major labels say they can’t pay it.

Profit streaming

 

Major labels keep 73% of Spotify premium payouts – report – Music Business Worldwide.

Overall, the publishing industry is not really concerned with eBook piracy. Many of the top companies such as HarperCollins, Hachette, S&S and Penguin have told me that piracy is a minor blip on the radar and does not hamper sales to any discernible degree. They all admit it is an extreme minority of tech savvy individuals and statistically people who pirate eBooks tend to be the biggest purchasers of digital content. There has even been some notable authors such as Tim Ferris that harnessed the power of Bitorrent to promote his book, the 4 Hour Chef. He recently said “Torrent conversion is NUTS. Of 210,000 downloads earlier this week, more than 85,000 clicked through “Support the Author” to the book’s Amazon page. We all had to triple and quadruple check that to believe it.

via There will be 700 Million Pirated e-Books in 2018.

And if CDs are truly dead, then digital music sales are lying in the adjacent grave. Both categories are down double-digits in the last year, with iTunes sales diving at least 13 percent.

via Digital music sales on iTunes and beyond are now fading as fast as CDs. – The Atlantic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Universal Music claims that a private company providing commissary services to prisons across the US is selling inmates pirated music in the form of mixtapes, and it wants the courts to stop it.

via Pirated music infiltrating US prisons, record label says | Ars Technica.

How Amazon’s Ebook Subscriptions Are Changing the Writing Industry – Slashdot.

First, a reality check. How big and dangerous is the phenomenon? PageFair, a startup-based in Dublin, Ireland, comes up with some facts. Here are key elements drawn from a 17-pages PDF document available here.

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via The Rise of AdBlock Reveals A Serious Problem in the Advertising Ecosystem | Monday Note.

As former CIA officer John Stockwell observed both large corporations and intelligence services are “vigorously committed to supporting the system.” Another former CIA officer, Philip Agee, explained this dynamic more bluntly, stating that the intelligence services are the “logical, necessary manifestations of a ruling class’s determination to retain power and privilege.” These assertions have been rigorously documented by activists like William Blum and filmmakers like Scott Noble.In a nutshell, US intelligence pursues the interests of private capital. Snowden indicated as much in an open letter to Brazil. He warned, in no uncertain terms, that the surveillance state has little to do with preventing terrorism and that instead it was focused on “economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation.” There’s no doubt whom this sort of activity actually benefits.

via Forgetting the Lesson of Cypherpunk History: Cryptography Is Underhanded.

How Consumers’ Content Preference Affects Cannibalization: An Empirical Analysis on E-book Market

via AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) – ICIS 2014 Proceedings: How Consumers’ Content Preference Affects Cannibalization: An Empirical Analysis on E-book Market.

How damaging is book piracy? It depends whom you ask. An author who’s just stumbled across an illicit copy of her work will be upset and full of anger. Over time these individual anecdotes of loss and outrage coalesce into generally received wisdom: that piracy is aggressive and pervasive and that it is bringing the book trade to its knees. Piracy is theft. Piracy is killing publishing. Piracy is taking food out of my children’s mouths. How can I stop it happening to me?

The answer is simple: you cannot stop piracy. The illegal copying of the stuff we’re now forced to call ‘content’ is an inevitable consequence of digital technology. Piracy is a side effect of the internet. But before we lose ourselves in helpless outrage, it’s worth asking a simple question: just how big a problem is it? The answer may surprise you.

Look at the data that’s available. Britain’s communications regulator Ofcom has now produced four waves of its commendably detailed Copyright Infringement Tracker. Anyone interested in piracy should read it in some detail.

The most recent survey covers March to May 2013 and it suggests that book piracy, as opposed to movie or music piracy, is a marginal activity that barely registers in the data. Only 1 per cent of British internet users downloaded a book illegally in the period surveyed, and only 10 per cent of all book downloads were illegal (these figures include legitimate free downloads from services such as Project Gutenberg).

To put it another way, 90 per cent of the online book trade is made up of paid-for retail or legitimate free services. Pause for a moment on that figure. Can the physical book trade, with its libraries and charity shops, boast a figure that high?

This is hardly a piratical takeover and the British book trade is not crumbling in the face of it. According to the Publishers Association, UK publishers’ sales across all formats in 2012 were up by 4 per cent on the previous year. Physical book sales fell by 1 per cent while digital sales surged by 66 per cent. Mapping the Ofcom numbers onto the Publishers Association figures suggests that in 2012 book piracy may have been equivalent to around £40 million (10 per cent of digital publishing revenues) out of total publishing revenues of £3.3 billion. And that assumes that each of those illegal downloads replaced a legitimate, purchased one.

Books, it is clear, are different to music and film, where illegal downloading is ten times more prevalent. Is there something different about the audience for books which makes piracy less of a problem? Yes. The book audience is older, it’s more affluent and it’s more female. Men download and share illegal material more than women; younger people download illegally more than older people. Older people, particularly those who are book readers, have the money to buy their entertainment legitimately and they probably don’t have either the time or the inclination to poke around in the darker corners of the web for free books or to install the obscure and clunky software needed to download them. They’d rather plug in their Kindles, iPads or Kobos and forget about it.

What the British figures tell us is this: where legitimate e-books are widely available and easy to access, piracy barely registers. But this is not the case in other countries and raises a crunchier problem for any rational discussion of piracy. Russian book-sharing site Library Genesis offers a massive archive of almost a million books. The site describes itself as a ‘scientific community targeting collections of books on natural science disciplines and engineering’, but the purity of this mission is at odds with the titles that are available. The most commonly pirated Western fiction seems to be material beloved by computer engineers. A search for ‘Terry Pratchett’ brings up almost nine pages of results in a variety of formats; David Foster Wallace, three pages; Donna Tartt, barely one.

Markets such as Russia remain a problem for publishing. By some estimates, 95 per cent of e-book downloads in Russia are illegitimate. But the big players in e-books – specifically Amazon – do not operate in Russia and there is a paucity of legitimate titles available (perhaps only 60,000). I have no experience of downloading an e-book in Russia but I’d like to bet it’s not as easy or convenient as downloading an e-book in Britain. In such an environment, piracy becomes the convenient option, not the outlaw one.

All of which raises an interesting question: if your book isn’t being distributed in Russia but is being merrily downloaded there, how should you feel? Before the internet, such piracy (in physical formats) would have been invisible to you. Now you know about it, what should you do? Should you even be (secretly, of course) pleased?

Neil Gaiman, whose titles seem to make up a large proportion of all the books on Library Genesis, has said that piracy in Russia has, in fact, increased his sales there. In this light, there is only one thing worse than being pirated and that is not being pirated, at least in those countries where you’re not receiving much distribution anyway.

Piracy, then, is unavoidable. This is not to say there are no weapons with which to fight back. One option might be the web service Muso, which will track whether illegal versions of your books are appearing and issue automated ‘takedown requests’ that, in most cases, are enough to have the illegal file removed. It’s simple to use and seems to be effective.

But here is the dilemma: Muso costs £12 a month per author name, book title or publication. That puts a price on your appetite to confront the pirates and, for all but a small number of authors, £12 a month is likely to be a good deal more than is being lost from piracy anyway.

And that itchier question remains: if you find a copy of your book on a service such as Library Genesis, what do you do? Do you hit the ‘takedown’ button in Muso and get it removed? Or do you ask yourself whether it’s better to be read illegitimately than not to be read at all? It is, at the very least, a question worth asking.

via Literary Review – Lloyd Shepherd from the pulpit.

An analysis on the role of hackers in the age of cyberwarfare, published in the special issue on business and technology of the Hungarian weekly HVG.
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A longform piece on guerilla open access in the Hungarian book industry periodical Konyvesblog.
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My analysis of the mass protests against Hungarian plans to tax the internet in the Hungarian weekly Magyar Narancs.

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The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies in Seville organized a workshop on the interaction between legal and pirated books sales. Imke Reimers presented her findings on the effect of copyright protection on e-book sales, I presented my LG study.

Pep Vallbe and I presented our study on Alternative compensation systems at the Copyright 4 Innovation conference in the Hague.
More below the fold.
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This paper discusses whether a compensation system (CS) for recorded music – endowing private Internet subscribers with the right to download and use works in return for a fee – would be welfare increasing under current market conditions. It reports the results of a discrete choice experiment conducted with a representative sample of the Dutch population consisting of 4,986 participants. The Internet penetration rate in the Netherlands is 95%, one of the highest worldwide (Eurostat 2014). The Netherlands also entertain a system of levies on copying technology, so that basic elements of a CS should be familiar to many residence.

We find that applied only to recorded music, a mandatory CS could increase the welfare of rights holders and users in the Netherlands by over €600 million per year (over €35 per capita). This far exceeds the current sales value of recorded music of ca. €144 million. Even if a CS were to substitute all of the current sales of recorded music and provided no cost savings, it could simultaneously increase user welfare and rights holder revenues at a price that constitutes a reasonable surplus split. According to our results, this is achieved over a broad range of CS user fees, for example between ca. €1.74 and €9.25 for a CS that is mandatory for all households with Internet subscription.

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RuNet, the Russian segment of the internet is now the home of the most comprehensive scientific pirate libraries on the net. These sites offer free access to hundreds of thousands of books and millions of journal articles. In this contribution we try to understand the factors that led to the development of these sites, and the sociocultural and legal conditions that enable them to operate under hostile legal and political conditions. Through the reconstruction of the micro-histories of peer produced online text collections that played a central role in the history of RuNet, we are able to link the formal and informal support for these sites to the specific conditions developed under the Soviet and post Soviet times.

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Aleph is currently the biggest online piratical collection of scholarly publications, with more than a million books, and tens of millions of journal articles. This chapter explores the question of the growth and impact of the Aleph network, via a close look at its collections and traffic. In so doing, we want to push the debate beyond the simple rhetoric of criminality and the accompanying claims of criminal profits made via these sites . Instead we want to better understand how these services operate, what publics they serve, and what harms to publishers and authors can be reasonably attributed to them. Aleph and its mirror sites infringe the copyrights on hundreds of thousands of works, potentially undercutting the market for those works. But they also respond to clear (and sometimes not so clear) market failures where work is unavailable or unaffordable, and play a role in the democratization of scientific and scholarly work. On what basis can we evaluate these trade offs? To date, there has been no substantive account of the shape, reach, or impact of these archives. This chapter takes some steps in that direction.

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On the 10th of August, for its 10th anniversary, The Pirate Bay (TPB) released a piece of software called the Piratebrowser, tagged with the headline: “No more censorship!”(Anon 2013b) It enables users who live in countries where access to TPB is blocked to circumvent national internet filters. It is a simplified version of a Tor network-based web-browser , which is used by many who want to stay anonymous and avoid the blocking and the surveillance of their online activities. The Tor network is used by: dissenters in oppressive countries with pervasive internet censorship; privacy-conscious users who wish to stay hidden from the surveillance machinery of spy agencies; leakers and whistleblowers; and users who wish to engage in various illegal activities from watching child pornography to buying drugs.

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In the digital era where, thanks to the ubiquity of electronic copies, the book is no longer a scarce resource, libraries find themselves in an extremely competitive environment. Several different actors are now in a position to provide low cost access to knowledge. One of these competitors are shadow libraries – piratical text collections which have now amassed electronic copies of millions of copyrighted works and provide access to them usually free of charge to anyone around the globe. While such shadow libraries are far from being universal, they are able to offer certain services better, to more people and under more favorable terms than most public or research libraries. This contribution offers insights into the development and the inner workings of one of the biggest scientific shadow libraries on the internet in order to understand what kind of library people create for themselves if they have the means and if they don’t have to abide by the legal, bureaucratic and economic constraints that libraries usually face. I argue that one of the many possible futures of the library is hidden in the shadows, and those who think of the future of libraries can learn a lot from book pirates of the 21st century about how users and readers expect texts in electronic form to be stored, organized and circulated.

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Is Public Debate of Trade Agreements Against the Public Interest?

Posted by timothy on Sunday November 02, 2014 @03:28PM

from the you-can-discuss-it-afterwards dept.

onproton writes The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), currently being negotiated in secret, has been subject to numerous draft leaks that indicate these talks are potentially harmful to everything from public health to internet freedom. So why isn’t the public involved, and why are the terms of the agreement being debated behind closed doors? According to New Zealand’s current Trade Minister, Tim Groser, full disclosure of what is being discussed would likely lead to “public debate on an ill-informed basis before the deal has been done.” Leaving one to question how revealing the full context and scope of the agreement talks would lead to an increase in misinformation rather than clarity.

via Is Public Debate of Trade Agreements Against the Public Interest? – Slashdot.

In The Netherlands, people spend about half as much on recorded music as they did in 2003. They spend about twice as much on live music as on CDs, downloads, and streaming.

Other countries have shown this shift from recorded to live revenue, including the UK, but nowhere as dramatically as in The Netherlands. However, consumer spending on music bounced back in 2013, arguably due to increased contributions from streaming services like Spotify:

via Adventures in the Lowlands: Spotify, Social Media and Music Festivals | Spotify Insights.

 

The failure of the Fire Phone has been widely cited as the reason for Amazon’s disastrous quarter, but a darker cloud has settled over the world’s biggest online retailer. The core of Amazon’s business—its original reason for being: selling books and other media—has grown wobbly. The problem: many people no longer want to buy stuff. They’d rather rent.

Amazon is not alone. This long-predicted shift in consumer priorities–from ownership to access—also seems to be taking a bite out of Apple, another business that depends on convincing people to buy things. For companies built on the practice of purchasing media, it’s time to reexamine basic assumptions.

During the last quarter, Amazon’s North American sales of media—books, music, movies, games—grew five percent compared to the same time a year ago. This may sound respectable. But that figure turns out to be the lowest year-over-year growth in North American media sales in more than five years, says Colin Gillis, an analyst at Wall Street outfit BGC Financial.

“Given the dispute with book publisher Hachette, it is hard to not view that the very public dust up had a negative impact on media sales, both from the decision to stop selling certain book titles and a possible backlash against Amazon from readers,” Gillis says.

The problem: many people no longer want to buy stuff. They’d rather rent.

But according to Amazon, a leading culprit is something that at least sounds much more innocuous: textbooks. “As you look at our North American media growth rates, one thing that we are seeing is certainly a shift from a textbook standpoint from purchase to rental,” Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak told analysts on Thursday. More customers also are renting rather than buying digital media, Szkutak said.

The irony is that in both cases, these are problems Amazon created for itself. Textbook rentals have exploded in part because Amazon makes it so easy. Instead of a would-be renter and lender having to track each other down one-on-one, the owner of a used text book can simply put it up on Amazon. (It’s a model textbook publishers hate, because they only make money on new book sales, which is one reason textbook prices are going through the roof).

Similarly, Amazon has made streaming media so easy that the practical incentive to buy diminishes. Renting or buying digital video from Amazon, for example, never has to involve a download. You never really have to “have” it. It simply streams from Amazon’s cloud to apps, browsers, and over-the-top internet TV boxes. The setup would seem to work to Amazon’s favor because you’re still paying Amazon money—but not as much, perhaps, as you’d pay to own.

A Bite Out of Apple

At the same time as the stock market started hammering Amazon on Friday, a report surfaced that Apple was having its own problems with owning. The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources, reported that digital music sales on iTunes had declined 13 percent to 14 percent since the start of the year. This worries the music industry, the Journal said, because Apple is the world’s biggest seller of music.

If fewer people are buying music from Apple, fewer people are probably buying music, period. The reason is obvious, and much as with Amazon, it’s a problem Apple is largely responsible for creating. The rise of streaming music apps wouldn’t be possible without powerful, portable, connected digital devices that have access to significant bandwidth for transferring data quickly. In other words, the iPhone is very much responsible for streaming becoming a viable, popular way to consume music. As the Journal notes, Apple acknowledged this trend with its purchase of Beats Music, a deal that included both its headphone and streaming music businesses.

In a recent New York Times Magazine piece, writer Dan Brooks lamented the loss of a certain kind of cultural identity deeply tied to the ownership of music: the record collection. The culprit: streaming music services that give everyone everywhere access to nearly every song ever recorded:

The bad news is that we have lost what was once a robust system for identifying kindred spirits. Now that we all share the same record collection, music snobs have no means to recognize one another. We cannot flip through a binder of CDs and see a new friend, a potential date. By making it perfectly easy to find new music, we’ve made it a little more difficult to find new people.

The irony, Brooks notes, is that streaming has brought once obscure music out of hiding: searching for tiny acts is as easy as searching for the biggest Top 40 stars. But it’s not only hipster obscurantism that streaming has upended. The most mainstream tech companies, the ones that have made access versus ownership easier than ever, are now experiencing their own losses because they’ve helped make accessing easier than owning. The only winners here seem to be consumers.

Well, except for one thing: If no one gets paid, nothing gets made.

via Apple and Amazon Have a Problem: People Don’t Want to Buy Stuff Anymore | WIRED.

My work—which involved interviews with file sharers as part of a dissertation in Social Anthropology—has focused on the strong non-economic undercurrent to participation in file sharing networks, ranging from the greater sense of agency and freedom they provided in an expanding cultural universe to their role as a perceived alternative to the ongoing Greek delegitimation of most social and political institutions. Freedom of expression, freedom to communicate, access to knowledge and information, excitement at the rediscovery and “rebirth” of old and rare works… All have figured as important motives for engagement with P2P networks. So too do perceptions of the lack of formal infrastructure and institutions for supporting cultural creativity; the successive shrinking of the welfare state; and the ongoing political crisis, shaped by scandals, nepotism and patronage relations. Within this context, P2P networks represent a form of self-organization and reconfiguration of social life outside established channels that has proved both valuable and—for some—inspirational in the context of the larger Greek crisis.

For some Greek youth, especially, the growth of P2P networks in Greece crystallized aspects of their broader social and political disaffection. Since 2008, P2P culture has merged with wider forms of political and sociocultural critique from all sides of the political spectrum. During the riots of December 2008, a popular Greek P2P tracker published a manifesto in which envisioned a full spectrum of social demands, from the development of alternative sources of energy; to free education, health care and public transportation; to the abolition of the anti-riot police units used to suppress protests; to the “copyleft of all spiritual and informative material.”

via File Sharing and the Greek Crisis » infojustice.

 

libraryjournal: Original comic by John Kleckner, modified by an anonymous librarian.

libraryjournal:

Original comic by John Kleckner, modified by an anonymous librarian.

via élet és könyvtár lite (libraryjournal: Original comic by John Kleckner,…).

Digimarc Guardian Customer Support : Announcements.

The future of copyright amendments crowdsourced by the Finnish public appear to be in doubt. The citizen-drafted proposals, which received 50,000 signatures, seek to decriminalize file-sharing, but Finland’s Education and Culture Committee now wants to reject the historic initiative.

via Finland Wants to Kill Crowdsourced Copyright Law | TorrentFreak.

Adobe has just given us a graphic demonstration of how not to handle security and privacy issues.A hacker acquaintance of mine has tipped me to a huge security and privacy violation on the part of Adobe. That anonymous acquaintance was examining Adobe’s DRm for educational purposes when they noticed that Digital Editions 4, the newest version of Adobe’s Epub app, seemed to be sending an awful lot of data to Adobe’s servers.My source told me, and I can confirm, that Adobe is tracking users in the app and uploading the data to their servers. Adobe was contacted in advance of publication, but declined to respond. Edit: Adobe responded Tuesday night.And just to be clear, I have seen this happen, and I can also tell you that Benjamin Daniel Mussler, the security researcher who found the security hole on Amazon.com, has also tested this at my request and saw it with his own eyes.

via Adobe is Spying on Users, Collecting Data on Their eBook Libraries – The Digital Reader.

Home StoryFBI chief: Apple, Google phone encryption perilousBy Ken DilanianAssociated PressPosted: 09/25/2014 02:06:09 PM PDT# Comments | Updated: about 18 hours agoWASHINGTON — The FBI director on Thursday criticized the decision by Apple and Google to encrypt smartphones data so it can be inaccessible to law enforcement, even with a court order.James Comey told reporters at FBI headquarters that U.S. officials are in talks with the two companies, which he accused of marketing products that would let people put themselves beyond the law’s reach.Comey cited child-kidnapping and terrorism cases as two examples of situations where quick access by authorities to information on cellphones can save lives. Comey did not cite specific past cases that would have been more difficult for the FBI to investigate under the new policies, which only involve physical access to a suspect’s or victim’s phone when the owner is unable or unwilling to unlock it for authorities.FILE – In this Sept. 23, 2014 file photo, FBI Director James Comey speaks at the FBI Albany Field Office in Albany, N.Y.FILE – In this Sept. 23, 2014 file photo, FBI Director James Comey speaks at the FBI Albany Field Office in Albany, N.Y. Mike Groll/AP Photo”What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law,” Comey said. At another point, he said he feared a moment when “when people with tears in their eyes look at me and say, ‘What do you mean you can’t?'”

via FBI chief: Apple, Google phone encryption perilous – San Jose Mercury News.

The Art of Unblocking Websites Without Committing Crimes | TorrentFreak.

Last month UK police took down several torrent site proxies and arrested their owner. Now a UK developer has created a new & free service that not only silently unblocks any website without falling foul of the law, but one that will eventually become available to all under a GPL 3.0 license.

networkThe blocking of sites such as The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and Torrentz in the UK led to users discovering new ways to circumvent ISP-imposed censorship. There are plenty of solutions, from TOR and VPNs, to services with a stated aim of unblocking ‘pirate’ sites deemed illegal by UK courts.

Last month, however, dozens of these went offline when the operator of Immunicity and other related proxy services was arrested by City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit. He now faces several charges including breaches of the Serious Crime Act 2007, Possession of Articles for Use in Fraud, Making or Supplying Articles for use in Frauds and money laundering.

While it’s generally accepted that running a site like The Pirate Bay is likely to attract police attention, merely unblocking a domain was not thought to carry any such risk. After all, visitors to torrent sites are just that, it’s only later on that they make a decision to infringe or not.

In our earlier article we discussed some of the possible reasons why the police might view “pirate” proxies to be illegal. However, there are very good arguments that general purpose proxies, even ones that are expressly setup to bypass filtering (and are able to unblock sites such as Pirate Bay), remain on a decent legal footing.

One such site is being operated by Gareth, a developer and networking guru who grew so tired of creeping Internet censorship he began lobbying UK MPs on the topic, later moving on to assist with the creation of the Open Rights Group’s Blocked.org.uk.

After campaigning and documenting Internet censorship issues for some time, Gareth first heard of last month’s proxy arrest during a visit to the United States.

“I was at DefCon in Las Vegas when the news of the Immunicity arrest reached me and I realized that for all my volunteer work, my open source applications, operation of Tor relays, donations and letters to MPs to highlight/combat the issues with Internet censorship, it was not enough,” the developer told TorrentFreak.

“I felt that this issue has moved from a political / technical issue to one about personal liberty and Internet freedom. e.g. first they came for the ‘pirate proxies’, then the Tor operators, then the ISPs that don’t censor their customers. The slippery slope is becoming a scary precipice.”

Since his return to the UK, Gareth has been busy creating his own independent anti-censorship tool. He’s researched in detail what happened to Immunicity, taken legal advice, and is now offering what he hopes is an entirely legal solution to website filtering and subsequent over-blocking (1)(2).

“Unlike Immunicity et al I’m not specifically building a ‘Pirate Proxy’. Granted people might use this proxy to navigate to torrent websites but were I to sell a laptop on eBay that same person may use it for the same reasons so I see no difference,” he explains.

“In fact Section 44, subsection 2 of the Serious Crimes Act 2007 even states [that an individual] is not to be taken to have intended to encourage or assist the commission of an offense merely because such encouragement or assistance was a foreseeable consequence of his act.”

The result of Gareth’s labor is the anti-censorship service Routing Packets is Not a Crime (RPINAC). People who used Immunicity in the past should feel at home, since RPINAC also utilizes the ability of popular browsers to use Proxy Auto-Config (PAC) files.

In the space of a couple of minutes and with no specialist knowledge, users can easily create their own PAC files covering any blocked site they like. Once configured, their browser will silently unblock them.

Furthermore, each PAC file has its own dedicated URL on RPINAC’s servers which users can revisit in order to add additional URLs for unblocking. PAC ‘unblock’ files can also be shared among like-minded people.

“When someone creates a PAC file they are redirected to a /view/ endpoint e.g. https://routingpacketsisnotacrime.uk/view/b718ce9b276bc2f10af90fe1d5b33c0d. This URL is not ephemeral, you can email it, tweet it (there is a tweet button on the left hand side of the site) etc and it will provide the recipient with the exact same view.

“It’ll show which URLs are specified to be proxied, which have been detected as blocked (using the https://blocked.org.uk database) and if the author passed along the password (assuming the PAC was password protected) they can add or remove URLs too,” Gareth explains.

“Each view page also has a comments section, this could allow for a small collection of individuals to co-ordinate with a smaller subset of password possessing moderators to create a crowd sourced PAC file in an autonomous fashion. There is also a ‘Clone’ button allowing anybody to create their own copy of the PAC file with their own name, description and password if the PAC file they’ve received isn’t quite what they need.”

This user-generated element of the process is important. While dedicated ‘pirate’ proxy sites specifically unblock sites already deemed illegal by the UK courts (and can be deemed to be facilitating their ‘crimes’), RPINAC leaves the decision of which sites to unblock completely down to the user. And since no High Court injunction forbids any user from accessing a blocked domain, both service and user remain on the right side of the law.

In terms of use, RPINAC is unobtrusive, has no popups, promotions or advertising, and will not ask for payment or donations, a further important legal point.

“To avoid any accusations of fraud and to avoid any tax implications RPINAC will never ask for donations,” the dev explains. “The current platform is pre-paid for at least a year, the domain for 10. At a bare minimum PAC file serving and education for creating local proxies will continue indefinitely.”

Finally, Gareth notes that without free and open source software his anti-censorship platform wouldn’t have been possible. So, in return, he has plans to release the source code for the project under the GPL 3.0 license.

RoutingPacketsIsNotACrime can be found here and is compatible with Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE. Additional information can be sourced here.

4chan adopts DMCA policy after nude celebrity photo postingsSite agrees to remove “bona fide” infringing material if asked.

via 4chan adopts DMCA policy after nude celebrity photo postings | Ars Technica.

As evidence mounts, it’s getting harder to defend Edward Snowden – Skating on Stilts.

The evidence is mounting that Edward Snowden and his journalist allies have helped al Qaeda improve their security against NSA surveillance. In May, Recorded Future, a predictive analytics web intelligence firm, published a persuasive timeline showing that Snowden’s revelations about NSA’s capabilities were followed quickly by a burst of new, robust encryption tools from al-Qaeda and its affiliates:

This is hardly a surprise for those who live in the real world. But it was an affront to Snowden’s defenders, who’ve long insisted that journalists handled the NSA leaks so responsibly that no one can identify any damage that they have caused.

In damage control mode, Snowden’s defenders first responded to the Recorded Future analysis by pooh-poohing the terrorists’ push for new encryption tools. Bruce Schneier declared that the change might actually hurt al Qaeda: “I think this will help US intelligence efforts. Cryptography is hard, and the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied open-source tool is slight.”

Schneier is usually smarter than this. In fact, the product al Qaeda had been recommending until the leaks, Mujahidin Secrets, probably did qualify as “home-brew encryption.” Indeed, Bruce Schneier dissed Mujahidin Secrets in 2008 on precisely that ground, saying “No one has explained why a terrorist would use this instead of PGP.”

But as a second Recorded Future post showed, the products that replaced Mujahidin Secrets relied heavily on open-source and proven encryption software. Indeed, one of them uses Schneier’s own, well-tested encryption algorithm, Twofish.

Faced with facts that contradicted his original defense of Snowden, Schneier was quick to offer a new reason why Snowden’s leaks and al Qaeda’s response to them still wouldn’t make any difference:

Whatever the reason, Schneier says, al-Qaida’s new encryption program won’t necessarily keep communications secret, and the only way to ensure that nothing gets picked up is to not send anything electronically. Osama bin Laden understood that. That’s why he ended up resorting to couriers.

Upgrading encryption software might mask communications for al-Qaida temporarily, but probably not for long, Schneier said….”It is relatively easy to find vulnerabilities in software,” he added. “This is why cybercriminals do so well stealing our credit cards. And it is also going to be why intelligence agencies are going to be able to break whatever software these al-Qaida operatives are using.”

So, if you were starting to think that Snowden and his band of journalist allies might actually be helping the terrorists, there’s no need to worry, according to Schneier, because all encryption software is so bad that NSA will still be able to break the terrorists’ communications and protect us. Oddly, though, that’s not what he says when he isn’t on the front lines with the Snowden Defense Corps. In a 2013 Guardian article entitled “NSA surveillance: A guide to staying secure,“ for example, he offers very different advice, quoting Snowden:

“Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.”

Scheier acknowledges that hacking of communication endpoints can defeat even good encryption, but he’s got an answer for that, too:

Try to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations. …Since I started working with Snowden’s documents, I have been using GPGSilent CircleTailsOTRTrueCryptBleachBit, and a few other things I’m not going to write about.…

The NSA has turned the fabric of the internet into a vast surveillance platform, but they are not magical. They’re limited by the same economic realities as the rest of us, and our best defense is to make surveillance of us as expensive as possible.

Trust the math. Encryption is your friend. Use it well, and do your best to ensure that nothing can compromise it. That’s how you can remain secure even in the face of the NSA.

It sounds as though al Qaeda took Bruce Schneier’s advice to heart, thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden — even if Schneier is still doing everything he can to avoid admitting it.

UPDATE: The description of Recorded Future was changed at the request of the company, which said, “While this may seem like splitting hairs, in the world of data analysis software “predictive analytics” has specific technical meaning which implies something different. We use the term web intelligence to reduce this confusion.”

A Dutch marketplace for second hand eBooks is being allowed to continue operating after the Amsterdam Court dismissed complaints from book publishers. The Court ruled that “Tom Kabinet” operates in a legal gray area which requires further investigation. Meanwhile the used eBook business is booming.

via Online Store Can Sell ‘Used’ Ebooks, Court Rules | TorrentFreak.

“It is clear from the TOR website that TOR is knowingly assisting websites such as Pinkmeth in committing torts against Texas resident, that the sole cause of action alleged against TOR herein conspiracy arises from its conduct in Texas and against Texas residents, and that assumption of jurisdiction by this court will not offend traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice.”

via Tor Sued Over Revenge Porn – Business Insider.

A complex system of rules and governance mechanisms control the lives of piratical P2P file-sharing darknets and ensure the survival and the quality of the shared P2P resource pool. In some communities these rules include the voluntary intellectual property (IP) protection as well. I show three different examples of voluntary, bottom-up IP regimes in piratical file-sharing communities. I demonstrate that though the emergence of such norms may sound counter-intuitive, they are in fact logical consequences in the development of the underground file-sharing scene. I then move to discuss whether or not the long-term consolidation of such norms is harmonious with the default ethical vision of copyright. Here I show that current practices in the IP field are scattered in both the legal and the ethical dimensions, and stable (social, business) practices consolidate not according to their legality but according to whether they comply with the default ethical vision. Finally I suggest that voluntary IP regimes can be effective enforcement mechanisms that rights-holders should begin experiment with.

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Austrian Tor Exit Node Operator Found Guilty As An Accomplice Because Someone Used His Node To Commit A crime

from the bad,-bad-news dept

Three years ago we wrote about how Austrian police had seized computers from someone running a Tor exit node. This kind of thing happens from time to time, but it appears that folks in Austria have taken it up a notch by… effectively now making it illegal to run a Tor exit node. According to the report, which was confirmed by the accused, the court found that running the node violated §12 of the Austrian penal code, which effectively says:

Not only the immediate perpetrator commits a criminal action, but also anyone who appoints someone to carry it out, or anyone who otherwise contributes to the completion of said criminal action.

In other words, it’s a form of accomplice liability for criminality. It’s pretty standard to name criminal accomplices liable for “aiding and abetting” the activities of others, but it’s a massive and incredibly dangerous stretch to argue that merely running a Tor exit node makes you an accomplice that “contributes to the completion” of a crime. Under this sort of thinking, Volkswagen would be liable if someone drove a VW as the getaway car in a bank robbery. It’s a very, very broad interpretation of accomplice liability, in a situation where it clearly does not make sense.

via Austrian Tor Exit Node Operator Found Guilty As An Accomplice Because Someone Used His Node To Commit A crime | Techdirt.

NSA: Linux Journal is an “extremist forum” and its readers get flagged for extra surveillance

 

A new story published on the German site Tagesschau and followed up by BoingBoing and DasErste.de has uncovered some shocking details about who the NSA targets for surveillance including visitors to Linux Journal itself.

While it has been revealed before that the NSA captures just about all Internet traffic for a short time, the Tagesschau story provides new details about how the NSA’s XKEYSCORE program decides which traffic to keep indefinitely. XKEYSCORE uses specific selectors to flag traffic, and the article reveals that Web searches for Tor and Tails–software I’ve covered here in Linux Journal that helps to protect a user’s anonymity and privacy on the Internet–are among the selectors that will flag you as “extremist” and targeted for further surveillance. If you just consider how many Linux Journal readers have read our Tor and Tails coverage in the magazine, that alone would flag quite a few innocent people as extremist.

While that is troubling in itself, even more troubling to readers on this site is that linuxjournal.com has been flagged as a selector! DasErste.de has published the relevant XKEYSCORE source code, and if you look closely at the rule definitions, you will see linuxjournal.com/content/linux* listed alongside Tails and Tor. According to an article on DasErste.de, the NSA considers Linux Journal an “extremist forum”. This means that merely looking for any Linux content on Linux Journal, not just content about anonymizing software or encryption, is considered suspicious and means your Internet traffic may be stored indefinitely.

 

via NSA: Linux Journal is an “extremist forum” and its readers get flagged for extra surveillance | Linux Journal.

A kiadókkal, forgalmazókkal és egyéb jogtulajdonosokkal ápolt viszonyuk amúgy érdekes. Mint mondják, rengeteg dolog szerepel a tiltott anyagok listáján. „Alapvetően mindenkivel megegyezünk, aki normális hangnemben közelít. A kamerás filmek sem csak azért lettek letiltva, mert lesújtóan szar minőségűek; hanem több filmforgalmazóval is megállapodtunk, hogy a dvd/bluray kiadásig várunk, így adva több esélyt a moziknak.” A legfrissebb olyan dolog, amit sokan keresnének, de nem találják az oldalon, a Watch Dogs című játék, amit egy ideig a magyar forgalmazó kérésére nem engednek majd feltölteni senkinek.A hivatalos indoklás szerint erre azért van szükség, hogy a játék kiadó

via Index – Tech – A rendőrök is tőlünk töltik le a filmeket.

The Law Library of Congress has digitized its collection of pre-1923 piracy trial. This historical collection of piracy trials is critical for understanding how the various nations of the world handled piracy issues before the year 1900. The full texts of these titles are available from the bibliography listed below.

via Piracy Trials | Law Library of Congress.

Against the Hypothesis of the End of Privacy

An Agent-Based Modelling Approach to Social Media

via Against the Hypothesis of the End of Privacy – An Agent-Based Modelling Approach to Social Media.

The Fourth RevolutionHow the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality

via The Fourth Revolution: Hardback: Luciano Floridi – Oxford University Press.

The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media ageIt’s an astonishing look inside the cultural change still needed in the shi

via The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age » Nieman Journalism Lab.

f the world starts looking like a scene from “Matrix 3” where everyone has Agent Smith’s face, you can thank Leo Selvaggio.

His rubber mask aimed at foiling surveillance cameras features his visage, and if he has his way, plenty of people will be sporting the Personal Surveillance Identity Prosthetic in public. It’s one of three products made by the Chicago-based artist’s URME Surveillance, a venture dedicated to “protecting the public from surveillance and creating a safe space to explore our digital identities.”

via Anti-surveillance mask lets you pass as someone else – CNET.

MacInnis, who previously worked for Apple, knew the soon-to-be-launched iPad held great potential for the education market. Bringing a boring and bulky science textbook onto a tablet in an easy-to-digest format that incorporated quizzes and videos, would make learning fun.

The Industry That Didn’t Want to Innovate

The problem was textbook publishers were slow to want to digitize their content. “They were still making a lot of their money off books,” says McInnis. To make matters worse, the small number of textbook publishers that made up the industry weren’t feeling the competitive pressures to innovate. Despite these challenges, Inkling continued to focus on their vision of digitizing textbooks, without realizing the infrastructure they had built was applicable to many other area

via What Happened When A Digital Textbook Company Was Forced To Redefine Its Customers | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

netzpolitik.org: Are you breaking any laws?

Jotunbane: Several 🙂

netzpolitik.org: Do you care? Why (not)?

Jotunbane: Sure I care. But what can I do? The laws are wrong on several different levels (the copyright monopoly have been extended 16 times in my lifetime alone, and will continue to be extended every time Mickey Mouse is getting close to the public domain). There will always be consequences when you decide to break the law and the risk of punishment is clearly part of the equation. Under US law I could get fined $150.000 for each infringement, but this is not a question of money, it’s a question of doing the right thing. Sharing is caring, so of course I care.

 

Interviews with E-Book-Pirates: “The book publishing industry is repeating the same mistakes of the music industry”.

 

“IP Industries’ Contribution to Economic Performance and the Public’s Perception Thereof” was the grand title of a session at this year’s Fordham IP Conference that was moderated by Coenraad Visser (University of South Africa, Pretoria). First to speak was Katfriend Paul Maier (Director, The European Observatory on Infringement of Intellectual Property Rights, Alicante), who reviewed two recently-prepared EU studies on the economic importance of IP and consumer perception. Paul took us through the statistics recorded in these studies, warning us that they represented a mere snapshot of how things currently look — they say nothing, in terms of causation, as to whether prosperity, employment or anything else is caused by IP rights or only accompanies their presence or use. The two studies to which Paul made reference, printed copies of which were provided in the black bag packs of all conference registrants, are

Intellectual property rights intensive industries: contribution to economic performance and employment in the European Union (Industry-Level Analysis Report, September 2013: A joint project between the European Patent Office and the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market) here

European Citizens and Intellectual Property: Perception, Awareness and Behaviour, here

via The IPKat: Fordham Report 2014: IP Industries’ Contribution to Economic Performance and the Public’s Perception Thereof.

Snowden Used the Linux Distro Designed For Internet Anonymity – Slashdot.

 

“When Edward Snowden first emailed Glenn Greenwald, he insisted on using email encryption software called PGP for all communications. Now Klint Finley reports that Snowden also used The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) to keep his communications out of the NSA’s prying eyes. Tails is a kind of computer-in-a-box using a version of the Linux operating system optimized for anonymity that you install on a DVD or USB drive, boot your computer from and you’re pretty close to anonymous on the internet. ‘Snowden, Greenwald and their collaborator, documentary film maker Laura Poitras, used it because, by design, Tails doesn’t store any data locally,’ writes Finley. ‘This makes it virtually immune to malicious software, and prevents someone from performing effective forensics on the computer after the fact. That protects both the journalists, and often more importantly, their sources.’

The developers of Tails are, appropriately, anonymous. They’re protecting their identities, in part, to help protect the code from government interference. ‘The NSA has been pressuring free software projects and developers in various ways,’ the group says. But since we don’t know who wrote Tails, how do we know it isn’t some government plot designed to snare activists or criminals? A couple of ways, actually. One of the Snowden leaks show the NSA complaining about Tails in a Power Point Slide; if it’s bad for the NSA, it’s safe to say it’s good for privacy. And all of the Tails code is open source, so it can be inspected by anyone worried about foul play. ‘With Tails,’ say the distro developers, ‘we provide a tongue and a pen protected by state-of-the-art cryptography to guarantee basic human rights and allow journalists worldwide to work and communicate freely and without fear of reprisal.'”

5-Year Suspended Sentence For S. Africa’s First Online Pirate – Slashdot.

The School of Public Policy at the Central European University organised an excellent forum on how to counter the anti-democratic trends in various countries. The discussion took place the day after Fidesz, the party which is responsible for countless anti-democratic steps in the last 4 years won a landslide victory in the general elections. Though this could have defined the discussion, due to the large number of foreign participants (both on the podium and in the audience) enabled us to move beyond the specifics of the Hungarian situation and address anti-democratic tendencies and counter-strategies from the US via France to the Ukraine.

You should check out the recorded panels, and/or the twitter archive for the amazing contributions by the participants. What I would like to do here is to sum up my arguments in the panel that was addressing the role of digital technologies in the pro-democratic process.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why should I even bother to back up my existing data? If I lose it, I’ll just get what I want from the cloud hereafter — I’m 100 percent positive I wouldn’t bother to re-rip all my CDs for the third time. Sure, the cloud is the physical embodiment of the surveillance state. But its siren song works too well to turn it off.

via Big Brother is in your Spotify: How music became the surveillance state’s Trojan horse – Salon.com.

The error message that launched this whole investigation.

Darrell Whitelaw / Twitter

For years now, Internet users have accepted the risk of files and content they share through various online services being subject to takedown requests based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and/or content-matching algorithms. But users have also gotten used to treating services like Dropbox as their own private, cloud-based file storage and sharing systems, facilitating direct person-to-person file transfer without having to worry.

This weekend, though, a small corner of the Internet exploded with concern that Dropbox was going too far, actually scanning users’ private and directly peer-shared files for potential copyright issues. What’s actually going on is a little more complicated than that, but it shows that sharing a file on Dropbox isn’t always the same as sharing that file directly from your hard drive over something like e-mail or instant messenger.

The whole kerfuffle started yesterday evening, when one Darrell Whitelaw tweeted a picture of an error he received when trying to share a link to a Dropbox file via IM. The Dropbox webpage warned him and his friend that "certain files in this folder can’t be shared due to a takedown request in accordance with the DMCA."

Whitelaw freely admits that the content he was sharing was a copyrighted video, but he still expressed surprise that Dropbox was apparently watching what he shared for copyright issues. "I treat [Dropbox] like my hard drive," he tweeted. "This shows it’s not private, nor mine, even though I pay for it."

In response to follow-up questions from Ars, Whitelaw said the link he sent to his friend via IM was technically a public link and theoretically could have been shared more widely than the simple IM between friends. That said, he noted that the DMCA notice appeared on the Dropbox webpage "immediately" after the link was generated, suggesting that Dropbox was automatically checking shared files somehow to see if they were copyrighted material rather than waiting for a specific DMCA takedown request.

Dropbox did confirm to Ars that it checks publicly shared file links against hashes of other files that have been previously subject to successful DMCA requests. "We sometimes receive DMCA notices to remove links on copyright grounds," the company said in a statement provided to Ars. "When we receive these, we process them according to the law and disable the identified link. We have an automated system that then prevents other users from sharing the identical material using another Dropbox link. This is done by comparing file hashes."

Dropbox added that this comparison happens when a public link to your file is created and that "we don’t look at the files in your private folders and are committed to keeping your stuff safe." The company wouldn’t comment publicly on whether the same content-matching algorithm was run on files shared directly with other Dropbox users via the service’s account-to-account sharing functions, but the wording of the statement suggests that this system only applies to publicly shared links.

We should be clear here that Dropbox hasn’t removed the file from Whitelaw’s account; they just closed off the option for him to share that file with others. In a tweeted response to Whitelaw, Dropbox Support said that "content removed under DMCA only affects share-links." Dropbox explains its copyright policy on a Help Center page that lays out the boilerplate: "you do not have the right to share files unless you own the copyright in them or have been given permission by the copyright owner to share them." The Help Center then directs users to its DMCA policy page.

Dropbox has also been making use of file hashing algorithms for a while now as a means of de-duplicating identical files stored across different users’ accounts. That means that if I try to upload an identical copy of a 20GB movie file that has already been stored in someone else’s Dropbox account, the service will simply give my account access to a version of that same file rather than allowing me to upload an identical version. This not only saves bandwidth on the user’s end but significant storage space on Dropbox’s end as well.

Some researchers have warned of security and privacy concerns based on these de-duplication efforts in the past, but the open source Dropship project attempted to bend the feature to users’ advantage. By making use of the file hashing system, Dropship effectively tried to trick Dropbox into granting access to files on Dropbox’s servers that the user didn’t actually have access to. Dropbox has taken pains to stop this kind of "fake" file sharing through its service.

In any case, it seems a similar hashing effort is in place to make it easier for Dropbox to proactively check files shared through its servers for similarity to content previously blocked by a DMCA request. In this it’s not too different from services like YouTube, which uses a robust ContentID system to automatically identify copyrighted material as soon as it’s uploaded.

In this, both Dropbox and YouTube are simply responding to the legal environment they find themselves in. The DMCA requires companies that run sharing services to take reasonable measures to make sure that re-posting of copyrighted content doesn’t occur after a legitimate DMCA notice has been issued. Whitelaw himself doesn’t blame the service for taking these proactive steps, in fact. "This isn’t a Dropbox problem," he told Ars via tweet. "They’re just following the laws laid out for them. Was just surprised to see it."

via Dropbox clarifies its policy on reviewing shared files for DMCA issues | Ars Technica.

The report noted that some within MIT believe “there has been a change in the institutional climate over recent years, where decisions have become driven more by a concern for minimizing risk than by strong affirmation of MIT values.”

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has been widely condemned as extreme in both its sweeping scope and its grave punishments. Sentencing guidelines suggest Swartz faced up to seven years in prison.

To his supporters, MIT bears some responsibility for that fact. MIT officials privately told the prosecutor that the university had no interest in jail time, but refused to oppose his prosecution publicly or privately, despite repeated entreaties from Swartz’s father, his lawyers, and a couple of faculty members, who argued MIT had the institutional heft to influence the US attorney’s office.

via Aaron Swartz and MIT: The inside story – Metro – The Boston Globe.

As Turkey prepares for elections on Sunday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan continues to double down on Internet censorship. A week after Turkish ISPs blocked Twitter Turkey’s telecommunications authority has blocked YouTube. The block began to be rolled out hours after a leaked recording published anonymously on YouTube purported to show a conversation in which Turkey’s foreign minister, spy chief, and a top general appear to discuss scenarios that could lead to a Turkish attack against militants in Syria.

The fallout from the Erdoğan government’s censorship spree has not been limited to platforms that host embarrassing political content. When Turkish Internet users handily circumvented the original Twitter block by using Google’s DNS servers, Google’s DNS was itself blocked. Now it appears that just as Turkey’s ISPs are rolling out a block on YouTube, they are also blocking access to the Tor Project’s website, where users can download the Tor Browser Bundle. The Tor browser is a powerful tool in the censorship circumvention toolbox because it is exceptionally difficult to filter Tor traffic.

via When Is a Tor Block Not a Tor Block? | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Today was a fairly good day. My paper on pirate libraries got accepted to the annual conference of the Society for Economic Research on Copyright Issues, I got invited to a panel at the Rolling Back The Rollback: Spaces & strategies for revival of democracy and open societies in Europe conference organized by the School of Public Policy (SPP) at Central European University, and the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights has put me on their list of external experts.

there’s never been an album quite like what Wu-Tang Clan is cooking up. In addition to releasing a 20th anniversary album this summer called A Better Tomorrow, the hip-hop collective also recorded a double album in secret over the last two years — and is only releasing one single copy of it.

via Wu-Tang Clan will sell only a single copy of their new album | The Verge.

Recording industry earns more from fan videos than from official music videosYouTube generates more money for record labels through fan-made videos than official music videos, a global recording industry report says.

via Recording industry earns more from fan videos than from official music videos | Toronto Star.

How to make money from Spotify by streaming silence | Culture | The Guardian.

Their new album Sleepify consists of 10 songs of absolute silence, each clocking in at either 31 or 32 seconds long (tracks need to be listened to for 30 seconds to register as having been played). All they ask is that their fans stream it overnight on repeat while they sleep, in order to produce enough royalties for the band to go on tour.

An open source textbook on open source cultures (in Hungarian).

Read the rest of this entry »

Ready to Dump Cable? | Free Press.

Ready to Dump Cable? | Free Press.

So, Did Tim Ferriss’s BitTorrent Book Gamble Work? – ReadWrite.

So, Did Tim Ferriss's BitTorrent Book Gamble Work? – ReadWrite.

At Least 8% of All Pirate Bay Traffic Now Provided By Proxy Services | TorrentFreak.

At Least 8% of All Pirate Bay Traffic Now Provided By Proxy Services | TorrentFreak.

Comcast Wants to Monitor and Convert Pirating Subscribers | TorrentFreak.

Comcast Wants to Monitor and Convert Pirating Subscribers | TorrentFreak.

Sony and Disney begin streaming movies still in theaters in a bold move against piracy | The Verge.

Sony and Disney begin streaming movies still in theaters in a bold move against piracy | The Verge.

What is Piracy? Jean-Philippe Vergne at TEDxWesternU – YouTube.

What is Piracy? Jean-Philippe Vergne at TEDxWesternU – YouTube.

A second important type of evidence to which the antitrust authorities look in order to gain insight into how the merger will affect future conduct in the sector is to examine past behavior, particularly “industry participants’ behavior in tracking and responding to price changed by some or all rivals”DOJ/FTC, 2010:11.  Here the record is particularly troubling.  The leading firms in the sector have engaged in a repeated pattern of anti-consumer and anticompetitive behavior.  In the mid-1990s, the major record labels engaged in two practices that imposed severe harm on consumers and competition.  They eliminated the sale of singles, even though the CD was well-suited for the sale of singles.  They adopted a price fixing scheme to keep album prices high, even though the new compact disc CD format dramatically lowered their costs and discounters had lowered prices.  In short, they restricted output and raised prices, forcing consumers to unnecessarily purchase hundreds of millions of overpriced CDs to get the music that they wanted.  An antitrust consent decree ended price fixing FTC: 2000 and digital distribution made the sale of singles a compelling alternative. Nestor, 2012  1.  

via The Role of Antitrust in Protecting Competition, Innovation, and Consumers as the Digital Revolution Matures: The Case against the Universal-EMI Merger and E-Book Price Fixing | Public Knowledge.

As a result, a steady stream of new movies is constantly nudging incumbents to make way at theatres. That makes the first week the biggest contributor to box-office collections. With the box office skewed thus, movies reach television as early as four weeks of hitting theatres. In other words, producers have obliterated the business model of their once formidable enemies.

via Bollywood no longer talks of piracy; but ignoring dangers of online can be costly – Page3 – The Economic Times.

In May of this year, ClarityRay reported that the overall rate of ad blocking by users was 9.26% in the U.S. and Europe. The rate ranged from 6.11% for business and finance sites to 15.58% for news sites and 17.79% for tech sites. For some sites, ad blocking reached 50%. Ad blocking is highest in Europe, where Austria is tops with a 22.5% ad blocking rate. The U.S. is slightly below average at 8.72%. With 1% or less are Iran, Guyana, Kuwait, Myanmar and Qatar.

via The Future of Ad Blockers | ZEDO, Inc..

The Government of Antigua is planning to launch a website selling movies, music and software, without paying U.S. copyright holders. The Caribbean island is taking the unprecedented step because the United States refuses to lift a trade “blockade” preventing the island from offering Internet gambling services, despite several WTO decisions in Antigua’s favor. The country now hopes to recoup some of the lost income through a WTO approved “warez” site.

Antigua and Barbuda is a small country in the Caribbean that for years had a flourishing gambling industry.

A few years ago 5% of all Antiguans worked at gambling related companies. However, when the U.S. prevented the island from accessing their market the industry collapsed.

“What was once a multi-billion dollar industry in our country, employing almost 5% of our population has now shrunk to virtually nothing,” Antigua’s High Commissioner to London, Carl Roberts, said previously.

Hoping to rebuild the gambling business Antigua filed a dispute at the World Trade Organization (WTO), which they won.

In 2005 the WTO ruled that the US refusal to let Antiguan gambling companies access their market violated free-trade, as domestic companies were allowed to operate freely. In 2007 the WTO went a step further and granted Antigua the right to suspend U.S. copyrights up to $21 million annually.

TorrentFreak is informed by a source close to Antigua’s Government that the country now plans to capitalize on this option. The authorities want to launch a website selling U.S. media to customers worldwide, without compensating the makers.

The plan has been in the works for several months already and Antigua is ready to proceed once they have informed the WTO about their plan. Initially the island put the topic on the WTO meeting last month, but the U.S. blocked it from being discussed by arguing that the request was “untimely.”

This month Antigua will try again, and if they succeed their media hub is expected to launch soon after.

Antigua’s attorney Mark Mendel told TorrentFreak that he can’t reveal any details on the plans. However, he emphasized that the term “piracy” doesn’t apply here as the WTO has granted Antigua the right to suspend U.S. copyrights.

“There is no body in the world that can stop us from doing this, as we already have approval from the international governing body WTO,” Mendel told us.

TorrentFreak is in the process of obtaining details of the content to be offered and the prices to be charged. One option would be to ask users for $5 a month in return for unlimited access to U.S. media.

As predicted, the suggestion to suspend U.S. copyrights is already meeting resistance from United States authorities.

“If Antigua actually proceeds with a plan for its government to authorize the theft of intellectual property, it would only serve to hurt Antigua’s own interests,” the U.S warned in a letter to the WTO last month.

According to the letter Antigua will ruin their chances of getting a settlement should they approve a site that sels U.S. copyrighted goods without compensating the makers.

“Government-authorized piracy would undermine chances for a settlement that would provide real benefits to Antigua. It also would serve as a major impediment to foreign investment in the Antiguan economy, particularly in high-tech industries,” the U.S. added.

Antigua doesn’t appear to be impressed much by these threats and is continuing with its plan.

If the Antiguan media portal indeed launches, it will make headlines all across the world, which may result in the site becoming one of the larger authorized suppliers of U.S. media on the Internet.

via Antigua Government Set to Launch “Pirate” Website To Punish United States | TorrentFreak.

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has announced plans to move the title to a digital-first strategy in a move he described as a "big cultural shift" for the business daily, and cut 35 jobs.

Barber said the FT will make a net headcount reduction of 25 – after hiring 10 journalists for digital roles – in an effort to save £1.6m this year as part of the strategy, outlined to staff in a memo on Monday, seen by MediaGuardian. He added that the FT needed to be "reshaped for the digital age".

via Financial Times editor announces digital-first strategy | Media | guardian.co.uk.

Excellent study on the Dutch file-sharing scene.

highlights:
About one in five people who download from illegal sources had in the past year bought a CD or LP that they had previously downloaded from an illegal source. The same was found for DVDs, Blurays and for printed books. The opposite – downloading a book from an illegal source that had been previously purchased in print – is also very common. This shows that for a substantial group of
consumers printed books and e-books are complementary.

People who download from an illegal source are more frequently also consumers from legal sources, and they are more likely go to concerts and the cinema and to purchase derived products Respondents who had downloaded music, films, series, games and books from illegal sources in the past year were more likely to use legal channels as well. Only in the case of music purchased on CDs or LPs, however, no difference is observed between those who had on occasion downloaded from an illegal source in the past year and people who had never done so. The differences are particularly marked in the case of paid-for downloading and streaming from a legal source: respondents who have never downloaded from an illegal source are also little inclined to pay for online content. The survey also showed that people who had, on occasion, downloaded from an illegal source in the past year bought more music and film merchandise and went to concerts or the cinema more often.

The survey shows that roughly one third to half of the respondents would not be interested in the latest download from an illegal source if it would not be available for free. The rest have an average maximum willingness to pay that is close to the normal selling price. Similarly, about one third of all book readers are interested in and willing to pay to borrow e-books from a library or bookshop, there being a slight preference for libraries and for a flat rate per year rather than a price per title borrowed.

http://www.ivir.nl/publications/poort/Filesharing_2012.pdf’

Excellent study on the Dutch file-sharing scene.

highlights:
About one in five people who download from illegal sources had in the past year bought a CD or LP that they had previously downloaded from an illegal source. The same was found for DVDs, Blurays and for printed books. The opposite – downloading a book from an illegal source that had been previously purchased in print – is also very common. This shows that for a substantial group of
consumers printed books and e-books are complementary.

People who download from an illegal source are more frequently also consumers from legal sources, and they are more likely go to concerts and the cinema and to purchase derived products Respondents who had downloaded music, films, series, games and books from illegal sources in the past year were more likely to use legal channels as well. Only in the case of music purchased on CDs or LPs, however, no difference is observed between those who had on occasion downloaded from an illegal source in the past year and people who had never done so. The differences are particularly marked in the case of paid-for downloading and streaming from a legal source: respondents who have never downloaded from an illegal source are also little inclined to pay for online content. The survey also showed that people who had, on occasion, downloaded from an illegal source in the past year bought more music and film merchandise and went to concerts or the cinema more often.

The survey shows that roughly one third to half of the respondents would not be interested in the latest download from an illegal source if it would not be available for free. The rest have an average maximum willingness to pay that is close to the normal selling price. Similarly, about one third of all book readers are interested in and willing to pay to borrow e-books from a library or bookshop, there being a slight preference for libraries and for a flat rate per year rather than a price per title borrowed.

http://www.ivir.nl/publications/poort/Filesharing_2012.pdf’

“As for my incarceration. Was it worth it? NO.”“Nothing is worth losing your freedom, would I do it again … hmmm I don’t know. I learned so much from it. Without it I wouldn’t have learned HTML and PHP. Both of which I use on the website I made for the Robotics teams I used to Mentor. They probably won’t want a felon to Mentor the kids.”

via IMAGiNE BitTorrent Group Sysop Speaks Out as He Heads to Prison | TorrentFreak.

Average revenue streams

For the major record labels the above pie chart would look quite different, as they mostly rely on revenue from music sales. This also explains their strong views against unauthorized file-sharing.

via Music Sales Are Just 6% of Average Musician’s Income | TorrentFreak.Average revenue streams

For the major record labels the above pie chart would look quite different, as they mostly rely on revenue from music sales. This also explains their strong views against unauthorized file-sharing.

via Music Sales Are Just 6% of Average Musician’s Income | TorrentFreak.

Why Winning A $7,000 Piracy Lawsuit Could Be The Worst News Ever For Book Publishers

John Paul Titlow posted 10 hours ago

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Earlier this week, the book publishing industry hit a milestone. For the first time ever, a publisher successfully sued consumers for pirating books via BitTorrent. As a result of the lawsuit, a pair of New York residents will pay $7,000 in damages to John Wiley and Sons, the company that puts out the “For Dummies” series of instructional books.

Sound familiar? With this litigation, Wiley borrowed a page from the playbook of the music industry, which became notorious a few years back for suing people for illegally sharing songs. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) eventually backed down from some of its most aggressive litigation after it became clear the strategy was doing little more than angering the most avid, dedicated music fans. Despite the epic failure of the RIAA’s approach, worried book publishers are now beginning to think lawsuits can help them slow the bleeding of a business that is – like the music industry before it – being radically upended by digital technology. Let’s hope this small victory for book publishers doesn’t send the industry on the same disastrous path taken by the music labels.

via Why Winning A $7,000 Piracy Lawsuit Could Be The Worst News Ever For Book Publishers.Why Winning A $7,000 Piracy Lawsuit Could Be The Worst News Ever For Book Publishers

John Paul Titlow posted 10 hours ago

inShare

12

Earlier this week, the book publishing industry hit a milestone. For the first time ever, a publisher successfully sued consumers for pirating books via BitTorrent. As a result of the lawsuit, a pair of New York residents will pay $7,000 in damages to John Wiley and Sons, the company that puts out the “For Dummies” series of instructional books.

Sound familiar? With this litigation, Wiley borrowed a page from the playbook of the music industry, which became notorious a few years back for suing people for illegally sharing songs. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) eventually backed down from some of its most aggressive litigation after it became clear the strategy was doing little more than angering the most avid, dedicated music fans. Despite the epic failure of the RIAA’s approach, worried book publishers are now beginning to think lawsuits can help them slow the bleeding of a business that is – like the music industry before it – being radically upended by digital technology. Let’s hope this small victory for book publishers doesn’t send the industry on the same disastrous path taken by the music labels.

via Why Winning A $7,000 Piracy Lawsuit Could Be The Worst News Ever For Book Publishers.

For another 10 years, Universal Pictures content will not be seen on Netflix.

Universal inked a deal with HBO on Monday that gives HBO exclusive rights to all Universal films for another decade. This is an extension of a previous exclusive agreement and means, essentially, that rival services like Starz and Netflix won’t be getting ahold of Universal’s movies anytime soon.

The extension is likely a reaction to Netflix’s agreement with Walt Disney pictures for exclusive access to Disney animated features and films until 2016. But HBO may not be able to compete on the same level as Netflix. HBO was called “the closest thing Netflix has to a direct competitor” by a Forbes contributor on Monday, but close to Netflix it is not.

via HBO Signs Deal With Universal, Continues To Make Life Difficult For Netflix, Consumers.For another 10 years, Universal Pictures content will not be seen on Netflix.

Universal inked a deal with HBO on Monday that gives HBO exclusive rights to all Universal films for another decade. This is an extension of a previous exclusive agreement and means, essentially, that rival services like Starz and Netflix won’t be getting ahold of Universal’s movies anytime soon.

The extension is likely a reaction to Netflix’s agreement with Walt Disney pictures for exclusive access to Disney animated features and films until 2016. But HBO may not be able to compete on the same level as Netflix. HBO was called “the closest thing Netflix has to a direct competitor” by a Forbes contributor on Monday, but close to Netflix it is not.

via HBO Signs Deal With Universal, Continues To Make Life Difficult For Netflix, Consumers.

The beauty of P2P and BitTorrent is that it’s a distributed system. Indeed, as far as sites are concerned bandwidth between users (and of course content) are both available for free and running in basic mode requires only a few dollars a month on top to pay for a server. Trading in the big gas guzzler for a something a little more frugal should be a survival option.

Of course, in many cases this could potentially mean file-sharing backing up in sophistication to 2004, to what may as well be the stone age to many of today’s younger enthusiasts. That said, ask anyone who was around at the time if it was so bad. Yes, at times Suprnova required 30 refreshes until a page actually loaded and yes, initial seeders uploaded at a snail’s pace, but the scene was buzzing and people were having fun. And if it’s not about having fun anymore, something has gone wrong along the way.

Maybe a fresh start and a resurgence of some old fashioned non-monetary gain values is what is needed. The money can’t be targeted if there isn’t any.

via Bombing BitTorrent and File-Sharing Websites Back to the Stone Age | TorrentFreak.The beauty of P2P and BitTorrent is that it’s a distributed system. Indeed, as far as sites are concerned bandwidth between users (and of course content) are both available for free and running in basic mode requires only a few dollars a month on top to pay for a server. Trading in the big gas guzzler for a something a little more frugal should be a survival option.

Of course, in many cases this could potentially mean file-sharing backing up in sophistication to 2004, to what may as well be the stone age to many of today’s younger enthusiasts. That said, ask anyone who was around at the time if it was so bad. Yes, at times Suprnova required 30 refreshes until a page actually loaded and yes, initial seeders uploaded at a snail’s pace, but the scene was buzzing and people were having fun. And if it’s not about having fun anymore, something has gone wrong along the way.

Maybe a fresh start and a resurgence of some old fashioned non-monetary gain values is what is needed. The money can’t be targeted if there isn’t any.

via Bombing BitTorrent and File-Sharing Websites Back to the Stone Age | TorrentFreak.

A group of publishers (Oxford and Cambridge University Press and Francis & Taylor) have sued Delhi University & its agent, Rameshwari Photocopy Service for compiling short extracts from different textbooks into a digest for students to use as part of their study (commonly referred to as “course packs”).

via Merry Copyright to you – A jingle for the Oxford v. Rameshwari Case « Kafila.A group of publishers (Oxford and Cambridge University Press and Francis & Taylor) have sued Delhi University & its agent, Rameshwari Photocopy Service for compiling short extracts from different textbooks into a digest for students to use as part of their study (commonly referred to as “course packs”).

via Merry Copyright to you – A jingle for the Oxford v. Rameshwari Case « Kafila.

Star architect Zaha Hadid is currently building several projects across China. One of them, however, is being constructed twice. Pirates are the process of copying one of her provocative designs, and the race is on to see who can finish first.

via Pirated Copy of Design by Star Architect Hadid Being Built in China – SPIEGEL ONLINE.Star architect Zaha Hadid is currently building several projects across China. One of them, however, is being constructed twice. Pirates are the process of copying one of her provocative designs, and the race is on to see who can finish first.

via Pirated Copy of Design by Star Architect Hadid Being Built in China – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

How 4 Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM | Ars Technica.How 4 Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM | Ars Technica.

Taunts aside, Tankafetast’s operators appear to be trying to raise the profile of the site. They have launched a clothing range, consisting mainly of t-shirts carrying a range of pro-filesharing slogans such as Keep Calm and Download and Support Your Local Uploader, plus a few with defiant messages on Tankafetast’s return.In addition, on Saturday the site’s operators announced that in celebration of the site’s return they would be hiring three cinemas in Malmö, Gothenburg and Stockholm and giving away tickets to fans of the site. The first viewing has been announced as taking place this Thursday for the premiere of the new Bond movie, Skyfall.What is interesting to observe here is that when it comes to file-sharing the Swedes are very defiant indeed, even in the face of adversaries such as the government and police. Whether the site will be able to back up its defiance with long-term uptime remains to be seen, but even that seems to be more likely than their aim this week of giving away at least hundred of their cinema tickets to girls.

via Raided PRQ Torrent Site is Back and Hiring Cinemas To Celebrate | TorrentFreak.Taunts aside, Tankafetast’s operators appear to be trying to raise the profile of the site. They have launched a clothing range, consisting mainly of t-shirts carrying a range of pro-filesharing slogans such as Keep Calm and Download and Support Your Local Uploader, plus a few with defiant messages on Tankafetast’s return.In addition, on Saturday the site’s operators announced that in celebration of the site’s return they would be hiring three cinemas in Malmö, Gothenburg and Stockholm and giving away tickets to fans of the site. The first viewing has been announced as taking place this Thursday for the premiere of the new Bond movie, Skyfall.What is interesting to observe here is that when it comes to file-sharing the Swedes are very defiant indeed, even in the face of adversaries such as the government and police. Whether the site will be able to back up its defiance with long-term uptime remains to be seen, but even that seems to be more likely than their aim this week of giving away at least hundred of their cinema tickets to girls.

via Raided PRQ Torrent Site is Back and Hiring Cinemas To Celebrate | TorrentFreak.

Textbook Publisher Pearson Takes Down 1.5 Million Teacher And Student Blogs With A Single DMCA Notice | Techdirt.

 

In case you don’t already know, we’re the folks not only behind this site andWPMU DEV, but also Edublogs… the oldest and second largest WordPress Multisite setup on the web, with, as of right now 1,451,943 teacher and student blogs hosted.

And today, our hosting company, ServerBeach, to whom we pay $6,954.37 every month to host Edublogs, turned off our webservers, without notice, less than 12 hours after issuing us with a DMCA email.

Because one of our teachers, in 2007, had shared a copy of Beck’s Hopelessness Scale with his class, a 20 question list, totalling some 279 words, published in 1974, that Pearson would like you to pay $120 for.

Putting aside for a moment the fact that Pearson somehow feels that a 38-year-old questionnaire is worth $120, and the fact that the targeted post was originally published in 2007, there’s still the troubling question as to why ServerBeach felt compelled to take down 1.5 million blogs over a single DMCA notice. There’s nothing in the DMCA process that demands an entire “ecosystem” be killed off to eliminate a single “bad apple.” This sort of egregious overcompliance gives certain copyright holders all the encouragement they need to continue to abuse the DMCA takedown system.  Textbook Publisher Pearson Takes Down 1.5 Million Teacher And Student Blogs With A Single DMCA Notice | Techdirt.

The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus has just released its 2012 International Piracy Watch List. In addition to countries such as China, Russia and Ukraine, this year Italy and Switzerland make fresh appearances in the list. Both countries are accused of not doing enough to combat online infringement with the latter allegedly proving itself as a “magnet for rogue sites.”

via New Anti-Piracy Watchlist Zooms In On File-Sharing Tolerant Countries | TorrentFreak.The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus has just released its 2012 International Piracy Watch List. In addition to countries such as China, Russia and Ukraine, this year Italy and Switzerland make fresh appearances in the list. Both countries are accused of not doing enough to combat online infringement with the latter allegedly proving itself as a “magnet for rogue sites.”

via New Anti-Piracy Watchlist Zooms In On File-Sharing Tolerant Countries | TorrentFreak.

Though his recent statements are unlikely to shock the many young music fans who grew up downloading albums and songs illegally, many were surprised when Neil Young said he didnt really mind piracy.”It doesnt affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio,” Young said in January. “I look at the radio as gone … Piracy is the new radio. Thats how music gets around … Thats the radio. If you really want to hear it, lets make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.”

via Neil Young: Piracy Is The New Radio, Way To Get Your Music Heard.Though his recent statements are unlikely to shock the many young music fans who grew up downloading albums and songs illegally, many were surprised when Neil Young said he didnt really mind piracy.”It doesnt affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio,” Young said in January. “I look at the radio as gone … Piracy is the new radio. Thats how music gets around … Thats the radio. If you really want to hear it, lets make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.”

via Neil Young: Piracy Is The New Radio, Way To Get Your Music Heard.

A leaked presentation from the RIAA shows that online file-sharing isn’t the biggest source of illegal music acquisition in the U.S. The confidential data reveals that 65% of all music files are “unpaid” but the vast majority of these are obtained through offline swapping. The report further shows that cyberlockers such as Megaupload are only a marginal source of pirated music.

In April, one of the RIAA’s key employees informed a group of music industry insiders about the upcoming six-strikes anti-piracy scheme in the U.S. TorrentFreak received a copy of the presentation sheets which include a rather interesting chart on where people get their music files from.

The data presented by the RIAA comes from NPD’s Digital Music Study but has never been published in public in its current form. While NPD’s press release mentioned a decline in music acquisition through P2P file-sharing and hard drive trading, these numbers were not placed in a larger context.

A strange decision, because the chart below is of critical importance for the debate on music piracy.

As it turns out, two thirds of all music acquired in the U.S. is unpaid. However, offline trading is a much bigger source of unpaid music than online piracy. Of all “unpaid” music less than 30 percent comes from P2P file-sharing or cyberlockers.

Music sources

In total, 15 percent of all acquired music (paid + unpaid) comes from P2P file-sharing and just 4 percent from cyberlockers. Offline swapping in the form of hard drive trading and burning/ripping from others is much more prevalent with 19 and 27 percent respectively.

This leads to the, for us, surprising conclusion that more than 70% of all unpaid music comes from offline swapping.

The chart is marked “confidential” which suggests that the RIAA doesn’t want this data to be out in the open. This is perhaps understandable since the figures don’t really help their crusade against online piracy.

The RIAA is lobbying hard for legislation and voluntary agreements to deal with the online piracy problem, an issue that might seem less severe in the chart above.

While not insignificant, the fact that less than one in five music acquisitions can be traced back to online file-sharing isn’t really that convincing – especially when one takes into account that only a tiny fraction represent a lost sale.

Even if all online music piracy disappeared tomorrow, more than half of all music acquisitions would be unpaid.

But maybe the RIAA will go after these offline swappers next. The TSA could perform piracy scans of travelers’ computer equipment, for example. Or perhaps schools could search MP3 players, phones and computers of their students for unpaid music?

Just a thought.

More revealing findings from the RIAA will be published soon.

via RIAA: Online Music Piracy Pales In Comparison to Offline Swapping | TorrentFreak.A leaked presentation from the RIAA shows that online file-sharing isn’t the biggest source of illegal music acquisition in the U.S. The confidential data reveals that 65% of all music files are “unpaid” but the vast majority of these are obtained through offline swapping. The report further shows that cyberlockers such as Megaupload are only a marginal source of pirated music.

In April, one of the RIAA’s key employees informed a group of music industry insiders about the upcoming six-strikes anti-piracy scheme in the U.S. TorrentFreak received a copy of the presentation sheets which include a rather interesting chart on where people get their music files from.

The data presented by the RIAA comes from NPD’s Digital Music Study but has never been published in public in its current form. While NPD’s press release mentioned a decline in music acquisition through P2P file-sharing and hard drive trading, these numbers were not placed in a larger context.

A strange decision, because the chart below is of critical importance for the debate on music piracy.

As it turns out, two thirds of all music acquired in the U.S. is unpaid. However, offline trading is a much bigger source of unpaid music than online piracy. Of all “unpaid” music less than 30 percent comes from P2P file-sharing or cyberlockers.

Music sources

In total, 15 percent of all acquired music (paid + unpaid) comes from P2P file-sharing and just 4 percent from cyberlockers. Offline swapping in the form of hard drive trading and burning/ripping from others is much more prevalent with 19 and 27 percent respectively.

This leads to the, for us, surprising conclusion that more than 70% of all unpaid music comes from offline swapping.

The chart is marked “confidential” which suggests that the RIAA doesn’t want this data to be out in the open. This is perhaps understandable since the figures don’t really help their crusade against online piracy.

The RIAA is lobbying hard for legislation and voluntary agreements to deal with the online piracy problem, an issue that might seem less severe in the chart above.

While not insignificant, the fact that less than one in five music acquisitions can be traced back to online file-sharing isn’t really that convincing – especially when one takes into account that only a tiny fraction represent a lost sale.

Even if all online music piracy disappeared tomorrow, more than half of all music acquisitions would be unpaid.

But maybe the RIAA will go after these offline swappers next. The TSA could perform piracy scans of travelers’ computer equipment, for example. Or perhaps schools could search MP3 players, phones and computers of their students for unpaid music?

Just a thought.

More revealing findings from the RIAA will be published soon.

via RIAA: Online Music Piracy Pales In Comparison to Offline Swapping | TorrentFreak.

Last night, robots shut down the live broadcast of one of science fictions most prestigious award ceremonies. No, youre not reading a science fiction story. In the middle of the annual Hugo Awards event at Worldcon, which thousands of people tuned into via video streaming service UStream, the feed cut off — just as Neil Gaiman was giving an acceptance speech for his Doctor Who script, “The Doctors Wife.” Where Gaimans face had been were the words, “Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement.” What the hell?Jumping onto Twitter, people who had been watching the livestream began asking what was going on. How could an award ceremony have anything to do with copyright infringement?Bestselling science fiction author Tobias Buckell tweeted: tobiasbuckell@tobiasbuckell Oh, FFS. Ustream just shut down live worldcon feed for copyright infringement.2 Sep 12 ReplyRetweetFavoriteAnd then it began to dawn on people what happened. Gaiman had just gotten an award for his Doctor Who script. Before he took the stage, the Hugo Awards showed clips from his winning episode, along with clips from some other Doctor Who episodes that had been nominated, as well as a Community episode.Wrote Macworld editorial director Jason Snell: Jason Snell@jsnell Ustream just shut down the #Hugos live stream because they showed clips of the TV nominees. Automated copyright patrols ruin more things.2 Sep 12 ReplyRetweetFavoriteThis was, of course, absurd. First of all, the clips had been provided by the studios to be shown during the award ceremony. The Hugo Awards had explicit permission to broadcast them. But even if they hadnt, it is absolutely fair use to broadcast clips of copyrighted material during an award ceremony. Unfortunately, the digital restriction management DRM robots on UStream had not been programmed with these basic contours of copyright law.

via How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards.Last night, robots shut down the live broadcast of one of science fictions most prestigious award ceremonies. No, youre not reading a science fiction story. In the middle of the annual Hugo Awards event at Worldcon, which thousands of people tuned into via video streaming service UStream, the feed cut off — just as Neil Gaiman was giving an acceptance speech for his Doctor Who script, “The Doctors Wife.” Where Gaimans face had been were the words, “Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement.” What the hell?Jumping onto Twitter, people who had been watching the livestream began asking what was going on. How could an award ceremony have anything to do with copyright infringement?Bestselling science fiction author Tobias Buckell tweeted: tobiasbuckell@tobiasbuckell Oh, FFS. Ustream just shut down live worldcon feed for copyright infringement.2 Sep 12 ReplyRetweetFavoriteAnd then it began to dawn on people what happened. Gaiman had just gotten an award for his Doctor Who script. Before he took the stage, the Hugo Awards showed clips from his winning episode, along with clips from some other Doctor Who episodes that had been nominated, as well as a Community episode.Wrote Macworld editorial director Jason Snell: Jason Snell@jsnell Ustream just shut down the #Hugos live stream because they showed clips of the TV nominees. Automated copyright patrols ruin more things.2 Sep 12 ReplyRetweetFavoriteThis was, of course, absurd. First of all, the clips had been provided by the studios to be shown during the award ceremony. The Hugo Awards had explicit permission to broadcast them. But even if they hadnt, it is absolutely fair use to broadcast clips of copyrighted material during an award ceremony. Unfortunately, the digital restriction management DRM robots on UStream had not been programmed with these basic contours of copyright law.

via How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards.

Today we are beginning to see the first signs of Google’s announced punishment of “pirate” websites. The changes are resulting in lower search rankings for many file-sharing sites, but that doesn’t seem to bother The Pirate Bay. They are, however, disappointed that Google is giving in to the demands of the entertainment industries. The owner of fellow BitTorrent site isoHunt has gone a step further with a call for protest against antitrust bullying and censorship.

via Pirate Bay and isoHunt Respond to Google Search Result Punishment | TorrentFreak.Today we are beginning to see the first signs of Google’s announced punishment of “pirate” websites. The changes are resulting in lower search rankings for many file-sharing sites, but that doesn’t seem to bother The Pirate Bay. They are, however, disappointed that Google is giving in to the demands of the entertainment industries. The owner of fellow BitTorrent site isoHunt has gone a step further with a call for protest against antitrust bullying and censorship.

via Pirate Bay and isoHunt Respond to Google Search Result Punishment | TorrentFreak.

Why Readers Pirate eBooks

via Why Readers Pirate eBooks – GalleyCat.

One confessed eBook pirate asked the Reddit community an important question: “eBook pirates, how do you justify what you do?

We’ve collected seven responses below, complete with links to the comments thread. Publishers, authors and readers should all pay attention to these rationalizations–they will play an important role in the future of publishing.

If you are an author or publisher struggling with pirates, check out our two posts about dealing with piracy: How To Fight Book Pirates and Writers Engage with eBook Pirates.

7 Reasons People Pirate eBooks

1. “I’ve pirated electronic versions of books I already own physically.

2. “I limit myself to pirating things that are out-of-print or otherwise unavailable through a legal digital outlet.”

3. “I’m poor and I like to read, but I can’t pirate food, so I pirate everything else.

4. “The library rarely has the books I want to read.”

5. “I only pirate textbooks from school … They are ridiculously priced an I have a hard enough time paying tuition.”

6. “If the ebook is more expensive than the paper-version I sometimes pirate it out of annoyance.”

7. “pirating also lets me sample things i would not be willing to pay money for up front

Why Readers Pirate eBooks

via Why Readers Pirate eBooks – GalleyCat.

“IFPI has inadvertently made available its own confidential internal report, penned by none other than IFPIs chief anti-piracy officer, which details its strategy against online piracy for major recording labels across the globe. The document, 30-pages long, talks about file sharing sites, torrents, cyberlockers, phishing attacks, expectations from Internet service providers, mp3 sites and a lot more. The document is a global view representation of IFPIs problems, current and future threats, and the industrys responses to them.”A few tactics: shutting down music services, requiring file lockers filter uploads or be shut down interesting, since the DMCAs one good provision is the safe harbor, and proactive filtering could mean losing that protection, lobbying for DNS blocking legislation, pressuring ISPs into extra-legally enforcing their will, disrupting payment processing for pirate sites through blacklists, and providing “training built around real world experiences and challenges rather than focusing on theory” on copyright law to judges and legal bodies.

via Leaked IFPI Report Details Anti-Piracy Strategy – Slashdot.“IFPI has inadvertently made available its own confidential internal report, penned by none other than IFPIs chief anti-piracy officer, which details its strategy against online piracy for major recording labels across the globe. The document, 30-pages long, talks about file sharing sites, torrents, cyberlockers, phishing attacks, expectations from Internet service providers, mp3 sites and a lot more. The document is a global view representation of IFPIs problems, current and future threats, and the industrys responses to them.”A few tactics: shutting down music services, requiring file lockers filter uploads or be shut down interesting, since the DMCAs one good provision is the safe harbor, and proactive filtering could mean losing that protection, lobbying for DNS blocking legislation, pressuring ISPs into extra-legally enforcing their will, disrupting payment processing for pirate sites through blacklists, and providing “training built around real world experiences and challenges rather than focusing on theory” on copyright law to judges and legal bodies.

via Leaked IFPI Report Details Anti-Piracy Strategy – Slashdot.

“The Skynet copyright act has been in effect for six months in New Zealand and rights holders reckon it halved the number of infringements in the first month. Even so, theyre not happy and say over forty per cent of Kiwis continue to infringe on line. The fix? Rights holders want the current NZ$25 infringement notice processing fee payable to ISPs to be dropped to just a few dollars or even pennies, so that they can send out thousands of notices a month. ISPs want the fee to increase four times instead, to cover their costs. Unfortunately, the submissions for the review of the infringement notice fees are kept secret by the government.”

via Three-Strikes Copyright Law In NZ Halves Infringement – Slashdot.“The Skynet copyright act has been in effect for six months in New Zealand and rights holders reckon it halved the number of infringements in the first month. Even so, theyre not happy and say over forty per cent of Kiwis continue to infringe on line. The fix? Rights holders want the current NZ$25 infringement notice processing fee payable to ISPs to be dropped to just a few dollars or even pennies, so that they can send out thousands of notices a month. ISPs want the fee to increase four times instead, to cover their costs. Unfortunately, the submissions for the review of the infringement notice fees are kept secret by the government.”

via Three-Strikes Copyright Law In NZ Halves Infringement – Slashdot.

People who obtain movies and TV shows from the Internet through unauthorized and often illegal channels would actually prefer not to do if they were given the chance. That’s one of the findings of a new survey into consumer habits which reveals that although lower cost is often cited as a tool for reducing piracy, three other issues are driving people to break the law – convenience, choice and availability.

via Pirates Want To Go Legal But Convenience, Choice & Availability Come First | TorrentFreak.People who obtain movies and TV shows from the Internet through unauthorized and often illegal channels would actually prefer not to do if they were given the chance. That’s one of the findings of a new survey into consumer habits which reveals that although lower cost is often cited as a tool for reducing piracy, three other issues are driving people to break the law – convenience, choice and availability.

via Pirates Want To Go Legal But Convenience, Choice & Availability Come First | TorrentFreak.

Buffett is concentrating on small and medium papers in defensible markets, while steering clear of metro markets, where costs are high and competition is fierce. But he says he has no transformational ideas in mind.

“I do not have any secret sauce,” Buffett told the New York Times. “There are still 1,400 daily papers in the United States. The nice thing about it is that somebody can think about the best answer and we can copy him. Two or three years from now, you’ll see a much better-defined pattern of operations online and in print by papers.”

via Reflections of a Newsosaur: What’s next for newspapers?.Buffett is concentrating on small and medium papers in defensible markets, while steering clear of metro markets, where costs are high and competition is fierce. But he says he has no transformational ideas in mind.

“I do not have any secret sauce,” Buffett told the New York Times. “There are still 1,400 daily papers in the United States. The nice thing about it is that somebody can think about the best answer and we can copy him. Two or three years from now, you’ll see a much better-defined pattern of operations online and in print by papers.”

via Reflections of a Newsosaur: What’s next for newspapers?.

Cord Cutting Is The New File-Sharing

Janko RoettgersJuly 15, 20124 cord cutting,

opinionPrint

Cord cutting will kill Hollywood. Cord cutting doesn’t exist. Cord cutting is the future. Cord cutting is only done by poor kids who will change their ways when they get a real job: These days, it seems like everyone is talking about cord cutting, the trend of people ditching their pay TV subscription for online alternatives.

I’ve written many stories about the subject over the years as well, and I’ve been making how-to videos for people interested in cutting the cord.

But lately, all that rhetoric about cord cutting has been sounding awfully familiar, and I started to wonder: Where had I heard that before? And then it hit me: Cord cutting is the new file-sharing.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that all cord cutters are pirates. Sure, a subset of them are definitely getting their TV show fix from BitTorrent sites and cyberlockers after ditching cable, especially in countries where no legal alternatives exist. But in the U.S., many people instead turn to Hulu, Netflix and even free over-the-air TV once they cut the cable cord.

Still, cord cutting and file-sharing have a lot in common. On the surface, both are about paying less for movies and TV shows. But take a closer look, and you’ll realize that money is only part of the equation. What really unites cord cutters and file-sharers is that they want to take their media consumption into their own hands.

via Cord Cutting Is The New File-Sharing | TorrentFreak.Cord Cutting Is The New File-Sharing

Janko RoettgersJuly 15, 20124 cord cutting,

opinionPrint

Cord cutting will kill Hollywood. Cord cutting doesn’t exist. Cord cutting is the future. Cord cutting is only done by poor kids who will change their ways when they get a real job: These days, it seems like everyone is talking about cord cutting, the trend of people ditching their pay TV subscription for online alternatives.

I’ve written many stories about the subject over the years as well, and I’ve been making how-to videos for people interested in cutting the cord.

But lately, all that rhetoric about cord cutting has been sounding awfully familiar, and I started to wonder: Where had I heard that before? And then it hit me: Cord cutting is the new file-sharing.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that all cord cutters are pirates. Sure, a subset of them are definitely getting their TV show fix from BitTorrent sites and cyberlockers after ditching cable, especially in countries where no legal alternatives exist. But in the U.S., many people instead turn to Hulu, Netflix and even free over-the-air TV once they cut the cable cord.

Still, cord cutting and file-sharing have a lot in common. On the surface, both are about paying less for movies and TV shows. But take a closer look, and you’ll realize that money is only part of the equation. What really unites cord cutters and file-sharers is that they want to take their media consumption into their own hands.

via Cord Cutting Is The New File-Sharing | TorrentFreak.

Copying and sharing recordings was not a mistake, let alone wrong, because sharing is good. Its good to share musical recordings with friends and family; its good for a radio station to share recordings with the staff, and its good when strangers share through peer-to-peer networks. The wrong is in the repressive laws that try to block or punish sharing. Sharing ought to be legalized; in the mean time, please do not act ashamed of having shared — that would validate those repressive laws that claim that it is wrong.You did make a mistake when you chose Kazaa as the method of sharing.

via Response To Emily.Copying and sharing recordings was not a mistake, let alone wrong, because sharing is good. Its good to share musical recordings with friends and family; its good for a radio station to share recordings with the staff, and its good when strangers share through peer-to-peer networks. The wrong is in the repressive laws that try to block or punish sharing. Sharing ought to be legalized; in the mean time, please do not act ashamed of having shared — that would validate those repressive laws that claim that it is wrong.You did make a mistake when you chose Kazaa as the method of sharing.

via Response To Emily.

According to the Federal Court, RapidShare has to take all “technically and economically reasonable precautions” without compromising its business model to ensure that its users do not upload Atari’s game. The Court also noted that by not installing a word filter RapidShare may have already breached the “reasonable” threshold.One of the additional steps that the Court said RapidShare must take is to monitor a “manageable number” of third-party sites that offer “link collections” of content available on RapidShare. Should it find them indexing a copy of Atari’s game available on RapidShare it should then delete it from its servers.

via Supreme Court: RapidShare Liable For Copyright Infringement – Sometimes | TorrentFreak.According to the Federal Court, RapidShare has to take all “technically and economically reasonable precautions” without compromising its business model to ensure that its users do not upload Atari’s game. The Court also noted that by not installing a word filter RapidShare may have already breached the “reasonable” threshold.One of the additional steps that the Court said RapidShare must take is to monitor a “manageable number” of third-party sites that offer “link collections” of content available on RapidShare. Should it find them indexing a copy of Atari’s game available on RapidShare it should then delete it from its servers.

via Supreme Court: RapidShare Liable For Copyright Infringement – Sometimes | TorrentFreak.

A jövő szabadsága arról fog szólni, hogy képesek vagyunk-e felügyelni az eszközeinket. Képesek leszünk-e értelmes működési szabályokat felállítani, megvizsgálni és leállítani azokat a programokat, amik futnak rajtuk, hogy az akaratunk őszinte és igaz szolgálói legyenek, ne kémek és árulók, akik bűnözőknek, gengsztereknek és kontrollmániásoknak dolgoznak. Ez a csatát még nem vesztettük el, de meg kell nyernünk a szerzői jogi háborút, hogy az internet és a PC szabad és nyitott maradhasson. – Cory Doctorow 28. CCC konferencián elhangzott előpadásának magyar fordítása

A jövő szabadsága arról fog szólni, hogy képesek vagyunk-e felügyelni az eszközeinket. Képesek leszünk-e értelmes működési szabályokat felállítani, megvizsgálni és leállítani azokat a programokat, amik futnak rajtuk, hogy az akaratunk őszinte és igaz szolgálói legyenek, ne kémek és árulók, akik bűnözőknek, gengsztereknek és kontrollmániásoknak dolgoznak. Ez a csatát még nem vesztettük el, de meg kell nyernünk a szerzői jogi háborút, hogy az internet és a PC szabad és nyitott maradhasson. – Cory Doctorow 28. CCC konferencián elhangzott előpadásának magyar fordítása

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I never went through the transition from physical to digital. Im almost 21, and since I first began to love music Ive been spoiled by the Internet.I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. Ive only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.I wish I could say I miss album packaging and liner notes and rue the decline in album sales the digital world has caused. But the truth is, Ive never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, Ive never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and T-shirts.

via I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With : All Songs Considered Blog : NPR.I never went through the transition from physical to digital. Im almost 21, and since I first began to love music Ive been spoiled by the Internet.I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. Ive only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.I wish I could say I miss album packaging and liner notes and rue the decline in album sales the digital world has caused. But the truth is, Ive never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, Ive never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and T-shirts.

via I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With : All Songs Considered Blog : NPR.

Most people think of Amazon as little more than an online bookstore, but it could be one of the defining forces of 21st–century life—an algorithmically managed infrastructure company that has single–handedly rewritten the publishing industrys rulebook.

via From books to infrastructure – Design – Domus.Most people think of Amazon as little more than an online bookstore, but it could be one of the defining forces of 21st–century life—an algorithmically managed infrastructure company that has single–handedly rewritten the publishing industrys rulebook.

via From books to infrastructure – Design – Domus.

Hollywood had the brainwave that the regional strategy to tackle copyright issues in Australia was to introduce harsher legislation, to criminalise Internet users who seek alternative means of accessing content in their preferred format, at a time that is convenient for them.

Hollywood have ignored this consumer demand for so many years now that multiple alternatives for the acquisition of content have not only been designed, built, adopted and thoroughly commoditised, they have become totally mainstream, with less tech savvy users readily using them.

via Find a better way to share content? We might as well be talking to a brick wall | the iiNet Blog.Hollywood had the brainwave that the regional strategy to tackle copyright issues in Australia was to introduce harsher legislation, to criminalise Internet users who seek alternative means of accessing content in their preferred format, at a time that is convenient for them.

Hollywood have ignored this consumer demand for so many years now that multiple alternatives for the acquisition of content have not only been designed, built, adopted and thoroughly commoditised, they have become totally mainstream, with less tech savvy users readily using them.

via Find a better way to share content? We might as well be talking to a brick wall | the iiNet Blog.

Speaking at a University of Melbourne seminar last evening, AFACT boss Neil Gane conceded that TV and movie fans might be driven to piracy by delays, but when the same question was framed slightly differently, it proved problematic.

Linking to TorrentFreak’s statistics, ITNews reports that they asked Gane if piracy rates were lower on shows that were fast-tracked to Australia. He was unable to answer.

AFACT’s members have spent huge sums of money suing local ISP iiNet, yet appear to have a problem answering a fundamental question such as this. The answer, of course, (particularly given Gane’s earlier concession over delays) is that they do recognize that bringing shows more quickly to market in areas such as Australia will reduce piracy, but internal politics restrict them from doing so.

But instead, Gane told the seminar that members of AFACT believe that fans of Game of Thrones are behaving unreasonably when they don’t want to wait an additional week to see the show.

via Anti-Piracy Boss: TV Fans Are Unreasonable For Wanting Content Quicker | TorrentFreak.Speaking at a University of Melbourne seminar last evening, AFACT boss Neil Gane conceded that TV and movie fans might be driven to piracy by delays, but when the same question was framed slightly differently, it proved problematic.

Linking to TorrentFreak’s statistics, ITNews reports that they asked Gane if piracy rates were lower on shows that were fast-tracked to Australia. He was unable to answer.

AFACT’s members have spent huge sums of money suing local ISP iiNet, yet appear to have a problem answering a fundamental question such as this. The answer, of course, (particularly given Gane’s earlier concession over delays) is that they do recognize that bringing shows more quickly to market in areas such as Australia will reduce piracy, but internal politics restrict them from doing so.

But instead, Gane told the seminar that members of AFACT believe that fans of Game of Thrones are behaving unreasonably when they don’t want to wait an additional week to see the show.

via Anti-Piracy Boss: TV Fans Are Unreasonable For Wanting Content Quicker | TorrentFreak.

Sites such as isoHunt, KickAssTorrents and Extratorrent are often characterized as lawless piracy havens that disregard the rights of content creators. But is this really the case? Not according to the site owners who say they are no different from Google. All the BitTorrent sites contacted by TorrentFreak say they remove content when they’re notified, with the number of requests processed ranging from just a handful to 1,680 per day.

pirate googleEntertainment industry groups including the RIAA and MPAA view BitTorrent sites as a major threat.

The owners of BitTorrent sites, however, believe they do nothing wrong. In fact, to the surprise of many copyright holders they are very responsive when they are asked to remove infringing links.

While it’s common knowledge that The Pirate Baydoes not remove any copyright infringing links from its site, all of the other major BitTorrent sites do honor DMCA-style takedown requests. In this regard they are no different from other major search engines such as Bing and Google.

TorrentFreak asked several of the most popular BitTorrent sites (and top DMCA targets on Google) about their takedown policies. Although they differ quite a bit in terms of the number of requests they receive per day, they all remove copyright infringing links on a daily basis.

With 1,680 takedown requests per day, BitSnoop is the most-targeted site. Since December last year they complied with 363,956 requests. The top DMCA sender is Nate Glass from takedownpiracy.com.

BitSnoop’s top DMCA takedown senders

ExtraTorrent receives between 20 and 30 requests per day and approximately 3,000 links are removed every month. The response time to process DMCA requests varies from a few hours to three days according to ExtraTorrent’s administrator.

KickAssTorrents also deleted thousands of torrents every month, and this number is rising rapidly. In May KAT removed 19,005 torrent files, up from 7,604 in January.

Inspired by Google, the site is currently working on a detailed web-interface where the public can view takedown statistics.

“We are very serious about removing copyrighted content following DMCA requests. We have staff who review and process all incoming requests. On working days the processing time of these requests never takes longer than several hours,” KickAssTorrents’ owners told TorrentFreak.

isoHunt receive relatively few DMCA notices considering the size of the site. The site’s founder, Gary Fung, told TorrentFreak that they receive about eight requests per day. Since the site started, isoHunt has responded to 18,000 individual notices emailed by copyright holders.

Fung notes that the volume of takedown requests has increased over the years but that they always respond within five working days. This responsiveness is often met with surprise by the senders.

“With the hundreds if not thousands of copyright holders we’ve talked to, some have even come back to say thanks and commented that we aren’t what they expected, in terms of answering with their wishes and speed of our takedowns,” Fung told us.

“While the DMCA is by no means perfect nor is it a law of my country, I do stand by it as the closest thing we have to an amicable process between copyright holders and internet intermediaries that is international by nature. It’s unfortunate some choose to ignore it and sue instead, for reasons purely political.”

isoHunt’s founder further emphasizes that they are no different from Google when it comes to respecting the DMCA. Google previously distanced itself from isoHunt and other torrent search engines, but Fung disagrees.

“Since we index any and all BitTorrent sites on the Internet, for links to files on BitTorrent swarms, I would like to call Google bullshit on how their search engine is any different from ours, in nature as an Internet intermediary or intention to comply and work with copyright holders.”

Many other BitTorrent site operators share Fung’s opinion on this matter.

While BitTorrent sites may link to relatively more copyrighted content than Google, they comply with the same takedown requests. In this regard it’s ineffective for copyright holders to ask Google to censor isoHuntBitSnoopKickAssTorrents and Extratorrent links.

But perhaps that’s too easy?

via Top Torrent Sites Respect Copyright Takedowns, Just Like Google | TorrentFreak.ebsites Charge A Fee To Process Copyright Takedowns?Copyright Holders Punish Themselves With Crazy DMCA TakedownsAnti-Piracy Co. Blames

via Top Torrent Sites Respect Copyright Takedowns, Just Like Google | TorrentFreak.

.http://fortunebrainstormtech.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/041112-us-v-apple-complaint.pdfhttp://fortunebrainstormtech.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/041112-us-v-apple-complaint.pdf

Fox sues Dish over ad-blocking feature; Dish fires back – latimes.com.

Fox Broadcasting Co. has sued Dish Network, becoming the first television network to fire a legal salvo over the satellite company’s controversial new ad-skipping device called AutoHop.

Dish, meanwhile, filed its own lawsuit, which asks a federal judge to declare that AutoHop violates no copyright laws. Dish sued not only Fox, but also CBS, Walt Disney-owned ABC, and Comcast Corp.controlled-NBC.

The television industry is grappling with new technologies that threaten to undercut the billions of dollars a year that the networks collect from advertisers to run 30- to 60-second television commercials. That advertising revenue underwrites the high cost of producing television shows.

Fox filed its copyright violation and breach-of-contract suit against Dish on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Dish filed its suit in U.S. District Court in New York.

“The suit asks for a declaratory judgment that the AutoHop feature does not infringe any copyrights that could be claimed by the major networks, and that Dish, while providing the AutoHop feature, remains in compliance with its agreements with the networks,” the Englewood, Colo., company said in a statement.

While consumers with digital video recorders can fast-forward through commercials of recorded shows, Dish’s AutoHop takes it a step further. The screen goes black when a commercial break appears. A few seconds later, the program returns. The service can’t be used on live programming, such as a sporting event, even after it has been recorded.

With more than 14 million subscribers, Dish Network Corp.’s new technology may threaten the networks’ ability to continue to charge premiums for their commercial time.

Dish Network’s new feature, launched earlier this month, comes at a particularly awkward time for broadcasters as they are beginning negotiations with advertisers over the sale of their commercial time for the 2012-2013 television season.

“We were given no choice but to file suit against one of our largest distributors, Dish Network, because of their surprising move to market a product with the clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem,” Fox said in a statement. “Their wrongheaded decision requires us to take swift action in order to aggressively defend the future of free, over-the-air television.”

Dish, for its part, said the new technology was simply making it easier for consumers to avoid commercials.

“Viewers have been skipping commercials since the advent of the remote control; we are giving them a feature they want and that gives them more control.”  David Shull, Dish senior vice president of programming, said in a statement. “We don’t believe AutoHop will substantially change established consumer behavior, but we do believe it makes the viewing experience better.”

Fox sues Dish over ad-blocking feature; Dish fires back – latimes.com.

Copyright Removal Requests – Google Transparency Report.Copyright Removal Requests – Google Transparency Report.

BitTorrent Traffic Booms Due to “Licensing Challenges” | TorrentFreak.

 

In the U.S., BitTorrent’s share of total Internet traffic is falling sharply and the aggregate share of all P2P sharing applications is now at an all-time low of 12.7 percent. In other parts of the world, however, this trend is noticeably absent. In Europe and the Asia-Pacific region BitTorrent continues to surge. In part this difference can be explained by the lack of legal alternatives.

Over the years we have been following various reports on Internet traffic changes, specifically in relation to BitTorrent. One of the emerging trends is BitTorrent and P2P traffic as a whole losing its share of total Internet traffic, in the U.S. at least.

This downward spiral is confirmed by a recent Sandvine report which reveals that BitTorrent traffic is now responsible for 11.3% of all U.S. Internet traffic during peak hours, compared to 17.3% last year. Although these numbers don’t take into account that absolute traffic has increased, it’s clear that there’s little to no growth in BitTorrent use.

However, this decline appears to be unique to the U.S. When we look at other regions a different pattern can be observed.

In Europe for example, BitTorrent traffic still accounts for 20.32% of all Internet traffic during peak hours, while eDonkey adds another 9.39% to the P2P total. During the last 18 months the share of P2P traffic nearly quadrupled, and this increase is even larger in absolute traffic.

According to Sandvine, the absence of legal alternatives is one of the reasons for these high P2P traffic shares.

“We see higher levels of P2P filesharing than in many other regions, at least partially due to geographical licensing challenges that restrict the availability of legitimate Real-Time Entertainment services.”

Europe: Internet traffic during peak hours

europe

A similar trend is visible in the Asia-Pacific region where BitTorrent now accounts for nearly half of all upstream traffic and 27.19% of the aggregate Internet traffic during peak hours. The P2P streaming service PPStream and the Chinese file-sharing client Thunder add another 6.36% and 4.62% to the P2P total.

Asia-Pacific: Internet traffic during peak hours

asia pacific

So, while BitTorrent traffic is stabilizing in the U.S. as its share of Internet traffic drops, the P2P protocol is still hugely popular in other parts of the world.

Sandvine’s suggestion that a lack of legal alternatives is one of the explanations for this seems plausible. As we reported earlier this week, the latest episodes of series such as Game of Thrones are widely pirated on BitTorrent in countries such as Australia and the Netherlands due to airing delays.

In the U.S. on the other hand, the availability of legal content has flourished in recent years. To illustrate this, Sandvine reports that one-third (32.9%) of all downstream traffic during peak hours is now generated by Netflix subscribers. In addition, Hulu has doubled its share in the last year to 1.8%.

The above seems to suggest that due to these alternatives, people are less inclined to pirate.

The MPAA is slowly starting to realize that consumers are not all out to steal content, they simply want to consume.

“I believe it’s critical to find solutions to the challenges facing both these consumers and the people who create the content. Because at the end of the day, this discussion is about consumers and by consumers who love TV shows and movies. They want to be able to access them quickly and safely online,” the MPAA’s Marc Miller wrote yesterday.

True words, but Miller continues with a classic misunderstanding. “No business in the world can compete with ‘free’,” he notes.

As it turns out, the entertainment industry can definitely compete with free, up to a certain point. The crucial part is to remove all the artificial barriers. Release delays for TV and movies drive people towards BitTorrent piracy, just as DRM is an incentive to pirate rather than a deterrent.

The challenge for the entertainment industry in the years to come is not to invent ways to stop piracy but to make it less attractive, by ensuring that consumers get timely access to the content they want independent of their location, and on demand.

BitTorrent Traffic Booms Due to “Licensing Challenges” | TorrentFreak.

That Book Place also has shelves and shelves carrying a mixture of new and used books, with price stickers giving the customer a variety of options. You can have a brand-new copy shipped to you the next day, or buy it used, or rent it, or get it as an e-book. If you take out a membership in the store, you can borrow a book for free, or get a copy without the Digital Rights Management DRM scheme that limits it to use on a specific kind of device.

via A model for the new bookstore essay | Inside Higher Ed.That Book Place also has shelves and shelves carrying a mixture of new and used books, with price stickers giving the customer a variety of options. You can have a brand-new copy shipped to you the next day, or buy it used, or rent it, or get it as an e-book. If you take out a membership in the store, you can borrow a book for free, or get a copy without the Digital Rights Management DRM scheme that limits it to use on a specific kind of device.

via A model for the new bookstore essay | Inside Higher Ed.

To a certain degree one could claim that HBO is to blame for Game of Throne’s success on BitTorrent. They want to keep access to the show “exclusive” and even Netflix wasn’t able to buy the rights no matter what they offered.Whether this is the best decision in terms of revenue is hard to tell, but it’s clear that HBO prefers more exclusiveness over less piracy. And who knows, maybe they even sell HBO subscriptions to BitTorrent downloaders in the long run.

via Who’s Pirating Game of Thrones, And Why? | TorrentFreak.To a certain degree one could claim that HBO is to blame for Game of Throne’s success on BitTorrent. They want to keep access to the show “exclusive” and even Netflix wasn’t able to buy the rights no matter what they offered.Whether this is the best decision in terms of revenue is hard to tell, but it’s clear that HBO prefers more exclusiveness over less piracy. And who knows, maybe they even sell HBO subscriptions to BitTorrent downloaders in the long run.

via Who’s Pirating Game of Thrones, And Why? | TorrentFreak.

We recently posted an interesting study talking about how greater file sharing of leaked albums had a specific (if small) causal impact that resulted in higher sales. I thought it was an interesting area of research, though one where a lot more work needs to be done. Following that, however, there was an interesting exchange on Twitter, mainly by former Warner Music exec Ethan Kaplan, who didn’t seem to think the concept was controversial at all — and instead that it was obvious.

via Former Record Label Exec Ethan Kaplan: Duh, Of Course More File Sharing Leads To More Sales | Techdirt.We recently posted an interesting study talking about how greater file sharing of leaked albums had a specific (if small) causal impact that resulted in higher sales. I thought it was an interesting area of research, though one where a lot more work needs to be done. Following that, however, there was an interesting exchange on Twitter, mainly by former Warner Music exec Ethan Kaplan, who didn’t seem to think the concept was controversial at all — and instead that it was obvious.

via Former Record Label Exec Ethan Kaplan: Duh, Of Course More File Sharing Leads To More Sales | Techdirt.

Its a dynamic thats been particularly pointed for Dodd, given his efforts to move forward on legislation preventing theft of intellectual property. The Protect I.P. Act and its counterpart in the House, the Stop Online Piracy Act, had broad bipartisan backing last year when Dodd was in his first months with the movie biz and was joined by the recording industry, book publishiers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the effort.”Were in a transformative period with an explosion of technology thats going to need content,” he said.But Internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter campaigned effectively against the legislation, mobilizing users on grounds that the new rules would impede the free flow of information on the Internet.”Google chose wisely by making Hollywood the enemy,” Dodd said ruefully.He said Saturday that the industry will need to take a far more nuanced approach to promoting future antipiracy legislation.”Were going to have to be more subtle and consumer-oriented,” he added. “Were on the wrong track if we describe this as thievery.”

via Dodd touts outreach on IP, bizs humanitarian efforts – Entertainment News, Film News, Media – Variety.Its a dynamic thats been particularly pointed for Dodd, given his efforts to move forward on legislation preventing theft of intellectual property. The Protect I.P. Act and its counterpart in the House, the Stop Online Piracy Act, had broad bipartisan backing last year when Dodd was in his first months with the movie biz and was joined by the recording industry, book publishiers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the effort.”Were in a transformative period with an explosion of technology thats going to need content,” he said.But Internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter campaigned effectively against the legislation, mobilizing users on grounds that the new rules would impede the free flow of information on the Internet.”Google chose wisely by making Hollywood the enemy,” Dodd said ruefully.He said Saturday that the industry will need to take a far more nuanced approach to promoting future antipiracy legislation.”Were going to have to be more subtle and consumer-oriented,” he added. “Were on the wrong track if we describe this as thievery.”

via Dodd touts outreach on IP, bizs humanitarian efforts – Entertainment News, Film News, Media – Variety.

A lengthy analysis on the Megaupload case in Magyar Narancs, a Hungarian weekly.
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A longfrom analysis of Gigapedia in the Hungarian weekly Magyar Narancs.
Read the rest of this entry »

This article examines what appears to be the most important factor shaping file sharing: the failure of traditional cultural markets to efficiently supply the demand in the online environment. Its findings are based on tracking the traffic of movies on three Hungarian P2P networks. This dataset is then matched with cinematic distribution data of the films tracked in P2P transactions. Central to our analysis is the assessment of two piracy paradigms: substitution and shortage, that is, whether pirated content is available through legal or only illegal channels. Shortage-driven downloaders are found to outnumber those downloading only current theater releases. Nonetheless, the supply of films available for downloading is more affected by parameters of cinematic distribution than it is by box office success. Therefore, part of the sales effort directly contributes to propping up piracy.
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Allowing students access to unpaid, small excerpts of copyrighted works promotes the spread of knowledge because it reduces the cost of education, the judge said. On the other hand, decreased income for publishers could reduce their ability to produce academic textbooks and scholarly works, thereby diminishing the spread of knowledge.Evans said that “decidedly small” excerpts could be copied by Georgia State. In most circumstances, she determined, it is permissible for universities and colleges to copy 10 percent of a book or one chapter of a book with 10 or more chapters.Brandon Butler, director of public policy initiatives for the Association of Research Libraries, said the publishers lawsuit had had a chilling effect on university libraries. “There was a feeling of being under siege,” he said. “They took us to court saying we were shameless pirates.”

via Judge rules largely for Georgia State in copyright case  | ajc.com.Allowing students access to unpaid, small excerpts of copyrighted works promotes the spread of knowledge because it reduces the cost of education, the judge said. On the other hand, decreased income for publishers could reduce their ability to produce academic textbooks and scholarly works, thereby diminishing the spread of knowledge.Evans said that “decidedly small” excerpts could be copied by Georgia State. In most circumstances, she determined, it is permissible for universities and colleges to copy 10 percent of a book or one chapter of a book with 10 or more chapters.Brandon Butler, director of public policy initiatives for the Association of Research Libraries, said the publishers lawsuit had had a chilling effect on university libraries. “There was a feeling of being under siege,” he said. “They took us to court saying we were shameless pirates.”

via Judge rules largely for Georgia State in copyright case  | ajc.com.

The Russian based “Pirate Pay” startup is promising the entertainment industry a pirate-free future. With help from Microsoft, the developers have built a system that claims to track and shut down the distribution of copyrighted works on BitTorrent. Their first project, carried out in collaboration with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, successfully stopped tens of thousands of downloads.

via Microsoft Funded Startup Aims to Kill BitTorrent Traffic | TorrentFreak.The Russian based “Pirate Pay” startup is promising the entertainment industry a pirate-free future. With help from Microsoft, the developers have built a system that claims to track and shut down the distribution of copyrighted works on BitTorrent. Their first project, carried out in collaboration with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, successfully stopped tens of thousands of downloads.

via Microsoft Funded Startup Aims to Kill BitTorrent Traffic | TorrentFreak.

Russell Brand testifies to Parliament about drug policy, channels Groucho Marx – Boing Boing.

In this video they talk about the importance of giving honest information on drugs in school education, because noone listens to info which contradicts everyday experiences. I thing the same argument applies to  IP education as well. (see the wonderful introduction of Lewis Hyde’s new book Common as air for an example).

On a second though I cannot understand why adults think giving dishonest information to kids would help them educate on anything from drugs via sex to IP, or life, in general.Russell Brand testifies to Parliament about drug policy, channels Groucho Marx – Boing Boing.

Douglas County Libraries, in Colorado, is trying something new: buying eBooks directly from publishers and hosting them on its own platform. That platform is based on the purchase of content at discount; owning—not leasing—a copy of the file; the application of industry-standard DRM on the library’s files; multiple purchases based on demand; and a “click to buy” feature.Its new DCL Digital Branch is one outcome of this strategy. As of this writing, more than 800 publishers have signed up, and their works are seamlessly integrated into and delivered from the library catalog, rather than from third-party sites.After integrating the ebooks it owns into its catalog, Douglas County Libraries began installing digital branch hardware and software in six of its Colorado locations in February.In a physical library, the digital branch features interactive touch-screen technology that allows library patrons to browse digital content from multiple platforms, including eBooks hosted by DCL, Overdrive, 3M and Freegal music. It integrates seamlessly with DCL’s library catalog, patron database, and its mobile app, DCL to Go. This same experience is also available online.The digital branch allows patrons to view and explore digital content using their hands and eyes the same way they might explore a traditional collection, with added functionality like immediate access to staff recommendations, most popular titles, and new content. Digital branch technology and features will change and improve as Douglas County Libraries’ eContent collection grows and patron use of digital content evolves.Douglas County Libraries’ model for purchasing eBooks directly from publishers is gaining interest from more and larger publishers, with five more joining just in the last week. DCL’s revolutionary distribution model is attracting not just publishers, but libraries across the nation. Marmot Library Consortium on Colorado’s western slope and Anythink Libraries in Adams County will soon provide eContent hosted by DCL. Other library systems have shown interest as well, from regions including California, New England, New York and New Jersey, and the Colorado State Library has created eVoke, an internet portal for libraries wishing to replicate DCL’s eBook model.

via Libraries set out to own their ebooks – Boing Boing.Douglas County Libraries, in Colorado, is trying something new: buying eBooks directly from publishers and hosting them on its own platform. That platform is based on the purchase of content at discount; owning—not leasing—a copy of the file; the application of industry-standard DRM on the library’s files; multiple purchases based on demand; and a “click to buy” feature.Its new DCL Digital Branch is one outcome of this strategy. As of this writing, more than 800 publishers have signed up, and their works are seamlessly integrated into and delivered from the library catalog, rather than from third-party sites.After integrating the ebooks it owns into its catalog, Douglas County Libraries began installing digital branch hardware and software in six of its Colorado locations in February.In a physical library, the digital branch features interactive touch-screen technology that allows library patrons to browse digital content from multiple platforms, including eBooks hosted by DCL, Overdrive, 3M and Freegal music. It integrates seamlessly with DCL’s library catalog, patron database, and its mobile app, DCL to Go. This same experience is also available online.The digital branch allows patrons to view and explore digital content using their hands and eyes the same way they might explore a traditional collection, with added functionality like immediate access to staff recommendations, most popular titles, and new content. Digital branch technology and features will change and improve as Douglas County Libraries’ eContent collection grows and patron use of digital content evolves.Douglas County Libraries’ model for purchasing eBooks directly from publishers is gaining interest from more and larger publishers, with five more joining just in the last week. DCL’s revolutionary distribution model is attracting not just publishers, but libraries across the nation. Marmot Library Consortium on Colorado’s western slope and Anythink Libraries in Adams County will soon provide eContent hosted by DCL. Other library systems have shown interest as well, from regions including California, New England, New York and New Jersey, and the Colorado State Library has created eVoke, an internet portal for libraries wishing to replicate DCL’s eBook model.

via Libraries set out to own their ebooks – Boing Boing.

Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

 

At the end of April, Tor Books, the world’s largest science fiction publisher, and its UK sister company, Tor UK, announced that they would be eliminating digital rights management (DRM) from all of their ebooksby the summer. It was a seismic event in the history of the publishing industry. It’s the beginning of the end for DRM, which are used by hardware manufacturers and publishers to limit the use of digital content after sale. That’s good news, whether you’re a publisher, a writer, a dedicated reader, or someone who picks up a book every year or two.

The first thing you need to know about ebook DRM is that it can’t work.

Like all DRM systems, ebook DRM presumes that you can distribute a program that only opens up ebooks under approved circumstances, and that none of the people you send this program to will figure out how to fix it so that it opens ebooks no matter what the circumstances. Once one user manages that, the game is up, because that clever person can either distribute ebooks that have had their DRM removed, or programs to remove DRM (or both). And since there’s no legitimate market for DRM – no readers are actively shopping for books that only open under special approved circumstances – and since the pirated ebooks are more convenient and flexible than the ones that people pay for, the DRM-free pirate editions drive out the DRM-locked commercial editions.

What’s more, books are eminently re-digitisable. That is, it’s very easy to retype a DRM-locked ebook, or scan a physical book, or take screenshots of a DRM-locked ebook, and convert the resulting image files to text. Google has scanned some 16 million books in the last few years.

It’s a solved problem.

Bad for business

If all DRM did was drive legit customers to pirate downloads, that would be bad enough for publishers. But that’s just the most obvious way that DRM is bad for business. Most developed countries have signed up to the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996, and have implemented it in laws that make it illegal for anyone except a DRM vendor to remove DRM. If Tor sells you one of my books for the Kindle locked with Amazon’s DRM, neither I, nor Tor, can authorise you to remove that DRM. If Amazon demands a deeper discount (something Amazon has been doing with many publishers as their initial ebook distribution deals come up for renegotiation) and Tor wants to shift its preferred ebook retail to a competitor like Waterstone’s, it will have to bank on its readers being willing to buy their books all over again.

Because only Amazon can authorise you to take the DRM off your Kindle books, and because doing so would mean giving a commercial advantage to Amazon’s direct competitors, it’s not likely that they would cooperate with Tor on this. It’s a rare business that volunteers to cut its own throat.

Back when ebook sales began to kick off, most major publishers were still DRM believers — or at least, not overly skeptical of the claims of DRM vendors. They viewed the use of DRM as “better than nothing”.

When queried on the competitive implications of giving control over their business relationships to DRM vendors, they were sanguine (if not utterly dismissive). They perceived “converting ebooks” as a technical challenge beyond the average book buyer. For the absence of DRM to make any kind of difference in the marketplace, they believed that book buyers would have to download and install a special program to let them convert Kindle books to display on a Nook (or vice-versa), and they perceived this to be very unlikely.

But it’s only the widespread presence of DRM that makes “converting ebooks” into a technical challenge. Your browser “converts” all sorts of graphic formats — GIF, JPEG, PNG, etc — without ever calling your attention to it. You need to take some rather extraordinary steps to find out which format of the graphics on your screen right now are using. Unless you’re a web developer, you probably don’t even know what the different formats are, nor what their technical differences are. And you don’t need to.

A troubled history of formats

Publishers have had some very bad experiences with formats, which may explain their misperception of the difficulty of “converting” ebooks.

Many publishers began their conversion to digital typesetting with QuarkXPress, which was an extraordinarily clunky product, especially in its early days. Quark files were difficult to import into any

program, including other versions of Quark. When publishers began to shift their typesetting to Adobe InDesign, they spent millions on the conversion, and technical problems with this changeover haunt them to this day. But that’s an exception, not the rule. In most cases, application developers handle the existence of new formats without breaking a sweat. Your word processor, browser, spreadsheet program, video player, music player and photo editor can handle a titanic variety of formats.

But when the only DRM-free ebooks are those from independent authors, small and medium publishers, and the occasional stiff-necked author like me, who convinces a major publisher to release his books without DRM, there’s not really much point in making programs that read “all the ebooks”. Readers will still have to maintain multiple readers, one for each of the DRM formats they consume, and one for everything else. There are a few apps that do a good job of converting between formats, especially the donation-based program Calibre. But there haven’t been any big venture capital investments in splashy, jack-of-all-trades ebook readers, because there’s no market for them for so long as DRM is the norm.

Reading the market

Most people don’t really read books. A typical book buyer can be expected to buy a single book every year or so. On the other hand, a small minority are avid readers, the sort who’ll buy 100-150 books a year. This market is one that publishers are eager to protect, and it’s likely that anyone who spends $100 or more on an ebook reading device is an avid book reader already. That’s why publishers spent so much time worrying about whether Amazon was discounting new ebook releases too deeply. Kindle owners overlap with avid readers, and avid readers are the target market for new, full-price hardcovers.

Discounting ebooks when the hardcover is just out is likely to cannibalise one of the critical profit-centres for the industry.

However, these readers are also the ones most likely to run up against the limits of DRM. They’re the customers who amass large libraries from lots of suppliers, and who value their books as long-term assets that they expect to access until they die. They may have the chance to change their ebook reading platform every year or two (the most common platform being a mobile phone, and many people get a new phone with each contract renewal). They want to be sure that their books travel with them. When their books don’t, they’ll be alienated, frustrated and will likely seek out unauthorised ways to get books in future. No one wants to be punished for their honesty.

There’s the other population of readers – the very occasional reader, someone who’ll grab a book on the way to a beach holiday or a weekend away and then toss it out afterwards. Avid readers start off as occasional readers, and there are a lot of occasional readers in aggregate, so it’s not a market that publishers can afford to alienate.

These readers are also poorly served by DRM, since they aren’t likely to know much about ebooks and ebook readers, and are thus prone to buying books that aren’t compatible with their reading devices and vice-versa.

Absent DRM, these customers will also have tools that effortlessly read any vendor’s ebooks.

In mature gadget markets – like DVD players and MP3 players – formats stop mattering altogether. Especially at the low end of the market, these devices support every format their makers can discover. The cheap-and-cheerful manufacturers at the low end don’t have a secondary market they’re trying to protect, no app store or crucial vendor relationship with a big distributor or publisher. They just want a product that ticks the box for every possible customer. Since multiformat support is just a matter of getting the software right, what tends to happen is that a standard, commodity firmware emerges for these devices that just works for just about everything, and the formats vanish into the background.

Now that Tor has dropped DRM – and acquired a valuable halo of virtue among committed ebook readers, who’ll celebrate their bravery – it’s inevitable that the competition will follow. It seems we have reached the beginning of the end of the ebook format wars, which is good news for readers, writers and publishers.

Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books Vanish

MAR 30 2012, 12:51 PM ET 71

Because of the strange distortions of copyright protection, there are twice as many newly published books available on Amazon from 1850 as there are from 1950.

Amazon pub domain.png

Paul Heald

The above chart shows a distribution of 2500 newly printed fiction books selected at random from Amazon’s warehouses. What’s so crazy is that there are just as many from the last decade as from the decade between 1910 and 1920. Why? Because beginning in 1923, most titles are copyrighted. Books from before 1923 tend to be in the public domain, and the result is that Amazon carries them — lots of them. The chart comes from University of Illinois law professor Paul Heald. In a talk at the University of Canterbury in March 16, he explained how he made it and what it shows. He said:

This is super exciting, interesting preliminary data, I think. I had one of my students write a computer program that would crawl through Amazon.com and pull 2,500 fiction titles at random. … The findings are absolutely fascinating.

We broke these out by decade. … You would expect that if you can crawl through Amazon looking at only new books and only books sold by Amazon — so these are not used books, these are not sold by Amazon associates, this is what’s in Amazon’s warehouses — of course, the biggest number of books is from the decade 2000-2010. That’s what you’d expect; they’re more recent, more popular. Drops off really quickly for books in the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, ’60, 1950, 1940, 1930 — here’s the point in time where books start falling in the public domain. Suddenly it goes up and up and up. There’s as many books [that] Amazon is selling brand new right now from the 1900s to 1910 as from the 2000s to 2010. You go all the way back to 1850 — there’s twice as many books from the 1850s being sold on Amazon right now as the 1950s. So this sort of confirms the notion that there’s some sort of positive public-domain effect …

Heald says that the numbers would be even more dramatic if you controlled for the number of books published in those years, because there are likely far more books published in 1950 than in 1850.

You can watch Heald’s whole talk, “Do Bad Things Happen When Works Fall Into the Public Domain?” below. His comments on this chart start at about 12:40. Thanks to Yoni Appelbaum for the pointer.

The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books VanishMAR 30 2012, 12:51 PM ET 71Because of the strange distortions of copyright protection, there are twice as many newly published books available on Amazon from 1850 as there are from 1950.Paul HealdThe above chart shows a distribution of 2500 newly printed fiction books selected at random from Amazons warehouses. Whats so crazy is that there are just as many from the last decade as from the decade between 1910 and 1920. Why? Because beginning in 1923, most titles are copyrighted. Books from before 1923 tend to be in the public domain, and the result is that Amazon carries them — lots of them. The chart comes from University of Illinois law professor Paul Heald. In a talk at the University of Canterbury in March 16, he explained how he made it and what it shows. He said:

via The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books Vanish – Rebecca J. Rosen – Technology – The Atlantic.

At 92, a Bandit to Hollywood but a Hero to Soldiers

The New York Times

 


April 26, 2012

At 92, a Bandit to Hollywood but a Hero to Soldiers

MASSAPEQUA, N.Y. — One of the world’s most prolific bootleggers of Hollywood DVDs loves his morning farina. He has spent eight years churning out hundreds of thousands of copies of “The Hangover,” “Gran Torino” and other first-run movies from his small Long Island apartment to ship overseas.

“Big Hy” — his handle among many loyal customers — would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. He is actually Hyman Strachman, a 92-year-old, 5-foot-5 World War II veteran trying to stay busy after the death of his wife. And he has sent every one of his copied DVDs, almost 4,000 boxes of them to date, free to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With the United States military presence in those regions dwindling, Big Hy Strachman will live on in many soldiers’ hearts as one of the war’s more shadowy heroes.

“It’s not the right thing to do, but I did it,” Mr. Strachman said, acknowledging that his actions violated copyright law.

“If I were younger,” he added, “maybe I’d be spending time in the hoosegow.”

Capt. Bryan Curran, who recently returned from Afghanistan, estimated that from 2008 to 2010, Mr. Strachman sent more than 2,000 DVDs to his outfits there.

“You’re shocked because your initial image is of some back-alley Eastern European bootlegger — not an old Jewish guy on Long Island,” Captain Curran said. “He would time them with the movie’s release — whenever a new movie was just in theaters, we knew Big Hy would be sending us some. I saw ‘The Transformers’ before it hit the States.”

Jenna Gordon, a specialist in the Army Reserve, said she had handed out even more of Mr. Strachman’s DVDs last year as a medic with the 883rd Medical Company east of Kandahar City, where soldiers would gather for movie nights around personal computers, with mortar blasting in the background. Some knew only that the discs came from some dude named Big Hy; others knew not even that.

“It was pretty big stuff — it’s reconnecting you to everything you miss,” she said. “We’d tell people to take a bunch and pass them on.”

White-haired, slightly hunched and speaking in his Depression-era Brooklyn brogue (think Casey Stengel after six years of Hebrew school), Mr. Strachman explained in a recent interview that his 60-hour-a-week venture was winding down. “It’s all over anyways — they’re all coming home in the near future,” he said of the troops.

As he spoke, he was busy preparing some packages, filled with 84 discs of “The Artist,” “Moneyball” and other popular films, many of them barely out of theaters, to a platoon in Afghanistan.

As for his brazen violation of domestic copyright laws, Mr. Strachman nodded guiltily but pointed to his walls, which are strewed with seven huge American flags, dozens of appreciative letters, and snapshots of soldiers holding up their beloved DVDs.

“Every time I got back an emotional e-mail or letter, I sent them another box,” he said, adding that he had never accepted any money for the movies or been told by any authorities to stop.

“I thought maybe because I’m an old-timer,” he said.

In February, Mr. Strachman duplicated and shipped 1,100 movies. (“A slow month,” he said.) He has not kept an official count but estimates that he topped 80,000 discs a year during his heyday in 2007 and 2008, making his total more than 300,000 since he began in 2004. Postage of about $11 a box, and the blank discs themselves, would suggest a personal outlay of over $30,000.

Born in Brooklyn in 1920 to immigrants from Poland, Mr. Strachman left high school during the Depression to work for his family’s window and shade store in Manhattan. He became a stockbroker on Wall Street — “When there were no computers, you had to use your noodle” — before retiring in the early 1990s.

After Mr. Strachman’s wife of more than half a century, Harriet, died in 2003, he discovered a Web site that collected soldiers’ requests for care packages. He noted a consistent plea for movie DVDs and wound up passing his sleepless nights replicating not only the films, but also a feeling of military comradeship that he had not experienced since his own service in the Pacific during World War II.

“I wouldn’t say it kept him alive, but it definitely brought back his joie de vivre,” said Mr. Strachman’s son, Arthur, a tax accountant in New York.

Mr. Strachman has never ripped a movie from a store-bought DVD and does not even know how; rather, he bought bootlegged discs for $5 in Penn Station before finding a dealer closer to home, at his local barbershop. Those discs were either recordings made illegally in theaters or studio cuts that had been leaked.

Originally, Mr. Strachman would use his desktop computer to copy the movies one tedious disc at a time. (“It was moyda,” he groaned.) So he got his hands on a $400 professional duplicator that made seven copies at once, grew his fingernails long to better separate the blank discs, and began copying hundreds a day.

Last month, in black grandpa shoes and blue suspenders that hoisted his trousers up to his sternum, Mr. Strachman and his spindly hands steered a master copy of “The Artist” into the machine, fed the seven other bays with blanks, and pressed “Record.” Six minutes later, in went “The King’s Speech.” Then “Moneyball.”

He eventually stuffed the maximum of 84 discs (12 titles, 7 each) into a United States Postal Service fixed-rate box, secured it with several yards of packing tape and scrawled out a packing slip for the Massapequa Park post office. The contraband, which he said could take up to three months to arrive, was addressed to an Army chaplain.

“Chaplains don’t sell them, and they fan out,” Mr. Strachman said. “The distribution is great.”

The movie studios are less enthusiastic. Although the most costly piracy now takes place online through file-sharing Web sites, the illegal duplication of copyright DVDs — usually by organized crime in Eastern Europe and China, not by retirees in their 90s in the American suburbs — still siphons billions of dollars out of the industry every year. And while Mr. Strachman’s movies were given to soldiers as a form of charity, studios do send military bases reel-to-reel films, which are much harder to copy, and projectors for the troops overseas.

Howard Gantman, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America, said he did not believe its member studios were aware of Mr. Strachman’s operation. His sole comment dripped with the difficulty of going after a 92-year-old widower supporting the troops.

“We are grateful that the entertainment we produce can bring some enjoyment to them while they are away from home,” Mr. Gantman said.

Careful to minimize his malfeasance, Mr. Strachman said he had kept no copies for himself and had destroyed every master disc soon after the new releases came in.

Before long, the sole evidence of his operation will be on his walls and on a little bookshelf, next to his cholesterol-control pills and a few envelopes of farina, where seven three-ring binders overflow with letters and pictures, most addressed to “Big Hy,” from appreciative soldiers.

“Our downtime is spent watching movies as we clean our weapons,” one handwritten note said.

Another accompanied a flag from a combat mission over Afghanistan: “I can think of no one more deserving than you, and no one who understands what this flag stands for and means to our veterans.”

The fun will stop soon, Mr. Strachman said. “I’m not sure who’s going to be left over there anymore,” he said, happier for the soldiers’ return than for his need to find another hobby.

And with that the duplicator beeped, spitting out seven more copies of “The Artist.”

Mr. Strachman scooped them out of their trays, put a rubber band around them and inserted the stack into a box, perhaps his very last.

 

MORE IN N.Y. / REGION (1 OF 33 ARTICLES)

Cuomo Says He Makes History, Then Repeats It

Read More »

via At 92, Movie Bootlegger Is Soldiers’ Hero – NYTimes.com.At 92, a Bandit to Hollywood but a Hero to Soldiers

via At 92, Movie Bootlegger Is Soldiers’ Hero – NYTimes.com.

technology adoption rate century.png PNG kép, 994 × 402 képpont.

technology adoption rate century.png PNG kép, 994 × 402 képpont.

“While the movie and music industries would have you think that torrents are a threat to their business, thousands of independent artists heartily disagree. Thats why more than 5,000 musicians, actors, writers, filmmakers and artists have signed up to be promoted by The Pirate Bay, the worlds largest torrent site. Earlier this year, following the seizures of many popular file-sharing domains like MegaUpload, The Pirate Bay introduced a new promotion platform for artists called The Promo Bay, which let independent artists reach tens of millions of people by offering favorable advertising spots on the The Pirate Bays homepage. The response to The Pirate Bays promotion platform has been overwhelming: the company announced on Thursday that it has already received more than 5,000 applications, and has managed to be a quality platform for driving significant interest to independent artists.”

via Pirate Bay Promotion Attracts Over 5000 Artists – Slashdot.“While the movie and music industries would have you think that torrents are a threat to their business, thousands of independent artists heartily disagree. Thats why more than 5,000 musicians, actors, writers, filmmakers and artists have signed up to be promoted by The Pirate Bay, the worlds largest torrent site. Earlier this year, following the seizures of many popular file-sharing domains like MegaUpload, The Pirate Bay introduced a new promotion platform for artists called The Promo Bay, which let independent artists reach tens of millions of people by offering favorable advertising spots on the The Pirate Bays homepage. The response to The Pirate Bays promotion platform has been overwhelming: the company announced on Thursday that it has already received more than 5,000 applications, and has managed to be a quality platform for driving significant interest to independent artists.”

via Pirate Bay Promotion Attracts Over 5000 Artists – Slashdot.

Copyright stagnationPaul Heald demonstrated the effect of the stagnant US copyright wall in seminar at Canterbury last week.Recall that books published through 1922 are in the public domain in the US; those published since then are covered by copyright.Heald dug through some Amazon stats to see what happens to books as they come out of copyright. Heres the rather stunning graph.So any arguments about underexploitation of unprotected works seem untenable.If this were a moving wall, maybe it wouldnt be so bad: eventually, books would come out of copyright and be released in new editions. But Disney does keep going back and insisting that nothing can ever be returned to the Commons from which they so liberally drew, and Congress loves Disney; we might reasonably expect another copyright term extension act to keep the wall fairly rigid.So while I can get Pride and Prejudice in remix with either vampires or zombies, Im not betting on being able to read a version of Good-bye, Mr. Chips in which he protects his students from the werewolf menace as well as offering them solace through the Great War. The werewolf version practically writes itself – the Germans infect some injured British soldiers with lycanthropy just after a full moon, knowing theyll be back in Britain by the next full moon….Heres Pauls SSRN page. The chart above isnt in any of his released papers, but is an update to some of the matters he covered here. His talk for the department is embedded below; the audio isnt fantastic, but all the slides are there. Pride and Prejudice is unreadable except in remix.Update: Paul Heald clarifies the chart source data:Hi, I just wanted to note that Amazon does not know when a book it sells was first published. It only knows the date of publication of the volume that it is selling, e.g. Treasure Island could have a date of 2002, if that’s the edition Amazon is selling. I had to check each of the 2500 books at the Library of Congress to determine the actual initial publication date. This is why stats taken from an Amazon “year of publication” stats don’t match up. Cheers, Paul Heald

via Offsetting Behaviour: Copyright stagnation.Copyright stagnationPaul Heald demonstrated the effect of the stagnant US copyright wall in seminar at Canterbury last week.Recall that books published through 1922 are in the public domain in the US; those published since then are covered by copyright.Heald dug through some Amazon stats to see what happens to books as they come out of copyright. Heres the rather stunning graph.So any arguments about underexploitation of unprotected works seem untenable.If this were a moving wall, maybe it wouldnt be so bad: eventually, books would come out of copyright and be released in new editions. But Disney does keep going back and insisting that nothing can ever be returned to the Commons from which they so liberally drew, and Congress loves Disney; we might reasonably expect another copyright term extension act to keep the wall fairly rigid.So while I can get Pride and Prejudice in remix with either vampires or zombies, Im not betting on being able to read a version of Good-bye, Mr. Chips in which he protects his students from the werewolf menace as well as offering them solace through the Great War. The werewolf version practically writes itself – the Germans infect some injured British soldiers with lycanthropy just after a full moon, knowing theyll be back in Britain by the next full moon….Heres Pauls SSRN page. The chart above isnt in any of his released papers, but is an update to some of the matters he covered here. His talk for the department is embedded below; the audio isnt fantastic, but all the slides are there. Pride and Prejudice is unreadable except in remix.Update: Paul Heald clarifies the chart source data:Hi, I just wanted to note that Amazon does not know when a book it sells was first published. It only knows the date of publication of the volume that it is selling, e.g. Treasure Island could have a date of 2002, if that’s the edition Amazon is selling. I had to check each of the 2500 books at the Library of Congress to determine the actual initial publication date. This is why stats taken from an Amazon “year of publication” stats don’t match up. Cheers, Paul Heald

via Offsetting Behaviour: Copyright stagnation.

Rapidshare emphasised that the court explicitly recognised the legality of Rapidshares business model and gave it legal legitimacy. Gema welcomed the courts ruling that Rapidshare is still prohibited from making public the works of musicians represented by the organisation, but didnt get its way on the measures the court ordered Rapidshare to take to prevent copyright infringement.The copyright organisation had asked the court to order Rapidshare to scan files during the upload process, but the court took another approach, ruling that Rapidshare must actively monitor incoming links from external sites to the files it hosts and take down any illegal files thus identified.This is exactly what Rapidshare has been doing for years, the company said. Rapidshare has an anti-abuse team that identifies illegal files that will be immediately blocked when spotted.

via Rapidshare is legal, finds German court – Techworld.com.Rapidshare emphasised that the court explicitly recognised the legality of Rapidshares business model and gave it legal legitimacy. Gema welcomed the courts ruling that Rapidshare is still prohibited from making public the works of musicians represented by the organisation, but didnt get its way on the measures the court ordered Rapidshare to take to prevent copyright infringement.The copyright organisation had asked the court to order Rapidshare to scan files during the upload process, but the court took another approach, ruling that Rapidshare must actively monitor incoming links from external sites to the files it hosts and take down any illegal files thus identified.This is exactly what Rapidshare has been doing for years, the company said. Rapidshare has an anti-abuse team that identifies illegal files that will be immediately blocked when spotted.

via Rapidshare is legal, finds German court – Techworld.com.

The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.Enlarge ImageGetty ImagesApple CEO Tim Cook speaks during Wednesdays iPad product launch.Several of the parties have held talks to settle the antitrust case and head off a potentially damaging court battle, these people said. If successful, such a settlement could have wide-ranging repercussions for the industry, potentially leading to cheaper e-books for consumers. However, not every publisher is in settlement discussions. AllThingsDs Ina Fried takes a first look at Apples new tablet, which was announced today at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.The five publishers facing a potential suit are CBS Corp.s Simon & Schuster Inc.; Lagardere SCA s Hachette Book Group; Pearson PLC s Penguin Group USA; Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; and HarperCollins Publishers Inc., a unit of News Corp. , which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

via U.S. Warns Apple, Publishers on E-Book Pricing – WSJ.com.The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.Enlarge ImageGetty ImagesApple CEO Tim Cook speaks during Wednesdays iPad product launch.Several of the parties have held talks to settle the antitrust case and head off a potentially damaging court battle, these people said. If successful, such a settlement could have wide-ranging repercussions for the industry, potentially leading to cheaper e-books for consumers. However, not every publisher is in settlement discussions. AllThingsDs Ina Fried takes a first look at Apples new tablet, which was announced today at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.The five publishers facing a potential suit are CBS Corp.s Simon & Schuster Inc.; Lagardere SCA s Hachette Book Group; Pearson PLC s Penguin Group USA; Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; and HarperCollins Publishers Inc., a unit of News Corp. , which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

via U.S. Warns Apple, Publishers on E-Book Pricing – WSJ.com.

Los Angeles, CA – Last week a website called “library.nu” disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. Library.nu formerly Gigapedia had offered, if the reports are to be believed, between 400,000 and a million digital books for free. And not just any books – not romance novels or the latest best-sellers – but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities.The texts ranged from so-called “orphan works” out-of-print, but still copyrighted to recent issues; from poorly scanned to expertly ripped; from English to German to French to Spanish to Russian, with the occasional Japanese or Chinese text. It was a remarkable effort of collective connoisseurship. Even the pornography was scholarly: guidebooks and scholarly books about the pornography industry. For a criminal underground site to be mercifully free of pornography must alone count as a triumph of civilisation.To the publishing industry, this event was a victory in the campaign to bring the unruly internet under some much-needed discipline. To many other people – namely the users of the site – it was met with anger, sadness and fatalism. But who were these sad criminals, these barbarians at the gates ready to bring our information economy to its knees? They are students and scholars, from every corner of the planet.Pirating to learn”The world, it should not come as a surprise, is filled with people who want desperately to learn.”The world, it should not come as a surprise, is filled with people who want desperately to learn. This is what our world should be filled with. This is what scholars work hard to create: a world of reading, learning, thinking and scholarship. The users of library.nu were would-be scholars: those in the outer atmosphere of learning who wanted to know, argue, dispute, experiment and write just as those in the universities do.Maybe they were students once, but went on to find jobs and found families. We made them in some cases – we gave them a four-year taste of the life of the mind before sending them on their way with unsupportable loans. In other cases, they made themselves, by hook or by crook.So what does the shutdown of library.nu mean? The publishers think it is a great success in the war on piracy; that it will lead to more revenue and more control over who buys what, if not who reads what. The pirates – the people who create and run such sites – think that shutting down library.nu will only lead to a thousand more sites, stronger and better than before.But both are missing the point: the global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry. It cannot be, not with the current business models and the prices. The users of library.nu – these barbarians at the gate of the publishing industry and the university – are legion.

via The disappearing virtual library – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.Los Angeles, CA – Last week a website called “library.nu” disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. Library.nu formerly Gigapedia had offered, if the reports are to be believed, between 400,000 and a million digital books for free. And not just any books – not romance novels or the latest best-sellers – but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities.The texts ranged from so-called “orphan works” out-of-print, but still copyrighted to recent issues; from poorly scanned to expertly ripped; from English to German to French to Spanish to Russian, with the occasional Japanese or Chinese text. It was a remarkable effort of collective connoisseurship. Even the pornography was scholarly: guidebooks and scholarly books about the pornography industry. For a criminal underground site to be mercifully free of pornography must alone count as a triumph of civilisation.To the publishing industry, this event was a victory in the campaign to bring the unruly internet under some much-needed discipline. To many other people – namely the users of the site – it was met with anger, sadness and fatalism. But who were these sad criminals, these barbarians at the gates ready to bring our information economy to its knees? They are students and scholars, from every corner of the planet.Pirating to learn”The world, it should not come as a surprise, is filled with people who want desperately to learn.”The world, it should not come as a surprise, is filled with people who want desperately to learn. This is what our world should be filled with. This is what scholars work hard to create: a world of reading, learning, thinking and scholarship. The users of library.nu were would-be scholars: those in the outer atmosphere of learning who wanted to know, argue, dispute, experiment and write just as those in the universities do.Maybe they were students once, but went on to find jobs and found families. We made them in some cases – we gave them a four-year taste of the life of the mind before sending them on their way with unsupportable loans. In other cases, they made themselves, by hook or by crook.So what does the shutdown of library.nu mean? The publishers think it is a great success in the war on piracy; that it will lead to more revenue and more control over who buys what, if not who reads what. The pirates – the people who create and run such sites – think that shutting down library.nu will only lead to a thousand more sites, stronger and better than before.But both are missing the point: the global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry. It cannot be, not with the current business models and the prices. The users of library.nu – these barbarians at the gate of the publishing industry and the university – are legion.

via The disappearing virtual library – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.

A nagy forgalmazók megveszik a politikusokat, hogy rendőrt uszíthassanak családokra, csak mert azok Garfield-et néznek a monitoron.

Az internet többek közt arra való, hogy kulturális tartalomhoz juthassunk, a napi hírömlenytől az elmélkedősebb anyagokon át a tudásbázisokig és tovább. Aki pedig azt állítja, hogy mindez ingyenes, és hogy a torrentezés bűn, az vagy téved, vagy hazudik. A hazugság, az tényleg bűn. Persze, a lopás is bűn, de ha valamiért fizettünk, akkor annak magunkhoz vétele nem lopás.

via Tanítsuk meg torrentezni a gyerekeket! – Különvélemény – Balavány György blogja.A nagy forgalmazók megveszik a politikusokat, hogy rendőrt uszíthassanak családokra, csak mert azok Garfield-et néznek a monitoron.

Az internet többek közt arra való, hogy kulturális tartalomhoz juthassunk, a napi hírömlenytől az elmélkedősebb anyagokon át a tudásbázisokig és tovább. Aki pedig azt állítja, hogy mindez ingyenes, és hogy a torrentezés bűn, az vagy téved, vagy hazudik. A hazugság, az tényleg bűn. Persze, a lopás is bűn, de ha valamiért fizettünk, akkor annak magunkhoz vétele nem lopás.

via Tanítsuk meg torrentezni a gyerekeket! – Különvélemény – Balavány György blogja.

“Just 30 minutes after Whitney Houston died, Sony Music raised the price of Houston’s greatest hits album, ‘Ultimate Collection,’ on iTunes and Amazon. Many technologists, including chairman of the NY Tech Meetup Andrew Rasiej, suggests that Sony should be boycotted for the move. In a tweet, Rasiej wrote, ‘Geez Sony raised price on Whitney Houston’s music 30 min after death was announced. #FAIL…We should boycott Sony.'”

via Sony Raises Price of Whitney Houston’s Music 30 Minutes After Death – Slashdot.“Just 30 minutes after Whitney Houston died, Sony Music raised the price of Houston’s greatest hits album, ‘Ultimate Collection,’ on iTunes and Amazon. Many technologists, including chairman of the NY Tech Meetup Andrew Rasiej, suggests that Sony should be boycotted for the move. In a tweet, Rasiej wrote, ‘Geez Sony raised price on Whitney Houston’s music 30 min after death was announced. #FAIL…We should boycott Sony.'”

via Sony Raises Price of Whitney Houston’s Music 30 Minutes After Death – Slashdot.

A large coalition of publishing firms and related trade organizations has taken legal action against what the Association of American Publishers in Washington, D.C., described on Wednesday as “one of the largest pirate web-based businesses in the world.”

At the request of 17 publishing companies in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, including HarperCollins, Oxford University Press and Macmillan, a Munich judge on Monday granted injunctions against illegal posting or sharing of online book files by two websites. Library.nu is alleged to have posted links to hundreds of thousands of illegal PDF copies of books since December 2010, Ed McCoyd, an attorney for the Association of American Publishers, told The Huffington Post. The majority of these uploads allegedly went through the website iFile.it, he said.

via Library.nu, Book Downloading Site, Targeted In Injunctions Requested By 17 Publishers.A large coalition of publishing firms and related trade organizations has taken legal action against what the Association of American Publishers in Washington, D.C., described on Wednesday as “one of the largest pirate web-based businesses in the world.”

At the request of 17 publishing companies in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, including HarperCollins, Oxford University Press and Macmillan, a Munich judge on Monday granted injunctions against illegal posting or sharing of online book files by two websites. Library.nu is alleged to have posted links to hundreds of thousands of illegal PDF copies of books since December 2010, Ed McCoyd, an attorney for the Association of American Publishers, told The Huffington Post. The majority of these uploads allegedly went through the website iFile.it, he said.

via Library.nu, Book Downloading Site, Targeted In Injunctions Requested By 17 Publishers.

If you copy media you purchased, you’re smart.

If you copy media you didn’t purchase, you’re cheap.

If you copy media you didn’t purchase AND you make a profit off of it, you’re a thief.

via Library.nu and Ifile.it Shut Down – Slashdot.If you copy media you purchased, you’re smart.

If you copy media you didn’t purchase, you’re cheap.

If you copy media you didn’t purchase AND you make a profit off of it, you’re a thief.

via Library.nu and Ifile.it Shut Down – Slashdot.

Ralph Spoilsport writes “A coalition of 17 publishing companies has shut down library.nu and ifile.it, charging them with pirating ebooks. This comes less than a month after megaupload was shut down, and SOPA was stopped. If the busting of cyberlockers continues at this pace and online library sharing dismantled, this under-reported story may well be the tip of a very big iceberg — one quite beyond the P&L sheets of publishers and striking at basic human rights as outlined in the contradictions of the UN Charter. Is this a big deal — a grim coalition of corporate power? Or just mopping up some scurvy old pirates? Or somewhere in between?” Adds new submitter roaryk, “According to the complaint, the sites offered users access to 400,000 e-books and made more than $11 million in revenue in the process. The admins, Fidel Nunez and Irina Ivanova, have been tracked down using their PayPal donation account, which was not anonymous. Despite the claims of the industry the site admins say they were barely able to cover the server costs with the revenue.”

via Library.nu and Ifile.it Shut Down – Slashdot.Ralph Spoilsport writes “A coalition of 17 publishing companies has shut down library.nu and ifile.it, charging them with pirating ebooks. This comes less than a month after megaupload was shut down, and SOPA was stopped. If the busting of cyberlockers continues at this pace and online library sharing dismantled, this under-reported story may well be the tip of a very big iceberg — one quite beyond the P&L sheets of publishers and striking at basic human rights as outlined in the contradictions of the UN Charter. Is this a big deal — a grim coalition of corporate power? Or just mopping up some scurvy old pirates? Or somewhere in between?” Adds new submitter roaryk, “According to the complaint, the sites offered users access to 400,000 e-books and made more than $11 million in revenue in the process. The admins, Fidel Nunez and Irina Ivanova, have been tracked down using their PayPal donation account, which was not anonymous. Despite the claims of the industry the site admins say they were barely able to cover the server costs with the revenue.”

via Library.nu and Ifile.it Shut Down – Slashdot.

An international alliance of publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Elsevier and Pearson Education Ltd, has served successful cease-and-desist orders on a piracy operation with an estimated turnover of £7m.The two platforms, sharehoster service www.ifile.it and link library www.library.nu, had together created an “internet library” making more than 400,000 e-books available as free illegal downloads. The operators generated an estimated turnover of €8m £6.7m through advertising, donations and sales of premium-level accounts, according to a report by German law firm Lausen which helped co-ordinate the alliance.The other publishers involved also comprised Georg Thieme; HarperCollins; Hogrefe; Macmillan Publishers Ltd; Cengage Learning; John Wiley & Sons;the McGraw-Hill Companies; Pearson Education Inc; Oxford University Press; Springer; Taylor & Francis; C H Beck; and Walter De Gruyter. The alliance was also co-ordinated by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association Börsenverein and the International Publishers Association IPA,Jens Bammel, secretary general of the IPA, said: “Today, the international book industry has shown that it continues to stand up against organised copyright crime.”We will not tolerate freeloaders who make unjustified profits by depriving authors and publishers of their due reward. This is an important step towards a more transparent, honest and fair trade of digital content on the Internet,” he said.Alexander Skipis, Börsenverein c.e.o., added: “This case demonstrates, in particular in the context of current debates, that systematic copyright infringement has developed into a highly criminal and lucrative business.”

via International publisher alliance shuts down piracy site | The Bookseller.An international alliance of publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Elsevier and Pearson Education Ltd, has served successful cease-and-desist orders on a piracy operation with an estimated turnover of £7m.The two platforms, sharehoster service www.ifile.it and link library www.library.nu, had together created an “internet library” making more than 400,000 e-books available as free illegal downloads. The operators generated an estimated turnover of €8m £6.7m through advertising, donations and sales of premium-level accounts, according to a report by German law firm Lausen which helped co-ordinate the alliance.The other publishers involved also comprised Georg Thieme; HarperCollins; Hogrefe; Macmillan Publishers Ltd; Cengage Learning; John Wiley & Sons;the McGraw-Hill Companies; Pearson Education Inc; Oxford University Press; Springer; Taylor & Francis; C H Beck; and Walter De Gruyter. The alliance was also co-ordinated by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association Börsenverein and the International Publishers Association IPA,Jens Bammel, secretary general of the IPA, said: “Today, the international book industry has shown that it continues to stand up against organised copyright crime.”We will not tolerate freeloaders who make unjustified profits by depriving authors and publishers of their due reward. This is an important step towards a more transparent, honest and fair trade of digital content on the Internet,” he said.Alexander Skipis, Börsenverein c.e.o., added: “This case demonstrates, in particular in the context of current debates, that systematic copyright infringement has developed into a highly criminal and lucrative business.”

via International publisher alliance shuts down piracy site | The Bookseller.

In fact, though there are hundreds of file sharing sites, an extremely small number of colo-location providers (six of them) provide infrastructure to these sites that generate more than 80% of all Internet file sharing traffic. Like other niche industries, file sharing has evolved with a specialized ecosystem / cyber supply chain.

via DeepField Networks.In fact, though there are hundreds of file sharing sites, an extremely small number of colo-location providers (six of them) provide infrastructure to these sites that generate more than 80% of all Internet file sharing traffic. Like other niche industries, file sharing has evolved with a specialized ecosystem / cyber supply chain.

via DeepField Networks.

Apple alone — even though iPhones account for just 9 percent of mobile phones sold — reaps about 75 percent of the mobile phone industry’s profits, and that number continues to grow. (Apple’s segment of U.S. sales is much higher, as is its share of smartphone sales.)

Should this economic trend continue, Apple will be the Microsoft of mobile platforms, the SAP of mobile apps, and the Oracle of mobile services. If you’re an Apple fanboy, that’s great news and would suggest a world very much like that of the Macintosh or iPod/iTunes: integrated, fun, innovative, and functional.

via The dark side of Apple’s dominance | Mobile Technology – InfoWorld.Apple alone — even though iPhones account for just 9 percent of mobile phones sold — reaps about 75 percent of the mobile phone industry’s profits, and that number continues to grow. (Apple’s segment of U.S. sales is much higher, as is its share of smartphone sales.)

Should this economic trend continue, Apple will be the Microsoft of mobile platforms, the SAP of mobile apps, and the Oracle of mobile services. If you’re an Apple fanboy, that’s great news and would suggest a world very much like that of the Macintosh or iPod/iTunes: integrated, fun, innovative, and functional.

via The dark side of Apple’s dominance | Mobile Technology – InfoWorld.

We’ve pointed it out numerous times in the past. Despite the rampant piracy, Hollywood and other entertainment industries continue to break revenue and sales records year after year.

In an excellent report commissioned by the CCIA, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has has made an excellent overview of how well things go in the various entertainment industry sectors.

The report titled “The Sky is Rising” was presented at the MIDEM music business conference earlier today.

A summary of some of the key findings:

* According to MPAA, box office revenues grew 25 percent from 2006 to 2010 from $25.5 billion to $31.8 billion.

* Data from PricewaterhouseCoopers and iDATE show that from 1998-2010 the value of the worldwide entertainment industry grew from $449 billion to $745 billion.

* From 1999 to 2009 music concert sales in the US tripled from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion

* Consumers’ choices growing as more movies are produced jumping from 5,635 films produced globally in 2005 to 7,193 in 2009.

* BLS data also show entertainment sector employment also grew 20 percent during that last decade and 43 percent for those identified as independent artists.

In addition to statistics, the report also lists many of the case studies that we’ve covered here at TorrentFreak, from Paulo Coelho to Louis CK.

In large part, the report is meant to counter the entertainment industry claims that their businesses have been ruined by piracy, and that the Internet has to be monitored and censored.

via What Piracy? The Entertainment Industry is BOOMING! | TorrentFreak.We’ve pointed it out numerous times in the past. Despite the rampant piracy, Hollywood and other entertainment industries continue to break revenue and sales records year after year.

In an excellent report commissioned by the CCIA, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has has made an excellent overview of how well things go in the various entertainment industry sectors.

The report titled “The Sky is Rising” was presented at the MIDEM music business conference earlier today.

A summary of some of the key findings:

* According to MPAA, box office revenues grew 25 percent from 2006 to 2010 from $25.5 billion to $31.8 billion.

* Data from PricewaterhouseCoopers and iDATE show that from 1998-2010 the value of the worldwide entertainment industry grew from $449 billion to $745 billion.

* From 1999 to 2009 music concert sales in the US tripled from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion

* Consumers’ choices growing as more movies are produced jumping from 5,635 films produced globally in 2005 to 7,193 in 2009.

* BLS data also show entertainment sector employment also grew 20 percent during that last decade and 43 percent for those identified as independent artists.

In addition to statistics, the report also lists many of the case studies that we’ve covered here at TorrentFreak, from Paulo Coelho to Louis CK.

In large part, the report is meant to counter the entertainment industry claims that their businesses have been ruined by piracy, and that the Internet has to be monitored and censored.

via What Piracy? The Entertainment Industry is BOOMING! | TorrentFreak.

The delays and queue restrictions are part of an overall effort by Warner Brothers to boost its ailing DVD sales. The company thinks that by lengthening the time it takes for a movie to reach other platforms, it will increase demand for the DVD, and in turn make more money. Once a move reaches rental services and streaming video platforms, Warner Brothers stands to make far less revenue.Not allowing Netflix users to conveniently wait out the delayed availability of new DVDs fits within Warner Brothers new strategy. The company clearly wants consumers to feel the inconvenience and discomfort of not being able to watch these newly released movies immediately because it makes the option of buying the DVD much more attractive.

via Warner Bros. now adding restrictions to your Netflix DVD queue | VentureBeat.The delays and queue restrictions are part of an overall effort by Warner Brothers to boost its ailing DVD sales. The company thinks that by lengthening the time it takes for a movie to reach other platforms, it will increase demand for the DVD, and in turn make more money. Once a move reaches rental services and streaming video platforms, Warner Brothers stands to make far less revenue.Not allowing Netflix users to conveniently wait out the delayed availability of new DVDs fits within Warner Brothers new strategy. The company clearly wants consumers to feel the inconvenience and discomfort of not being able to watch these newly released movies immediately because it makes the option of buying the DVD much more attractive.

via Warner Bros. now adding restrictions to your Netflix DVD queue | VentureBeat.

The idea of alternatives to copyright should not sound strange. There already is a vast amount of work supported through universities, private foundations and different levels of government. While the existing channels of funding are not sufficient to replace copyright-supported work, they can be expanded to fill the gap.One route would be to allow individuals a modest refundable tax credit — an artistic freedom voucher AFV — that would allow them to give $75-$100 a year to support creative work. This money could either go directly to the worker or to an intermediary that supports specific types of creative work e.g. an intermediary may finance action films, jazz music, or mystery novels.

via Dean Baker: The Surefire Way to End Online Piracy: End Copyright.The idea of alternatives to copyright should not sound strange. There already is a vast amount of work supported through universities, private foundations and different levels of government. While the existing channels of funding are not sufficient to replace copyright-supported work, they can be expanded to fill the gap.One route would be to allow individuals a modest refundable tax credit — an artistic freedom voucher AFV — that would allow them to give $75-$100 a year to support creative work. This money could either go directly to the worker or to an intermediary that supports specific types of creative work e.g. an intermediary may finance action films, jazz music, or mystery novels.

via Dean Baker: The Surefire Way to End Online Piracy: End Copyright.

Mostanra a hazai lakosság körében is megkezdődött a digitális televíziós videótár térhódítása, és a trend folytatódásával 2012-ben széles körűvé válhat az otthonról távkapcsolóval megrendelhető videótartalmak fogyasztása. Ez állapítható meg a UPC és az ITHAKA Információs Társadalom- és Hálózatkutató Központ online kutatásának eredményeiből, illetve a UPC saját VOD-statisztikáinak összevetéséből.

via 2012.01.19. – Feljövőben a digitális videótárak.Mostanra a hazai lakosság körében is megkezdődött a digitális televíziós videótár térhódítása, és a trend folytatódásával 2012-ben széles körűvé válhat az otthonról távkapcsolóval megrendelhető videótartalmak fogyasztása. Ez állapítható meg a UPC és az ITHAKA Információs Társadalom- és Hálózatkutató Központ online kutatásának eredményeiből, illetve a UPC saját VOD-statisztikáinak összevetéséből.

via 2012.01.19. – Feljövőben a digitális videótárak.

The new “Mission: Impossible” film has made ten times more money than smaller films like “Young Adult.” If greater demand is supposed to move prices, why does a ticket to each movie cost the same?

via Why Do All Movie Tickets Cost the Same? – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic.The new “Mission: Impossible” film has made ten times more money than smaller films like “Young Adult.” If greater demand is supposed to move prices, why does a ticket to each movie cost the same?

via Why Do All Movie Tickets Cost the Same? – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic.

The exhibition entitled “Metropolitan archeology” by Tamás Budha, András Tábori and Miklós Rácz was on show at the Holdudvar gallery from mid June to mid July 2010. We met with Miklós Rácz, the archeologist team member to talk about the project. The interview features photos from the exhibition.
Two artists and an archeologist decide to document the city… what does an archeologist do in contemporary culture?
Read the rest of this entry »

As I noted in my previous post with a reading list, I found it really hard to find good bibliographies when trying to figure out what was important to read. The best sources were obviously the notes sections of books and current articles, and it required a lot of compilation! I see no reason not to share the fruits of my labor; there’s no value to a list of books.

Below is my working bibliography for the dissertation. This is just the foundational stuff: almost all of them books, with a few articles thrown in that I’ve needed to cite in my proposal. If I missed anything, put it in the comments or email me!

via Reading List: Media Industries, History and Convergence (Radio/TV/Film/Internet) | Televisual.

From the perspective of copyright holders, piracy represents lost revenue. In this article we argue that piracy nevertheless has important generative features. We consider the range of commercial opportunities that piracy opens up outside of the media industries, identifying four overlapping fields of legal anti-piracy enterprise: technological prevention, revenue capture, knowledge generation, and policing/enforcement. Our analysis notes the commercialization of these activities and their close relationship with the informal media economy. A case study of recent “speculative invoicing” lawsuits demonstrates the extent of this commercialization and its detachment from the mainstream content industries.

via The Business of Anti-Piracy: New Zones of Enterprise in the Copyright Wars by Ramon Lobato, Julian Thomas :: SSRN.

Digital copyright has become a key site of debate and dissent as a generation of consumers accustomed to file-sharing of proprietary content seeks to assert its rights more aggressively. A vocal anti-copyright movement has emerged, rallying around a free-speech defence of piracy honed in opposition to the hardline approach to intellectual property (IP) enforcement pursued by the US entertainment lobbies. This article discusses recent attempts at collective legitimation within this movement, with a focus on the implicit critiques of copyright that underpin pro-piracy discourse. I conclude that if this kind of popular copyright critique is to be more than a pet cause for early adopters, it needs to begin with an inclusive philosophy of access that does not reify the creative consumer as the normative citizen of the information society.

via Constructing the pirate audience: on popular copyright critique, free culture and cyber-libertarianism – Swinburne Research Bank : Open Access Repository.

Recently, Senator Ron Wyden asked CRS if it could explore the state of the movie industry today as compared to 1995 on a variety of different criteria. You can read the full report embedded below, but here are a few key points. First off, despite the industry’s regular attempt to play up its contribution to GDP and employment, the report found that the combined GDP contribution of both the “motion picture and sound recording” industries was a whopping 0.4% in 2009. Back in 1995… it was also 0.4%.

via Congressional Research Service Shows Hollywood Is Thriving | Techdirt.

An analysis of the SOPA debate the the Hungarian weekly Magyar Narancs.
Read the rest of this entry »

“Amazon’s released their list of 2011’s best-selling books, revealing that 40% of the best-selling ebooks didn’t even make it onto their list of the best-selling print books. The #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks of the year weren’t even available in print editions, while four of the top 10 best-selling print books didn’t make it into the top 100 best-selling ebooks. ‘It couldn’t be more clear that Kindle owners are choosing their material from an entirely different universe of books,’ notes one Kindle site, which points out that five of the best-selling ebooks came from two million-selling ebook authors — Amanda Hocking and John Locke — who are still awaiting the release of their books in print. And five of Amazon’s best-selling ebooks were Kindle-only ‘Singles,’ including a Stephen King short story which actually outsold another King novel that he’d released in both ebook and print formats. And Neal Stephenson’s ‘Reamde’ was Amazon’s #99 best-selling print book of 2011, though it didn’t even make it onto their list of the 100 best-selling ebooks of the year. ‘People who own Kindles are just reading different books than the people who buy printed books,’ reports the Kindle site, which adds ‘2011 may be remembered as the year that hundreds of new voices finally found their audiences.'”

via Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters.

A short piece on transborder ethnic piratical networks on mindennapi.hu
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WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

via WordPress › Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS.

Earlier today, Megaupload released a pop video featuring mainstream artists who endorse the cyberlocker service. News of the controversial Mega Song even trended on Twitter, but has now been removed from YouTube on copyright grounds by Universal Music. Kim Dotcom says that Megaupload owns everything in the video, and that the label has engaged in dirty tricks in an attempt to sabotage their successful viral campaign.

This morning we published an article on a new campaign by cyberlocker service Megaupload.

Site founder Kim Dotcom told TorrentFreak he had commissioned a song from producer Printz Board featuring huge recording artists including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, The Game and Mary J Blige. These and others were shouting the praises of Megaupload.

By this afternoon #megaupload was trending on Twitter as news of the song spread. Little surprise interest was so high; Megaupload is described as a rogue site by the RIAA and here are some of their key labels’ artists promoting the service in the most powerful way possible – through a song.

And then, just a little while ago, the music stopped. Visitors to YouTube hoping to listen to the Mega Song were met with the following message.

Mega Song Blocked

TorrentFreak immediately contacted Kim to find out what was happening.

“Those UMG criminals. They are sending illegitimate takedown notices for content they don’t own,” he told us. “Dirty tricks in an effort to stop our massively successful viral campaign.”

So did Universal have any right at all to issue YouTube with a takedown notice? Uncleared samples, anything?

“Mega owns everything in this video. And we have signed agreements with every featured artist for this campaign,” Kim told TorrentFreak.

“UMG did something illegal and unfair by reporting Mega’s content to be infringing. They had no right to do that. We reserve our rights to take legal action. But we’d like to give them the opportunity to apologize.”

“UMG is such a rogue label,” Kim added, wholly appreciating the irony.

A few minutes after this exchange Kim contacted us with good news. After filing a YouTube copyright takedown dispute, the video was reinstated. But alas, just seconds later, it was taken down again.

“We filed a dispute, the video came back online and now it’s blocked again by UMG and the automated YouTube system has threatened to block our account for repeat infringement,” Kim explained.

TorrentFreak spoke with Corynne McSherry, Intellectual Property Director at EFF, who says this type of copyright abuse is nothing new.

“This appears to be yet another example of the kind of takedown abuse we’ve seen under existing law — and another reason why Congress should soundly reject the broad new powers contemplated in the Internet Blacklist Bills, aka SOPA/PIPA.

“If IP rightholders can’t be trusted to use the tools already at their disposal — and they can’t — we shouldn’t be giving them new ways to stifle online speech and creativity,” McSherry concludes.

Sherwin Siy, Deputy Legal Director at Public Knowledge, worries that this type of sweeping power would only be augmented with the arrival of the SOPA anti-piracy bill in the US.

“If UMG took down a video it has no rights to, then what we have here is exactly the sort of abuse that careless, overzealous, or malicious copyright holders can create by abusing a takedown law,” he told us.

“What makes this even worse is that UMG, among others, is pushing to expand its power to shut people down by fiat–SOPA lets rightsholders de-fund entire websites with the same sort of non-reviewed demand that removed this video,” he concludes.

Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom informs us that he has now submitted an international counter notification to YouTube, informing them that UMG has no rights to anything in the video and that the label abused the YouTube takedown system to sabotage the company’s business.

“It’s ridiculous how UMG is abusing their intervention powers in YouTube’s system to stop our legitimate campaign. They are willfully sabotaging this viral campaign. They own no rights to this content,” Kim insists.

“What UMG is doing is illegal. And those are the people who are calling Mega rogue? Insanity!”

Streisand Effect, here we come again.

Update: “The fact that this expression could be silenced by a major label — without any apparent infringement — should be seriously troubling to anyone who cares about artists’ speech rights,” says Casey Rae-Hunter, Deputy Director, Future of Music Coalition. “If this can happen to Snoop Dogg and others, it can happen to anyone.”

via Universal Censors Megaupload Song, Gets Branded a “Rogue Label” | TorrentFreak.

Movies and TV are one of America’s biggest exports and biggest employers, with over 2 million Americans working in the entertainment community. But today, this American success story is facing a threat like never before – content theft. Content theft costs U.S. workers $5.5 billion annually in lost earnings. The real victims aren’t stars or studios or networks; they’re middle class people in all 50 states who make their living in film and television.This Creative America documentary explores this important issue and what you can do about it. Visit creativeamerica.org to learn more.

via Content Theft: The Big Picture on Vimeo.

One in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet and since last year the government has been wondering what to do about it. This week their response was published and it was crystal clear. Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won’t suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products.

swissIn Switzerland, just as in dozens of other countries, the entertainment industries have been complaining about dramatic losses in revenue due to online piracy.

In a response, the Swiss government has been conducting a study into the impact downloading has on society, and this week their findings were presented.

The overall conclusion of the study is that the current copyright law, under which downloading copyrighted material for personal use is permitted, doesn’t have to change.

Their report begins with noting that when it comes to copying files, the Internet has proven a game-changer. While the photocopier, audio cassette tape and VCR allowed users to make good quality copies of various media, these devices lacked a in-built distribution method. The world-wide web changed all that.

Distribution method or not, the entertainment industries have opposed all these technological inventions out of fear that their businesses would be crushed. This is not the right response according to the Swiss government, which favors the option of putting technology to good use instead of taking the repressive approach.

“Every time a new media technology has been made available, it has always been ‘abused’. This is the price we pay for progress. Winners will be those who are able to use the new technology to their advantages and losers those who missed this development and continue to follow old business models,” the report notes.

The government report further concludes that even in the current situation where piracy is rampant, the entertainment industries are not necessarily losing money. To reach this conclusion, the researchers extrapolated the findings of a study conducted by the Dutch government last year, since the countries are considered to be similar in many aspects.

The report states that around a third of Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people don’t spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary.

The other side of piracy, based on the Dutch study, is that downloaders are reported to be more frequent visitors to concerts, and game downloaders actually bought more games than those who didn’t. And in the music industry, lesser-know bands profit most from the sampling effect of file-sharing.

The Swiss report then goes on to review several of the repressive anti-piracy laws and regulations that have been implemented in other countries recently, such as the three-strikes Hadopi law in France. According to the report 12 million was spent on Hadopi in France this year, a figure the Swiss deem too high.

The report further states that it is questionable whether a three-strikes law would be legal in the first place, as the UN’s Human Rights Council labeled Internet access a human right. The Council specifically argued that Hadopi is a disproportionate law that should be repealed.

Other measures such as filtering or blocking content and websites are also rejected, because these would hurt freedom of speech and violate privacy protection laws. The report notes that even if these measures were implemented, there would be several ways to circumvent them.

The overall suggestion the Swiss government communicates to the entertainment industries is that they should adapt to the change in consumer behavior, or die. They see absolutely no need to change the law because downloading has no proven negative impact on the production of national culture.

Aside from downloading, it is also practically impossible for companies in Switzerland to go after casual uploaders. In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled that tracking companies are not allowed to log IP-addresses of file-sharers, making it impossible for rightsholders to gather evidence.

via Swiss Govt: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal | TorrentFreak.

What would it mean in terms of revenue if ALL BitTorrent traffic moved to Netflix?If we assume that BitTorrent and Netflix users consume roughly the same amount of content again an assumption favoring the movie studios, then this is an easy calculation. Netflix would generate a third more revenue. Based on the shareholders report of the last quarter of 2010 where most of the torrent stats in this article are based on this translates into $198 million additional revenue for Netflix.Based on more recent stats contained in Netflix’s third quarter filing of this year, the increase in revenue would be $266 million for that quarter.

via MPAA Costs Hollywood More Than US BitTorrent Piracy | TorrentFreak.

What should we call this ad hoc association of Silicon Valley businesses, venture capitalists, law professors, civil libertarians, and avid Internet users? Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute told me he’d brand it a “populist technocratic coalition,” which is somehow both oxymoronic and apt. Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, says it calls to mind the old buzzword Netizens. My preferred term: the geek lobby.

via Stop Online Piracy Act: Can the geek lobby stop Hollywood from wrecking the Internet? – Slate Magazine.

An analysis prepared for Energiaklub Climate Policy Institute on the media reception of the Fukushima disaster. We analyzed how the mainstream Hungarian online press discussed the events of the Fukushima nuclear accident. We were asked to focus on the Hungarian contexts and analyze the ways atomic energy; the Paks Nuclear Power Plant and the Hungarian energy policy were mentioned and discussed in the context of the Japanese events.
Read the rest of this entry »

ReDigi bills itself as “The World’s First Online Marketplace For Used Digital Music,” but the RIAA is not impressed. Categorically rejecting the “first sale” doctrine as a safe harbor, the Recording Industry Association of America has sent the ReDigi digital music resale site a letter (PDF, hat tip: Cnet) that effectively demands that the company abandon its business and open its sales records to RIAA’s lawyers. Cease and desist your “infringing activities,” the missive warns. But that’s the least of it.

via RIAA wants ReDigi out of the business of selling “used” iTunes tracks.

A major new survey of American attitudes to online copyright infringement has found that 70 percent of all 18 to 29-year-olds have pirated music, TV shows, or movies. But almost no Americans are hardcore grog-swillers, and two-thirds of those who do acquire copyrighted material without permission also acquire content legally.The new research comes courtesy of a forthcoming report called Copy Culture in the US and Germany, and it was done by some of the same researchers who worked on the groundbreaking Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report earlier this year. Data comes from a Princeton Survey Research Associates telephone poll of 2,303 American adults during the month of August; a Google grant funded some of the research.The poll found that 46 percent of all Americans have engaged in piracy, but that young people skew the numbers significantly. And while it found that piracy is common, it also found that most is relatively casual. Only 2 percent of Americans are “heavy music pirates” with more than 1,000 tracks of infringing music; only 1 percent of Americans are heavy TV/movie pirates with more than 100 infringing shows or films.For most people, downloading music and video goes hand-in-hand with acquiring it legally; less than one-third of admitted pirates copped to owning an entire collection of illicit material. And large numbers of pirates have already altered their behavior in response to more attractive legal services for acquiring content. When it comes to music, 46 percent of American pirates said that they grab unauthorized music less than they used to thanks to legal streaming services and the survey was done before Spotify launched in the US. For video, 40 percent of pirates have already curtailed their activity thanks to legal alternatives like Netflix.As for video game pirates, they’re negligible. Only 3 percent of homes with game consoles have machines modified to accept pirated discs.The takeaway: Americans pirate, but few are engaged in some kind of principled War Against Copyright. Most just want easy access to legal material and are willing to pay reasonable fees to get it see the success of iTunes, Netflix, and the Kindle for examples of this in action. Indeed, only 16 percent of Americans believe that it’s acceptable to upload pirated content to sites where anyone can download it, only 8 percent say posting pirated content to Facebook would be acceptable, and only 6 percent think selling copies of pirated content is okay.Oh—and piracy isn’t gendered. The survey found that “men outpolled women by 2 percent or less” when it came to piratical behavior.

via It’s official: America a land of young, casual pirates.

Analysis: Did the content industry lose the legal battle?

Do you remember back in 2001 when Napster shut down its servers? US courts found Napster Inc was likely to be liable for the copyright infringements of its users. Many of Napster’s successors were also shut down.

Aimster and its controversial CEO were forced into bankruptcy, the highest court in the US strongly suggested that those behind Grokster and Morpheus ought to be held liable for “inducing” their users to infringe, and Kazaa’s owners were held liable for authorisation by our own Federal Court. Countless others fled the market in the wake of these decisions with some, like the formerly defiant owners of Bearshare and eDonkey, paying big settlements on the way out.

By most measures, this sounds like an emphatic victory for content owners. But a funny thing happened in the wake of all of these injunctions, shutdowns and settlements: the number of P2P file sharing apps available in the market exploded.

By 2007, two years after the US Supreme Court decided Grokster, there were more individual P2P applications available than there had ever been before. The average number of users sharing files on file sharing networks at any one time was nudging ten million and it was estimated that P2P traffic had grown to comprise up to 90 percent of global internet traffic. At that point content owners tacitly admitted defeat, largely abandoning their long-time strategy of suing key P2P software providers and diverting enforcement resources to alternatives like graduated response or “three strikes” laws.

Why is it that, despite being ultimately successful in holding individual P2P software providers liable for their users’ infringement, content owners’ litigation strategy has failed to bring about any meaningful reduction in the amount of P2P development and infringement?

Physical vs digital

I would argue pre-P2P era law was based on a number of “physical world” assumptions. That makes sense, since it evolved almost exclusively with reference to physical world scenarios and technologies. However, as it turns out, there is often a gap between those assumptions and the realities of P2P software development.

Four such physical world assumptions are particularly notable in explaining this phenomenon.

The first is that everybody is bound by physical world rules. Assuming this rule had universal application, various secondary liability principles evolved to make knowledge and control pre-requisites to liability. But software has no such constraint. Programmers can write software that will do things that are simply not possible or feasible in the physical world. So once the Napster litigation made P2P programmers aware of the rules about knowledge and control, they simply coded Napster’s successors to eliminate them – something no provider of a physical world distribution technology ever managed to do.

Remember to sign up to our new Telecommunications bulletin to stay connected with a concise online wrap of Australiaís telecommunications and ISP industry.

In response, the US Supreme Court in Grokster created a brand new legal doctrine, called inducement, that did not rely on either knowledge or control. That rule was aimed at capturing “bad actors” – those P2P providers who aimed to profit from their users’ infringement and whose nefarious intent was demonstrated by “smoking guns” in their marketing and other communications. But the inducement law failed to appreciate some of the other differences that make the software world special and thus led directly to the explosion in the number of P2P technologies. In understanding why, three other physical world assumptions come into play.

One is that it is expensive to create distribution technologies that are capable of vast amounts of infringement. Of course in the physical world, the creation of such technologies, like printing presses, photocopiers, and VCRs required large investment. Research and development, mass-manufacturing, marketing and delivery all require massive amounts of cash. Thus, the law came to assume that the creation of such technologies was expensive.

That led directly to the next assumption – that distribution technologies are developed for profit. After all, nobody would be investing those massive sums without some prospect of a return.

Finally comes the fourth assumption: that rational developers of distribution technologies won’t share their secrets with consumers or competitors. Since they needed to recoup those massive investments, they had no interest at all in giving them away.

All of these assumptions certainly can hold up in the software development context. For example, those behind Kazaa spent a lot on its development, squeezed out the maximum possible profit and kept its source code a closely guarded secret. By creating a law that focused on profits, business models and marketing, the Supreme Court succeeded in shaking out Kazaa and its ilk from the market.

But the Court failed to appreciate that none of these things are actually necessary to the creation of P2P file sharing software. It can be so inexpensive to develop that some university programming courses actually require students to make an app as part of an assignment. When the software provider puts in such a small investment, there’s much less need to realise a profit. This, combined with widespread norms within the software development community encouraging sharing and collaboration, also leads to some individuals making the source code of their software publicly available for others to adapt and copy.

When the US Supreme Court created its new law holding P2P providers liable where they “fostered” third party infringement, as evidenced by such things as business models, marketing and internal communications, the result was an enormous number of programmers choosing to create new applications without any of those liability attracting elements. In the absence of any evidence that they had set out to foster infringement, they could not be liable for inducement, and having coded out of knowledge and control they could not be held liable under the pre-P2P law either.

The end result? The mismatch between the law’s physical world assumptions and the realities of the software world meant that the law created to respond to the challenges of P2P file sharing led to the opposite of the desired result: a massive increase in the availability of P2P file sharing software. The failure of the law to recognise the unique characteristics of software and software development meant the abandonment of the litigation campaign against P2P providers was only a matter of time.

Dr Rebecca Giblin is a member of Monash University’s law faculty in Melbourne. Her new book Code Wars tells the story of the decade-long struggle between content owners and P2P software providers, tracing the development of the fledgling technologies, the attempts to crush them through litigation and legislation, and the remarkable ways in which they evolved as their programmers sought ever more ingenious means to remain one step ahead of the law. The book explains why the litigation strategy against P2P providers was ultimately unsuccessful in bringing about any meaningful reduction in the amount of P2P development of infringement.

Visit codewarsbook.com where you can read the first chapter in full. Physical copies can be ordered online from stores like Amazon and Book Depository, and electronic copies are available via Google books at a heavily discounted price.

via How litigation only spurred on P2P file sharing – Telco/ISP – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au.

Unfortunately, the side effect in this less-than-successful attempt to fight piracy is the hours it takes users to retrieve, rip, and back up their music when a services shuts down, is sold, or simply decides DRM wasn’t the right way to go sometimes in as little as five months. The following is a brief history of the rise and fall of DRM in music services.

via The DRM graveyard: A brief history of digital rights management in music | opensource.com.

Today’s digital, global, on-demand media landscape has had only minimal effects on Hollywood’s “windowing” addiction—pushing out films in stages to theaters, then pay-TV, then satellite, then physical rental. Studios are continuing to push their “buyers only” window during which a film could be purchased at stores like Wal-Mart, but would not yet be available for rental.Blockbuster won’t go along with the request to delay new release rentals for 28 days after they first go on sale. In retaliation, Warner Bros. has refused to sell films directly to the chain, forcing Blockbuster to source those movies elsewhere. It’s the same tactic used by the studios on RedBox, which doesn’t get DVDs for rental until they have been on the retail market for four weeks.“The question is: how do we make ownership more valuable and attractive?” Warner Bros. Home Entertainment President Kevin Tsujihara told the Financial Times. “We have started the process of creating a window in bricks-and-mortar DVD and Blu-ray rental.”Blockbuster can work around the studios’ wishes because DVDs and Blu-ray discs are physical objects and thus subject to the “first sale doctrine” in the US; after purchase, the seller can’t continue to exert control over the objects. That’s not true of online streaming and downloads, giving the studios much greater power to control the windows of services like Netflix.

via Blockbuster trying to evade Warner Bros’ 28-day “buyers only” window.

Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell has spoken out once again on the issue of piracy.Newell reiterates what he’s said on previous occasions. DRM doesn’t work and pirates are not per se after free stuff.“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” he says.“The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”“For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market.”Newell argues that instead of hurting legitimate customers with DRM, you have to give them something that’s superior to the pirated counterpart.‘It doesn’t take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue,” Newell says.

via Valve: Piracy is a Service Issue | TorrentFreak.

This is strange on so many levels. Police and customs claim that they have seized a big time criminal gang operating an illegal warez service making thousands of copyrighted materials available for a fee.

In the same time the images they have taken show a pretty run down flat, definitely not the big time lair of the evil criminals we get used to in james bond movies despite of the few million hufs (few thousand euros) on the table.

On the other hand they boast about catching CINEDUB, a release group, which has little to do with selling warez for change.

add to this the masked squad, the wwII rifle and the coke+credit card on the mirror (from where did they get THAT?) and we land in a very-very unreal universe.

and the reason for this? hollywood put hungary on a blacklist for early CAM releases. apparently this is the operation that sent hollywood on its knees. 🙂

Lebukott a CINEDUB – YouTube.

Miramax CEO Mike Lang and Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos gave a keynote talk at the MIPCOM conference. The two discussed the challenges they face in the continuously changing digital world. Both agreed that piracy is not much of an issue as long as you give consumers what they want. Digital monopolies, such as Apple’s dominance in the music industry, are a far bigger threat.

pirateIf we believe the words of the MPAA and RIAA, piracy is the root of all evil resulting in billions of dollars in losses every year.

However, not all of the big players in the entertainment business subscribe to this theory. During the MIPCOM conference where movie and TV moguls gather, Miramax CEO Mike Lang and Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos touched on the subject of piracy. Both appeared to have a rather positive stance towards the issue.

Lang, whose company today debuts the Blu-Ray version of the cult classic Pulp Fiction, emphasized that people don’t necessarily want to pirate, as long as they get what they want. “Innovate or die,” should be the motive of entertainment industry companies, where it’s key to listen to customers.

“Piracy has not been the bigger issue for our company,” Lang noted. “I think all consumers at some point in their life , whatever market of the world, don’t want to pirate. They really don’t.”

via Digital Monopolies A Bigger Threat Than Piracy, Says Miramax CEO | TorrentFreak.

A court has overturned a 2010 ruling which said that blocking The Pirate Bay at the ISP level was “disproportionate”. The Antwerp Court of Appeal sided with the Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation in their quest to force two ISPs to block subscriber access to the world’s most famous torrent site. Belgacom and Telenet must now implement a DNS blockade of the site within 14 days or face fines.

via Belgian ISPs Ordered To Block The Pirate Bay | TorrentFreak.

Amazon has finally announced its long-anticipated Kindle lending library, allowing Kindle and Kindle app users to borrow Amazon’s e-books from thousands of libraries across the US. Users will be able to find the Kindle books on their participating public library’s website and check them out through Amazon, which will send the book directly to users’ devices over Whispersync.”Libraries are a critical part of our communities and we’re excited to be making Kindle books available at more than 11,000 local libraries around the country,” Amazon’s Kindle director Jay Marine said in a statement. “We’re even doing a little extra here—normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no. But we’re fixing this by extending our Whispersync technology to library books, so your notes, highlights and bookmarks are always backed up and available the next time you check out the book or if you decide to buy the book.”The ability to make notes and highlights—and subsequently sync them back to the system for review later—is certainly a major plus. The downside, of course, is that the e-books have to be “returned” after a certain period of time, just like any other library book. Amazon doesn’t specify on its site how long the books are borrow-able for, but when asked, Amazon spokesperson Kinley Campbell said that the expiration time varies by library and by the book.”Generally [it will be] 7-14 days,” Campbell told Ars. “We recommend checking with local libraries on questions related to availability and specific books.”Seven to 14 days isn’t a lot of time to read an entire book for some people, but it’s hard to argue with free, borrowed books. Our only complaint with this announcement is that there seems to be no comprehensive list of the 11,000 participating libraries—even Amazon’s FAQ page about public library books remains vague on this question. The requirement is that the library offers e-books via third party service OverDrive, though, so it’s safe to assume that most major libraries will be participating to some degree or another. You Chicagoans out there get to be lazy, as I’ve already confirmed that Kindle books can be found via the CPL website.Edit: Removed links to Amazon due to technical CMS problems on our end. See comments for proper links for now.

via Kindle e-books now available to borrow from 11,000 US libraries.

10 things to remember about Netflix while scratching your head about Qwikster

  1. Netflix DVD shipments “have likely peaked” and the company’s DVD subscriber base is declining. Already, 75% of Netflix’s new customers were signing up for streaming-only plans in the first couple of weeks after Netflix announced its price increases.
  2. Netflix sees its strongest competition as “an improved MVPD service offering more Internet video on-demand.” MVPD stands for “multichannel video programming distributor,” and includes cable companies like Comcast, telcos like Verizon, and satellite companies like DirecTV. Don’t forget that DISH Network recently bought Blockbuster’s assets and is bidding on Hulu.
  3. Netflix is expanding its streaming-only business internationally, but DVDs are only available to rent in the United States. Having a universal, worldwide definition of the Netflix brand — “streaming movies and TV shows for a monthly subscription fee” — is worth something.
  4. Qwikster relies heavily on the U.S. Postal Service, which is in big trouble. Would you want to have to worry about that every day?
  5. Netflix’s holy grail is to get each person, not each household, to have a separate streaming subscription, the way everyone also has a separate Facebook account. Separating a per-household service like DVD rentals-by-mail helps simplify that eventual transition.
  6. Netflix was already physically separating the DVD business, with that team to be based in San Jose, whereas Netflix corporate HQ is in Los Gatos, Calif. Netflix also says that negotiating DVD and streaming deals is already largely a separate process, involving separate groups at the studios.
  7. Eventually, Qwikster may decline enough or pivot into a different business to the point where Netflix may want to fully spin it off. Or sell it, or use it to buy other companies, or merge it with another company, ranging from Redbox to Best Buy to GameStop. Having a nondescript name that doesn’t suggest “mail” or “movies” is probably a good thing, given its unclear future.
  8. Netflix was already planning some sort of next step for this shakeup. It teased on its last earnings call: “we’ve got a dedicated group, who actually have come up with some pretty neat ideas for how to improve the DVD service … and those improvements will roll out in Q4.” [PDF]
  9. If Netflix finishes Q3 with 21.8 million streaming subscribers, as anticipated, it will still almost have as many video subscribers as Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company. Also: Most people who subscribe to digital TV services still aren’t Netflix subscribers, so they aren’t involved in the upheaval.
  10. As before, Netflix’s biggest challenge is now to get more streaming content to make the service better, while preserving its value. Part of that means it needs to convince studios to stream more of their best content through Netflix. (Some of that content is still only available on a plastic disc.) That’s why Netflix is so adamant to separate itself from the DVD business and speed up streaming adoption for studios and consumers.

 

via 10 things to remember about Netflix while scratching your head about Qwikster – SplatF.

The deed is done. Copyright term extension for sound recordings from 50 to 70 years was adopted yesterday (12 September 2011) by qualified majority in the European Council. The remaining opposition came from Belgium, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Sweden. Austria and Estonia abstained.

The chorus of approval has been led by aging artists, masking the fact that for more than a decade the lobby for copyright extension has been resourced by the multinational record industry. Labels do not want to lose the revenues of the classic recordings of the 1960s which are reaching the end of their current 50 year term. Rather than innovating, right holders find it much easier to exclude competition. Europe is in danger of locking away her music heritage just as digital technology is enabling the opening of the archives.

via Copyright Term | Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management | Bournemouth University.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) has a rejoinder to those who argue copyright laws must be further strengthened: “I think if we were to do nothing on copyright law, we would be getting it just about right.”

Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley, spoke this week at a meeting of the Intellectual Property Breakfast Club in Washington, DC. She offered her typically blunt assessments of digital copyright, arguing that “the focus on copyright has almost been an impediment for content owners to really embrace streaming and to really understand how to make money utilizing the Internet.” In her view, copyright was partially responsible for a mindset that focused too much on control just as the Internet was offering a different distribution model.

via US Rep: Copyright has actually been an “impediment” to rightsholders.

The publishers allege that GSU’s hosting of over 6,700 works for 600 classes commits direct copyright infringement, due to the school officials directly uploading the material; contributory copyright infringement, due to inducing others to download, copy, and read the unlicensed material; and vicarious copyright infringement, due to profiting from the alleged illegal actions.The uploaded items range from 14 pages to a few hundred pages per course. In one instance, the publishers found an entire semester’s worth of readings—nearly 80 different uploads—for an Introduction to Anthropology class. Shortly after the complaint was filed, some of the online e-reserves required a GSU username and password; however, links to the e-reserves are still located on online syllabi and course websites.GSU rebutted the claims, saying it was protected by fair use and “sovereign state immunity,” a doctrine that generally protects states and their entities from being sued by citizens. Judge Orinda Evens agreed in part with the defense dismissing the direct and vicarious infringement claims. In the first instance, she concluded that none of the named defendants directly engaged in the infringement, while in the latter instance she found no evidence that GSU profited from the alleged uploading. Evens pointed to professors who claimed they only upload material if they believe students would not buy the text if it were assigned, and who say that professors would stop using the system if they had to pay licensing fees.

via Campus copyright: publishers sue over university “e-reserves”.

IFSE Digimen.

Olvasni?… Manapság?
Beszélgetés Bodó Balázzsal


Avagy olvasásnak számít-e az újság? Irodalom-e a ponyvaregény? Tulajdonképpen mit értünk ma olvasás alatt, és olvasunk-e még egyáltalán, úgy igazából, mint régen? Bodó Balázzsal beszélgettem, a BME egyetemi adjunktusával.

Olvasunk még manapság?

Ha úgy definiáljuk az olvasást, hogy egy írott szöveg befogadása, és így belefér a fogalomba a Facebook és az SMS olvasás, akkor nagyon is. De ez persze keveset mond arról, hogy mennyi időt töltünk, és főként hogyan boldogulunk nehezebb szövegek forgatásával. Itt sejtenek nagy váltást azok, akik ezzel foglalkoznak. Úgy tűnik, hogy bár az internet nagy szolgálatot tett az olvasásnak a maga szöveg-alapúságával, az is biztos, hogy ez a fajta olvasás, nem ugyanaz az olvasás, mint amikor egy könyvbe mélyedve veszünk el a szöveg univerzumában.

Környezetünk, családunk, kultúránk előírhatja, hogy mit olvassunk?

Az biztos, hogy időnként megpróbálja, lásd az iskolai kötelező olvasmányok esetét. De épp a tantervben szereplő szövegek és az érettségi tételek kapcsán az is nyilvánvaló, milyen irgalmatlanul nehéz feladat összeállítani egy olyan irodalmi minimumot, ami nem csak „fontos”, nem csak „értékes”, nem csak „nemzeti”, – jelentsenek ezek a fogalmak bármit -, de adott esetben kortárs, releváns, olvasmányos, ne adj isten, szórakoztató is. Ha a külső elvárások mellé nem társul – épp többek között ez utóbbi szempontokból fakadó – belső motiváció az olvasásra, akkor az előírások épp az ellenkező hatást érik el, mint amire szántuk őket.

Akkor talán nem is fontos ebben a médiával behálózott világban, hogy olvassunk?

Dehogynem! De ugyanakkora veszteség lenne, ha nem fényképeznének vagy nem hallgatnának zenét vagy nem néznénk filmeket. Ezeken a médiumokon mind születtek csodák, kiemelkedő alkotások, és ezek ugyanúgy részei a közös műveltségünknek, mint az írott szó. Számomra az olvasás/ nem olvasás kérdésénél fontosabb az, hogy megmarad-e az gyerekeink kíváncsisága az iránt, hogy ezeket a csodákat – legyenek azok könyvbe vagy zeneműbe rejtve – felfedezzék. Ha ez a kíváncsiság megvan, akkor olvasni is fognak, ha nincs, akkor meg úgyis minden elveszett.

Mennyire fontos a mai fiatalokat, gyerekeket olvasásra nevelni?

Ugyanannyira, mint filmnézésre és zenehallgatásra vagy éppen a természet szeretetére nevelni. Engem, megvallom, kicsit zavarba hoz, ha az olvasást fetisizálni látom, mert rögtön felmerül bennem a gyanú, hogy ha ez ennyire fontos, akkor majd nyilván kényszeresen fogunk majd tenni akarni érte. Márpedig pont az olvasásra nem hiszem, hogy kényszeríteni lehetne (vagy kellene) bárkit is. Vicces is elképzelni azt a szituációt, ahol a szülők mondjuk maguktól nem olvasnának, de a gyereket erővel olvasásra nevelik. A három és fél éves gyerekemen azt látom, hogy az olvasás ragadós. Az ő életének természetes része a könyv, de nem azért, mert arra tudom kényszeríteni, hogy vegye a kezébe a könyvet. A minap egyszer csak azt vettük észre, hogy eltűnt. Elkezdtük keresni a lakásban, azt láttuk, hogy minket utánozva lefeküdt a kanapéra és egy könyvet lapozgatott. Nem tanítottuk rá, nem mondtuk neki, hogy feküdjön le és olvasson, csupán csak ezt látja mintaként és ez számára a természetes. De az olvasás csupán egy csatornája a világ felkutatásának, nem jobb és nem is rosszabb, mint a rádió, a film, vagy a tévé.

Örökség volna az olvasás?

Egy ideig örökség, de aztán választás és szokás, és persze néha kín, néha élvezet.

Ön minek alapján választ olvasmányt?

Az elolvasott könyvek kisebb része kerül tervezetten, programszerűen a kezembe, nagyobb részüket egy-egy engem ért aktuális inger, vagy véletlen nyomán kezdem olvasni. Amit most éppen befejeztem, az Vekerdinek a Családom történeteiből, mert a párom ezt olvasta. Őmiatta vettem elő újra Parti-Nagy A fagyott kutya lábát-ját, de annyira nyomasztott, hogy félretettem. Alexander R. Galloway és Eugene Thacker The Exploit-ja szakmai érdeklődésből került a kezembe, akárcsak Tim Wu The Master Switch-e. Tóth Kriszta, Rakovszky Zsuzsa könyvei be vannak tervezve, de még nem vettem meg őket. Letöltöttem viszont egy Charles Stross nevű általam nem ismert sci-fi szerző életművét, mert nagyon dicsérték, és gondoltam belenézek, mielőtt döntenék róla, hogy megveszem-e. Azt gondolom, hogy a mostani internetes beszélgetések arra bizonyosan jók, hogy az olvasók kedvet kaphassanak egy-egy könyvhöz. Ahhoz, hogy ez jól tudjon működni, arra is szükség van, hogy ezeket az impulzusokat minél könnyebben ki lehessen elégíteni, azaz minél könnyebben lehessen az érdeklődést vásárlássá fordítani. Ez a nyomtatott könyv világában minimum 2-3 napnyi várakozás, az online világban lehetne akár egy kattintás is…

ko

 

http://www.konyv7.hu/index.php?akt_menu=11507

“We’re a broken record on this,” Newell told me,. “This belief that you increase your monetization by making your game worth less through aggressive digital rights management is totally backwards . It’s a service issue, not a technology issue. Piracy is just not an issue for us.”And it’s not because Steam avoids regions of the world known for their software piracy, they actually embrace them.”When we entered Russia everyone said, ‘You can’t make money in there. Everyone pirates,'” Newell said.But when Valve looked into what was going on there they saw that the pirates were doing a better job of localizing games than the publishers were.”When people decide where to buy their games they look and they say, ‘Jesus, the pirates provide a better service for us,'” he said.So Valve invested in getting the games they sold there localized in Russian. Now Russia is their largest European market outside of the UK and Germany.”The best way to fight piracy is to create a service that people need,” he said. “I think publishers with strict DRM will sell less of their products and create more problems.

via Why Portal’s Publishers Don’t Fear Piracy, Competition.

BitTorrent is no longer the dominant player when it comes to file-sharing on the Internet. The five largest English language websites dedicated to swapping files are all related to centralized file-hosting services, also known as cyberlockers. The Pirate Bay and Torrentz are the only BitTorrent sites that managed to secure a spot in the top 10.

via Top 10 Largest File-Sharing Sites | TorrentFreak.

It’s been a week since Fox stopped offering free access to its TV-shows the day after they air on television. The TV-studio took this drastic step in the hope of getting more people to watch their shows live and thus make more revenue. TV-viewers, however, are outraged by the decision and have massively turned to pirated sources to watch their favorite shows.

foxOne of the main motivations for people to download and stream TV-shows from unauthorized sources is availability. If fans can’t get a show through legal channels they turn to pirated alternatives.

This is one of the reasons why Hulu drastically decreased TV-show piracy in the U.S. Viewers are happy with the legal streaming option it offers them, but not all studios see that as a success.

Starting last Monday, Fox began delaying the availability of new episodes on Hulu and Fox.com for 8 days. The decision goes directly against the wishes of the public but Fox will take this disappointment as collateral damage in the hope that the delay will result in more live viewers and better deals with cable and satellite distributors.

When the plan was first announced last month we predicted that it could lead to a significant boost in online piracy of Fox shows, and this does indeed turn out to be the case.

Over the last week TorrentFreak tracked two Fox shows on BitTorrent to see if there was an upturn in the number of downloads compared to the previous weeks, and the results are as expected. For both Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef the download numbers have surged.

During the first 5 days, the number of downloads from the U.S. for the latest episode of Hell’s Kitchen increased by 114% compared to the previous 3 episodes. For MasterChef the upturn was even higher with 189% more downloads from the U.S. For MasterChef; the extra high demand may in part have been facilitated by the fact that it was the season finale.

Aside from BitTorrent, there are of course many other options for people to catch up with a missed episode. YouTube for example, from where tens of thousands of people streamed the latest Hell’s Kitchen episode.

Instead of Hulu or Fox, the pirates get the praise. On YouTube and BitTorrent sites many users thank the uploaders for making the shows available.

“You so rock and allowed me to keep my promise to my son. I promised if he cleaned for one hour he could watch Hell’s Kitchen with me. He was excited and then disappointed that we couldn’t watch it on Hulu or Fox.com,” WithurShield writes.

“Thanks a lot for uploading these, Hulu used to be my go-to but alas, they have failed me,” minniemica adds.

On the other hand, several users who went to Hulu expecting to see a fresh episode left comments berating Fox (although most target Hulu) for their decision not to make the episodes available for free.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I went to Hell’s Kitchen and Master Chef. Right in the middle of the series idiot at Hulu decided to through in the pay services. At least have the decency to wait till the end [sic],” one commenter writes on Hulu.

“What I don’t like is up until now I have been able to watch the episode of Hell’s Kitchen the day after it airs and all of a sudden they now want me to pay for it?” another commenter adds.

There is no doubt that the Hulu delay is not in the best interests of TV-viewers. Although it might be a good business decision in the short term, one has to doubt whether driving people to ‘pirated’ content is a wise choice. To many viewers it is clearly a step backward.

Instead of artificial restrictions the public demands flexibility when it comes to entertainment. They want to decide when and where they want to watch something, and right now video streaming sites, BitTorrent and even the old VCR do a better job at this than Fox.

“I’m going to go buy a DVR or dust off my VCR and I will be recording my tv shows from now on,” a commenter writes on Hulu.

via Fox’s 8-Day Delay on Hulu Triggers Piracy Surge | TorrentFreak.

Yet piracy has not exactly swept the world. It is endemic in some countries but a niche activity in others. In some places the tide is flowing; in others it appears to be ebbing. In response, media firms are moving their resources from country to country, with potentially large consequences for the global flow of popular culture.

via Illegal downloading and media investment: Spotting the pirates | The Economist.

I am at the Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest. I am in two panels and leading a third, so it will be a busy week ahead. Check out the program.

The report shows that BitTorrent traffic has very a different impact depending on the place an ISP has in the network. Higher tier companies mostly profit from BitTorrent downloads, while lower tier companies are charged for the downloading habits of their consumers. According to the researchers the Internet providers should be aware of the impact BitTorrent has on them, as it may greatly impact their business decisions.

The fact that ‘local’ BitTorrent traffic is preferable is not a new idea. Attempts to keep P2P transfers within the local network as much as possible are not new, and some ISPs have secretly tested the concept in the wild by seeding their own BitTorrent downloads.

As a closing remark we have to note that the study only looked at bandwidth, and not the various other costs BitTorrent traffic has on a network by making millions of connections every day. The takeaway message, however, is that in terms of revenue there are quite a few very large companies that profit directly from heavy BitTorrent users. That’s a conclusion we haven’t heard before.

via Large ISPs Profit From BitTorrent Traffic, Study Finds | TorrentFreak.

In 2011, art and culture exist as DIGITAL MEDIA, and it is naive to think it will not be leaked or downloaded or shared or “stolen” repeatedly. It is just a fact of life. People need to decide for themselves if they want to steal or not. And if they DO then they can decide if and how to follow up with support. If you download leaked music, and you enjoy it, why not go buy an official copy? It seems fair. You are not obligated to do this, it is just a choice. Do you enjoy the artist? IF YOU ENJOY, THEN SUPPORT. If not, then simply carry on. It takes a LOT of time and energy for artists to create their craft, and even more time and energy for them to prepare a release, and to distribute it. You can support what you love in many ways, and in a sense you vote with your dollar.

via Dubstep Producer Bassnectar Talks Piracy, Leaks And Making It Easy For Your Fans To Support You | Techdirt.

Joe Karaganis, from SSRC, points us to the news that there’s been yet another such study… and this one is from HADOPI, itself. Yes, the French agency put together to kick people off the internet for file sharing did a study on the nature of unauthorized file sharing, too. Not surprisingly and consistent with every other study we’ve seen on this topic, it found that those who spend a lot of money on content… were much, much, much more likely to also get content through unauthorized means.

via Another Day, Another Study That Says ‘Pirates’ Are The Best Customers… This Time From HADOPI | Techdirt.

Advisory Committee on Enforcement : Sixth Session

Meeting Documents

Code Title(s) File(s)
WIPO/ACE/6/INF/1
English : Liste des participants/ List of Participants Liste des participants/ List of Participants, Complete document (pdf)
French : Liste des participants/ List of Participants Liste des participants/ List of Participants, Complete document (pdf)
WIPO/ACE/6/1
English : Agenda Agenda, Complete document (pdf)
French : Projet d’ordre du jour Projet d’ordre du jour, Complete document (pdf)
Spanish : Proyecto de Orden del día Proyecto de Orden del día, Complete document (pdf)
WIPO/ACE/6/2
English : Recent Activities of WIPO in the Field of Building Respect for Intellectual Property (IP) Recent Activities of WIPO in the Field of Building Respect for Intellectual Property (IP), Complete document (doc) Recent Activities of WIPO in the Field of Building Respect for Intellectual Property (IP), Complete document (pdf)
French : Activités récentes de l’OMPI dans el domaine de la promotion du respect de la propriété intellectuelle Activités récentes de l'OMPI dans el domaine de la promotion du respect de la propriété intellectuelle, Complete document (doc) Activités récentes de l'OMPI dans el domaine de la promotion du respect de la propriété intellectuelle, Complete document (pdf)
Spanish : Actividades reicentes de la OMPI dirigidas a cultivas el respeto por la propiedad intelectual Actividades reicentes de la OMPI dirigidas a cultivas el respeto por la propiedad intelectual, Complete document (doc) Actividades reicentes de la OMPI dirigidas a cultivas el respeto por la propiedad intelectual, Complete document (pdf)
WIPO/ACE/6/3
English : Future Work of the Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) Future Work of the Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE), Complete document (doc) Future Work of the Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE), Complete document (pdf)
French : Travaux futurs du Comité consultatif sur l’application des droits (ACE) Travaux futurs du Comité consultatif sur l'application des droits (ACE), Complete document (doc) Travaux futurs du Comité consultatif sur l'application des droits (ACE), Complete document (pdf)
Spanish : Labor futura del Comité asesor sobre observancia (ACE) Labor futura del Comité asesor sobre observancia (ACE), Complete document (doc) Labor futura del Comité asesor sobre observancia (ACE), Complete document (pdf)
WIPO/ACE/6/4
English : Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods, Complete document (doc) Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods, Complete document (pdf)
French : Observations sur les efforts visant à quantifier les répercussions sur l’économie des produits contrefaisants ou pirates Observations sur les efforts visant à quantifier les répercussions sur l'économie des produits contrefaisants ou pirates, Complete document (doc) Observations sur les efforts visant à quantifier les répercussions sur l'économie des produits contrefaisants ou pirates, Complete document (pdf)
Spanish : Observaciones sobre los esfuerzos para cuantificar los efectos económicos de los productos falsificados y pirateados Observaciones sobre los esfuerzos para cuantificar los efectos económicos de los productos falsificados y pirateados, Complete document (doc) Observaciones sobre los esfuerzos para cuantificar los efectos económicos de los productos falsificados y pirateados, Complete document (pdf)
WIPO/ACE/6/5
English : Media Piracy in Emerging Economies: Price, Market Structure and Consumer Behavior Media Piracy in Emerging Economies: Price, Market Structure and Consumer Behavior, Complete document (doc) Media Piracy in Emerging Economies: Price, Market Structure and Consumer Behavior, Complete document (pdf)
French : Le piratage des supports d’information dans les économies des paye émergents: prix, structure du marché et compportement du consommateur Le piratage des supports d'information dans les économies des paye émergents: prix, structure du marché et compportement du consommateur, Complete document (doc) Le piratage des supports d'information dans les économies des paye émergents: prix, structure du marché et compportement du consommateur, Complete document (pdf)
Spanish : La piratería de productos audiovisuales y de software en las economías emergentes: precios, estructura de mercado y comportamiento de los consumidores La piratería de productos audiovisuales y de software en las economías emergentes: precios, estructura de mercado y comportamiento de los consumidores, Complete document (doc) La piratería de productos audiovisuales y de software en las economías emergentes: precios, estructura de mercado y comportamiento de los consumidores, Complete document (pdf)
WIPO/ACE/6/6
English : Research Report on Consumer Attitudes and Perceptions on Counterfeiting and Piracy Research Report on Consumer Attitudes and Perceptions on Counterfeiting and Piracy, Complete document (doc) Research Report on Consumer Attitudes and Perceptions on Counterfeiting and Piracy, Complete document (pdf)
French : Rapport de recherche sur l’attitude et la perception des consommatuers en matière de contrefaçon et de piratage Rapport de recherche sur l'attitude et la perception des consommatuers en matière de contrefaçon et de piratage, Complete document (doc) Rapport de recherche sur l'attitude et la perception des consommatuers en matière de contrefaçon et de piratage, Complete document (pdf)
Spanish : Informe de investigación sobre las actitudes y percepciones de los consumidores respecto de la fialsificaión y la piratería Informe de investigación sobre las actitudes y percepciones de los consumidores respecto de la fialsificaión y la piratería, Complete document (doc) Informe de investigación sobre las actitudes y percepciones de los consumidores respecto de la fialsificaión y la piratería, Complete document (pdf)
WIPO/ACE/6/7
English : The Economic Effects of Counterfeiting and Piracy: A Literature Review The Economic Effects of Counterfeiting and Piracy: A Literature Review, Complete document (doc) The Economic Effects of Counterfeiting and Piracy: A Literature Review, Complete document (pdf)
French : Examen des études consacrées aux conséquences économiques de la contrefaçon et du piratage Examen des études consacrées aux conséquences économiques de la contrefaçon et du piratage, Complete document (doc) Examen des études consacrées aux conséquences économiques de la contrefaçon et du piratage, Complete document (pdf)
Spanish : Examen de la documentación acerca de la de los efectos económicos de la falsificación y la piratería Examen de la documentación acerca de la de los efectos económicos de la falsificación y la piratería, Complete document (doc) Examen de la documentación acerca de la de los efectos económicos de la falsificación y la piratería, Complete document (pdf)
WIPO/ACE/6/8
English : A Study Relating to Existing Methods of Disposal and Destruction of Counterfeit Goods and Pirated Goods within the Asia Pacific Region A Study Relating to Existing Methods of Disposal and Destruction of Counterfeit Goods and Pirated Goods within the Asia Pacific Region, Complete document (doc) A Study Relating to Existing Methods of Disposal and Destruction of Counterfeit Goods and Pirated Goods within the Asia Pacific Region, Complete document (pdf)
French : Étude relative aux méthodes actuelles d’écoulement et de destruction des produits contrefaisants et pirates dans le région asie et pacifique Étude relative aux méthodes actuelles d'écoulement et de destruction des produits contrefaisants et pirates dans le région asie et pacifique, Complete document (doc) Étude relative aux méthodes actuelles d'écoulement et de destruction des produits contrefaisants et pirates dans le région asie et pacifique, Complete document (pdf)
Spanish : Estudio sobre los métodos de eliminación y destrucción de mercancías falsificadas o pirateadas en la región de asia y el pacífico Estudio sobre los métodos de eliminación y destrucción de mercancías falsificadas o pirateadas en la región de asia y el pacífico, Complete document (doc) Estudio sobre los métodos de eliminación y destrucción de mercancías falsificadas o pirateadas en la región de asia y el pacífico, Complete document (pdf)
WIPO/ACE/6/10
English : IPR Infringements and Enforcement – Accounting for Socio-Economic, Technical and Dvelopment Variables IPR Infringements and Enforcement - Accounting for Socio-Economic, Technical and Dvelopment Variables, Complete document (doc) IPR Infringements and Enforcement - Accounting for Socio-Economic, Technical and Dvelopment Variables, Complete document (pdf)
French : Atteintes aux droits de propriété intellectuelle et application des droits – la prise en consideration des variables socioéconomiques, techniques et en rapport avec le développement Atteintes aux droits de propriété intellectuelle et application des droits - la prise en consideration des variables socioéconomiques, techniques et en rapport avec le développement, Complete document (doc) Atteintes aux droits de propriété intellectuelle et application des droits - la prise en consideration des variables socioéconomiques, techniques et en rapport avec le développement, Complete document (pdf)
Spanish : Infracciones y observancia de los derechos de propiedad intelectual. La toma en consideración de las variables socioeconómicas, técnicas y de desarrollo Infracciones y observancia de los derechos de propiedad intelectual. La toma en consideración de las variables socioeconómicas, técnicas y de desarrollo, Complete document (doc) Infracciones y observancia de los derechos de propiedad intelectual. La toma en consideración de las variables socioeconómicas, técnicas y de desarrollo, Complete document (pdf)
WIPO/ACE/6/11
English : Summary by the Chair Summary by the Chair, Complete document (doc) Summary by the Chair, Complete document (pdf)
French : Résumé du Président Résumé du Président, Complete document (doc) Résumé du Président, Complete document (pdf)
Spanish : Resumen del Presidente

via Advisory Committee on Enforcement.

As was widely reported last week, several major internet access providers including, very likely, yours struck a deal last week with big content providers to help them police online infringement, educate allegedly infringing subscribers and, if subscribers resist such education, take various steps including restricting their internet access. We’ve now had a chance to peruse the lengthy “Memorandum of Understanding” MOU behind this deal. Turns out, as is often observed, the devil is in the details – and they are devilish indeed.

via The “Graduated Response” Deal: What if Users Had Been At the Table? | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Starting in two weeks, Fox will no longer offer free access to its TV-shows the day after they air on television. For TV-fans the decision to limit the availability of these show is a step backward, and all the signs indicate that TV-show piracy will once again surge in the United States. But whether Fox will care much about this piracy increase remains to be seen.foxWhen Hulu first launched in 2008 there was an immediate effect on the piracy rates in the United States.Having a free, legal and on-demand option to catch up with missed TV-shows suddenly made BitTorrent a less urgent need.

via Fox Will Boost U.S. TV-Show Piracy | TorrentFreak.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

  This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling
33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
and which should be  available to everyone at no cost, but most
have previously only been made available at high prices through
paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the  documents here is typically sold for $19
USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as
cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article
at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to
locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a
checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I
published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who
profit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney
General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers
from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd systemΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥the authors are not paid for their
writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics),
and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the
authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously
expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access
fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals,
but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little
significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The
"publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly
weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary
scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather
than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They
are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the
resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask
for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on
the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to
which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they
realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would
benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed
to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending
it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic
documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid
scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their
attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has
classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions
with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give
up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for
creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more
works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence,
when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use
threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly
owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and
lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.

These particular documents are the historic back archives of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal SocietyΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥a prestigious scientific
journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published
prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some
18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind,
and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available
freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's
viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to
Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, WikisourceΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ where they
could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting
historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus
was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at
the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the
several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of
other papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing:
publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation
from the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish
reproductionΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥scanning the documentsΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ created a new copyright
interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial
watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They
might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained
the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover
the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only
unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and
the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is
legally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary,
the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archivesΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥but "free"
only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about
100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not
disseminators of knowledgeΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥as their lofty mission statements
suggestΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing
they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are
valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one
steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word
on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value
they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence 
competition.

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific
inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive
copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question
of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not
paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access
to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued
survival may even depend on it.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous
industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding,
then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justifiedΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥it will be one
less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent
lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers
a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed
out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would
probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous
charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe
that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful
applications which come of this archive.

- ---- 
Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011
gmaxwell@gmail.com  Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

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via Papers from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, fro download torrent – TPB.

Discovering behaviors and attitudes related to pirating content

Today’s consumers can access an astonishing variety of movies, videos, and television shows — on multiple platforms — faster than ever before. With so much content at their fingertips, what compels some consumers to commit online piracy by downloading or streaming content illegally?

via Speed of life: Consumer intelligence series.

The publisher says it tried everything it could to stamp out these unauthorized copies, but it was unable to stop the flood — and it’s a good thing it couldn’t, since the book rocketed to the No. 1 slot. It has since fallen to No. 2. Although it remains to be seen how many books get sold when the official version is available, there’s no question that the publisher and the author have effectively gotten millions of dollars worth of free marketing for their title. The publisher admits it has spent virtually nothing on marketing so far, but has already boosted the size of the print run.

via The Future of Media: It’s Not Piracy, It’s Marketing — Tech News and Analysis.

Pachter predicts Netflix’s streaming content licensing costs will rise from $180 million in 2010 to a whopping $1.98 billion in 2012.

via Studios are starting to play hardball with Netflix – Jul. 11, 2011.

Today, Netflix announced that they are raising rates on monthly plans that allow customers to get unlimited streaming and one DVD out at a time. The plan which originally cost $9.99 a month will now cost $15.98 a month.

In addition, the company is now splitting out streaming only plans from DVD plans and consumers can get an unlimited streaming plan for $7.99 a month, or one DVD out at a time for $7.99 a month.

Essentially, Netflix is making people decide if they really want DVDs as part of their streaming subscription and if they do, requiring them to pay nearly $6 more for it per moth.

In November of last year, Netflix raised DVD plans between $1-$3 per month, depending on the plan you were in and now, only eight months later, they are raising rates again. This is a bad move on Netflix’s part, but one that’s not surprising as they look for ways to generate more revenue. With their licensing costs skyrocketing and the company aggressively pursuing more content deals for their expansion into Latin America, Netflix is feeling the pressure.

Now, they are forcing people like me who were paying $9.99 a month, to drop to a streaming only plan at $7.99 a month. That’s $24 in revenue they are missing out from one customer, per year, and they are going to be millions like me who make that decision. Typically, I only got one or two DVDs a month, so Netflix wasn’t losing money on me with the inclusion of DVDs in my plan. Now, when I want a DVD, I’ll simply go to Redbox and get it for $1 a night. Forcing customers to go somewhere else for DVD rentals, when even Netflix admits their is still a demand for then, really isn’t a smart move.

It was bad enough that Netflix gave in to the studios and agreed not to rent any new DVDs by mail for 28 days, just so the studios could force consumers to have to buy the DVDs instead. Now they are raising prices on DVD plans for the second time in 8 months and not increasing the selection and inventory of streaming only content fast enough or with content that’s a lot newer.

In January of 2008, Netflix confirmed it had about 12,000 titles available for streaming. In September of 2009, ads on their website put that number at 17,000. Today, it appears that Netflix has about 20,000 titles for streaming, although Netflix won’t confirm that number. If that number is accurate, it means that at any given time, Netflix has only added about 4,000 pieces of content a year for the past two years. That’s not a lot of content.

Netflix is going to have a real challenge continuing to grow their subscriber numbers each quarter when they continue to give customers less for their money each month and make their plans less valuable.

Added: When logging into my Netflix account, unless I click on “your account” and then select “change plan,” there is no notice that Netflix is going to raise my rate to $15.98 a month come September 1st. So unless you have heard of the news, imagine how many people are going to be surprised when they see their monthly fee change. Netflix should be highlighting this change to you immediately upon logging into their website.

via Netflix Business Model Faces Serious Challenges After Raising Rates, Again.

Industries that rely on fair use exceptions to U.S. copyright law have weathered the recent slow economy better than other businesses, according to a new study released by a tech trade group.

The fair use industries, including consumer device makers, software developers, search engines and news organizations, had US $4.5 trillion in revenue in 2009, up from $3.4 trillion in 2002, according to the study, commissioned by the Computer and Communications Industry (CCIA) Association. Revenue peaked at $4.7 trillion in 2008 and 2009, said the study, by Capital Trade, an economic consulting firm.

Fair use industries in the U.S. employed 17 million people in 2009, about one out of every eight U.S. workers, according to the study, released Monday. The employment numbers were down from 17.7 million 2008.

“The fair use economy really held its own” during the recent recession, said Andrew Szamosszegi, co-author of the study.

Fair use businesses make up about 17 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, according to the study.

The study shows the importance of fair use exceptions in copyright law, said Ed Black, CCIA’s president and CEO. While the entertainment industry and other groups push for tougher copyright laws, lawmakers should consider the impact of those laws on fair use and on its economic impact, he said.

via Study: Fair use drives large part of US economy – U.S. Department of Justice, Patrick Leahy, legislation, legal, Jared Polis, intellectual property, government, Ed Black, copyright, Computer and Communications Industry Association, Capital Trade – Computerworld.

“Mac sales rose 28 percent year-over-year during Apple’s last quarter, while PC sales declined 1 percent

There are now 54 million active Mac users around the world.

Mac sales have outpaced the broader PC market for 5 years, 22 straight quarters

Apple has sold 200 million IOS devices to date …

… which accounts for more than 44 percent of the mobile market

25 million iPads were sold in the device’s 14 months of availability

15 billion songs have been sold from the iTunes store …

… making Apple the #1 music retailer in the world

130 million books have been downloaded from iBooks

There are 425,000 apps in the app store

90,000 of them are designed specifically for the iPad

14 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store in less than 3 years

Apple has paid some $2.5 billion to developers building apps for the app store

There are 225 million iTunes Store accounts, all of them with associated credit cards and 1-click purchasing

There are 50 million Game Center users. XBox Live, which has been around for a lot longer, only has about 30 million

IOS users send more than 1 billion Tweets a week

To date, about 100 billion push notifications have been sent to iOS devices

The iPhone 4′s camera is the second most used camera on Flickr”

via Digital Stats.

At the D9 Conference this morning, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings credited his company with helping to beat piracy — at least in the U.S. Now, he says, the challenge is to outcompete copyright infringement in places like Korea, where it runs rampant.

“One of the things that we’re most proud of is we’re now finally beating BitTorrent,” Hastings told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. Thanks to services like Netflix, Hastings said most Internet video is now paid for in the U.S. The hard part for content providers, he said, was coming up with a service good enough that people were willing to pay for, rather than just searching for free content on the Internet. Netflix has been able to provide that service by making its streaming videos available across a vast number of devices, and giving subscribers access to a wide range of library content for a relatively low price.

Netflix has also enabled content owners to make money on shows they previously weren’t monetizing. Hastings offered up Joss Whedon’s Firefly as one example of a series that had a rabid fan base that couldn’t find it under legal means prior to appearing on Netflix. At the same time, he quelled any rumors that the company could bring Firefly back from the dead.

via Netflix CEO: ‘We’re Finally Beating BitTorrent’ — Online Video News.

People don’t necessarily buy Blu-ray players for the discs, but to access Netflix instead. However, once they take the players home, they apparently decide to buy a few discs and see what all the fuss is about. Despite the massive growth of Netflix, Blu-ray users are beginning to buy more discs than they did in the two previous years, according to NPD. This means that Netflix may actually help Hollywood to sell Blu-ray discs by moving away from shipping discs itself.

via Netflix helps boost Blu-ray player and disc sales — Online Video News.

American newspapers are in trouble, but in emerging markets the news industry is roaring ahead

“WHO KILLED THE newspaper?” That was the question posed on the cover of The Economist in 2006. It was, perhaps, a little premature. But there is no doubt that newspapers in many parts of the world are having a hard time. In America, where they are in the deepest trouble, the person often blamed is Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, a network of classified-advertising websites that is mostly free to use. Mr Newmark has been called a “newspaper killer” and “the exploder of journalism”, among other things. The popularity of Craigslist, the ninth most popular website in America, has contributed to a sharp decline in newspapers’ classified-advertising revenue (see chart 1)—a business where many newspapers have had comfortable local monopolies for decades. Sitting in a café in San Francisco, Mr Newmark looks an unlikely assassin. Did he kill newspapers? “That would be a considerable exaggeration,” he says with a smile.

The internet-driven fall in classified-ad revenue is only one of the reasons for the decline of newspapers in America, which started decades ago (see chart 2). The advent of television news, and then cable television, lured readers and advertisers away. Then the internet appeared in the 1990s. A new generation of readers grew up getting their news from television and the web, now the two leading news sources in America (the web overtook newspapers in 2010 and is already the most popular source among the under-30s).

These technological shifts hit American newspapers particularly hard because of their heavy reliance on advertising. According to the OECD, a club of developed countries, in 2008 America’s newspapers collectively relied on advertising for 87% of their total revenue, more than any other country surveyed. The 2008-09 recession made things worse. Between 2007 and 2009 newspaper revenues in France fell by 4%, in Germany by 10% and in Britain by 21%. In America they plummeted by 30%. On top of that, a series of mergers and acquisitions in the American newspaper business left many companies saddled with huge debts and pushed several into bankruptcy.

For American regional and metro-area newspapers, further job cuts, closures and consolidation now seem likely. In retrospect it is clear that the industry became too dependent on local advertising monopolies. “The real trouble that a lot of US news organisations have is that they are defined by geography—by how far trucks could go to deliver papers in the morning,” says Joshua Benton, head of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. The internet has undermined that business model by providing alternatives for both advertisers and readers.

The health of newspapers is particularly important because they tend to set the agenda for other news media and employ the most journalists. In America, for example, the national television networks had around 500 journalists on their staff in 2009, compared with more than 40,000 for daily newspapers (down from 56,000 in 2001). But it would be wrong to conclude from the woes of American newspapers that newspapers and news are in crisis everywhere.

“The United States is the worst case that we see worldwide, and a lot of media news comes out of the US, so it is exceedingly negative. But the US experience is not being replicated elsewhere,” says Larry Kilman, deputy head of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), an industry body. “There’s an assumption that there’s a single crisis affecting all news organisations, and that’s not the case,” says David Levy, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. “There are different kinds of crisis in different countries, and some countries in the developing world are experiencing expansion rather than decline.”

Newspapers in western Europe are having to manage long-term decline rather than short-term pain. In Germany, the biggest market, a 10% drop in revenue amid the worst recession in a generation “is not a terrible result”, says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, a colleague of Mr Levy’s at the Reuters Institute and co-author with him of a recent book, “The Changing Business of Journalism and its Implications for Democracy”. That does not mean the German industry is immune to long-term changes. “But broadly speaking, the German industry has a large and loyal audience, strong brands and editorial resources to manage that transition,” says Mr Nielsen. Many European newspapers are family-owned, which helps to protect them in difficult times.

In Japan, home to the world’s three biggest-selling daily newspapers (the Yomiuri Shimbun alone has a circulation of more than 10m), circulation has held up well, in part because over 94% of newspapers are sold by subscription. But there is trouble on the horizon. Young Japanese do not share their elders’ enthusiasm for newsprint, and advertising revenues are dropping as the population ages.

The number of newspaper titles in Russia increased by 9% in 2009, but it might be no bad thing if a few newspapers died, particularly those “useless” titles that are merely mouthpieces for the local authorities that fund them, says Elena Vartanova, dean of the journalism school at Moscow State University. The Kremlin controls 60% of Russia’s newspapers and owns stakes in all six national television stations. In a country where newspapers were traditionally used as propaganda tools, online news sites offer an opportunity to break with the past. But there is a clear divide between the internet-savvy youth, who get their news online, and the old and rural populations, who depend on state-run television.

Hungry for news

There is certainly no sign of a news crisis in India, now the world’s fastest-growing newspaper market. Between 2005 and 2009 the number of paid-for daily newspapers in the country increased by 44% to 2,700 and the total number of newspapers rose by 23% to more than 74,000, according to the WAN. In 2008 India overtook China to become the leader in paid-for daily circulation, with 110m copies sold each day. Newspaper and magazine advertising expenditure increased by 32% in the year to June 2010, according to Nielsen India, a market-research firm.

Television news is also booming: of more than 500 satellite channels that have been launched in India in the past 20 years, 81 are news channels. The field is dominated by private firms with interests in both news and entertainment media, so the emphasis is on sensationalist, “Bollywoodised” coverage of celebrities, says Daya Thussu at the University of Westminster in London. Most news outlets are openly partisan. Thanks to India’s vast population, there is scope for growth in print media for years to come. “Indian publishers come to newspaper conferences and complain that it’s too focused on digital, not enough on print,” says Mr Kilman. But Mr Levy wonders whether the greater interest in news in fast-growing India and Brazil will prove to be a short-term phenomenon that will be undermined by the spread of internet access.

China is another market where news media are growing rapidly, but the strict controls on them have intensified in recent months. A private media industry was allowed to develop only in the 1990s. The combination of social change, increasingly savvy readers, a booming advertising market and the need to reconcile credibility among readers with state controls has created a very confusing environment, says David Bandurski at the University of Hong Kong. Media firms must dance skilfully “between the party line and the bottom line”, in the memorable phrase of Zhao Yuezhi, an analyst of the Chinese media scene.

Officially the state permits watchdog journalism, known as “supervision by public opinion”, but in practice news outlets are wary of offending local party officials. One way around this used to be for reporters to expose wrongdoing in other provinces, but a ban on “cross-regional” reporting put an end to that. Journalists must identify areas where muckraking will be permitted by officials, or ensure that their own political connections will provide them with sufficient cover.

A new tactic, which became particularly popular in China during 2010, is the use of microblogging services to release information anonymously in small chunks, notes Ying Chan, dean of the journalism school at Shantou University in China. Twitter is banned in China, so this is done using local clones of the service. Microblogging works well in China because it can be done on mobile phones, which are widespread, and Chinese characters allow an entire paragraph to be packed into a short message. Moreover, microblog posts are difficult to censor because they may not make sense unless they are all read in order.

Ms Chan describes the future for Chinese journalists as “both promising and perilous”. Journalists elsewhere would agree, though for different reasons. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, all unhappy in their own way, the news business faces different problems in different countries. To survive, news organisations will have to make the internet part of the solution.

via How newspapers are faring: A little local difficulty | The Economist.

The internet has turned the news industry upside down, making it more participatory, social, diverse and partisan—as it used to be before the arrival of the mass media, says Tom Standage

EVEN IF YOU are not a news junkie, you will have noticed that your daily news has undergone a transformation. Television newscasts now include amateur videos, taken from video-sharing websites such as YouTube, covering events like the Arab spring or the Japanese tsunami. Such videos, with their shaky cameras and people’s unguarded reactions, have much greater immediacy than professional footage. Messages posted on Twitter, the microblogging service, have been woven into coverage of these events and many others. “You have these really intimate man-in-the-street accounts, and you can craft a narrative around them,” says Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter. A computer consultant in Pakistan unwittingly described the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in a series of tweets. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, too, were reported on Twitter in real time by people who were there.

The past year has also seen the rise to fame of WikiLeaks, an organisation that publishes leaked documents supplied to it anonymously. WikiLeaks and its media partners have published detailed records of the Afghan and Iraq wars, hundreds of classified American diplomatic cables and records from the Guantánamo Bay detention centre. “We believe that true information does good,” says Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder. “Our goal is not just to have people reading documents, but to achieve political reforms through the release of information.”

In January this year Al Jazeera, a news organisation based in Qatar, published its own cache of leaked documents, known as the Palestine Papers, which lifted the lid on more than a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. And by broadcasting amateur videos of the Tunisian uprising to its millions of satellite viewers across the Arab world, the channel played an active role in spreading the protests across the region. Among television news organisations it has led the way in integrating social media (such as tweets, Facebook posts and amateur online video) into its operations in order to engage with its increasingly wired audience. “The way we operate has changed because the landscape has changed dramatically,” says Moeed Ahmad, the firm’s head of new media.

Clearly something dramatic has happened to the news business. That something is, of course, the internet, which has disrupted this industry just as it has disrupted so many others. By undermining advertising revenue, making news reports a commodity and blurring the boundaries between previously distinct news organisations, the internet has upended newspapers’ traditional business model. But as well as demolishing old ways of doing things, it has also made new ones possible. As patterns of news consumption shift, much experimentation is under way. The internet may have hurt some newspapers financially, but it has stimulated innovation in journalism.

Reporters all

For consumers, the internet has made the news a far more participatory and social experience. Non-journalists are acting as sources for a growing number of news organisations, either by volunteering information directly or by posting comments, pictures or video that can be picked up and republished. Journalists initially saw this as a threat but are coming to appreciate its benefits, though not without much heart-searching. Some organisations have enlisted volunteers to gather or sift data, creating new kinds of “crowdsourced” journalism. Readers can also share stories with their friends, and the most popular stories cause a flood of traffic as recommendations ripple across social networks. Referrals from social networks are now the fastest-growing source of traffic for many news websites. Readers are being woven into the increasingly complex news ecosystem as sources, participants and distributors. “They don’t just consume news, they share it, develop it, add to it—it’s a very dynamic relationship with news,” says Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post, a news website in the vanguard of integrating news with social media.

As well as making Twitter, Facebook and Google part of the news ecosystem, the internet has also made possible entirely new kinds of specialist news organisations. It has allowed WikiLeaks, for example, to accept documents anonymously and publish them to a global audience, while floating in cyberspace above national jurisdictions, operated by a small, nomadic team. Other newcomers include a host of not-for-profit news organisations that rely on philanthropic funding and specialise in particular kinds of journalism. Many of these new outfits collaborate with traditional news organisations, taking advantage of their broad reach and trusted, established brands.

All these new inhabitants of the news ecosystem have brought an unprecedented breadth and diversity of news and opinion to the business. This has cast new light on a long-running debate about the politics of journalism: when there are so many sources, does political objectivity become less important?

This special report will consider all these trends in turn, starting with a look at the state of the industry and the new business models that are emerging. It will argue that as news becomes more social, participatory, diverse and partisan, it is in many ways returning to the more chaotic, freewheeling and politically charged environment of the era before the emergence of mass media in the 19th century. And although the internet has proved hugely disruptive to journalists, for consumers—who now have a wider choice than ever of news sources and ways of accessing them—it has proved an almost unqualified blessing.

via Bulletins from the future | The Economist.

According to Spanish newspaper El País, the investigation is focused on José Luis Rodríguez Neri, the head of an SGAE subsidiary called the Digital Society of Spanish Authors (SDAE). Neri faces charges of “fraud, misappropriation of funds and disloyal administration.” On Monday, a High Court judge grilled him for more than four hours over the charges.

Investigators say Neri made payments for non-existent services to a contractor that then paid kickbacks to Neri and his associates. The contractor’s books show that it received 5 million euros from SDAE, but only reported 3.7 million euros of those funds to tax authorities.

Although Neri is the focus of the investigation, investigators suspect he did not act alone. A total of nine people associated with SGAE, including its chairman Teddy Bautista, were detained on Friday and Saturday. They were released on Sunday without bail, but their passports have been taken and they are barred from leaving Spain.

via Spanish anti-piracy execs busted for ripping off artists – Boing Boing.

The number of illegally downloaded films in the UK has gone up nearly 30% in five years, new figures suggest.

That research, from internet consultancy firm Envisional, indicates that the top five box office movies were illegally downloaded in the UK a total of 1.4 million times last year.

Film industry bosses say it is costing £170m every year and putting thousands of jobs at risk.

The research also shows a big rise in TV shows being pirated online.

Dr David Price led the the team which conducted the research and said there are four main reasons for the increase.

Graph showing increase in illegal downloads

“We’ve seen increases in technology like faster broadband,” he said.

“The methods of piracy have become easier, with quicker downloads and easier to find content.

“We have a generation online now who aren’t really bothered about downloading things illegally.

“Finally it’s an issue of availability – there’s a lot of American content which a lot of people are desperate to download that they can’t get hold of legitimately.”

via BBC – Newsbeat – Illegal UK film downloads up 30%, new figures suggest.

American Internet users, get ready for three strikes “six strikes.” Major US Internet providers—including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable—have just signed on to a voluntary agreement with the movie and music businesses to crack down on online copyright infringers. But they will protect subscriber privacy and they won’t filter or monitor their own networks for infringement. And after the sixth “strike,” you won’t necessarily be “out.”Much of the scheme mirrors what ISPs do now. Copyright holders will scan the ‘Net for infringement, grabbing suspect IP addresses from peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. If they see your IP address participating in a swarm for, say, Transformers, they will look up that IP address to see which ISP controls it, then fire off a message.ISPs have committed to forward such notices to subscribers—though, crucially, they won’t turn over actual subscriber names or addresses without a court order. This is a one-way notification process.

via Major ISPs agree to “six strikes” copyright enforcement plan.

2011 márciusának végén bezárt a Songo.hu, Magyarország utolsó olyan internetes zeneáruháza, mely nemcsak magyar, de nemzetközi kiadók anyagait is árusította. Ezzel beállt abba a sorba, mint a korábban már bezárt, Magyar Telekom által üzemeltetett Track.hu, illetve a CLS kiadó Mp3music.hu zeneáruháza. Ma már csak egyetlen, letöltéses modellen alapuló zeneáruház, a Dalok.hu üzemel, a többiekhez képest sokkal szerényebb kínálattal, hiszen csak magyar előadók zenéit kínálja eladásra. A megszűnés különösen fájó a hazai jogvédő szervezeteknek és zenei tartalomtulajdonosoknak, hiszen a bevezetni tervezett „kalóztörvény” egyik kiindulópontja az volt, hogy létezik olyan legális forrás, ahonnan a zenei tartalmak jelentős része beszerezhető. A most kialakult helyzet viszont komoly munícióval szolgál azoknak, akik az illegális letöltést azzal védik, hogy legális módon nincs lehetőség zenei tartalmak beszerzésére.

Pedig a kezdetek optimizmusra adtak okot.

A 2000-es évek első évtizedének derekára a hazai szélessávú internetes hálózatfejlesztés eredményeképpen a fogyasztói oldalon megjelent az igény arra, hogy az interneten már ne csak szöveges tartalmat lehessen fogyasztani, hanem egyéb audiovizuálisakat is. Több oka is van annak, hogy első körben a zenei tartalmat kínáló online áruházak jelentek meg. Egy cd-nyi tömörített zenei tartalom letöltése maximum tíz percet vett igénybe, míg egy film esetében ez meghaladta volna az egy órát is az akkori sávszélességek mellett. További előny volt az is, hogy a zenei tartalmak jogtulajdonosai relatív koncentráltak voltak (a négy nemzetközi zenei kiadó és a korábbi állami monopóliumból átalakult Hungaroton). Optimizmusra adott okot az is, hogy 2005 közepére már félmilliárd zeneszámot töltöttek le az Apple Itunes Store-jából.

Eleinte biztatóan alakultak a forgalmi adatok, azonban 2008-ra a növekedés megállt, majd ugyanazzal a dinamikával csökkenésbe váltott. A legális online zeneletöltés sikertelenségének okait vizsgálva láthatjuk, hogy a kudarcban az értéklánc összes szereplője szerepet vállalt. A nemzetközi kiadók anyagaik átadásakor ragaszkodtak a másolásvédelmi technológiák bevezetéséhez. A digitális jogvédelmi (DRM) rendszereknek azonban megvan az a hátrányuk, hogy erősen korlátozzák a fogyasztó szabad választását a zenehallgatás tekintetében. A DRM rendszer platformfüggetlenségének hiánya a nem Windows-alapú számítógépek és különösen az okostelefonok piaci részesedésének robbanásszerű növekedésével jelentősen csökkentette a potenciális vásárlók számát, hiszen ezekkel már nem lehetett meghallgatni a megvásárolt zenéket. Nem segítette a piac fejlődését az a tény sem, hogy a nemzetközi kiadók nagyon szigorú területi korlátozással adták át anyagaikat, így a felvevőpiac Magyarországra korlátozódott. Ez viszont a méretgazdaságosság elérését akadályozta meg, hiszen nincsenek nagyságrendbeli különbségek fejlesztés, üzemeltetés és beruházás tekintetében egy 10 milliós vagy egy 100 milliós piac kiszolgálása esetén. Viszont egy tízszer akkora piac esetén tízszer gyorsabb megtérüléssel lehet számolni.

A kudarc egy másik oka az árban keresendő. Sajnos a nagykereskedelmi árak és a jogdíjak megállapítását követően kialakuló végfelhasználói ár sok esetben megegyezett a hagyományos cd-ével, sőt néha még meg is haladta azt. Mindezt úgy, hogy a megvásárolt virtuális zene – a digitális tömörítés miatt – rosszabb minőségű, mint a cd, illetve a hagyományos lemezekkel ellentétben nem adja meg a vásárlóknak a fizikai birtoklás érzetét. A közös jogkezelők piacromboló hatású, magas minimumdíjú jogdíjszámításának következtében az eladott zenék jelentős hányadánál a fizetendő jogdíj önmaga elérte a bruttó 70 forintot. Tovább drágította a végfelhasználói árakat a fizetési szolgáltatók magas tranzakciódíja is.

Az árak nem vették figyelembe a fogyasztási attitűd változását sem. Húsz-harminc évvel ezelőtt egy átlagos zenehallgató jellemzően 3-500 dalt tartalmazó kazetta- vagy lemezgyűjteménnyel rendelkezett, addig a mai zenefogyasztó akár tízezres repertoárt is hallgathat. Ez pedig azt jelenti, hogy az egy dalra jutó fajlagos szabadidő töredékére csökkent, így annak értéke is töredékére esett. Emellett pedig az átlag magyar internetfelhasználó az évek során úgy szocializálódott, hogy az interneten található tartalmak a szabad jószág kategóriájába esnek, így nem érez belső késztetést arra, hogy azokért fizessen.Mindezen körülmények miatt egyre szélesebb körben terjednek el azok a nézetek, melyek szerint a zenei kiadók már elvesztették a harcot, és csak idő kérdése, hogy mikorra válnak teljesen ingyenessé a zenei tartalmak. Egy biztos, a hagyományos üzleti modell az internetes zenefogyasztásban halott, ha már eleve nem halva született. Ma nincs a világon olyan fizetős, internetes zenei szolgáltatás, amely önmagában nyereséges lenne. Az oly sokszor példaként felhozott Apple zeneáruház is csak a magas fedezeti hányaddal rendelkező hardvereladás nyereségességéből keresztfinanszírozott, önmagában nem lenne életképes.

Persze az élet nem áll meg, a jogtulajdonosok, szolgáltatók újabb és újabb üzleti modelleket húznak elő a cilinderből. Pár éve a reklámalapú streamingszolgáltatások tűntek befutónak. Azonban az egyik legkomolyabb szolgáltatónak, a Spotifynak az a lépése, hogy megszünteti az ingyenes szolgáltatást (pontosabban annyira lekorlátozza, hogy az gyakorlatilag felér a megszüntetéssel), és havidíjassá teszi azt, mutatja, hogy ez a modell sem vált sikeressé. Hasonló alapon működik a pár hete Magyarországon elindított Superbox.hu, amely havidíjas konstrukcióban kínál korlátlanul zenét. Komoly hibája, hogy csak egyetlen nemzetközi kiadó anyagát tartalmazza, valamint a felhasznált technológia következtében mobileszközökön nem élvezhető. A korábbi hasonló hazai szolgáltatások tapasztalatait figyelembe véve sajnos ettől a szolgáltatástól sem várható komolyabb áttörés.

Végül pedig azoknak, akik lemaradtak a fizetős online zenei piac vesszőfutásáról, és szeretnék ugyanezeket a problémákat valós időben megfigyelni: „kapcsoljanak át” az ebookok piacára! Érdemes.

(forrás: Kreatív )

BE Broadband surveyed a few hundred customers and asked them whether they are aware of the Digital Economy Act, and how they think their file-sharing habits would change under the new law. The results are intriguing.

Of all the respondents who use file-sharing networks (85% of the total sample) more than 94 percent say they will not share less when the Digital Economy Act gets into full swing. Instead, the majority of the file-sharers say they will simply take measures to hide their IP-address, by using VPN and proxy services for example.

via ISP Survey: Three Strikes Won’t Deter Pirates | TorrentFreak.

Rene Summer, Director of Government and Industry Relations at Ericsson, offers some similar suggestions. Speaking for Ericsson, Summer states that copyright holders should stop their calls for harsher anti-piracy legislation, and focus their attention on giving consumers what they really want.“Current restrictions have forced European consumers into a digital exile. Seeking an appropriate way to access legal digital content, and unable to satisfy this legitimate desire through a legitimate digital alternative, many resort to illegal file-sharing. Economic rights holders spare little expense in pursuing and prosecuting these individuals, and do not hesitate to ask courts or policymakers to mandate Internet service providers ISPs and other intermediaries to police such behavior,” Summer writes.

via Ericsson: File-sharing Is a Symptom Not the Problem | TorrentFreak.

Torrent Stream Magic Player is a brand new add-on that allows users to stream video and music torrents directly in their browser. The Magic Player works with Chrome, Firefox, Opera and supports dozens of popular torrent sites including The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, BTjunkie and EZTV. It’s one of the first solutions to create a true video-on-demand experience directly in the browser.

via Stream Torrents in Your Web Browser With Magic Player | TorrentFreak.

How it works:

– You install our add-on into your browser

– If ever Demoniod.com is seized by ICE or the upcoming COICO legislation it won’t matter.

– You simply type Demoniod.com into your browser as usual, the browser sends the address to the add-on, the add-on checks if Demoniod.com is on the list of sites to be redirected and immediately redirects you to the mirror site.

This happens in microseconds and completely transparent to you (the user).

via MAFIAAFire.com.

We are informed by the BBC that the MPA is in the UK High Court today seeking to force the ISP British Telecom to block us from Stephen Fry’s web browser. Charming, we thought, bloody charming: “A Newzbin2 themed costume party, with horsehair wigs, and no-one invited us.” The MPA didn’t invite us, BT didn’t invite us, the court didn’t invite us. Team R Dogs would have loved to have had some say.What is worse is that it is a UK legal first: the first time anyone there has sought a blocking order in the High Court. The only blocking so far has been done by British Telecom using their Cleanfeed system to filter out kiddyporn sites on a list created by the Internet Watch Foundation, but that has been done without a court order.If the MPA get this injunction they will certainly, in the mould of the Internet Watch Foundation, start to add to the list other sites that offend them, e.g. the Pirate Bay. All of this will probably also be secret and, like us, not subject to an appeal or any due process.

via Press statement for immediate release. 29/6/2011 | NZBlog.

Signing a deal that makes anyone a net profit participant in a Hollywood movie deal has always been a sucker’s bet. In an era where studios have all but eliminated first dollar gross and invited talent to share the risk and potential rewards, guess what? Net profit deals are still a sucker’s bet. I was slipped a net profit statement below for Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, the 2007 Warner Bros sequel. Though the film grossed $938.2 million worldwide, the accounting statement below conveys that the film is still over $167 million in the red. Text continues below…harry potter net profits

via STUDIO SHAME! Even Harry Potter Pic Loses Money Because Of Warner Bros’ Phony Baloney Net Profit Accounting – Deadline.com.

Now on sale in some online marketplaces: cheap, illegal access to SciFinder, an extensive database of scholarly articles and information about chemical compounds run by a division of the American Chemical Society. The sellers are pirates, hawking stolen or leaked SciFinder account information from college students and professors.”There are reseller Web sites in China where we’ve purchased access to our own products for pennies on the dollar,” says Michael Dennis, vice president for legal administration and applied research at the Chemical Abstracts Service, the division that publishes SciFinder. “We’re shutting down hundreds of these every couple of months,” he says, though in some cases the publisher has trouble taking effective action against sites in other countries.

via Academic Publisher Steps Up Efforts to Stop Piracy of Its Online Products – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Some of the country’s largest Internet service providers are poised to leap into the antipiracy fight in a significant way.

After years of negotiations, a group of bandwidth providers that includes AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are closer than ever to striking a deal with media and entertainment companies that would call for them to establish new and tougher punishments for customers who refuse to stop using their networks to pirate films, music and other intellectual property, multiple sources told CNET.

The sources cautioned that a final agreement has yet to be signed and that the partnership could still unravel but added that at this point a deal is within reach and is on track to be unveiled sometime next month.

via Exclusive: Top ISPs poised to adopt graduated response to piracy | Media Maverick – CNET News.

The benefits of being on Facebook are fairly obvious by now: you can connect to friends and family and share things with them no matter where they are — and it’s all free! This quasi-public space is also owned and controlled by a corporate entity, however, and it has its own views about what kinds of behavior should be allowed. That inevitably raises questions about whether the site is engaging in what amounts to censorship — questions that resurfaced this week after a page belonging to film critic Roger Ebert disappeared, and a group of protesters in Britain found their content blocked. Who is watching the watchmen?

via The downside of Facebook as a public space: Censorship — Tech News and Analysis.

Friday nights in Romania under the Communist regime which came to an end in December 1989, friends and family would gather in front of their television sets, trying to guess what they were actually watching. Telephone calls would be made, film reference and theory books consulted. Such detective skills were required due to the government’s censorship tactics, which included screening foreign films both on television and in cinemas with their titles altered beyond recognition, their credit sequences removed, entire scenes eliminated, and dialogue ideologically “cleansed” through the subtitling process. 1 Coauthor and Romanian national Ioana Uricaru recalls that “God” was invariably translated as Cel-de-Sus, or “the one above,” and “church” as edificiu, or “edifice.” 2 Sometimes films playing in cinemas would differ dramatically at the beginning and end of their run as elements requiring excision came to the attention of officials. 3Subtitling was the translation method associated with government media channels. As such, it was considered official, professional, and proper—both “ideologically correct” and the industry standard. With subtitles, interference of the “original” is kept at a minimum. 4 As lines of text superimposed onto the film image, subtitles neither erase nor noisily intrude upon the foreign soundtrack. Consequently, they are often viewed as a clean technique that respects the source material by enabling it to remain intact. However, in Romania the identification of subtitling with “quality” translation was compromised by its close link to adjacent practices of content deletion and paraphrasing for the sake of ideological alteration. The role that subtitling played in making meaning palatable for the “party line” meant that this technique was, concurrently, subject to suspicion and distrust

via Project MUSE – The Velvet Light Trap – Slashings and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship, and Translation.

Each new pocket of attention is harder to find: maybe your product needs to steal attention from that one TV obscure show watched by just 3% of the population between 11:30 and 12:30 AM. The next displacement will fragment the attention even more. When found, each new pocket is less valuable. There is a lot more money to be made in replacing hand-washing time with washing-machine plus magazine time, than there is to be found in replacing one hour of TV with a different hour of TV.

via A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100.

As TorrentFreak, one of the first blogs to report on the Locker case, points out: If only 10,000 of the alleged infringers pay a $2,000 settlement, it would net $20 million for Voltage and USCG. In comparison, The Hurt Locker grossed $17 million at the U.S. box office.

via Hurt Locker lawsuit: 50,000 sued for BitTorrent downloads – Jun. 10, 2011.

Kaiser Chiefs – Create your album.

A Hamisítás Elleni Nemzeti Testület publikálta honlapján annak a felmérésnek eredményeit, amelyet 2011. március-április hónapban végeztek. Az online kérdőívre az ország 241 középiskolájának 17435 diákja válaszolt.

via A középiskolások többsége szerint jár pénz a dalokért – eszerint.blog.hu.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression has released an important new report that examines freedom of expression on the Internet. The report is very critical of rules such as graduated response/three strikes, arguing that such laws may violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Canada became a member in 1976. Moreover, the report expresses concerns with notice-and-takedown systems, noting that it is subject to abuse by both governments and private actors.On the issue of graduated response, the report states:he is alarmed by proposals to disconnect users from Internet access if they violate intellectual property rights. This also includes legislation based on the concept of “graduated response”, which imposes a series of penalties on copyright infringers that could lead to suspension of Internet service, such as the so-called “three strikes-law” in France and the Digital Economy Act 2010 of the United Kingdom.Beyond the national level, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ACTA has been proposed as a multilateral agreement to establish international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement. While the provisions to disconnect individuals from Internet access for violating the treaty have been removed from the final text of December 2010, the Special Rapporteur remains watchful about the treaty’s eventual implications for intermediary liability and the right to freedom of expression.In light of these concerns, the report argues that the Internet disconnection is a disproportionate response, violates international law and such measures should be repealed in countries that have adopted them

via Michael Geist – UN Report Says Internet Three Strikes Laws Violate International Law.

Global Congress on Public Interest Intellectual Property LawCall for Applications to ParticipateAugust 25-27, 2011American University Washington College of Law4801 Massachusetts Ave, NWWashington DC, 20016REGISTRATIONRegistration is now open to participate in one of the most important meetings on international intellectual property law and policy of the year.HOSTS AND SPONSORSAmerican University Washington College of Law WCL will host the inaugural Global Congress on Public Interest Intellectual Property August 25-27, 2011. The Global Congress will be co-hosted by WCL’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Fundação Getulio Vargas’s Center for Technology and Society Brazil, the American Assembly at Columbia University and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development Geneva. Sponsors include Google Inc., the Institute for Global and International Studies at George Washington University, Seattle University School of Law and the American University International Law Review the sponsoring journal for symposium publications. Other sponsors are currently being solicited.

via Global Congress on Public Interest Intellectual Property Law.

The explosive growth of ereading is creating the biggest change to the publishing industry since Gutenberg. Bricks-and-mortar sales are declining as digital distribution and self-publishing rise. The rapid proliferation and adoption of ereading devices by tens of millions of US consumers are accelerating these trends.

As ebooks reshape the industry, publishers, booksellers, and device manufacturers need to understand trends and changes in consumption patterns quicker than ever before. Our latest survey uncovers consumer behaviors and attitudes towards ebooks that can help industry players face challenges and exploit opportunities in the brave new world of publishing.

Elastic Path's consumer research report on ebooks reveals:

Why and how consumers read digital content

How much they spend on ebooks versus print books

How they discover books and where they buy

And more….

via Brave New Publishing World: Assessing the Impact of Ebooks on Consumers | Elastic Path Software.

The Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Seth

Why are we so afraid of metal, of sexualization of anything seemingly opposite of the warm, living, animalistic and primal? Sexual augmentation in our era is dominated by these inorganic sexualities. Though dreaming of an eXistenZ-like future where all tech is biotech, gently embedded in a fleshy container, we find ourselves prior to it. But until sextech passes that uncanny valley, to meet us in the flesh, we’re the Borg from Star Trek. Robofucking, an abject, Ballardian collision of soft organic and hard synthetic. Inflatable penises, tongue extensions, fuckingmachines(.com). Erogenous zones visibly mechanical, audibly whirring, largely non-digital, and cold.

Mechanical sex is permeating even the most platinumb of mainstream culture now; as 2006 heard Justin Timberlake’s Future Sex/Love Sounds, 2010 bore witness to Christina Aguilera going Bionic. It’s losing its kink. In the technosexual millennium, porn is on tap in every household; cyber-sexting is redefining adolescent sexualities and the legislation around them.

http://journal.cyborgsubjects.org/2010/09/age-mechanical-reproduction/

Book chapter on the reason d’etre of cultural black markets.

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Az elmúlt években a szerzői jogsértésekkel kapcsolatban leggyakrabban a fájlcserélő hálózatok kerültek szóba, a Facebook azonban mindig kimaradt. Pedig Christian Solmecke, a Wilde Beuger Solmecke Médiajogi Ügyvédi Iroda résztulajdonosa szerint több millió tinédzser gyakorlatilag a szerzői jogot megsértve internetezik. A közösségi portálon több millióan rendelkeznek saját profillal és az ott megjelentetett tartalmak miatt sokezer eurós kártérítési perek is indíthatók lennének.

A Facebookon a fiatalok megosztják ismerőseikkel a sztárok fotóit, YouTube-videóit, dalszövegeit vagy különböző könyvek beszkennelt oldalait. A jogász úgy véli, hogy egyetlen átlagos Facebook-tagnak akár 10 000, vagy 15 000 euróról szóló csekket is ki lehetne kézbesíteni. Az persze már más kérdés, hogy a szerzői jogi ügyekkel foglalkozó ügyvédek és a zene-, illetve a filmipar érdekeit képviselő szervezetek még nem fedezték fel ezt a számukra mindenképpen kincsesbányát jelentő világot.

A perek megnyerésére a jelenleg hatályos szerzői jogi törvények alapján elvileg jó esély lenne, és a felhasználók még csak nem is tudnának védekezni. A figyelmeztető levelek után hiába törölnék esetleg a linkeket vagy a videókat, a jogsértés ténye ettől még fennállna. Az ügyvéd számos példát felsorolt: egy sztár fotójának engedély nélküli nyilvánosságra hozatala büntethető csakúgy, mint a YouTube-videókra mutató hivatkozások megjelentetése. De az sem érezheti magát biztonságban, aki a saját, népszerű slágerek feldolgozásait játszó zenekarának felvételeit jelenteti meg. A zeneszámok eredeti előadója és kiadója ugyanis szintén kártérítési igénnyel léphet fel.

A dalszövegek sem jelentenek kivételt, mivel 70 éves szerzői jogvédelem vonatkozik rájuk. Végül, de egyáltalán nem utolsósorban az is büntethető, aki ilyen tartalmakat ugyan nem jelentet meg, de a rájuk való hivatkozásokat terjeszti az ismerősei, barátai körében. A jogász persze irreálisnak tartja elképzelését, ezzel a felvetéssel csupán érzékeltetni kívánta mekkora szükség lenne egy teljesen új szerzői jogi szabályozás kialakítására, amellyel kivédhető lenne, hogy fiatalok milliói naponta kövessenek el jogsértéseket. Jelenleg még csak nagyon ritkán küldenek az ügyvédek figyelmeztetéseket a Facebook-tagoknak, azonban félő, hogy hamarosan szabályos feljelentési és kártérítés kérési lavina indulhat el.

Kapcsolódó cikkek

via SG.hu – Tele vannak jogsértésekkel a közösségi oldalak.

Responses to Amazon.com's hire of Laurence Kirshbaum as publisher have varied from worried to fear of a “dampening” effect on competition among delegates at the BEA conference.

Word that started to spread Sunday night was confirmed first thing Monday morning with the announcement that Kirshbaum, former TimeWarner c.e.o.-turned-agent, would be heading up Amazon's publishing operation in New York.

Everybody knew that an Amazon push into frontlist publishing was coming: the move into original genre books and the cooperation with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was not enough to satisfy the giant's ever-hungry maw. Highly-placed executives from New York houses have been migrating to Amazon for a while, and the company ratcheted up expectations after circulating a recruiting letter for various personnel a few weeks back. The question was only when.

The news spread swiftly around the Javits Center even though the exhibition floor was not yet open, the first day of BEA being devoted to conference sessions. For Kirshbaum, it seemed a natural: as Workman's Bob Miller put it, “Larry missed running the whole show. Being an agent just wasn't the same.”

Independent booksellers took the news in their stride: “it didn't surprise” outgoing ABA president Michael Tucker, whose store is in San Francisco. Another major indie bookseller, Elliott Bay's Rick Simonsen (on Amazon's home turf of Seattle), saw it being “of more concern to publishers than to booksellers at this point. Remember, most booksellers have to deal with B&N's Sterling [publishing subsidiary] already. And Amazon will now get trapped in the real world!”

The proprietor of a store much closer to New York, who preferred to talk on background, said that given the state of Borders, and the likely difficulties Amazon may encounter with B&N, indies might actually get higher discounts on the books Amazon publishes since they will need a bricks and mortar storefront.

What people on the publishing side are feeling—again, off the record for the most part—is worried. Publishers, already feeling squeezed, have been feeling even more so since Monday morning.

Agent Richard Curtis, who doubles as proprietor of E-Reads, one of the earliest e-publishing and POD reprinters of out-of-print books, said: “I think Larry is an iconic branded figure in the American book business and will be the perfect person to bring the old and new worlds of publishing together.

via Amazon’s Kirshbaum move could reduce competition—BEA | The Bookseller.

The year 2010 was similar to 2009 in that the domestic box office hit a record high, once again, while the domestic video retail market was continuing its steady decline as consumers alter their home video viewing habits.Consumers are now opting to sign up for streaming and/or rental services, such as Netflix Inc. They are using video-on-demand services more and more, as they discover these services can be cost-effective.Unfortunately for studios, the revenue from VOD has not yet offset the resulting drop in DVD sale revenue, which was their top earner for more than a decade now.We tracked 415 titles in our database that were released on DVD in 2010, and among those titles, wholesale revenue dropped by 43.9% from $7.97 billion in 2009 to $4.47 billion in 2010. It is important to note that this does not include Blu-ray revenue, which grew significantly in 2010. It should also be noted that this sample of the video market does not include library titles, direct-to-video titles and TV on DVD, as well. When looking at the video retail market as a whole, consumer spending only declined 10.8% to $11.86 billion in 2010.The average wholesale price was relatively flat when compared with 2009, but there were significantly fewer units shipped, down 43.8% to nearly 226.0 million.On average, films shipped 545,000 units and made $10.8 million in wholesale revenue, off 52.4% from the $22.6 million average in 2009. In the past five years, average wholesale revenue posted a negative 13.7% CAGR.

via SNL: Article.

Now, the cyberspace metaphor is thirty years old. You can see how violently it has been reshaped by the passage of time. It's not bad that these things happen — but you need to understand that these historical formulations are mortal. They're not false. It's not like the “information Superhighway” never existed. It existed. It got federal funding. There were political issues about it, newspaper stories. It's not false, it's just mortal. You don't want to tie your fate to such mortal things. Universities need to be places in our society where young people, who know very little — young, innocent, ignorant people — are put directly in touch with things that are less mortal than we are. Less mortal than we are — not more mortal than we are.

via Program » Bruce Sterling’s Keynote :: Communia 2010 :: University and Cyberspace :: 28-30 June 2010 :: Torino, Italy.

BSA Global Software Piracy Study – Home.

Anti-censorship campaigners compared the plan to China’s notorious system for controlling citizens’ access to blogs, news websites and social networking services.The proposal emerged an obscure meeting of the Council of the European Union’s Law Enforcement Work Party LEWP, a forum for cooperation on issues such as counter terrorism, customs and fraud.“The Presidency of the LEWP presented its intention to propose concrete measures towards creating a single secure European cyberspace,” according to brief minutes of the meeting.

via Alarm over EU ‘Great Firewall’ proposal – Telegraph.

Netflix knocked over a new milestone Monday: It now has more subscribers than the largest cable TV operator in the U.S.

Netflix's global subscriber base grew almost 70% over the past year, to 23.6 million users. With that audience, it dethroned Comcast (CMCSA, Fortune 500) as the country's biggest provider of subscription video content. More than 7% of Americans now subscribe to Netflix.

Those details came out Monday in Netflix's (NFLX) first-quarter report, in which the company reported earnings of of $60.2 million, or $1.11 a share. That's up from $32 million, or 59 cents a share, a year ago.

Revenue rose 46% to $719 million. Both figures topped Wall Street estimates, but shares fell 2.5% in after-hours trade on light forecasts for the second quarter.

via Netflix tops Comcast as largest video subscription service – Apr. 25, 2011.

Netflix knocked over a new milestone Monday: It now has more subscribers than the largest cable TV operator in the U.S.

Netflix's global subscriber base grew almost 70% over the past year, to 23.6 million users. With that audience, it dethroned Comcast (CMCSA, Fortune 500) as the country's biggest provider of subscription video content. More than 7% of Americans now subscribe to Netflix.

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Those details came out Monday in Netflix's (NFLX) first-quarter report, in which the company reported earnings of of $60.2 million, or $1.11 a share. That's up from $32 million, or 59 cents a share, a year ago.

Revenue rose 46% to $719 million. Both figures topped Wall Street estimates, but shares fell 2.5% in after-hours trade on light forecasts for the second quarter.

via Netflix tops Comcast as largest video subscription service – Apr. 25, 2011.

YouTube could become the latest to offer a movie rental service, challenging streaming sites such as Netflix.The entertainment news site The Wrap says Google is lining up deals with major Hollywood studios in order to launch the service. The story cited an anonymous executive at a studio that has signed on who said Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Brothers, Lionsgate and Universal have all licensed their movies to the service. Not everyone is on board — Paramount, Fox and Disney declined to join. Photo: Reuters<br>YouTube is preparing a video rental service according to one report.EnlargePhoto: ReutersYouTube is preparing a video rental service according to one report.Related ArticlesStrong earnings push S&P through key levelAnalysts Are Concerned Netflix’s Fun Run About To EndStrong earnings drive S&P through key levelRelated Topics Netflix Wal-Mart Hollywood Sony InvestmentGet Tech Emails & Alerts Stay connected with cutting edge technology news SampleYouTube has already gotten into the movie rental game with a few independent films. The service is currently in beta mode and the films are available for a 24-hr rent at the price of $2.99.A YouTube spokesperson said, “We&apos;ve steadily been adding more and more titles since launching movies for rent on YouTube over a year ago, and now have thousands of titles available. Outside of that, we don&apos;t comment on rumor or speculation.”

via Watch Out Netflix, YouTube Is On The Prowl – Entertainment & Stars.

I cordially invite you to the XVIII. International Book Festival, to the launch of my first book ‘Copyright Pirates’. The launch will take place on the 15th of Aprin, 3 PM in the Osztovits Levente hall.

The event will be in English!

. Szeretnélek benneteket meghívni a könyvbemutatómra április 15-én a nemzetközi Könyvfesztiválra, ahol a Szerzői jog kalózai című könyvemnek (http://www.typotex.hu/konyv/aszerzoijogkalozai) lesz több bemutatója is.

Aki a könyvtárosokat szereti azt 10.30-ra várom a Fogadó épület galériájába, ahol a szerzői jogi törvény könyvtárakban való gyakorlati alkalmazásáról lesz szó Fodor Klaudia Franciskával (Artisjus) és Fonyó Istvánnéval (BME OMIKK).

A hivatalos esemény pedig délután 3-kor lesz az Osztovits Levente teremben.

Állófogadás, pezsgő, a kalóz pdf-ek dedikálása, fun!

A recent study on moral standards and whether some law breaking is socially acceptable has revealed an interesting stance on file-sharing among the public. Of those questioned in the study, 70% said that downloading illicit material from the Internet is acceptable. Three out four, however, felt it was completely unacceptable to then sell that product for profit.

via 70% of the Public Finds Piracy Socially Acceptable | TorrentFreak.

“Myself and a few friends were very angry that certain people only seem to want to profit from recordings like the Toy album, so when we saw the eBay auction and heard of someone else selling discs for $55, I decide to upload it and give it away,” Brigstow told TorrentFreak.

via Unreleased Bowie on BitTorrent: Pirate Sabotage Turned Cultural Blessing | TorrentFreak.

Creative Destruction and Copyright Protection, a paper by the London School of Economics&apos; Bart Cammaerts and Bingchun Meng, is an eye-opening look at the economics of file-sharing and music. The authors argue that an overall decline in consumer entertainment spending is to blame for the music industry&apos;s downturn, supporting their assertion with (for example), research showing that entertainment spending declined by 40 percent in households that didn&apos;t own computers (who probably weren&apos;t downloading!) over the period of overall decline for the industry.

via Boing Boing.

Rights holders from across the music and film industries have identified about 100 websites – including The Pirate Bay and “cyberlocker” sites – that they want internet service providers such as BT to block under new measures to tackle illegal filesharing.Under a voluntary code that is under discussion, content owners would pass evidence of illegal filesharing sites to ISPs, which would then take action against those sites.However, the proposals are fraught with complications. ISPs are understood to be open to the idea of cutting off access to some infringing sites, but argue that an impartial judge should decide which get blocked. It is also unclear whether content owners or ISPs would be liable to pay compensation to a site that argues that it has been unfairly censored.

via ISPs urged to block filesharing sites | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

There are two principle components of the new value chain of television hyperdistribution: the producer and the advertiser. An advertising agency is likely acting as an intermediary between these two, connecting producers to advertisers, working out the demographic appeal of particular programs, and selling ad payload into those programs; this is a role they already fulfill – although at present they work with the broadcast networks rather than the producers. There is no role for a broadcaster in this value chain; the audience has abandoned the broadcaster in favor of a direct relationship with the program provider. That said, the broadcasters are uniquely qualified to transform themselves into highly specialized advertising agencies, connecting advertisers to producers; this is something they already excel at.

This is clearly a viable economic model: the producer gets paid at least as much for their programming as they would have received from a broadcaster, and probably more; the advertiser gets a cheaper ad buy; and the audience continues to receive free television programs. This is a win-win-win scenario, unless you&apos;re a broadcaster.

via Mindjack – Piracy is Good? Part Two: The New Laws of Television.

On Tuesday 1 March, several publishing offices in Europe were raided by inspectors from the European Commission. “They burst in like cowboys” said Francis Esménard, the president of French publisher Albin Michel, to journalists at 01net, even if “they were only going to find legal contracts”. Elsewhere, they seized smart phones and laptops from senior executives and no doubt ruined a good few lunches. No one likes to meet a Eurocrat at the best of times, but these ones may be beating the death knell of the publishing industry.The background to these raids is the agency model many big publishers have adopted to sell ebooks. Under this model, instead of selling the ebooks wholesale and allowing the retailer to set the price they charge the customers, the publisher itself sets the price of the ebooks and the retailer takes a commission. The potential problem with this arrangement is that it could, according to the EU commission statement explaining the raids, “violate EU anti-trust rules that prohibit cartels and other restrictive business practices”.

via EU anger over ebook deal suggests hard times ahead for publishers | Books | guardian.co.uk.

In a little over two months time, the long-awaited horror movie The Tunnel will receive its world premiere. Rather than a traditional theatrical release, the movie – which is set in abandoned real-life tunnels under Sydney, Australia – will make its debut online for free with BitTorrent. Simultaneously it will be released on physical DVD, to be distributed by Hollywood giant Paramount Pictures.

via Paramount Pictures Partner With BitTorrent Release Movie | TorrentFreak.

Specifically, I saw that a self-published book could be offered on Kindle for 99 cents, and still turn a 35 cent profit. I was stunned! I walked around in a daze for, well, days, trying to explain to people what that meant. No one seemed impressed. To me it was like receiving the keys to the kingdom, and I immediately set a goal to become the world’s greatest 99-cent author.

Joe: Which, at this moment, you are. This fascinates me, because when Amazon began offering 70% to ebooks priced $2.99 and up, a lot of people considered staying at 99 cents to be slumming.

Which was naive. Coming from a legacy publishing background, I knew that 35% royalties were much better than anything the Big 6 offered. Even so, when I first got into this, I thought that cheap ebooks would be a loss lead, that would get people to read my more expensive books.

And yet, when I lowered the price of The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, I started selling 20x as many copies–about 800 a day. My loss lead became my biggest earner.

via A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: Guest Post by John Locke.

The injunction was the result of a lengthy and ongoing litigation process which dates back to 2006, and soon after it was awarded the record labels filed a claim to recoup damages said to have been caused by LimeWire. The labels calculated that the company behind the popular file-sharing client owes them up to a billion dollars.

The case dragged on and in recent weeks dozens of documents were submitted to the court in a noteworthy side-battle. To get to the bottom of how the music industry sets up licensing deals with other Internet companies, LimeWire subpoenaed internal emails from Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and others.

Thus far a quarter million pages of emails have been collected, leading LimeWire to draw some interesting conclusions. Among other things, they found that unauthorized downloads actually boosted the revenue of music labels, and that their income took a dive when LimeWire shut down.

via LimeWire Settles With Record Labels, Still Faces $1 Billion Claim | TorrentFreak.

Wikileaks represents a new type of (h)activism, which shifts the source of potential threat from a few, dangerous hackers and a larger group of mostly harmless activists — both outsiders to an organization — to those who are on the inside. For insiders trying to smuggle information out, anonymity is a necessary condition for participation. Wikileaks has demonstrated that the access to anonymity can be democratized, made simple and user friendly.

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LibraryGoblin sez, “HarperCollins has decided to change their agreement with e-book distributor OverDrive. They forced OverDrive, which is a main e-book distributor for libraries, to agree to terms so that HarperCollins e-books will only be licensed for checkout 26 times. Librarians have blown up over this, calling for a boycott of HarperCollins, breaking the DRM on e-books–basically doing anything to let HarperCollins and other publishers know they consider this abuse.”

I&apos;ve talked to a lot of librarians about why they buy DRM books for their collections, and they generally emphasize that buying ebooks with DRM works pretty well, generates few complaints, and gets the books their patrons want on the devices their patrons use. And it&apos;s absolutely true: on the whole, DRM ebooks, like DRM movies and DRM games work pretty well.

But they fail really badly. No matter how crappy a library&apos;s relationship with a print publisher might be, the publisher couldn&apos;t force them to destroy the books in their collections after 26 checkouts. DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it&apos;s a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day.

HarperCollins has some smart and good digital people (they&apos;re my UK/Australia/South Africa publisher, and I&apos;ve met a ton of them). But batshit insane crap like this is proof that it doesn&apos;t matter how many good people there are at a company that has a tool at its disposal that is as dangerous and awful as DRM: the gun on the mantelpiece in act one will always go off by act three.

And that&apos;s why libraries should just stop buying DRM media for their collections. Period. It&apos;s unsafe at any speed.

I mean it. When HarperCollins backs down and says, “Oh, no, sorry, we didn&apos;t mean it, you can have unlimited ebook checkouts,” the libraries&apos; answers should be “Not good enough. We want DRM-free or nothing.” Stop buying DRM ebooks. Do you think that if you buy twice, or three times, or ten times as many crippled books that you&apos;ll get more negotiating leverage with which to overcome abusive crap like this? Do you think that if more of your patrons come to rely on you for ebooks for their devices, that DRM vendors won&apos;t notice that your relevance is tied to their product and tighten the screws?

You have exactly one weapon in your arsenal to keep yourself from being caught in this leg-hold trap: your collections budget. Stop buying from publishers who stick time-bombs in their ebooks. Yes, you can go to the Copyright Office every three years and ask for a temporary exemption to the DMCA to let your jailbreak your collections, but that isn&apos;t Plan B, it&apos;s Plan Z. Plan A is to stop putting dangerous, anti-patron technology into your collections in the first place.

The publisher also issued a short statement: “HarperCollins is committed to the library channel. We believe this change balances the value libraries get from our titles with the need to protect our authors and ensure a presence in public libraries and the communities they serve for years to come.”

Josh Marwell, President, Sales for HarperCollins, told LJ that the 26 circulation limit was arrived at after considering a number of factors, including the average lifespan of a print book, and wear and tear on circulating copies.

As noted in the letter, the terms will not be specific to OverDrive, and will likewise apply to “all eBook vendors or distributors offering this publisher&apos;s titles for library lending.” The new terms will not be retroactive, and will apply only to new titles. More details on the new terms are set to be announced next week.

For the record, all of my HarperCollins ebooks are also available as DRM-free Creative Commons downloads. And as bad as HarperCollins&apos; terms are, they&apos;re still better than Macmillan&apos;s, my US/Canadian publisher, who don&apos;t allow any library circulation of their ebook titles.

via HarperCollins to libraries: we will nuke your ebooks after 26 checkouts – Boing Boing.

http://www.itworld.com/%5Bprimary-term%5D/138187/music-execs-stressed-over-free-streaming

Free streaming services are replacing piracy as the chief culprit of music industry revenue loss in the minds of fiscally frustrated executives, if a number of panel discussions at a New York digital music conference are any indication.

People are listening to more music than ever before, but they are paying less for it, noted Russ Crupnick, a president at the analyst firm NPD Group, speaking at the Digital Music Forum East conference, held Thursday in New York.

Crupnick noted that the average consumer listened to music 19.7 hours a week in 2010, up from 18.5 hours per week in 2009. But at the same time, consumers have been buying less music. In 2010, only 50 percent of consumers purchased music, by either buying a CD or paying for a downloadable music track, down from 70 percent in 2006.

“We have lost 20 million buyers in just five years,” Crupnick said. Moreover, only about 14 percent of buyers account for 56 percent of revenue for the recording industry.

“Consumers have flipped us the bird,” Crupnick concluded, adding that the lost sales has thus far not been made up yet by other forms of revenue, such as concerts or merchandise sales.

The music industry has long expected that sales of music CDs would decline, as consumers move their libraries to computers and portable listening devices. Digital sales, however, have not made up for the shortfall on CD sales over the past decade. Last year, digital sales accounted for about 23 percent of all music sales, which is up only modestly from 14 percent in 2006, Crupnick said.

“We never really made the digital transformation,” he said.

The reasons behind this sales decline have been routinely debated at this conference over the past decade, the panelists noted. In years past, music executives put the blame on digital music piracy — the easy and free sharing of music with Internet software like BitTorrent — for eroding sales of recorded music.

At this year&apos;s conference, however, concern centered on the growing influence of free streaming Internet services, such as Pandora, MySpace, Spotify and even YouTube. Music listeners deploy YouTube as a streaming service, picking the songs they want to hear and minimizing the browser window, noted Eric Garland, who is the CEO and founder of BigChampagne, a media tracking company.

via Music execs stressed over free streaming | ITworld.

A piece in the Infocommunications and Law journal on pricing problems and piracy. In this piece I argue that the problem is not that pirates and ISPs are not willing to pay rightsholders, but that legitimate businesses cannot get the right price with which they could outcompete the black market. I argue that if there is a room for intervention, it must be concentrated on forcing rights holders to set a price which reflects local market realities, instead of forcing ISPs or their users to pay a levy for file-sharing.
Read the rest of this entry »

A longform piece in the Prae literary journal on the Hungarian e-book market.
Read the rest of this entry »

Hulu Blog

The Hulu team is often asked about our thoughts on the future of TV. The following represents our point of view, which has been materially influenced by our daily interactions with users, advertisers, and content owners. We are fortunate to have such meaningful interactions with these three customer sets, and we are relentlessly inventing better ways to serve them.

Slashdot

“The Guardian reports that Britain’s two biggest record labels, Sony and Universal, plan to beat music piracy by making new singles available for sale on the day they first hit the airwaves hoping the effort will encourage young people to buy songs they can listen to immediately rather than copying from radio broadcasts online. Songs used to receive up to six weeks radio airplay before they were released for sale, a practice known as ‘setting up’ a record. ‘What we were finding under the old system was the searches for songs on Google or iTunes were peaking two weeks before they actually became available to buy, meaning that the public was bored of — or had already pirated — new singles,’ says David Joseph. Sony, which will start the ‘on air, on sale’ policy simultaneously with Universal next month, agreed that the old approach was no longer relevant in an age where, according to a spokesman for the music major, ‘people want instant gratification.'”

“The hacktivism 1.0 was the activism of outsiders. Its organizing principle was to get outsiders into the territory of the other. Wikileaks, on the other hand, is an infostructure developed to be used by insiders. Its sole purpose is to help people get information out from an organization. Wikileaks shifts the source of potential threat from a few and dangerous hackers and a larger group of mostly harmless activists – both outsiders to an organization -, to those who are on the inside. For mass protesters and cyber activists anonymity is a nice, but certainly not an essential feature. For insiders trying to smuggle information out, anonymity is a necessary condition for participation. Wikileaks has demonstrated that the access to such features can be democratized, made simple and user friendly. Easy anonymity also radically transforms who the activist may be. It turns a monolithic, crystal clear identity, defined through opposition into something more complex, multilayered, hybrid, by allowing the cultivation of multiple identities, multiple loyalties.  It allows those to enter the activist scene, who do not want to define themselves – at least not publicly – as activist, radical or oppositional. The promise – or rather, the condition – of Wikileaks is that one can be in the inside and on the outside at the same time. Through anonymity the mutually exclusive categories of inside/outside, cooption/resistance, activism/passivity, power/subjection can be overridden and collapsed.”

excerpt from my upcoming publication on wikileaks, freedom and sovereignty in the cloud.“The hacktivism 1.0 was the activism of outsiders. Its organizing principle was to get outsiders into the territory of the other. Wikileaks, on the other hand, is an infostructure developed to be used by insiders. Its sole purpose is to help people get information out from an organization. Wikileaks shifts the source of potential threat from a few and dangerous hackers and a larger group of mostly harmless activists – both outsiders to an organization -, to those who are on the inside. For mass protesters and cyber activists anonymity is a nice, but certainly not an essential feature. For insiders trying to smuggle information out, anonymity is a necessary condition for participation. Wikileaks has demonstrated that the access to such features can be democratized, made simple and user friendly. Easy anonymity also radically transforms who the activist may be. It turns a monolithic, crystal clear identity, defined through opposition into something more complex, multilayered, hybrid, by allowing the cultivation of multiple identities, multiple loyalties.  It allows those to enter the activist scene, who do not want to define themselves – at least not publicly – as activist, radical or oppositional. The promise – or rather, the condition – of Wikileaks is that one can be in the inside and on the outside at the same time. Through anonymity the mutually exclusive categories of inside/outside, cooption/resistance, activism/passivity, power/subjection can be overridden and collapsed.”

excerpt from my upcoming publication on wikileaks, freedom and sovereignty in the cloud.

Slashdot

“Ambiguity surrounds the real impact of digital book piracy, notes Brian O’Leary in an interview with O’Reilly Radar, but all would be better served if more data was shared and less effort was exerted on futile DRM. ‘The publishing industry should be working as hard as we can to develop new and innovative business models that meet the needs of readers. And what those look like could be community-driven. I think of Baen Books, for example, which doesn’t put any DRM restrictions on its content but is one of the least pirated book publishers. As to sales, Paulo Coelho is a good example. He mines the piracy data to see if there’s a burgeoning interest for his books in a particular country or market. If so, he either works to get his book out in print or translate it in that market.'”

Gabriella Coleman – Technology – The Atlantic

 

Anonymous, who have been on a week long sprint/spree to paralyze website sites like Mastercard and Paypal, are often described in the news as a “group” with “members.” This is usually followed by a series of prolonged qualifications and caveats because many characteristics we usually associate with groups don’t seem to apply comfortably with Anonymous: there are no leaders, anyone can seemingly join, and participants are spread across the globe, although many of them can be found on any number of Internet Relay Chat Channels where they discuss strategy, plan attacks, crack jokes, and often pose critical commentary on the unfolding events they have just engendered. Earlier this week, The Economist listened in on the IRC channels, opening a fascinating window into the order behind the seeming chaos of Anonymous and providing a sense of how the Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks are coordinated by a trusted group of Ops who leverage the labor of thousands of other contributors.

But there is a lot more to how Anonymous, at least in this operation, deliberate about their mission, make decisions, and produce collective statements, such as Manifestos. Here I want to give a fuller picture of what it looks like to participate in Anonymous, how they arrive at some consensus, how they change tactics, and how they use technology to produce collaboratively. Although this is quite an incomplete picture, it will perhaps give a more human face to an operation that otherwise seems faceless.

As mentioned already, IRC is where many participants congregate. They do so in very large numbers to coordinate attacks, debate, and simply watch. In the constant streams of chatter (and they are often multiple channels), there is always a strange mix of pragmatic imperatives with more philosophical or critical takes on the events:

(11:23:42 AM) XXXX Well until we get real orders, just keep attacking MasterCard, until we get real orders(in the topic)Well until we get real orders, just keep attacking MasterCard, until we get real orders(in the topic) migs.mastercard.com.au port . . .

(11:23:43 AM) YYYY: i think most of people here do not fight because of something… they are fighting because of the fight… such a shame

We see here how one participant is trying to rally the infantry to stay on target but this is followed by critical commentary on motivations behind the attacks. But is it the case that “most people here do not fight because of something?” In reality, it is hard to tell. In some ways, it may be impossible to gauge the intent and motive of thousands of participants, many of who don’t even bother to leave a trace of their thoughts, motivations, and reactions. Among those that do, opinions vary considerably.

And yet there are other statements made by Anonymous that do give a clear sense that some fight for “something” and that this is part of a larger political plan, even if surely not everyone participates in Anonymous for noble causes. Along with IRC, Anonymous have also made ample use of collaborative writing software, in this case Pirate Pad (which rose from the ashes of Etherpad) and do so to coordinate actions, pick targets, and write manifestos. If IRC is where the cacophonous side of Anonymous is most clearly manifest, then the documents and conversation on Pirate Pad reflect a calmer, more deliberate and deliberative side of Anonymous, where participants offer arguments that are picked apart or supported through reasoned debate.

Take for instance a snapshot from a document written by 31 anons, 16 writing simultaneously:

biella_600.jpg

Here they get into a few more details as to who and why they attack:

biella2.jpg

From at least this vantage point Anonymous starts to look more like a group of seasoned politics activists, debating the merits and demerits of actions and targets, warning for example, not to attack the media. Even if these documents cannot be taken as the totality of Anonymous, they reveal that some of the participants do engage in strategic and political thinking.

These documents are not, however, the only place where participants deliberate or announce tactics. IRC, as I noted, is where so much of the action and the coordination occurs.

As I was writing this up, a number of participants were calling for a change of tactics: (12:25:13 PM) AAAA: Decision: Our message has come across. We have been mentioned in medias, blogs and other sources. Our response has been succesful. Our point has come across. We need to stop all attacks now and focus on organization, so that future attack may come in tenfold strength. Stop all attacks!

And yet, did this happen? There are some signs — like Operation Leakspin — that it has. But it’s too early to make a real determination. And Anonymous has shown that it’s willing to change as circumstances change. And the news that Julian Assange expects to be charged for espionage could shift things for Anonymous, as this tweet makes utterly clear. Stay tuned.

biella3.jpg

 

TekGoblin

 

Netflix announced today that they have brokered a deal with Disney-ABC to add their content to the Netflix library. The deal should add a substantial number of new TV shows and Movies to instant watch. The episodes will be added rather quickly to instant watch only 15 days after initial telecast. Here is a list of the new additions to Netflix:

  • Prior season episodes of current ABC hit series “Grey’s Anatomy,”  ”Desperate Housewives” and, for the first time on Netflix, “Brothers & Sisters,” all of which are among the network’s most successful and popular TV franchises in recent years.
  • Every episode of recent ABC favorites “Lost” and “Ugly Betty,” the latter making its streaming debut at Netflix.
  • Each season of several hit series from ABC Studios, including “Scrubs” and “Reaper,” which are both new additions to Netflix.
  • A host of content from the Disney Channel, including the hits “Phineas and Ferb” and “Good Luck Charlie,” which are also new to Netflix; updated and expanded offerings of “The Suite Life on Deck” and “Wizards of Waverly Place;” and library offerings from the smash hits “Hannah Montana” and “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.”
  • A wide range of content from ABC Family, marking the introduction of ABC Family content streaming from Netflix.  Included are the hit series “Greek,” “Make It or Break It,” “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” and “Melissa & Joey.”

With much more content to come. Netflix also recently added a new plan that included no dvd rentals but unlimited streaming for only $7.99 a month down from the original $8.99 plan.

 

Q&A: Why money doesn’t motivate file-sharers | Interviews | News | PC Pro

 

Q&A: Why money doesn’t motivate file-sharers

Bank notes

By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 8 Dec 2010 at 14:11

Piracy is so difficult to battle because file-sharers are motivated by altruism and not financial gain, according to one academic.

Joe Cox, an economist at the Portsmouth Business School, believes file-sharers who post content online see themselves as the “Robin Hoods of the digital age,” according to a study he’s published in the journal Information Economics and Policy.

Such insight could help drive policy and find ways to prevent illegal downloads, he claims. We spoke to him to find out more.

Q. Why did you decide to look at file-sharing?

A. A lot of the academic effort which has focused on file-sharing has been on lost revenues, to say how much the record industry and the film industry has lost as a result of people illegally downloading content.

 

I was more interested in the behavioural motivations. To me it seems pretty obvious why you might want to illegally download a music track or a film or a video game, but what I was really interested in is the people who make the content available in the first place, because there doesn’t seem to be much to be gained for them, at least not materially. They presumably already bought the material to make it available in the first place.

I called them seeders – it’s a pretty standard term for people who make the material available – distinguishing them from leechers, who just take material from others but don’t give any back. I’ve never seen anything published which looks at those two groups to look at their different motivations.

Q. What was the motivation for seeders?

A. For the leechers, pretty obviously, the major motivation was financial. They wanted to acquire music or films without paying for it because it was cheaper than going out to buy it.

What was interesting was the difference with the seeders, and it was quite apparent that financial motivations were nowhere near as prevelant; it was a kind of altruism.

Their main motivation was that they were seeking notoriety, peer recognition, peer esteem, some sort of feeling of getting one over on the system. It was a much richer tapestry of different things contributing to the decision to go ahead and make the content available.

Q. With that in mind, how should illegal sharing be prevented?

A. The survey data suggested there was a deep-seated belief that this type of activity shouldn’t be illegal, that there was no criminal act involved.

That makes it very hard to deter with advertising to suggest that you’re funding piracy, that you’re a cheap knock-off merchant, because they believe what they’re doing is morally right. And it’s these guys that record labels and movie studios are most interested in getting to. They’re the source.

Q. You’ve said the Digital Economy Act won’t work, so what do you suggest?

A. Technology has developed to such a point now that you can’t turn back the clock and you can’t change the digital revolution – it’s a bit like King Canute trying to halt the advance of the tides.

 

I think there needs to be a more radical rethink in how the arts and the creative industries are funded.

The phenomena of the record label and the movie studio pretty much come into their own in the 20th century and I think they are a 20th century phenomena. Before that opera, ballet, and music were funded on a system of patronage.

I think we need to consider potential funding from the public sector. Coming at this from an economics perspective – I’m an economist – we have a particular type of common good that we look at, called a public good.

 

I would argue that these days music and movies are public goods: you can’t really exclude people from using them

The characteristics of this are you can’t exclude people from enjoying the benefits of it if they don’t pay for it, and if any one person consumes the good it doesn’t affect anyone else’s ability to consume it too. Classic examples are things like street lighting or national defence.

I would argue that these days music and movies are public goods. You can’t really exclude people from using them. The internet is giving them the availability to share this material at will and it’s virtually impossible to stop that. And with the digital nature of material, you can make perfect reproductions and share it to others.

What economists say will happen if you have a public good and look to the free market, the market won’t provide any output because everyone will just look to free-ride, and not pay themselves. But if no-one pays the good doesn’t get produced.

Q. And public funding is the way to get around that?

A. With street lighting or national defence, these are things that government funds through taxation. It would probably be a bit radical to say the government should fund the creative industries through taxation, but there are creative ways knocking around at the moment.

For example, you could try introducing non-commercial use levies on iPods or DVD players. It’s a lump sum you would pay over and above the purchase price when you buy the device, with the understand that you’re going to use it to access digital content.

If that money was collected into a pot, it could be distributed to record labels and movie studios to give proper compensation to rights owners. And then there could be a relaxation on how people access the material. You could keep track of downloads to make sure the most popular artists get the most money.

 

The Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Library of the Zrínyi Miklós University have organized a conference of the web and the library. My presentation asks the question whether the libraries need to follow the fate of their quickly dematerializing books.

A tudomány ünnepe keretében Webpolgár címen rendezett konferenciát a Zrínyi Miklós Nemzetvédelmi egyetem könyvtára.  Nagy sikert aratott az előadás, ami azt a kérdést teszi fel, hogy követik-e a könyvtárak a dematerializálódó könyveik sorsát…

ars technica

 

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA, S.3804) sets up a system through which the US government can blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid online ad networks from working with the site. It passed the Senate Judiciary Committee 19-0 this week, but it’s never going to pass the Senate before the end of the current Congress.

That’s due to resistance from people like Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who announced at a separate trade hearing of his own yesterday that he was going to “take the necessary steps to stop [COICA] from passing the United States Senate.”

“It seems to me that online copyright infringement is a legitimate problem,” he said in the midst of his questioning, “but it seems to me that COICA as written is the wrong medicine. Deploying this statute to combat online copyright infringement seems almost like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb when what you really need is a precision-guided missile.”

“The collateral damage of this statute could be American innovation, American jobs, and a secure Internet.”

Ed Black, CEO of computing industry trade group CCIA, was testifying at the hearing, and he agreed that COICA was a “good example of what not to do in an important, complicated digital ecosystem.”

Sweet sanity! And yet—this thing passed out of committee 19-0 with minimal hearings? Presumably there’s a big bipartisan bloc in the Senate which doesn’t think a major new Internet censorship regime—and one that applies only to copyright—needs much in the way of oversight. While the bill looks dead this year, the idea has met with thunderous applause from the movie and music industries, who are sure to back it next year. Hopefully, something more considered will be on the table the second time around.

 

ars techica

YouTube will begin paying French artists when their works show up on the site, thanks to a new deal with three French royalty societies. The agreement only affects videos viewed in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, but it does cover clips and movies uploaded to YouTube from 2007 all the way through 2013.

Google’s new agreement affects screenwriters and filmmakers represented by Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD), Société Civile des Auteurs Multimedia, and the Société des auteurs dans les arts graphiques et plastiques, the company said during a press conference on Thursday (covered by the Wall Street Journal). The agreement follows a similar one made earlier this year between Google and France’s leading royalty society for musicians, SACEM.

Like other agreements made in other parts of Europe—as well as the US—the royalty societies will get a cut of YouTube’s ad revenues in exchange for permission to host the clips. Google didn’t disclose the terms of the deals, but it’s likely that the payments will vary depending on how many views each of the films gets from Internet users in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Whether the films will be viewable to users outside of those countries isn’t clear.

Making these agreements hasn’t always been easy for YouTube. The site had to block “premium” content in the UK in 2009 thanks to a disagreement over royalties. Warner Music made waves in 2008 for pulling all of its content in the US after licensing negotiations broke down. It’s a fine line to walk—content owners can definitely benefit from the exposure of their materials to a wider audience, but they want to make sure YouTube’s not getting a free ride either.

“This is a happy moment after nearly 10 years of misunderstanding,” said SACD director general Pascal Rogard. “It shows that there is a middle ground between protecting authors’ rights and making [content] available online.”

 | TorrentFreak

 

Operation Payback has been without a doubt the longest and most widespread attack on anti-piracy groups, lawyers and lobbyists. Despite the massive media coverage, little is known about the key players who coordinate the operation and DDoS attacks. A relatively small group of people, they are seemingly fuelled by anger, frustration and a strong desire to have their voices heard.

operation paybackIn the last two months, dozens of anti-piracy groups, copyright lawyers and pro-copyright outfits have been targeted by a group of Anonymous Internet ‘vigilantes’ under the flag of Operation Payback.

Initially DDoS assaults were started against the MPAA, RIAA and anti-piracy company AiPlex Software because these outfits had targeted The Pirate Bay. Those DDoS attacks were later replicated against many other targets that have spoken out against piracy or for copyright, resulting in widespread media coverage.

Even law enforcement agencies showed interest in the operation recently. Last week CNET reported that an FBI probe is underway, and TorrentFreak personally knows of at least one court case against a person that was associated with the operation.

Besides covering the results of the DDoS attacks and website hacks, very little is known about the people who are part of the operation. Who are they? What do they want, and what are their future plans? In this article we hope to solve a few pieces of the puzzle.

After numerous talks with people who are actively involved in Operation Payback, we learned that there are huge differences between the personal beliefs of members.

We can safely conclude that this Anonymous group doesn’t have a broad shared set of ideals. Instead, it is bound together by anger, frustration and the desire to be heard. Their actions are a direct response to the anti-piracy efforts of pro-copyright groups.

Aside from shared frustration, the people affiliated with the operation have something else in common. They are nearly all self-described geeks, avid file-sharers and many also have programming skills.

When Operation Payback started most players were not looking to participate in the copyright debate in a constructive way, they simply wanted to pay back the outfits that dared to target something they loved: file-sharing.

Many of the first participants who set the DDoS actions in motion either came from or were recruited on the message board 4Chan. But as the operation developed the 4Chan connection slowly disappeared. What’s left today are around a dozen members who are actively involved in planning the operation’s future, and several dozen more who help to execute the DDoS attacks.

An Anonymous spokesperson, from whose hand most of the manifestos originated, described the structure of the different groups to us.

“The core group is the #command channel on IRC. This core group does nothing more than being some sort of intermediary between the people in that IRC channel and the actual attack. Another group of people on IRC (the main channel called #operationpayback) are just there to fire on targets.”

Occasionally new people are invited to join the command to coordinate a specific attack, but a small group of people remains. The command group is also the place where new targets are picked, where future plans are discussed, and where manifestos are drafted. This self-appointed group makes most of the decisions, but often acts upon suggestions from bypassers in the main IRC channel.

Now let’s rewind a little and go back to the first attacks that started off the operation in September.

The operation’s command was ‘pleasantly’ surprised by the overwhelming media coverage and attention, but wondered where to go from there. They became the center of attention but really had no plan going forward. Eventually they decided to continue down the road that brought them there in the first place – more DDoS attacks.

What started as a retaliation against groups that wanted to take out The Pirate Bay slowly transformed into an attack against anyone involved in anti-piracy efforts. From trade groups, to lawyers, to dissenting artists. Since not all members were actively following the copyright debate, command often acted on suggestions from the public in the main IRC channel.

What followed was an avalanche of DDoS attacks that were picked up by several media outlets. This motivated the group to continue their strategy. Anonymous’ spokesperson admitted to TorrentFreak that the media attention was indeed part of what fuelled the operation to go forward. But not without some strategic mistakes.

As the operation continued more trivial targets were introduced and the group started to lose sympathy from parts of the public. While targeting the company that admittedly DDoSed The Pirate Bay could be seen as payback by some, trying to take out Government bodies such as the United States Copyright Office and UK’s Intellectual Property Office made less sense. In part, these targets were chosen by anarchistic influences in the operation.

“I fight with anonops because I believe that the current political system failed, and that a system based on anarchy is the only viable system,” one member told TorrentFreak. “I encouraged them to go after political targets just because I like Anarchy.”

The Anonymous spokesperson admitted to TorrentFreak that mistakes were made, and command also realized that something had to change. The targets were running out and the attacks weren’t gaining as much attention as they did in the beginning. It was a great way to gather attention, but not sustainable. In fact, even from within the operation not everyone was convinced that DDoS attacks were the best ‘solution’.

“I personally don’t like the concept of violence and attacking, but violence itself does raise attention,” Anonymous’ spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

“Attacking sites is one side of the story, but this operation would finally have to serve a purpose, otherwise it wouldn’t exist. We all agree that the way things [abuse of copyright] are currently done, is not the right way.”

Last week command decided to slow the DDoS attacks down and choose another strategy, mainly to regain the focus of attention. It was decided that they would make a list of demands for governments worldwide. In a move opposed to the desires of the anarchic influences, command decided to get involved in the political discussion.

Copyright/patent laws have to change, they argued, and from the bat they were willing to negotiate. They called for scrapping censorship, anti-piracy lawsuits and limiting copyright and patent terms, but not getting rid of copyright entirely. Interestingly, there is also no word in the demands about legalizing file-sharing.

To some this new and more gentle position taken by Anonymous came as a complete surprise. We asked the spokesman of the group about this confusing message and he said that there are actually several political parties that already adopt a similar position, like the Pirate parties and the Greens in Europe.

However, according to the spokesman (who wrote the latest manifesto with other members in Piratepad) they consciously chose this set of demands. “Some of us have the vision of actually getting rid of copyright/patents entirely, but we are at least trying to stay slightly realistic.”

“What we are now trying to do, is to straighten out ideals, and trying to make them both heard and accepted. Nobody would listen to us if we said piracy should be legal, but when we ask for copyright lifespan to be reduced to ‘fair’ lengths, that would sound a lot more reasonable,” the spokesman told TorrentFreak.

The demands have been published on the Operation Payback site for nearly a week, but thus far the media coverage hasn’t been as great as when they launched their first DDoS. Some have wondered whether this is the right path to continue in the first place, as it may get in the way of groups and political parties that have fought for similar ‘ideals’ for years already.

The spokesman disagreed and said that Operation Payback has “momentum” now.

So here we are nearly two months after Anonymous started Operation Payback. The initial anger and frustration seems to have been replaced by a more friendly form of activism for the time being. The group wanted to have their voice heard and they succeeded in that. However, being listened to by politicians and entertainment industry bosses might take more than that.

 

 – WSJ.com

 

How hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay and Google? It wouldn’t be impossible, but for even a moderate Internet user, it would be a real pain. Forgoing Google and Amazon is just inconvenient; forgoing Facebook or Twitter means giving up whole categories of activity. For most of us, avoiding the Internet’s dominant firms would be a lot harder than bypassing Starbucks, Wal-Mart or other companies that dominate some corner of what was once called the real world.

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Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs

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The Internet has long been held up as a model for what the free market is supposed to look like—competition in its purest form. So why does it look increasingly like a Monopoly board? Most of the major sectors today are controlled by one dominant company or an oligopoly. Google “owns” search; Facebook, social networking; eBay rules auctions; Apple dominates online content delivery; Amazon, retail; and so on.

There are digital Kashmirs, disputed territories that remain anyone’s game, like digital publishing. But the dominions of major firms have enjoyed surprisingly secure borders over the last five years, their core markets secure. Microsoft’s Bing, launched last year by a giant with $40 billion in cash on hand, has captured a mere 3.25% of query volume (Google retains 83%). Still, no one expects Google Buzz to seriously encroach on Facebook’s market, or, for that matter, Skype to take over from Twitter. Though the border incursions do keep dominant firms on their toes, they have largely foundered as business ventures.

Bloomberg News

Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos

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The rise of the app (a dedicated program that runs on a mobile device or Facebook) may seem to challenge the neat sorting of functions among a handful of firms, but even this development is part of the larger trend. To stay alive, all apps must secure a place on a monopolist’s platform, thus strengthening the monopolist’s market dominance.

Today’s Internet borders will probably change eventually, especially as new markets appear. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we are living in an age of large information monopolies. Could it be that the free market on the Internet actually tends toward monopolies? Could it even be that demand, of all things, is actually winnowing the online free market—that Americans, so diverse and individualistic, actually love these monopolies?

The history of American information firms suggests that the answer to both questions is “yes.” Over the long haul, competition has been the exception, monopoly the rule. Apart from brief periods of openness created by new inventions or antitrust breakups, every medium, starting with the telegraph, has eventually proved to be a case study in monopoly. In fact, many of those firms are still around, if not quite as powerful as they once were, including AT&T, Paramount and NBC.

Internet industries develop pretty much like any other industry that depends on a network: A single firm can dominate the market if the product becomes more valuable to each user as the number of users rises. Such networks have a natural tendency to grow, and that growth leads to dominance. That was the key to Western Union’s telegraph monopoly in the 19th century and to the telephone monopoly of its successor, AT&T. The Bell lines simply reached more people than anyone else’s, so ever more customers came to depend on them in a feedback loop of expanding market share. The more customers they reached, the more impervious the firm became to challengers.

Still, in a land where at least two mega-colas and two brands of diaper can duke it out indefinitely, why are there so many single-firm information markets? The explanation would seem to lie in the famous American preference for convenience. With networks, size brings convenience.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

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Consider that, in the late 1990s, there were many competing search engines, like Lycos, AltaVista and Bigfoot. In the 2000s, there were many social networking sites, including Friendster. It was we, collectively, who made Google and Facebook dominant. The biggest sites were faster, better and easier to use than their competitors, and the benefits only grew as more users signed on. But all of those individually rational decisions to sign on to the same sites yielded a result that no one desires in principle—a world with fewer options.

Every time we follow the leader for ostensibly good reasons, the consequence is a narrowing of our choices. This is an important principle of information economics: Market power is rarely seized so much as it is surrendered up, and that surrender is born less of a deliberate decision than of going with the flow.

We wouldn’t fret over monopoly so much if it came with a term limit. If Facebook’s rule over social networking were somehow restricted to, say, 10 years—or better, ended the moment the firm lost its technical superiority—the very idea of monopoly might seem almost wholesome. The problem is that dominant firms are like congressional incumbents and African dictators: They rarely give up even when they are clearly past their prime. Facing decline, they do everything possible to stay in power. And that’s when the rest of us suffer.

AT&T’s near-absolute dominion over the telephone lasted from about 1914 until the 1984 breakup, all the while delaying the advent of lower prices and innovative technologies that new entrants would eventually bring. The Hollywood studios took effective control of American film in the 1930s, and even now, weakened versions of them remain in charge. Information monopolies can have very long half-lives.

Bloomberg News

Google co-founder Sergey Brin

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Declining information monopolists often find a lifeline of last resort in the form of Uncle Sam. The government has conferred its blessing on monopolies in information industries with unusual frequency. Sometimes this protection has yielded reciprocal benefits, with the owner of an information network offering the state something valuable in return, like warrantless wiretaps.

Essential to NBC, CBS and ABC’s long domination of broadcasting was the government’s protection of them first from FM radio (the networks were stuck on AM) and later from the cable TV industry, which it suppressed for decades. Today, Verizon and AT&T’s dominance of wireless phone service can be credited in part to de facto assistance from the U.S., and consequently their niche is probably the safest in the entire industry. Monopolies may be a natural development, but the most enduring ones are usually state-sponsored. All the more so since no one has ever conceived a better way of scotching competitors than to make them comply with complex federal regulation.

Info-monopolies tend to be good-to-great in the short term and bad-to-terrible in the long term. For a time, firms deliver great conveniences, powerful efficiencies and dazzling innovations. That’s why a young monopoly is often linked to a medium’s golden age. Today, a single search engine has made virtually everyone’s life simpler and easier, just as a single phone network did 100 years ago. Monopolies also generate enormous profits that can be reinvested into expansion, research and even public projects: AT&T wired America and invented the transistor; Google is scanning the world’s libraries.

The downside shows up later, as the monopolist ages and the will to innovate is replaced by mere will to power. In the 1930s, AT&T took the strangely Luddite measure of suppressing its own invention of magnetic recording, for fear it would deter use of the telephone. The costs of the monopoly are mostly borne by entrepreneurs and innovators. Over the long run, the consequences afflict the public in more subtle ways, as what were once highly dynamic parts of the economy begin to stagnate.

These negative effects are why people like Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis and Thurman Arnold regarded monopoly as an evil to be destroyed by the federal courts. They took a rather literal reading of the Sherman Act, which states, “Every person who shall monopolize…shall be deemed guilty of a felony.” But today we don’t have the heart to euthanize a healthy firm like Facebook just because it’s huge and happens to know more about us than the IRS.

The Internet is still relatively young, and we remain in the golden age of these monopolists. We can also take comfort from the fact that most of the Internet’s giants profess an awareness of their awesome powers and some sense of attendant duty to the public. Perhaps if we’re vigilant, we can prolong the benign phase of their rule. But let’s not pretend that we live in anything but an age of monopolies.

—Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School. His new book is “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.”

 

Slashdot Technology Story | Google Challenges Facebook Over User Address Books

“When you sign in to Facebook, you had the option of importing your email contacts, to ‘friend’ them all on the social network. Importing the other way — easily copying your Facebook contacts to Gmail — required jumping through considerable copy/paste hoops or third-party scripts. Google said enough is enough, and they’re no longer helping sites that don’t allow two-way contact merging. The stated intention is standing their ground to persuade other sites into allowing users to have control of where their data goes — but will this just lead to more sites putting up ‘data walls?'”

Telegraph Blogs

 

If book publishers want to see the next decade in any reasonable health, then it’s absolutely imperative that they rethink their pricing strategies and business models right now. I hope this example will illustrate why:

I’m a big fan of Iain Banks’ novels; I always buy them in hardback as soon as they come out. It doesn’t matter what reviewers say, I need to have his books immediately. His latest novel, Surface Detail, came out a few days ago and promptly arrived at my office – all 627 pages of it. I lugged the thing home and began reading it this morning.

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Being a Culture novel, it’s a real page-turner and I found it difficult to pull myself away from it. I didn’t want to lug it back to the office again, not least because I didn’t have any space left in my bag, so I did the unthinkable – I googled surface detail ePub so I could download and read it on my iPad (and iPhone).

I try doing this every six months or so, and I usually end up mired in a swamp of fake torrent links and horrible PDF versions; for what it’s worth, this was mostly out of curiosity, since six months ago I didn’t own an iPad.

This time, it took me 60 seconds to download a pristine ePub file, and another five minutes to move it to my iPad and iPhone. While this was going on, I took the opportunity to poke around the torrent sites and forums that my search had yielded, and discovered a wonderful selection of books, including:

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carre

Jump! by Jilly Cooper

The Fry Chronicles, by Stephen Fry

Eat Pray Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert

Solar, by Ian McEwan

Zero History, by William Gibson

Obama’s Wars, by Bob Woodward

Now, that’s not all of the current bestsellers, but it’s not a bad start. “Oh, but we’ve still got the backlist!” I hear some publisher cry. No such luck, because some helpful pirate has bundled entire collections of popular backlist novels into a single torrents, including:

Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels

Lord of the Rings

Narnia

Harry Potter

Artemis Fowl

Twilight

The Hunger Games

Every Ken Follett book

Every Stieg Larsson book

Every Stephen King book

Every Douglas Adams book

etc.

Pretty much all of these books are available in ePub, mobi, PDF and every other popular format (the non-fiction and literary selection is much worse though, which probably reflects the tastes of the people uploading the torrents – that’ll change soon enough).

I am not a torrent-finding genius – I just know how to add ‘ePub’ to the name of a book or author. I don’t need a fast internet connection, because most books are below 1MB in size, even in a bundle of multiple formats. I don’t need to learn how to use Bittorrent, because I already use that for TV shows. And Apple has made it very easy for me to add ePub files to my iPad and iPhone. So really, there is nothing stopping me from downloading several hundred books other than the fact that I already have too much to read and I think authors should be paid.

But why would the average person not pirate eBooks? Like Cory Doctorow says, it’s not going to become any harder to type in ‘Toy Story 3 bittorrent’ in the future – and ‘Twilight ePub’ is even easier to type, and much faster to download to boot.

After Christmas, tens of millions of people will have the motive, the means, and the opportunity to perform book piracy on a massive scale. It won’t happen immediately, but it will happen. It’ll begin with people downloading electronic copies of books they already own, just for convenience’s sake (and hey, the New York Times says it’s ethical!). This will of course handily introduce them to the world of ebook torrents.

Next, you’ll have people downloading classics – they’ll say to themselves, “Tolkein and C. S. Lewis are both dead, so why should I feel bad about pirating their books?” Then you’ll have people downloading ebooks not available in their country yet. Then it’ll be people downloading entire collections, just because it’s quicker. Then they’ll start wondering why they should buy any ebooks at all, when they cost so much. And then you go bust.

(In case you think this is just a scary story, think again – a conservative estimate this month suggests there are 1.5-3 million people looking for pirated eBooks every day [nb: this is a link to a PDF]. A suggestion: If you gave away a free eBook copy with physical books, that might help things. A bit.)

But of course I’m exaggerating. Most publishers won’t go bust. eBook prices will be forced down, margins will be cut, consolidation will occur. New publishers will spring up, with lower overheads and offering authors a bigger cut. A few publishers will thrive; most publishers will suffer. Some new entrants will make a ton of cash; maybe there’ll be a Spotify or Netflix for books. Life will go on. Authors will continue writing – it’s not as if they ever did it for the money – and books will continue being published.

Three years ago, I wrote a blog post called The Death of Publishers. Back then, most commenters didn’t believe that eBook readers would ever rival physical books for convenience and comfort. They didn’t think that it would ever be that easy to pirate books. The post caused a splash at the time, but it didn’t change anything.

Here’s an excerpt:

Book publishers have had a longer grace period than the other entertainment industries. Computers and iPods had an easy time besting DVDs and CDs, but it’s been difficult to make something that can compete with a book. It may be strange to hear, but a book is a fantastic piece of technology. It’s portable, it doesn’t need batteries, it’s cheap to print and easy to read. This has led many publishers to complacency, thinking there’s something special about books that will spare them from the digital revolution. They’ve seen so many poor or substandard eBook readers that they think it’ll never be done properly.

They’re wrong. eBook readers are about to get very good, very quickly. A full colour wireless eBook reader with a battery life of over a week, a storage capacity of a thousand books, and a flexible display will be yours for $150 in ten years time. If this sounds unbelievable, consider this – the first iPod was released only six years ago and cost $400. Imagine what an iPod will look like in four years time.

How wrong I was! It’s only taken us three years to get the Kindle 3 at a mere $189, with a battery life of a month and a storage capacity of 3500 books. Sure, it doesn’t have colour or a flexible display, but it does have global wifi and 3G, and it’s a lot lighter than I thought it might be. Give it another year or two and we’ll have that colour as well.

(I was also wrong about scanning and OCRing being the main way of pirating books – turns out it was people cracking the DRM of eBooks that publishers had helpfully formatted and distributed themselves!)

But I was right about the complacency of publishers. They’ve spent three years bickering about eBook prices and Amazon and Apple and Andrew Wylie, and they’ve ignored that massive growling wolf at the door, the wolf that has transformed the music and TV so much that they’re forced to give their content away for practically nothing.

Time’s up. The wolf is here.

 

Steal this book: The loan arranger | The Economist

 

AMAZON.COM says soon you will be allowed to lend out electronic books purchased from the Kindle Store. For a whole 14 days. Just once, ever, per title. If the publisher allows it. Not mentioned is the necessity to hop on one foot whilst reciting the Gettysburg Address in a falsetto. An oversight, I’m sure. Barnes & Noble’s Nook has offered the same capability with identical limits since last year. Both lending schemes are bullet points in a marketing presentation, so Amazon is adding its feature to keep parity.

Allowing such ersatz lending is a pretence by booksellers. They wish you to engage in two separate hallucinations. First, that their limited licence to read a work on a device or within software of their choosing is equivalent to the purchase of a physical item. Second, that the vast majority of e-books are persistent objects rather than disposable culture.

If you own a physical book, in much of the world you may sell it, lend it—even burn or bury it. You may also keep the book forever. Each of those characteristics is littered with footnotes and exceptions for e-books. We are granted an illusion of ownership, but may read only within the ecosystem of hardware and software supported by the bookseller with sometimes additional limitations imposed by publishers. Witness Amazon’s remote deletion—since abjured—of improperly sold copies of George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” in 2009. This Babbage recalls an Apple executive, Phil Schiller, extolling to him in 2003 the virtues of purchasing downloadable music when that company’s iTunes Store launched, and the dominant model was for recurring subscriptions. Mr Schiller described buying a song as owning it. Asked if one could therefore sell the song, Mr Schiller said no. He explained:

I do think of it as ownership, and it really does fit the definition of legal ownership. [There are] certain boundaries on your rights, just as on everything I own. I can own a car but that doesn’t give me the right to speed 100mph in it.

That was as tendentious then as it is now, and applies just as directly to Apple’s current e-book offerings. True, Apple removed digital rights management (DRM) protection from its music when the recording industry decided its best tool to fight Apple’s near-total ownership of digital downloads was to make it possible for music to be played on devices other than iPods. But the licensing terms for music didn’t change, and books and video remain locked down, however ineffective such protection is.

But the reason for restricting lending, even with the sham of offering it in Amazon’s or Barnes & Noble’s form, is to distract people from the fact that buyers are spending real money to buy a book they may read just once. To judge from the information Amazon provides, the long tail applies to e-books as it does everywhere else. Many different titles are flogged, but the most disposable and ephemeral have the lion’s share of units sold. Dan Brown’s epics are rarely re-read, judging by how many copies are available for one penny or given away in free book bins weeks after release. Allowing the loan of “The Lost Symbol” by any purchaser to any other e-book hardware or software user worldwide turns each buyer into a one-person lending library. Publishers don’t much like libraries, either, despite the chin-wagging otherwise. (In the US, the public lending right or remuneration right doesn’t hold; the first-sale doctrine allows library lending of physical media without additional fees.)

With a physical book, the afterlife of a disposable read is to hand it off to another party: a library sale, a friend or relative, or the free bin outside a used bookstore. Such books are also purchased in the millions and sold for one penny plus shipping online partly as a marketing effort by booksellers who can then include their own catalogs with each sale. An e-book, however, lives in limbo. Neither moving on to the next life, nor returning to this one, it can never be freed.

That will change. Just as with music, DRM will be cracked. As more people possess portable reading devices, the demand and availability for pirated content will also rise. (Many popular e-books can now be found easily on file-sharing sites, something that was not the case even a few months ago, as Adrian Hon recently pointed out.) The end-game is unclear. Authors can’t turn to touring to obtain revenue in the way musicians can, though some can charge steep speaking fees. Nor can authors produce their work in 3D, only readable in certain special theaters. (McSweeney’s has a proposal in that regard.)

All is not lost, however. Despite fewer adults reading fewer books, billions are still sold worldwide each year, with an increasing portion being digital. Publishers and booksellers need to get non-readers to pick up a device and buy books, and existing readers to read more. Lowering the risk of purchasing a book that a reader may not like would reduce the friction between considering a title and clicking the buy button.

In fact, Barnes & Noble and Starbucks are experimenting with a sort of loan in their bricks-and-mortar shops. The bookseller allows its Nook hardware owners to read books willy-nilly on its stores’ Wi-Fi networks for up to an hour a day. Starbucks has partnered with several publishers to allow full access to some titles, but only while a browser is in the store. Barnes & Noble’s effort is a year old and Starbucks’ was launched just a few days ago.

In other words, they are finally doing with digital books what they have long practised with the printed sort. After all, most bookshops nowadays let you pick a book off the shelf and read it at your leisure, sometimes providing comfy armchairs. Cafés have been making books and newspapers available to patrons for centuries, to entice them to stick around for another cuppa.

The college-textbook market provides another replicable business model. Students pay through their noses for new textbooks at the start of term only to resell them at the end to other students or back to the original bookshop at a discount. Alternatively, they rent books for a fee while leaving a deposit which is returned when the book comes back to the shop. Creating a legitimate digital resale market along similar lines ought to be possible. If, that is, publishers can be convinced to let what are in effect mint-condition digital copies to go at a lower price.

Introducing either de facto rental (purchase and resell at prices set by the bookseller) or the actual sort (read a book in a set period of time for a lower fee) would expand general and specialist readership alike, while discouraging a turn to piracy by breaking the appearance of immutable, high prices. At the same time, it would enable publishers, booksellers and authors to sidestep the first-sale doctrine of physical media, and to rake in revenue each time a “used” digital copy passes from hand to hand.

The music and film industries fought a decade-long losing battle for the digital realm that only put them at odds with their best customers. The book business may yet be able to avoid recapitulating all that pain and disruption, not least by pinching ideas from the off-line world.

 

Slashdot Technology Story | How Hulu, NBC, and Other Sites Block Google TV

Shortly after the launch of Google TV, it became clear that several networks and services were blocking access. Reader padarjohn points out a blog post from Lauren Weinstein explaining the blocking mechanisms being used and wondering why it’s being tolerated. “Imagine the protests that would ensue if Internet services arbitrarily blocked video only to Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers! Or if Hulu and the other networks decided they’d refuse to stream video to HP and Dell computers because those manufacturers hadn’t made deals with the services to the latter’s liking.” Various workarounds are being used to get around the blocks.

This was the second conference on book marketing. This time I was asking the Hungarian publishers and e-book dealers not to create their own black-market by using DRM on their books.

A II. könyvmarketing konferencián arról beszéltem, hogy hogyan fogják a magyar kiadók és a terjesztők a feketepiactól való páni félelmükben a DRM alkalmazásával maguk létrehozni a magyar kalózokat, és ezzel hogyan fogják kinyírni a magyar ekönyvpiacot egyszer és mindenkorra… 🙁

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Tracker interjúk (Frissítve) – Asva.info

 

Még a múlt héten szervezkedtünk egy kicsit, és próbáltunk segítni a Hírtv-nek, hogy kapcsolatba lépjenek a tracker tulajokkal. Végül három tracker küldte vissza a válaszát felhívásunkra, ezeket most egy egyesítetett interjúban közöljük.

 

– Érintette-e a szerver razzia?

1st: Igen, érintett sajnos minket is. Lefoglalták a webszerverünket, amin az oldalunk futott.

BD: Igen érintett a razzia, két, félmilliós gépet vittek el, amit ha vissza is adnának, a képen látható szakszerű tárolás, kezelés miatt hibásan kapnánk vissza.

moon: Igen. Mi is kaptunk felszólítást a jogvédőktől, de a servergépet nem foglalták le.

BladeSector: Közvezlenül nem, viszont közvetve több, mint 2 hétre leállítottuk a fel és letöltést.

– A rendőrség elérhet-e Önhöz, vagy a userekhez?

1st: Kérdéses, hogy az akció elsődleges célja a hazai torrentforgalom megbénítása volt-e, vagy a trackerüzemeltetők és felhasználók felelősségre vonása. Utóbbi esetben elképzelhető, hogy megpróbálják ráhúzni a vélt jogsértéseket a felhasználókra. Ugyanakkor az ügyben eddig nyilatkozatot tett jogászok véleménye szerint ezen jogsértések bizonyítása a trackerüzemeltetők esetében is nehéz, sőt egyes vélemények szerint lehetetlen. Ezen kívül meggyőződésünk, hogy a lefoglalt trackerszerveren felhasználókra terhelő bizonyíték nem található.

BD: Felvettem a kapcsolatot a rendőrséggel, megadtam az elérhetőségemet, így bármikor behívhatnak. A userekhez elérhetnének, de nem fognak, mert nem ez volt a cél. Feleslegesen pánikoltatták egymás a userek, de a jó szóra nem hallgattak. Ma a PROART vezetője megerősítette, hogy nem kívánnak a userek ellen eljárni.

moon: Természetesen az userekhez nem érhetnek el, kódolt merevlemezen vannak az adatok servern. A server tulajához annál inkább.

BladeSector: A leállás során biztonsági lépéseket készítettünk, így a felhasználók biztonságban vannak.

– Milyen látogatottsága volt? Hány regisztrált tagot jelent?

1st: Az oldalnak naponta átlagosan 45 ezer egyéni látogatója volt. Hétvégenként nem ritkán 65 ezer feletti volt ez a szám. Az utóbbi időben nagyjából 50 ezer regisztrált tagunk volt.

BD: 65 ezer user átlagos látogatottság 250 fő 24/7

moon: Nálunk 21 ezer tag volt regisztrálva, ez átlagosan napi 7 ezer egyedi látogatást jelent, és közel 25ezer oldal letöltést.

BladeSector: A razzia előtt 6ezer tagot számoltunk, azóta 5570-re csökkent, bízunk benne, hogy mindenki visszajön, aki accountjának törlése mellett döntött. Ez átlag napi 1000-1500 egyedi IP-t, és többezer oldalletöltést jelent.

– Meglepte-e, hogy ekkorát ütött a rendőrség?

1st: Mindenképpen megdöbbentő volt az akció súlya. Ilyen drasztikus eljárásra nem hiszem, hogy akárki is számított a hazai p2p világban. Még inkább szokatlan, hogy az elsődleges célpontok az ingyenes fájlcserét biztosító, az adatforgalomból nem profitáló oldalak voltak. Többször hangsúlyoztuk mi is, hogy a trackerszerveren nem található illegálisan forgalmazott, jogsértő adattartalom, ennek tükrében még inkább alaptalannak érezzük az eljárást. Furcsa továbbá az is, hogy oldalunk semmiféle előzetes figyelmeztetést vagy a vélt jogsértő tartalmak eltávolítására való felszólítást nem kapott.

BD: Ha arra irányul a kérdés hogy a nekem okozott kárt előre láttam, akkor igen, benne volt a pakliban.Ha a teljes torrenttársadalomra vonatkozik a kérdés, akkor nem gondoltam, hogy az ingyenes oldalakat viszik. Reméltem a fizetősek, akik hasznot húznak,azokat fogják vegzálni.

moon: Igen. Bár sejteni lehetett, hogy előbb utóbb ismét várható razzia, de ilyen mértékű, ilyen határozott fellépésre senki nem számított.

BladeSector: Nem gondoltam, hogy az ingyenes oldalakkal szúrnak ki ennyire, de szokás mondani, “aki k*rvának megy, ne sírjon ha b*sszák”, persze sírtunk miis eleget.

– Lehetett-e belső információja a rendőrségnek? Valaki segíthette-e a nyomozókat a trackerek közül?

1st: A talpon maradt trackerek jelenlegi, akció utáni működését látva mindenképp jogos a felvetés. Elgondolkodtató, hogy egyes jelenleg is működő oldalak szabad regisztrációval és folyamatos reklámozással próbálnak toborozni felhasználókat a lefoglalt oldalak közönségéből. Ezen oldalak közül kettő tudomásunk szerint elérhető közelségben volt és van a hatóságok számára, mégse foglalták le a szerverüket. Erős a gyanú, hogy e két oldal háborítatlan működése összefüggésben lehet azzal, hogy információkat, tippeket szolgáltattak a hatóságnak.

BD: A hírekkel ellentétben, a rendőröknek, és a többieknek is van elérésük. Nem akarom nagyon védeni a rendőröket, de ők tényleg parancsot teljesítettek.

moon: Ez könnyen meglehet, bár nem kell túl nagy zseninek lenni ahhoz, hogy valaki egy domain és a hozzá tartozó ip-cím alapján lenyomozza, honnan, mely szolgáltatótól fut az oldal.

BladeSector: Nem a rendőr fog úgy dönteni, hogy most akkor márpedig mi lefoglalunk 3 napig! Valaki utasította, annak a valakinek lehet fülese.
Ahogy több ezellen küzdő politikus, bíró, és egyéb szerv dolgozója használta a p2p protokollt, úgy ezek az emberek is tagjai lehettek az oldal(ak)nak.
Előfordulhat, hogy valamelyik tracker is ludas, viszont miért vágná maga alatt a fejszét. Annyira nem biztos a helyzet, hogy legközelebb nem vele kezdik.

-Hogyan juthattak el a rendőrök a szerverekhez?

1st: Minden hálózatra csatlakoztatott szervergép rendelkezik IP-címmel, ennek követésével el lehet jutni a géphez. A nyomozás pontos technikai részleteiről célszerűbb lenne a hatóságot kérdezni.

BD: :) Az oldalak nevei a google keresőben bármikor megnézhetők, az ip keresővel kiadja pontosan hol van a domainhoz tartozó ip, és a gép ha megvan a parancs, akkor azzal a kütyüvel a kezében bemegy, és hátulról kihuzogatják a netkábelt. Ahol a jel megszakad, azt a gépet keresték. (leegyszerűsítve)

moon: Jól kidolgozott akció és tracker lista alapján. Ehhez már csak házkutatási parancsra volt szukség, amit be is szereztek, gond nélkül.

BladeSector: A szerverig eljutni tulajdonképpen nem kell mérnöknek lennünk, tracert is végigköveti az útvonalat, de bármilyen ingyenes domain-tool kiírja a szerver publikus adatait, onnantól meg már csak egy házkutatási parancs a megfelelő teremben.

– Sokan azzal indokolják a letöltést, hogy drágák a jogdíjas termékek. Ön szerint is így van ez?

1st: Egy premier DVD bolti ára 4-5000 Ft (melyek minősége gyakran silány), a premier mozijegyek ára pedig bőven 1000 Ft felett van egy nagyvárosi vetítőteremben. A jogtiszta számítógépes szoftverek ára egyes operációs rendszerek esetén 100 ezer Ft-os nagyságrendű, és akkor még nem is beszéltünk vírusirtó, szövegszerkesztő és egyéb alapprogramokról. Ha még arra a luxusra is ragadtatnánk magunkat, hogy számítógépünkön játszani szeretnénk, szintén 10 ezer forintos nagyságrendben kell kiadnunk 1-1 játékért. Nyilvánvaló, hogy ezek az árak a magyar jövedelmi viszonyok tükrében irreálisak. Egy átlagos magyar család egész egyszerűen nem engedhet meg magának ilyen kiadásokat, esetleg csak alkalmanként. Az ár mellett további elősegítő tényezője a letöltésnek, hogy a magyar piacon egyre növekvő igény van HD tartalmakra, mellyel a forgalmazók egyáltalán nem tartanak lépést. Emellett számos sorozat nem jelenik meg a TV vetítés után nemhogy HD minőségben, de semmilyen megvásárolható formában.

BD: Az én indokom főleg az lenne, hogy több féle dolgot meg tudok nézni, és válogathatok. Sok olyan filmet vettem meg eredetiben, amit ha nem szedem le, és nézem meg, soha eszembe nem jutna megvenni. Ha egy sorozat tetszik, a többi részt is megveszem. A usereket megszavaztattuk, nagy részük arra szavazott, hogy megnézni, informálódni. A második helyen a kipróbálom megveszem verzió volt. Ugyanis megnézik, sikerfilm 10 ezer, de mondjuk 1 év múlva már 2 ezerért is elérhető.

moon: Teljes mértékben! Ha lenne itthon is Magyar Online zene és film bolt megfizethető áron, biztos hogy sokan használnák. Például ha lenne Magyar iTunes, amit már sokan régóta hiányolnak.

BladeSector: Mint minden, ez is relatív. Ha azt nézzük, hogy egy Film legyen mondjuk 5ezer forint akkor az 25 dollár, vagy 17 euró, hogy ne menjünk olyan messze az országokkal.
Egy kezdő fizetés Ausztriába 1200-1500 euró + juttatások + üzemanyag hozzájárulás, de maradjunk 1500nál. 420ezer forint.
Éljünk nagy lábon, legyen a rezsi 150 ezer. Költsünk el kajára, meg mindennapi cuccokra 100 ezret, adjunk a gyereknek heti 5 ezer zsebpénzt, és még mindig maradt 150, ha jól számolom.
Miért ne vegyem meg azt a félévente kiadott új játékot,meg egy két filmet havonta..  Nálunk mi van, egy családi ház rezsije takarékosan (130 négyzet, 5 tagú család) 90-100 ezer.
Apuka keres jóesetben 150 et, anyuka minimálbér, ha nem mindegyik, egyik fizetés egy az egybe a számlákra, és akkor éljünk egy hónapig. Ruha, kaja, pia, bérlet, üzemanyag.
Nem fér bele. Még néha egy-egy mozi sem, mert bárhogy számolom, legyen 1000 a jegy, kukorica + kóla = 1000, 1000Ft/Fő. És akkor még nem számoltuk az utazást, meg az aznapi kaja, pia stb. ha messzebb van a mozi.
Máshogyan kellene gondolkozni a hazai kereskedelemben.

– Mekkora fogásnak minősül ez? A rendőrség szerint világviszonylatban is jelentős.

1st: A kérdés az, mit gondol a hatóság jelentős fogásnak. Ugyanis nyugodtan kijelenthető, hogy ennek az akciónak az időleges elrettentésen kívül semmiféle haszna nem volt, még jogvédő szemmel sem. Látszatintézkedésnek és az ilyen ügyekkel foglalkozó rendőrségi osztály létjogosultságának igazolására mindenképp az lehetett. Pár kisebb-nagyobb bezáró trackeren kívül az eredmény mindössze annyi, hogy új néven, vagy újraindítva folytatódik a nagyobb trackerek működése a továbbra is fennálló letöltési és közösségi-társasági igényt kielégítendő. A lefoglalások miatt minden nagyobb tracker olyan óvintézkedéseket (pl. szervergépek külföldre költöztetése) tesz majd a jövőben, melynek folytán a szervergépek a magyar rendőrség számára elérhetetlenek lesznek, ezáltal egyre kevésbé lehet majd ellenőrizni a fájlcserét. Emellett a meglévő, sőt növekvő letöltési igényt követve újra elharapózik majd a sms-warez szervereken folyó letöltés is. Egy biztos, a jogtiszta szoftverek forgalma nem fog ettől nőni. Valódi javulást nem lefoglalással, nem a szabad forrású szoftverek terjedésének akadályozásával, hanem a jogtiszta szoftverek árának mérséklésével, illetve jogtiszta online letöltési lehetőségek biztosításával lehetne elérni. Ez utóbbi egyébként a jogvédő szervezetek rég óta előszeretettel hangoztatott ígérete. Kár, hogy ebben évek óta nem történik előrelépés.

BD: Elvitték a legnagyobb oldalakat. Jelenleg utkeresés van, de legtöbb oldal ujra el fog indulni.A nagy fogást a seedszerverek, a fizetős ftp, sms -ben lehetett volna. Mindegy mit mondanak, főleg azt amit akarnak, de ha 50 géppől, 15 oldal volt, akkor ott oldalanként 2-5 GB adat volt.A maradék szerverekben nem lehet ennyi adat:)

moon: Mivel az egyik legnagyobb oldalt is elvitték, ahol közel 100 ezer user volt regisztrálva, valamint sok kisebb oldal is elhullott, ezek tudatában kijelenthető, hogy jelentős fogás. Talán az eddigi legnagyobb.

BladeSector: Fogás… Hogy mit, nem tudom. Csak tovább kelti az ellenszenvet és felháborodást az emberekben. Aki eddig megvette, az ezután még annyira sem fogja. Én eddig megvettem, ami tetszett, amire úgy gondoltam megérdemli a szerző.
Ezután inkább gyűjtök új szerverre, hátha elvinnék azt is.

– Ön leállt-e, vagy szünetelteti, vagy külföldre “menekül”?

1st: Az első lehetőség fel sem vetődött bennünk. Jelenleg szüneteltetjük az oldal működését, mialatt kutatjuk a legoptimálisabb körülményeket az újrainduláshoz.

BD: Egyik sem :) Más domain alatt elindulunk, és a folytatás pontos menetét kidolgozzuk. Vagy szigorítsanak, vagy enyhítsenek, de ez így szélmalomharc….

moon: Külföldi serveren tovább folytatjuk amit elkezdtünk, nem hátrálunk meg. Bár ilyenkor mindig felmerül, hogy bedobjuk a törölközőt, van-e értelme tovább, de még kitartunk.

BladeSector: Mint említettem, 2 hetes átalakítás folyt, de az oldal közösségi (Üzenőfal, Fórum) funkciói működtek.

– Felháborodtak ettől a vehemens támadástól?

1st: Természetesen felháborítónak tartjuk ezt a lépést. Fentebb kifejtettük, hogy egyrészt a trackerszerverek lefoglalása egyáltalán nem volt indokolt, emellett az akció hozadéka egyértelműen ellentétes a vélt jogvédői és hatósági szándékkal.

BD: Felháborodni értelmetlen. Az eljárás sajnos jogszerű volt, hisz az üzemeltetők tudták mi vár rájuk. Mindettől amin felháborodtunk az pont a lényeg amit fent is írtam, hogy a fizetősek, támogatásosok maradtak.

moon: Természetesen! Váratlanul ért mindenkit, minden tracker tulajdonost.

– Üzlet vagy szórakozás, esetleg valamiféle lázadás a fáljcsere?

1st: Az első semmiképp sem; mélységesen elítéljük a nyerészkedő oldalakat, melyek alatt az sms-warez szervereket, illetve az olyan oldalakat értjük, melyek sms-regisztrációval illetve sorozatos átveréssel próbálnak meg pénzt kicsalni a felhasználóktól. Nálunk ugyan volt támogatás opció, de csakis önkéntes alapon fogadtunk el adományt és kizárólag az oldal fenntartására és fejlesztésére költöttünk belőle. Aki úgy gondolja, a torrenttrackerek működtetése aranybánya, az nagyot téved. Aki üzemeltet egy trackert, annak sok esetben inkább ráfizetés ez, mint anyagi haszon. Szórakozás vagy lázadás? Inkább úgy fogalmaznánk, hogy a torrentezés egy szemlélet, mely ötvözi a közösségi szellemet, az „add vissza, amit kaptál” elvét és a letöltés igényét. Egy tracker élete korántsem csak a letöltésről szól. Egy trackeren akkor érzik magukat jól a felhasználók, mikor a fájlcsere lehetősége mellett a fórumon beszélgethetnek, pályázatokon vehetnek részt. Egy minőségi oldal sokkal többet ad, mintsem hogy letöltőhelyként funkcionáljon.

BD: nekem szórakozás,a fizetősöknek üzlet, és mindent bele lehet magyarázni, de lázadásnak semmiféleképpen nem nevezném. Volt egyszer egy ellenzéki képviselő, aki egyszer azt mondta, polgári engedetlenségből, ne fizessünk adót. Ebből kiindulva polgári engedetlenségből, nem akarok több piócát eltartani (főleg hogy magyar zene, film nem volt nálunk….)

moon: Lázadásról nem beszélnék, mert ez nem az. De nyílt titok, hogy vannak olyan oldalak akik hasznot húznak ebből is. SMS-ért támogathatod őket, vagy csak Banki átutalással küldesz nekik pénzt, bizonyos kreditért cserébe. Mi nem használtunk ilyen eszközöket, non-profitban megy a dolog, nincs támogatási lehetőség sem. Számunkra szórakozás az egész, jót tenni másokkal, és a végén látni, olvasni egy köszönömöt! Ezért csináljuk.

BladeSector: Számunkra hobbi, tanulás, a lehetőségek kihasználása, embertársaink segítése, munkánk gyümölcse.

 

– Asva.info

Szóval mi a tanulság? Az, hogy a pedofília miatt kap az ember 2 év felfüggesztett börtönt, míg kalóz szoftverek használata miatt nyolcmilliós bírságot. Félre ne értsen senki, egyáltalán nem akarom védeni az embert, nekem csak az fáj, hogy ha ez két külön személy lett volna, mennyivel rosszabbul  járt volna a másolt Photoshop-ot futtató ember.

FoxNews.com

 

The basic idea is to offer publishers another way to reach readers and to give readers the chance to try more books — books that perhaps they wouldn’t normally peruse if they had to pay more for them. Initially, Wowio specialized in offering digital versions of comic books and graphic novels, usually formatted as Adobe PDFs. So it was a natural step for the company to offer graphic ads that are inserted in e-books.

The ads themselves aren’t intrusive: There are no annoying highlighted links in the text, nor are there irritating animations or takeovers to interrupt the reading experience. The advertisements are simply pages added to a book, typically up front: Notices for movie site Fandango and auction site iTaggit appeared in the copy of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds that I read. It’s much like the advertising you’d see in a magazine, except that if you want more information or are enticed by a promotion, all you have to do is click to visit the advertiser’s site.

“We think we’re creating a broader audience for some of these titles,” Wowio’s CEO Brian Altounian told me. “I think folks are going to download more books because they’re saving the costs” of having to drive to the store or pay more for them.

 

TorrentFreak

A new Internet traffic trends report released by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that global P2P traffic is expanding, with BitTorrent as the key player. In North America, more than half of all upstream traffic (53.3%) on an average day can be attributed to P2P. The report further signals some really interesting regional differences in P2P use, such as the dominance of Ares in Latin America.

íEpicenter | Wired.com

It’s easy to tease, but the serious matter here is that neither the Kindle nor the Nook allow book owners to lend their e-books in any reasonable sense of the word. Amazon and B&N are allowing them to give it a one-time-only, two-week furlough. Not even a Netflix-like “as long as you like” policy. Not even to competing devices (format incompatibilities notwithstanding). And just plain forget about giving “your” e-book away, or reselling it — things that you can do with any of your only-slightly-more-expensive print editions.

Simon Says…

 

DRM’s Collateral Damage

The problem with technology-enforced restrictions isn’t that they allow legitimate enforcement of rights; it’s the collateral damage they cause in the process. In my personal opinion the problems are (very concisely) that they:

  1. quantise and prejudge discretion,
  2. reduce “fair use” to “historic use”,
  3. empower a hierarchical agent to remain in the control loop, and
  4. condemn content to become inaccessible.

 

 

Ars Technica

 

The film and music businesses couldn’t stop file-sharing, but the porn industry has a plan to drive piracy into the shadows in 15 months or less. Can DogFart, Lords of Porn, and Naughty Bank succeed where others have failed?

They certainly hope so. To that end, a company called Pink Visual rounded up a huge collection of porn studios and lawyers for a “content protection retreat” (CPR) in Tucson last week, one designed to get the industry working together on an anti-P2P strategy. CPR was designed to “revive” the business, and backers hope hope they can “significantly reduce digital piracy of adult content and to effectively drive those who engage in adult content piracy completely underground by January 2012.”

The event was secretive enough that the location and agenda weren’t revealed publicly, but we do know that lawyers engaged in widespread “Doe” litigation against anonymous file-swappers were present to make their case. These firms included Media Copyright Group, the Minneapolis/Chicago company that recently brought large-scale porn litigation to the heartland (and which is represented in federal court by a family law attorney with little discernible practice in intellectual property cases).

The industry routinely claims that it is being decimated by piracy—it’s even worse off than the mainstream film business. (In 2007, the now-defunct Portfolio did a terrific piece on this, called “Obscene Losses.”) In part, that’s due to the huge (indeed, record-setting) box office numbers put up by theaters in the last few years. Porn, which is highly dependent on individual sales to home users, doesn’t have the theatrical revenue stream and is therefore more at risk from the free Flash-based “tube” sites that now cater to every kind of fetish. These sites, modeled after YouTube, are awash in copyrighted content.

At the CPR event in the Arizona desert, Pink Visual did reveal that several studios have agreed go after both the tube sites and large torrent trackers. (The porn industry’s Free Speech Coalition has for some time pressured tube sites to adopt content-screening technology.)

But when it comes to suing end users, porn studios are as divided as every other content industry. We’ve seen numerous studios sue thousands of anonymous Does over the last few months, apparently taking a cue from the US Copyright Group’s 14,000+ lawsuits against indie film pirates. Several of the companies involved in this new wave of litigation were at the CPR event, but others believe it’s simply counterproductive to sue fans and have refused to do so.

Such lawsuits have had limited success when it comes to music and movies, but pornographers might be in a better position to coax people into settling quickly for a few thousand dollars. As Pink Visual president Allison Vivas told the Agence France Presse in September, “It seems like it will be quite embarrassing for whichever user ends up in a lawsuit about using a popular shemale title. When it comes to private sexual fantasies and fetishes, going public is probably not worth the risk that these torrent and peer-to-peer users are taking.”

While the short-term goal of such suits may be to tap a new revenue source, the long-term challenge is retraining people who now believe that porn should be free. The music industry has had some success with this thanks to lower prices (especially 99 cent iTunes downloads, which redefined digital music pricing); the movie and TV businesses are seeing at least some success with cheap subscriptions (Netflix) or free, ad-supported streaming (Hulu). But in an Internet that’s awash in porn and a limited pool of shemale-porn-friendly advertisers, the pornographers may have a hard time pulling in the profits.

 

WSJ.com

“We don’t have to rush out records that don’t work for the sake of making money,”

Asva.info

 

  • Kezdjük a legérdekesebbel, úgy tűnik a BitBarát és a DeathLord szervereit egy kósza Ákos cd (illetve nyilván az ahhoz passzoló torrent file) miatt lefoglalták. Nem elérhető ezenkívül a BigTorrent és Z-Tracker sem, de ezeknek az oldalaknak az elvitelét senki nem erősítette meg ezidáig.
  • A Majomparadé gyorsan reagált a lefoglalásokra, tegnap óta “meghatározatlan” ideig tilos feltölteni az oldalra magyar zenét.
  • Hasonlóképpen döntött ma a Carpathians is. Oda a mai naptól fogva “TILOS” feltölteni Ákos anyagait tartalmazó torrenteket.
  • A 1st a nemzeti ünnep miatt freeleechet tart.
  • Szerver problémák miatt áll az Evo is. Legközelebb elindulás csak a jövő hét elejére, hétfő kedd környékére várható.
  • Az Insane készített egy “Tetszik” gombot a torrentoldal adatlapjára. Minél több embernek tetszik egy torrent annál jobb lehetőségeket biztosít a tracker. Amennyiben egy torrent eléri a 200 tetszést, úgy automatikusan dupla lesz (ha még nem volt az). 300-nál 3x-os feltöltés, 400-nál 4x-es, 500-nál 4x-es és ingyenesen letölthető lesz automatikusan.
  • A TvStore oldalára ezidáig mintegy 10 ezer felhasználó regisztrált be. Ez, ha emlékeink jók, a BitGate állományának a fele. Az oldalon jelenleg majdnem 5000  aktív torrent van, több mint 30 ezer kapcsolódással.
  • Megjelent a https-es belépés lehetősége és a Wiki az nTrace oldalán. Ezenkívül törölték az inaktív felhasználókat, maradt kicsivel több mint 12 ezer tag.
  •  

    [origo]

     

    – Becslése szerint mekkora bevételtől eshet el az illegális letöltések miatt?

    – A  Fehér Sólyom nevű kiadóm csak a saját kiadványaimat jelenteti meg, ennél kisebb, egyszerűbb vállalkozás aligha létezik. Négy év munkája van A katona imája című új albumban, sok érzelmi és anyagi ráfordítás: vonóskari felvételek, nagy stúdió, rengeteg munka, aki akarja, csaknem kétórányi werkfilmben ellenőrizheti le a videómegosztókon vagy a CD-hez adott ajándék DVD-n. Ha a saját munkát nem számolom, a konkrét anyagi ráfordítás valahol hatezer példánynál térülne meg. Viszonylag egyszerű belátni, hogy nem ez a világ legnagyobb biznisze. Nem lehet megmondani, hányan töltik le hobbiból, esetleg kifejezetten károkozási szándékkal az anyagot. Mindenesetre biztos, hogy potenciális vásárlók is töltenek: nem lehet nem észrevenni, hogy milyen észvesztő mértékben zsugorodik évről-évre a lemezpiac. Ebben a torrentezés szerepe letagadhatatlan, baromi nagy kárt okoz, elsősorban olyan kis országok zenészeinek, előadóinak, mint Magyarország. Pásztor László, a Neoton gitárosa és az mTon kiadó vezetője ezt úgy fogalmazta meg, hogy a torrentezés elvégezte itthon azt a piszkos munkát, amit a kilencvenes évek kazetta- és CD-hamisítóinak nem sikerült.

    – Ön követi az új technológiákat, Blu-ray-en is jelent meg koncertfelvétele, zenéi elérhetők a Songo.hu online zeneáruházban is. A hagyományos lemezekhez képest milyen eladásokat hoz a legális online zenebolt? Milyen ütemezés szerint kerülnek fel a zenéi a szájtra, ahol ez az új album még nem elérhető?

    – Valóban mi adtuk ki az első magyar zenei Blu-ray-t, de részemről nem lesz folytatás, mert rengeteg pénzt költöttünk rá, és egyszerűen nem érte meg: nagyon nem! A legális zeneboltokból elenyésző, szinte mikroszkopikus a bevétel, mert esélyük sincs versenyezni a torrentezéssel. Ha ötszáz forint lenne egy album, a letöltő akkor se venné meg, mert az pont ötszázzal drágább, mint a torrent.

    – A ProArt az ön albumát jelölte meg tömeges szerzőijog-sértést elkövető magyar torrentoldalak ellen tett feljelentésében. Egyes szájtokon a lefoglalások hatására olyan belső szabályzatot hoztak, hogy tilos magyar zenéket megosztani, a külföldi kiadványok terjesztése azonban továbbra is rendben van. Mit gondol, egy ilyen lépés segíthet valamelyest a hazai előadók helyzetén?

       

    A fájlcserélők világával foglalkozó Asva.info blog a hétvégén számolt be arról, hogy pénteken lefoglalták két hazai, Bittorrent technológiát használó letöltőoldal, a Deathlord és a BitBarát szervereit.

    A ProArt szerzőijog-védő szervezet igazgatójától, Horváth Pétertől megtudtuk, hogy a múlt héten valóban feljelentést tettek három hazai Bittorrent-oldal, a fent említett két szájt, illetve egy BigTorrent nevű, péntek óta ugyancsak nem elérhető oldal ellen. Horváth Péter szerint a szövetség folyamatosan figyeli a magyar letöltőoldalakat, és jelzi ezek üzemeltetőinek a jogsértéseket. A múlt héten perbe fogott oldalakon hosszú ideje tapasztalják ezeket. Bár a feljelentésben Ákos múlt héten megjelent A katona imája című albumát hozták fel példaként, a ProArt igazgatója szerint ez csupán egy volt az oldalakon elérhető számtalan jogsértő tartalom közül.

    Miután az Asva.info még szombaton hírül adta, hogy valószínűleg az új Ákos-album miatt zajlott a szerverek lefoglalása, a hétvégén a warezoldalak fórumain sokan kígyót-békát kiáltottak az énekesre az állítólagosan tőle eredeztethető rendőrségi akció miatt: egyes torrentoldalakon “csak azért is” elkezdték terjeszteni Ákos új albumát. Érdekes módon másutt tiltólistára került a lemez digitális kópiája, bizonyos letöltőoldalakra pedig a hétvége óta nem szabad feltölteni magyar előadó zenéit.

    – Azt beszélik, hogy a torrentoldalak, ha levelet kapnak egy magyar előadótól, akkor kérésre leveszi az anyagait. Ehhez persze állandóan ezeken az oldalakon kéne lógniuk a zenészeknek. Ehelyett a legtöbb magyar előadó a kicsiktől a nagyokig felhatalmazza a ProArtot, hogy ha a tartalmaikat megosztva látja a szervezet a torrentoldalakon, akkor azokat távolíttassa el azokról. Amikor megkérdeztem a szervezetet, hogy miért az én albumomra való hivatkozással koboztak el szervereket, azt a választ kaptam, hogy ezeket az oldalakat még augusztusban felszólítottákl a jogsértések megszüntetésére, azok pedig nagy ívben tettek az egészre. A feljelentést is úgy írták meg, hogy több zenei tartalom érhető el az oldalon az én albumomon kívül is. A ProArt is örül, ha megoszthatja a felelősséget és egy széles körben ismert előadó lemezére hivatkozhat egy feljelentésben. Az igazsághoz hozzátartozik, hogy egyes szájtokon valóban leállították a magyar zenék megosztását. Más szájtokon meg engem kiáltottak ki első számú közellenségnek, arra a népmesei egyszerűségű kitalációra hivatkozva, hogy én feljelentettem, elkoboztam a torrentoldalakat. Úgy tűnik, nem sok embert érdekel, hogy ez kamu, és hogy sem szándékom, sem hatalmam nincs ilyesmire – viszont újra lehet böködni az Ákos-alakú vudubabát. Ezeken a fájlmegosztókon dollármilliókért készült filmek Blu-ray-kiadásait tölthetik le az emberek ingyen. Éppen az én 3990 forintos CD-m miatt tiltottak le szervereket? Ez komoly? Aki ezt beveszi, az azt is elhiszi, hogy Gyurcsány Ferenc gyerekeket talál az utcán. Ami ezután következett, az a hazai torrentezésben egy egészen új, figyelemreméltó elem. Egy magyar produkcióval szemben szervezetten, direkt károkozási szándékkal lépett fel a torrentezők egy csoportja (akik a lefoglalásokat követően szándékosan kezdték terjeszteni Ákos új albumát – a szerk.): ezt egyértelműen megfogalmazták. Az csak ráadás, hogy hamis vád alapján tették-teszik mindezt. Ezzel sajnos vége az “ártatlan fájlmegoszás” imidzsének.

    – Ön min hallgat zenét? Előfordult már, hogy egy számot, albumot nem tudott beszerezni semmilyen legális formában, ezért letöltötte mondjuk torrentről?

    – Nincs különbség, csak jobban indokolható. Ódivatú srác vagyok, CD-n hallgatok zenét, ha mp3-at töltöttem le, akkor is CD-re írtam ki. Ritkaságokat régen a lemezboltból lehetett beszerezni: ma azért nem lehet, mert a lemezboltok bezártak és a nagyobb műszaki boltok lemezosztályai is egyre kisebbek. A minden képzeletet meghaladó fájlmegosztás miatt néha már az sem tud lemezt venni, aki szeretne, mert egyszerűen nincsen hol.

    – Nem jogilag, erkölcsileg kérdezzük ezt is: elítélendőnek tartod, hogy ha megvannak az albumaid kazettán vagy cd-n, és letöltöm őket warezszájtról mp3-ban?

    – Teljesen hipotetikus kérdés. Minek töltenéd le azt, ami már megvan? Aki ma letölt, az nem vásárol. Nem olyan bonyolult ez.

    – Ön szerint megoldaná a hazai lemezipar problémáját, ha nem lehetne torrentezni?

    – Ha nem lehetne ingyen letölteni azt, ami az alkotóknak pénzbe kerül, az elég sok mindent megoldana, igen.

     

    Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education

     

    You’ve heard it before: Digital technologies blew up the music industry’s moneymaking model, and the textbook business is next.

    For years observers have predicted a coming wave of e-textbooks. But so far it just hasn’t happened. One explanation for the delay is that while music fans were eager to try a new, more portable form of entertainment, students tend to be more conservative when choosing required materials for their studies. For a real disruption in the textbook market, students may have to be forced to change.

    That’s exactly what some companies and college leaders are now proposing. They’re saying that e-textbooks should be required reading and that colleges should be the ones charging for them. It is the best way to control skyrocketing costs and may actually save the textbook industry from digital piracy, they claim. Major players like the McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons are getting involved.

    To understand what a radical shift that would be, think about the current textbook model. Every professor expects students to have ready access to required texts, but technically, purchasing them is optional. So over the years students have improvised a range of ways to dodge buying a new copy—picking up a used textbook, borrowing a copy from the library, sharing with a roommate, renting one, downloading an illegal version, or simply going without. Publishers collect a fee only when students buy new books, giving the companies a financial impetus to crank out updated editions whether the content needs refreshing or not.

    Here’s the new plan: Colleges require students to pay a course-materials fee, which would be used to buy e-books for all of them (whatever text the professor recommends, just as in the old model).

    Why electronic copies? Well, they’re far cheaper to produce than printed texts, making a bulk purchase more feasible. By ordering books by the hundreds or thousands, colleges can negotiate a much better rate than students were able to get on their own, even for used books. And publishers could eliminate the used-book market and reduce incentives for students to illegally download copies as well.

    Of course those who wanted to read the textbook on paper could print out the electronic version or pay an additional fee to buy an old-fashioned copy—a book.

    Some for-profit colleges, including the University of Phoenix, already do something like this, but the practice has been rare on traditional campuses.

    An Indiana company called Courseload hopes to make the model more widespread, by serving as a broker for colleges willing to impose the requirement on students. And it is not alone. The upstart publisher Flat World Knowledge recently made a bulk deal with Virginia State University’s business school, and last month the company hired a new salesperson devoted entirely to “institutional sales” of its e-textbooks. And Daytona State College, in Florida, is negotiating with publishers to test a similar arrangement.

    The real champions of the change are the college officials signing the deals. They say they felt compelled to act after seeing students drop out because they could not afford textbooks, whose average prices rose 186 percent between 1986 and 2005, and continue to shoot up each year far faster than inflation.

    “When students pay more for new textbooks than tuition in a year, then something’s wrong,” says Rand S. Spiwak, executive vice president at Daytona State, who is leading the experiment there. “Our game plan is to bring the cost of textbooks down by 75 to 80 percent.”

    Apple reset the sales model for music, with its iPod players and market-leading online store, and the company is likely to try to enter the e-textbook market as well. But watch out, publishers, the change agents for textbooks may just be traditional colleges.

    Moving the Tollbooth

    Courseload, the e-book broker, started in 2000, when a co-founder, Mickey Levitan, a former Apple employee inspired by the company’s transformative role in the music industry, devised the idea and teamed up with a professor at Indiana University at Bloomington to try it. But the company failed to find enough takers, and it all but shut down after a brief run.

    Then last year an official at Indiana, Bradley C. Wheeler, called Mr. Levitan and talked him into trying again.

    Mr. Wheeler is part of an effort at the university to bring down textbook costs, and he remembered a conversation he had had with Mr. Levitan about the idea 10 years ago. Back then, Mr. Wheeler was just a professor of business, but now he is also vice president for information technology and able to help try the approach, which he calls “moving the tollbooth” for textbooks.

    “Universities are going to have to engage in saying, This is how we want e-textbook models to evolve that are advantageous to our students and our interests,” he told me this month.

    For three semesters Indiana has tested Courseload’s system, which brings in content from various publishers and allows annotation and other features. So far the company has persuaded McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and John Wiley to participate. During those first experiments, students were not charged, and the university and Courseload paid for the e-textbooks. But Mr. Wheeler said that in the spring the university would try at least one pilot where students would pay a mandatory fee for the e-textbooks, which he expected to be about $35 per course in most cases.

    Company and university officials gingerly approached two key groups early on: students and state legislators. Mr. Wheeler said student-government officials he talked to were supportive. Mr. Levitan said that the legislators generally opposed new fees, but sympathized with the project’s goal of reducing overall costs to students and said they would not oppose it.

    Mr. Levitan said the company was running tests at a handful of colleges, though he declined to name them.

    The Virginia Pilot

    Mirta Martin, dean of Virginia State’s business school, speaks passionately about her reasons for taking part in the experiment with Flat World, which makes e-textbooks standard in eight courses this fall.

    “For our accounting books senior year, there’s nothing under $250,” she told me this summer. “What the students were saying is, We don’t have the money to purchase these books.”

    Last year Ms. Martin became so frustrated over hearing stories about students who were performing poorly because they could not afford textbooks that she pledged that no needy student would go without a book. At first she asked community leaders and others to donate to a fund to pay for the books of students who sought financial help. Last year that project bought $4,000 worth of books for students.

    But Ms. Martin felt that the philanthropic model was not sustainable, so she began reaching out to publishers to see if the institution could get some sort of bulk rate that would allow it to pay for textbooks for all students.

    In its standard model, Flat World offers free access to its textbooks while students are online. If students want to download a copy to their own computers, they must pay $24.95 for a PDF (a print edition costs about $30). But the publisher offered the Virginia State business school a bulk rate of $20 per student per course, and it will allow students at the school to download not only the digital copies but also the study guide, an audio version, or an iPad edition (a bundle that would typically cost about $100).

    Tricky issues remain, though. What if a professor wrote the textbook assigned for his or her class? Is it ethical to force students to buy it, even at a reduced rate? And what if students feel they are better off on their own, where they have the option of sharing or borrowing a book at no cost?

    Proponents of the new model argue that in time policies can be developed and prices can be driven low enough to win widespread support.

    If so, more changes are bound to follow. In music, the Internet reduced album sales as more people bought only the individual songs they wanted. For textbooks, that may mean letting students (or brokers at colleges) buy only the chapters they want. Or only supplementary materials like instructional videos and interactive homework problems, all delivered online.

    And that really would be the end of the textbook as we know it.

     

    Slashdot News Story |

     

    Since I never heard of Sickbeard, sabnzbd, or Astraweb, I figured I’d do a little research, and post my (Score: 5 Informative?) findings here. Please correct me if I made any mistakes….

    Sickbeard is an open source, GPL licensed Python application (so runs on Windows and Linux and other platforms), that watches newsgroups, looking for announcements of TV shows whose torrents have been put on the web. In Sickbeard, the user can specify which shows he is interested in, and it keeps an eye out for those shows. Once it finds shows that the user has specified, it can queue up a retrieval program, but Sickbeard doesn’t retrieve them itself.

    Sickbeard will request the show from sabnzbd. Sabnzbd is also open source, Python. Its function is to go retrieve binaries from newsgroups. So it seems to me that the newsgroups have both the announcement of the availability of a TV program (like a torrent tracker), and the actual program. Sickbeard is watching the announcements, and Sabnzbd is grabbing the program.

    Astraweb is a newsgroup website that apparently allows you to download newsgroup posts. This is a paid service, and the parent post signed up for a $25 service for 180GB of downloads. Based on my MythTV experience, I’m guessing this might be 180 half hours of TV (please correct this number if I am off!).

    So for $25 plus 2 free open source programs, I can have almost 200 half-hour programs that I can watch anytime (starting a few minutes after they air). Interesting!

     

    WSJ.com

    ABC, CBS and NBC are blocking TV programming on their websites from being viewable on Google Inc.’s new Web-TV service, exposing the rift that remains between the technology giant and some of the media companies it wants to supply content for its new products.

    Full-length episodes of shows like NBC’s “The Office,” CBS’s “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” and ABC’s “Modern Family” can’t be viewed on Google TV, a service that allows people to access the Internet and search for Web videos on their television screens, as well as to search live TV listings. Logitech International S.A. and Sony Corp. began selling devices running the software this month.

    Spokespeople for the three networks confirmed that they are blocking the episodes on their websites from playing on Google TV, although both ABC and NBC allow promotional clips to work using the service. ABC is owned by Walt Disney Co., CBS is part of CBS Corp., and NBC is a unit of General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal.

    “Google TV enables access to all the Web content you already get today on your phone and PC, but it is ultimately the content owners’ choice to restrict their fans from accessing their content on the platform,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement.

    The move marks an escalation in ongoing disputes between Google and some media companies, which are skeptical that Google can provide a business model that would compensate them for potentially cannibalizing existing broadcast businesses.

    Over the summer, Google pressed major media companies to optimize their websites and videos to work more seamlessly with Google TV. Some outlets, including Time Warner Inc.’s HBO and Turner Broadcasting networks, did so. Even NBC Universal’s CNBC embraced the service, optimizing some content to work specifically on Google TV.

    But many other companies declined to specifically optimize their websites, and some held out the possibility that they could block their content from the service, as the three networks are now doing. Some TV executives said they were worried their shows would be lost in the larger Internet. Some, including Disney and NBC, were also concerned about Google’s stance on websites that offer pirated content, according to people familiar with their thinking.

    Disney executives, for example, asked that Google filter out results from pirate sites when users search for Disney content, like “Desperate Housewives.” But they were unsatisfied with Google’s response, according to people familiar with the conversations.

    News Corp.‘s Fox Broadcasting and Viacom Inc.’s MTV aren’t blocking Google TV from playing episodes on their websites, according to a spot check Thursday. Spokespeople for Fox and MTV confirmed they are not currently blocking Google TV, but the Fox spokeswoman said “a firm decision has not yet been reached.” News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.

    For its part, Google has tried to assure broadcasters and content owners such as Disney that Google TV’s search feature is optimized to promote their TV broadcasts and own websites’ video content rather than pirated content, according to a person familiar with the matter.

    In addition, Google has also told broadcasters and content owners they can submit requests to Google to delete unauthorized results from the Google TV search feature, just like they do for results in Google’s traditional Web search engine, this person said.

    Some shows—from siblings of the networks that are blocking their content—were working on Google TV on Thursday. Shows from the CW network, which is jointly owned by CBS and Time Warner, appear to play on Google TV, as do some from Lifetime, a cable channel jointly owned by Walt Disney Co., Hearst Inc., and NBC Universal.

    Google won’t directly make money from the sale of the Google TV software, but the software’s use will benefit Google’s ad-supported Web search engine and is expected to increase viewership of the ad-supported YouTube site, which is owned by Google. The company also has been in talks with Madison Avenue’s media-buying firms to discuss how to sell ads on the Google TV interface without interfering with TV commercials, people familiar with the matter have said.

    But the three networks are also not alone in blocking their content. Video site Hulu, whose owners include Disney, NBC Universal and News Corp., also blocks its video from being played through the Google TV interface. Spokeswomen for both Hulu and Google said the companies are in talks to bring the Hulu Plus subscription service to Google TV.

    Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303339504575566572021412854.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection#ixzz13IlB7D8R

    Comic Book ‘Pirated’ On 4Chan, Author Joins Discussion… Watches Sales Soar | Techdirt

     

    Paul Watson points us to yet another example of how engaging with fans of your work (even if, technically, they infringed on your copyrights) can lead to pretty happy outcomes for everyone. The basic details are that comic book artist Steve Lieber discovered that folks at 4chan had scanned in and uploaded every page of his graphic novel Underground. Now, the typical reaction is to freak out, scream “piracy,” whine about “losses” and demand that “something must be done.” But, in a world where obscurity is really a much bigger issue than “piracy,” another option is to actually engage with those fans who liked his work so much that they put in the effort to share it with the world. And that’s exactly what Lieber did. He went to the site and actually started talking about the work with the folks on 4chan (image from Paul):

    Nice. But, what did it actually mean? Well, the day after he engaged with fans on 4chan, Lieber posted a blog post highlighting his sales. As he says, “pictures help us learn.”

    But “piracy” is killing the ability to earn money, right?

     

    Epicenter | Wired.com

     

    Netflix instant accounts for 20 percent of all non-mobile internet use during prime time in the United States, according to a new study.

    Streaming media — real-time entertainment — accounts for 43% of peak period traffic in the U.S., according to Sandvine, which helps ISPs manage their networks and thus has access to buckets of information about usage patterns.

    But Netflix alone accounts for nearly half of that between 8 and 10 p.m., and that usage comes from only 1.8 percent of the service’s subscribers.

    “Per-user, Netflix is the heaviest user of downstream bandwidth in North America: the average fixed access Netflix connection is 1 megabit per second,” Sandvine said in reply to an e-mail question. “On mobile networks, per user, only Slingbox (at almost 800 kbps) is heavier than Netflix (~125 kbps).”

    Streaming video is the most bandwidth-intensive use of the internet, but there are plenty of other choices — starting with YouTube. So the dominance of Netflix, which only offers “studio” fare, would seem to indicate that there is an enormous appetite for profession programming delivered from the cloud.

    Good news for Hulu, Amazon Unbox and even YouTube, should its movie rentals service gain traction. Better news for the content creators, assuming they can come up with a killer streaming revenue model and as if they needed any more proof that on-demand, internet delivery is the future. Bad news for cable and satellite — protestations by CEO Reed Hastings notwithstanding.

    But Hastings does see that streaming is the engine for Netflix now. “In fact, by every measure, we are now primarily a streaming company that also offers DVD-by-mail,” Hastings said in conjunction with the company’s earnings report Wednesday [pdf]. “At the same time, the introduction of our streaming offering in Canada in late September has provided us with very encouraging signs regarding the potential for the Netflix service internationally.”

     

    I was a program committee member of the 3rd Free Culture Research Conference. So many nice people, so many interesting discussions. I put up a poster there, that summed up this presentation:

    .prezi-player { width: 550px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }

    Idén Berlinben volt a Free Culture Research Conference, már a harmadik. Idén is benne voltam a programbizottságban, és bár mostr elő nem adtam, azért egy posztert elvittem, ami nagyjából  ezt a prezit mondta el (sajnos csak statikusan):

    Slashdot News Story | E-Books Are Only 6% of Printed Book Sales

    “MIT’s technology blog argues that ebook sales represent ‘only six pecent of the total market for new books.’ It cites a business analysis which calculates that by mid-July, Amazon had sold 15.6 million hardcover books versus 22 million ebooks, but with sales of about 48 million more paperback books. Amazon recently announced they sell 180 ebooks for every 100 hardcover books, but when paperbacks are counted, ebooks represent just 29.3% of all Amazon’s book sales. And while Amazon holds about 19% of the book market, they currently represent 90% of all ebook sales — suggesting that ebooks represent a tiny fraction of all print books sold. ‘Many tech pundit wants books to die,’ argues MIT’s Christopher Mims, citing the head of Microsoft’s ClearType team, who says ‘I’d be glad to ditch thousands of paper- and hard-backed books from my bookshelves. I’d rather have them all on an iPad.’ But while Nicholas Negroponte predicts the death of the book within five years, Mims argues that ‘it’s just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of ebooks will slow.'”

    Blockbuster files for Chapter 11 protection | Business | The Guardian

    The loss-making DVD rental chain Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US today, after being hammered by mail-order and online film rental services.

    Norman Spinrad At Large:

    But there are also true idealists who believe they are performing a public service to both readers and writers by making books available for free that otherwise would have disappeared.  You don’t have to agree with their ideal–and I certainly don’t–to admit that they are sincere.

    Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

    The Avatar activists are tapping into a very old language of popular protest. The cultural historian Natalie Zemon Davis reminds us in her classic essay “Women on Top” (2) that protesters in early modern Europe often masked their identity through dressing as peoples real (the Moors) or imagined (the Amazons) seen as a threat to the civilised order. The good citizens of Boston continued this tradition in the New World when they dressed as Native Americans to dump tea in the harbour. And African-Americans in New Orleans formed their own Mardi Gras Indian tribes, taking imagery from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, to signify their own struggles for respect and dignity (a cultural practice being reconsidered in HBO’s television series, Treme, by David Simon, about the post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans).

    Népszabadság – Támadnak a könyvkalózok

    Az év legveszélyesebb szerzői jogi kalózakcióját hiúsította meg a hazai könyves egyesülés. Egy amerikai szerverről vetettek le egy több mint ezer népszerű könyv letöltését ingyenesen kínáló honlapot. Ez két éven belül már a második próbálkozás volt. A kalózkodásnak azonban ezzel nincs vége: az e-könyv bevezetése újabb veszélyeket rejt.

    YouTube – How anti-piracy screws over people who buy PC Games.flv

     

    Doctorow’s First Law

    In the meantime, I’ve been filling the time productively by attempting to discover which online booksellers exist to serve the interests of copyright owners, like me, and which ones are seeking to unfairly bind copyright holders (and consumers) to their platforms and, as a result, diminish our negotiating power. I’m happy to say that after much work, I have persuaded three major retailers to offer my e-books without any technology or license conditions that would prohibit my customers from moving the e-books they’ve purchased to a competitor’s device: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

    In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.  In the one thousand two hundred twenty-ninth year from the incarnation of our Lord, Peter, of all monks the least significant, gave this book to the [Benedictine monastery of the] most blessed martyr, St. Quentin.  If anyone should steal it, let him know that on the Day of Judgment the most sainted martyr himself will be the accuser against him before the face of our Lord Jesus Christ.

    http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/2010/08/medieval-copy-protection.htmlIn the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.  In the one thousand two hundred twenty-ninth year from the incarnation of our Lord, Peter, of all monks the least significant, gave this book to the [Benedictine monastery of the] most blessed martyr, St. Quentin.  If anyone should steal it, let him know that on the Day of Judgment the most sainted martyr himself will be the accuser against him before the face of our Lord Jesus Christ.

    http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/2010/08/medieval-copy-protection.html

    My laptop was stolen.

    It was a Lenovo x200s with an SSD drive, type LEN 7469-74G NS474HV.

    The serial number is: SL3ADT0B

    The lenovo sticker is missing from the outer side of the screen. it has hungarian keyboard. In case you find it, please drop me an email. 🙂Ellopták a laptopom.

    Lenovo x200s volt SSD meghajtóval, valószínüleg kevés ilyen van az országban. A típusa LEN 7469-74G NS474HV. Magyar a billentyűzet.

    A gép sorozatszáma: SL3ADT0B

    A lenovo matrica hiányzik a házról. Ha nálad kötött ki, vagy találkozol a géppel, kérlek keress meg.

    In this book my aim was to look beyond the legal and economic readings of contemporary western copyright piracy and understand it as a unique social practice that merits attention not only because of its dubious legality, ubiquity, or the havoc it has played with copyright-based business models, but first and foremost because it shapes the ideas and attitudes of millions of netizens about what intellectual property is and could be; what sharing and online cooperation means in a p2p setting; what privacy is and how it can be protected; how to form and negotiate online identities in an anonymous environment, just to name a few issues. Piracy is not just a drain on the cultural economy, but a powerful productive force whose legacy in social relations will stay with us long after the economic conditions that called it into being –and the power vacuum that enabled it – have passed.
    Read the rest of this entry »

    Michael F. Brown a couple of years ago asked the question: who owns native culture. The conflict he described centered around the place of native American artifacts in US public museums, and the right of Native Americans for self-determination over their representation as well as the material fate of artifacts that once belonged to them, as a cultural group.

    I now want to raise a similar question: who owns digital native culture? If the local audiovisual heritage is accessible only thorugh YouTube, if local digital identities and social connections are stored by Facebook, if local tastes are better known by Amazon and last.fm than by anyone else, and if all of these critical infrastructures are beyond the reach of not  only individuals but for groups, nations as well, that what happens to the digital self-determination?

    Everyone now is preoccupied with the privacy scandals of Facebook. That conflict is between a company and the individual. I would like to reframe that conflict by putting the group in focus, and ask: what happens to local cultures if the infrastructures they use to create, reproduce, maintain, archive their individual and group identities are not owned and/or controlled by them, in fact they have no say in the fate of the data, digital being is all about.

    „Amit csak magunk javára tettünk, velünk pusztul el. Amit a többiek és a világ javára tettünk megmarad és halhatatlan.” Ez az Elveszett jelkép című  Dan Brown könyvből származó – meglehet némileg közhelyes- idézet az egyik legnépszerűbb, leggyakrabban bejelölt sor az amazon.com internetes könyváruház  által árult e-könyvek olvasói között. A könyves világ elektronizálódása nem csak azt teszi megfigyelhetővé, hogy mik az e-könyv olvasók (csak Amerikában 3 millió van belőlük) kedvenc sorai, de olyan dolgokat is, mint például, hogy mik a leggyakrabban megvásárolt, de soha el nem olvasott könyvek, mik az éjszakába nyúlóan, a leggyorsabban/lassabban/gyakrabban olvasott könyvek, hogy csak néhány példát említsek. Az e-könyvek terjesztését ellenőrző szervezet minden különösebb erőfeszítés nélkül jut korábban elképzelhetetlen mélységű és részletességű információk birtokába arról, hogy kik, mit milyen módon, hányszor, mennyi ideig, mikre ügyelve, és mely dolgokat átugorva olvasnak.

    Read the rest of this entry »

    Piracy ravages Spain – Entertainment News, International Top Story, Media – Variety

    Online piracy cost the Spanish media biz an estimated E5 million ($6.3 billion) in the second half of 2009, according to a new study.

    The study, carried out by IDC Research Iberia, the Spanish arm of U.S. consultancy IDC, covered the piracy of music, movies, vidgames and books.

    It was commissioned by Spain’s Coalition of Creators and Content Industries, an umbrella lobby for most of the country’s film and TV trade associations.

    Polling 5,911 Spaniards, the report found that piracy accounted for 83.7% of all online movie consumption and 95.6% of that for music.

    IDC reported that 58.4% of Spanish users would pay for music and 54.8% for movies.

    Technology | guardian.co.uk

    I’m not suggesting that the only way the electronic book industry can succeed is by promoting piracy. But without it, there’s no whip to crack. There’s no easy cause and effect to startle the publishers out of their leather armchairs and into action.

    I suspect that the real change will come as more authors who are already part of the digital age push for new things. But that’s a generational shift, and we’re still a long way from it.

    It’s not that I don’t believe electronic books can’t be a success – just that without an outside factor that can push things faster than the industry is comfortable with, progress is always going to be very, very slow.

    GigaOM

    So while Zuckerberg was announcing Facebook’s ambitious plans, Dixon and some like-minded programmers were cooking up their own launch: an open-source standard for recommendations called Open Like. The idea behind the project, which is still in its embryonic stages, is that websites and services would be able to federate recommendations or “likes” by adopting a uniform standard for the data. In the same way that OAuth (which Facebook is now supporting) is an open standard for sharing user information, and OpenID is an open standard for logging into websites and services, Open Like would allow anyone who adopts the standard to make use of recommendation data.

    “I feel like everyone is falling asleep while Facebook and Twitter are taking over,” Dixon said in a phone interview. “I love Facebook and Twitter — I think I’m even an investor in Twitter through some venture funds I’m a shareholder in — but I just think it’s a bad thing for the web. What if HTTP or SMTP were owned by one company?” What Facebook is trying to do with its open graph protocol might be good for Facebook, the Hunch co-founder says, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for anyone else. “They’re acting in their economic interests — there’s nothing evil about it,” he says. “But people who think that it’s some kind of move towards being open are just naive.”

    Music Ally | Blog Archive

    Brindley from Music Ally now (I feel like Paxman on University Challenge). He talks about where should the crackdown on piracy come – suing your own consumers hasn’t worked in markets like the US. “When you start taking action against them, that tends to lead to some pretty bad PR,” he says. And he points out that taking action against the file-sharing sites hasn’t worked well either. Yet pressuring the intermediary – ISPs – is dangerous. “When you start playing around with people’s connections… that’s a pretty severe intervention.” He thinks that actually cutting people off from accessing the internet in their own homes – “when that’s going to become just like electricity, water – a basic human right… I’m not sure it’s worth that battle

    In this article we look at the interconnections between the p2p and legal marketplaces in the case of the film industry using data collection methods that avoid the pitfalls of questionnaire-based surveys. Central to our analysis is the assessment of two piracy paradigms: substitution and shortage, that is whether pirated content is available through legal or only through illegal channels. Using transactional data (real time observation of p2p downloading activity by users of three major Hungarian torrent trackers) and movie distribution statistics we find that shortage-driven downloaders (pirating old catalogues only) outnumber those downloading only current theatrical releases, while the majority pirates both categories. The analysis of causal relationships reveals nonetheless that demand for a film among online pirates is impacted by its theatrical distribution (number of copies) rather than its actual success at the box offices, the effect of which is insignificant. This leads to the conclusion that part of the marketing efforts directly contributes to propping up piracy. However, the high diversity of the movie genres downloaded by users suggests that p2p pirating is also an activity that is disembedded from the context of personal taste and is thus contributing to the evolution of cultural consumption beyond preexisting preferences and loyalties.
    Read the rest of this entry »

    On the XVII. Budapest International Book Festival I was talking about the Goggle Book project and led a panel about the online book black-markets at the Book publishing and distribution in the age of electronic copies conference, co-organized by the Hungarian Patent Office, and the National Anti-counterfeiting Committee, the Ministry of Justice, and the Book Trade.

    Hosszú hónapok munkájával sikerült rávenni az Igazságügyi és Rendészeti Minisztériumot, a Magyar Szabadalmi Hivatal  és főleg a Hamisítás Elleni Nemzeti Testületet arra, hogy a feketepiaci szereplők ellenoi fellépés módozatai helyett végre a legális piac előtt álló kihívások legyen egy általuk is fontosnak tartott rendezvény témája. A XVII. Budapesti Nemzetközi Könyvfesztivál keretében megrendezett egész napos konferencián a Google Books-ról beszéltem, illetve a legális és feketepiacok közötti kapcsolatról vezettem panelt.

    Beszámolók a konferenciáról:

    Toporgás a digitális kor küszöbén-litera.hu
    Mezei Péter beszámolója
    A Google a könyvzabáló kisgömböc – index.hu

    Kedves olvasók!

    A site redesign alatt van, az átállás remélhetőleg pár napon belül befejeződik. Addig is szíves türelmüket a fennakadásért.

    b.-

    Adobe Labs – Stratus

    dobe® Stratus 2 enables peer assisted networking using the Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) within the Adobe Flash® Platform. RTMFP is the evolution of media delivery and real time communication over the Internet enabling peers on the network to assist in delivery. Stratus was first introduced in 2008 as a rendezvous-only service that allowed clients to send data from client to client without passing through a server. Adobe Flash Player 10, which debuted peer assisted networking, has been adopted today by over 90% of all internet connected PCs.

    The Technium: How to Thrive Among Pirates

    What do these gray zones have to teach us? I think the emerging pattern is clear. If you are a producer of films in the future you will:

    1) Price your copies near the cost of pirated copies. Maybe 99 cents, like iTunes. Even decent pirated copies are not free; there is some cost to maintain integrity, authenticity, or accessibility to the work.

    2) Milk the uncopyable experience of a theater for all that it is worth, using the ubiquitous cheap copies as advertising. In the west, where air-conditioning is not enough to bring people to the theater, Hollywood will turn to convincing 3D projection, state-of-the-art sound, and other immersive sensations as the reward for paying. Theaters become hi-tech showcases always trying to stay one step ahead of ambitious homeowners in offering ultimate viewing experiences, and in turn manufacturing films to be primarily viewed this way.

    3) Films, even fine-art films, will migrate to channels were these films are viewed with advertisements and commercials. Like the infinite channels promised for cable TV, the internet is already delivering ad-supported free copies of films.

    Book marketing conference was a trade conference where all the major publishers and distributors were present. I talked them about the fate of the local markets if they do not match the efforts of Google Books in terms of digitizing and making accessible of books.

    Könyvmarketing konferencia kiadóknak, terjesztőknek. Igyekeztem ráijeszteni mindenkire, szoros összefüggésben azzal, amit az információs szuverenitásról gondolok.

    Airstrike Video Brings Attention to WikiLeaks Site – NYTimes.com

    Three months ago, WikiLeaks, a whistleblower Web site that posts classified and sensitive documents, put out an urgent call for help on Twitter.
    Enlarge This Image
    WikiLeaks.org, via Reuters

    An image from United States military video of a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters in Iraq, posted by WikiLeaks. The Web site obtained the video from an undisclosed source and decrypted it.

    Video Video (wikileaks.org) Warning: Explicit Material

    From the Lens Blog
    Photographs
    Remembering Photographer Killed in Assault
    At War

    Notes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era.
    Go to the Blog »
    Related

    *
    The Lede Blog: WikiLeaks Defends Release of Video Showing Killing of Journalists in Iraq (April 6, 2010)
    *
    Baghdad Bombing Streak Stokes Fear of New Round of Sectarian Violence (April 7, 2010)
    *
    For 2 Grieving Families, Video Reveals Grim Truth (April 7, 2010)
    *
    Video Shows U.S. Killing of Reuters Employees (April 6, 2010)

    Enlarge This Image
    Ali Abbas/European Pressphoto Agency

    In July 2007, a crowd gathered at the scene of an airstrike in Baghdad that killed 12 people, including two Reuters employees.
    Readers’ Comments

    Share your thoughts.

    * Post a Comment »
    * Read All Comments (199) »

    “Have encrypted videos of U.S. bomb strikes on civilians. We need super computer time,” stated the Web site, which calls itself “an intelligence agency of the people.”

    Somehow — it will not say how — WikiLeaks found the necessary computer time to decrypt a graphic video, released Monday, of a United States Army assault in Baghdad in 2007 that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters. The video has been viewed more than two million times on YouTube, and has been replayed hundreds of times in television news reports.

    The release of the Iraq video is drawing attention to the once-fringe Web site, which aims to bring to light hidden information about governments and multinational corporations — putting secrets in plain sight and protecting the identity of those who help do so. Accordingly, the site has become a thorn in the side of authorities in the United States and abroad. With the Iraq attack video, the clearinghouse for sensitive documents is edging closer toward a form of investigative journalism and to advocacy.

    “That’s arguably what spy agencies do — high-tech investigative journalism,” Julian Assange, one of the site’s founders, said in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s time that the media upgraded its capabilities along those lines.”

    Mr. Assange, an Australian activist and journalist, founded the site three years ago along with a group of like-minded activists and computer experts. Since then, WikiLeaks has published documents about toxic dumping in Africa, protocols from Guantánamo Bay, e-mail messages from Sarah Palin’s personal account and 9/11 pager messages.

    Today there is a core group of five full-time volunteers, according to Daniel Schmitt, a site spokesman, and there are 800 to 1,000 people whom the group can call on for expertise in areas like encryption, programming and writing news releases.

    The site is not shy about its intent to shape media coverage, and Mr. Assange said he considered himself both a journalist and an advocate; should he be forced to choose one, he would choose advocate. WikiLeaks did not merely post the 38-minute video, it used the label “Collateral Murder” and said it depicted “indiscriminate” and “unprovoked” killing. (The Pentagon defended the killings and said no disciplinary action was taken at the time of the incident.)

    “From my human point of view, I couldn’t believe it would be so easy to wreak that kind of havoc on the city, when they can’t see what is really going on there,” Mr. Schmitt said in an interview from Germany on Monday night.

    The Web site also posted a 17-minute edited version, which proved to be much more widely viewed on YouTube than the full version. Critics contend that the shorter video was misleading because it did not make clear that the attacks took place amid clashes in the neighborhood and that one of the men was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade.

    By releasing such a graphic video, which a media organization had tried in vain to get through traditional channels, WikiLeaks has inserted itself in the national discussion about the role of journalism in the digital age. Where judges and plaintiffs could once stop or delay publication with a court order, WikiLeaks exists in a digital sphere in which information becomes instantly available.

    “The most significant thing about the release of the Baghdad video is that several million more people are on the same page,” with knowledge of WikiLeaks, said Lisa Lynch, an assistant professor of journalism at Concordia University in Montreal, who recently published a paper about the site. “It is amazing that outside of the conventional channels of information something like this can happen.”

    Reuters had tried for two and a half years through the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the Iraq video, to no avail. WikiLeaks, as always, refuses to say how it obtained the video, and credits only “our courageous source.”

    Mr. Assange said “research institutions” offered to help decrypt the Army video, but he declined to detail how they went about it. After decrypting the attack video, WikiLeaks in concert with an Icelandic television channel sent two people to Baghdad last weekend to gather information about the killings, at a cost of $50,000, the site said.

    David Schlesinger, Reuters editor in chief, said Tuesday that the video was disturbing to watch “but also important to watch.” He said he hoped to meet with the Pentagon “to press the need to learn lessons from this tragedy.”

    WikiLeaks publishes its material on its own site, which is housed on a few dozen servers around the globe, including places like Sweden, Belgium and the United States that the organization considers friendly to journalists and document leakers, Mr. Schmitt said.

    By being everywhere, yet in no exact place, WikiLeaks is, in effect, beyond the reach of any institution or government that hopes to silence it.

    Because it relies on donations, however, WikiLeaks says it has struggled to keep its servers online. It has found moral, but not financial, support from some news organizations, like The Guardian in Britain, which said in January that “If you want to read the exposés of the future, it’s time to chip in.”

    On Tuesday, WikiLeaks claimed to have another encrypted video, said to show an American airstrike in Afghanistan that killed 97 civilians last year, and used the opportunity to ask for donations.

    WikiLeaks has grown increasingly controversial as it has published more material. (The United States Army called it a threat to its operations in a report last month.) Many have tried to silence the site; in Britain, WikiLeaks has been used a number of times to evade injunctions on publication by courts that ruled that the material would violate the privacy of the people involved. The courts reversed themselves when they discovered how ineffectual their rulings were.

    Another early attempt to shut down the site involved a United States District Court judge in California. In 2008, Judge Jeffrey S. White ordered the American version of the site shut down after it published confidential documents concerning a subsidiary of a Swiss bank. Two weeks later he reversed himself, in part recognizing that the order had little effect because the same material could be accessed on a number of other “mirror sites.”

    Judge White said at the time, “We live in an age when people can do some good things and people can do some terrible things without accountability necessarily in a court of law.”

    GIGAOM

    There are still significant gaps in the catalog.
    I still can’t merge things I own with things I just want to stream.
    Ownership of music still provides a smoother listening experience.
    I can only share music with fellow subscribers.
    I can still hear things that I don’t already own without paying for them.

    Gramofon Online

    YouTube Blog: Broadcast Yourself

    For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

    Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

    Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube — and every Web platform — to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.

    Viacom’s brief misconstrues isolated lines from a handful of emails produced in this case to try to show that YouTube was founded with bad intentions, and asks the judge to believe that, even though Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube, YouTube is like Napster or Grokster.

    Nothing could be further from the truth. YouTube has long been a leader in providing media companies with 21st century tools to control, distribute, and make money from their content online. Working in cooperation with rights holders, our Content ID system scans over 100 years worth of video every day and lets rights holders choose whether to block, leave up, or monetize those videos. Over 1,000 media companies are now using Content ID — including every major U.S. network broadcaster, movie studio, and record label — and the majority of those companies choose to make money from user uploaded clips rather than block them. This is a true win-win that reflects our long-standing commitment to working with rights holders to give them the choices they want, while advancing YouTube as a platform for creativity.

    We look forward to defending YouTube, and upholding the balance that Congress struck in the DMCA to protect the rights of copyright holders, the progress of technological innovation, and the public interest in free expression.

    Posted by Zahavah Levine, YouTube Chief Counsel

    Internet piracy taking big toll on jobs | Reuters

    A study into Internet piracy by a Paris-based consultancy published on Wednesday showed that 1.2 million jobs in the European Union could be lost over the next five years if more is not done to clamp down on illegal downloading.

    The study by TERA Consultants for the International Chamber of Commerce focused on piracy in Europe’s music, film, television and software industries.

    Those industries generated 860 billion euros ($1.186 trillion) and employed 14.4 million people in 2008. But in the same year, 10 billion euros and 186,000 jobs were lost to piracy, the study found.

    If that trend continues — and the rapid increase in illegal downloads and advancing piracy techniques suggest it will — then up to 1.2 million jobs and 240 billion euros worth of European commerce could be wiped out by 2015.

    “In the near future and even today in 2010, we observe increasing bandwidth, increasing penetration rate in terms of the Internet,” said TERA Consultant’s Patrice Geoffron, explaining that piracy was only likely to escalate.

    “If we combine all those elements, obviously the impact in a few years won’t remain stable compared to what it was in 2008.”

    ARTISTS SUFFER

    The bulk of illegal downloading targets music, television and video sites, with consumers using “peer-to-peer” formats to download songs and video clips onto their laptops and home computers from websites without paying a fee.

    In that respect it has a disproportionate impact on the creative industries, with musicians, actors and artists standing to lose the most from unfettered downloading, experts say.

    Agnete Haaland, the president of the International Actors’ Federation, believes consumers need to be made more aware of the damaging economic and social impact of their illegal activity.

    “We should change the word piracy,” she told reporters at the unveiling of the report on Wednesday.

    “To me, piracy is something adventurous, it makes you think about Johnny Depp. We all want to be a bit like Johnny Depp. But we’re talking about a criminal act. We’re talking about making it impossible to make a living from what you do,” she said.

    Haaland, whose group supported the study, said one of the best ways to reverse the situation would be stricter EU legislation to enforce existing laws against piracy.

    IT | Tudomány: Százból csak öt magyar blogol – HVG.hu

    Saját bevallásuk szerint a netezők fele legalább heti rendszerességgel oszt meg és tölt le főként zenét, illetve filmes tartalmakat, több mint egyharmada legalább hetente tölt fel képeket. Minden második internetező már rendszeresen vesz igénybe online banki szolgáltatásokat, és egyharmaduk a számláit is a weben keresztül fizeti ki. A megkérdezettek fele ugyanakkor soha nem intézi hivatalos (adóbevallási vagy más ügyfélkapus) ügyeit az interneten.

    Ars technica

    Access to the Internet is a fundamental right to nearly four out of five adults across the globe, and those in South Korea, Mexico, and China seem to have the strongest feelings on the topic. This is according to a report (PDF) by the BBC World Service, which polled 27,973 adults on their feelings about, usage of, and concerns about the Internet. Although users are somewhat divided on whether the Internet should be regulated, they are in agreement on its usefulness for learning and information discovery.

    Across all 26 countries, 79 percent of Internet and non-Internet users said that they felt that Internet access should be “the fundamental right of all people.” When isolated for people who already use the Internet, that number went up to 87 percent. Almost universally (90 percent), respondents said that the Internet was a good place to learn and almost 80 percent said the Internet brought them greater freedom.

    ekonyvolvaso.blog.hu

    Decemberben már emlegettük,
    hogy a négy nagy magyar terjesztő közül a “kicsi, de dinamikus”, a
    Bookline belecsap az elektronikus-tartalom értékesítésébe is. Az
    anyacégtől átvett idegennyelvű anyagok azért nem verték le forgalmukkal
    a biztosítékot (az áraik már inkább).

    Szerencsére nem állt meg itt az élet, a magában sem kicsi Bookline közös céget alapított az elsősorban nagykereskedelmi vonalon erős Lírával, a beszédes eKönyv Magyarország Kft néven. A
    téma még nagyon friss, ezért mélyelemzésbe még nem mennék bele, de
    talán végre látható közelségbe került az értelmes (értsd kurrens
    tartalom, megfizethető áron, szabványos formátumban) magyar
    e-könyvkiadás. A Bookline erős az internetes piacokon, a Lírának nagyon erős saját brandjei (kiadói) vannak, és a nem sajátokkal sem rossz a kapcsolata.

    Elfért
    nagyon ez a manőver az Alexandra és Libri uralta kicsit langyos
    állóvízben, de ne felejtsük el, hogy nekik is lehet még egy-két szavuk
    a dologhoz.

    Maradjanak velünk, a reklám után jövünk a részletekkel.

    Elfért nagyon ez a manőver az Alexandra és Libri uralta kicsit langyos állóvízben, de ne felejtsük el, hogy nekik is lehet még egy-két szavuk a dologhoz.

    Maradjanak velünk, a reklám után jövünk a részletekkel.

    EXCESS COPYRIGHT: Some Thoughts on the Google Book Settlement Hearing of February 18, 2010

    1. Is this an appropriate use of the class action process, especially in view of the many prestigious groups, corporations and individuals who have objected to the ASA? In other words, to what extent does the class involved adequately represent affected authors and publishers, not to mention countless other stakeholders, including librarians and scholars?

    2. Can a class action settlement go well beyond the original pleadings and, effectively, change the law both for the past and for the future in a way that would otherwise be impossible at this point in time if it were to be attempted in Congress and/or through a treaty?

    3. Given the extraordinary complexity of the settlement documentation and the relatively short notice period, can affected authors, publishers and other stakeholders realistically come to informed conclusions?

    4. Is it appropriate to use class action litigation to arguably transform the normally “exclusive rights” basis of copyright law, which requires explicit permission, into an opt-out regime, where permission will be given unless specifically refused in writing? The deadline for total “opting out” was January 28, 2010. Google argues that even those who didn’t opt out by January 28, 2010 will have plenty of opportunities to exercise control over their works down the line for many purposes – but this will still require further “opt out” or other action.

    5. Would the Settlement, if approved, put the United States into contravention of international law with respect to such basic concepts as those of national treatment, mandatory exclusive rights, and the three step test? None other than the Hon. Marybeth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights raised the national treatment issue in her testimony to the House Judiciary Committee.

    6. What will be the antitrust implications of the ASA, given the dominant or monopoly position that Google will have with respect to several markets that it is creating by virtue of this Settlement, i.e. access to orphan works, and, above all the sole portal to search engine access to the database of tens of millions of books (the great “Library to Last Forever”, as Sergey Brin himself calls it)?

    7. What are the implications of views such as this by prominent US IP antitrust lawyer Gary Reback?

    8. What are the extraterritorial implications of this agreement, which requires authors of books published in Australia, Canada (including French language books) and the UK (the “foreign publishing countries”) to have opted out by January 28, 2010 or be bound by it? It also covers books published in these countries, even for the countless authors who are not citizens or residents of these foreign publishing countries or the USA. Unlike United States works, there is no requirement for the foreign works to have been registered in the US Copyright Office. Given the practice of simultaneous or near simultaneous publication of countless English language books in the foreign publishing countries, Google will acquire an enormous number of books in their database that would not fit into the necessarily tighter definition of a US work, which requires publication and registration in the USA. Moreover, many French books published in Quebec but originating from anywhere in the world including France would be included.

    9. What about the countless past agreements signed between authors and publishers that were silent or at best ambiguous about electronic rights?

    10. What about the privacy rights of potential users?

    Here are some Canadian-focussed questions, which Judge Chin will not likely answer but others may eventually have to face:

    1. Why has the Government of Canada apparently been uninvolved and uninterested in the GBS? There has been no public consultation that I am aware of. France and Germany have become engaged at the official level. On the other hand, Canadian officials who would normally be involved in an issue such as this haven’t been.

    2. Where are the several prominent Canadian trade associations and collectives that should have provided some useful specific advice and potentially some representation for Canadian authors, publishers, librarians etc. on these issues?

    3. What are the implications of the Google Partner Program, which appears to allow publishers to feed into Google’s database for very extended access the books of many authors, who may have been and still may be unaware of the Program?

    4. Why is this shaping up to be a battle between scholarly and other individual authors. ranging from the most obscure to J. K. Rowling herself on the one hand and big corporate publishers on the other? I note that the Canadian Publishers’ Council and the Association of Canadian Publishers (which together represent the big multinational and major Canadian publishers) are recommending approval of the Settlement at the same time that they attempting to intervene to fight “flexible fair dealing” and push back on the CCH v. LSUC decision in the Access Copyright K-12 case currently before the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal. On the other hand, many independent Canadian authors and the Canadian Association of University Teachers (“CAUT”) are opposing the GBS. Naturally, the database will be far more important for innovation and research purposes with respect to scholarly works than, for example, light romance novels (no offence to the fan fiction crowd).

    5. Although vast numbers of Canadian published books by thousands of Canadian authors will be drawn into this settlement, most of the bells and whistles of the Google Books database will presumably not be available in Canada with respect to most of the database. This is because Google is necessarily putting up something of a firewall around this database since, even though there may be some extraterritorial aspects to the settlement, the Settlement not surprisingly purports not to affect activities implicating copyright rights in foreign countries outside of the USA.

    6. Canadians may wish to read, if nothing else, the submissions of Google itself and the US Department of Justice (which supports the basic goals of the ASA but reiterates that it is still “a bridge too far” and should not be approved as is). Canadians will also want to read the few but important submissions from Canada. As well, there are “must read” submissions from Pam Samuelson and many notable advocacy groups on all sides, and corporate interests, including Microsoft and AT&T.

    Electronic Frontier Foundation

    Total number of books in the world = 174m.
    Total number of books held by Google partner libraries = 42m.
    Total number of books subject to the amended settlement = 10m.
    ~5 million are in-print
    ~5 million are out-of-print
    ~1 million of the out-of-print works would turn out to be true “orphan works”

    Google has scanned 12 million books so far,
    2 million scanned through its Partner Program,
    2 million public domain works, and foreign works that are outside the amended settlement.

    Authors Guild claims a membership of over 8,500
    Association of American Publishers claims to represent over 300 publishers,
    30,000 authors and publishers have already struck deals to be in Google Books through Google’s Publisher Partner Program.

    44,450 claim forms (both
    online and hardcopy) have been received as of February 8, claims relate to
    approximately 1.13 million books and 21,829 “inserts” (i.e., things
    like a short story or article in an anthology).

    Of the 1,107,620 books
    claimed online,

    619,531 are classified by Google as out-of-print

    488,089 are classified as in-print.


    Total number of claimants: 44,450

    Total books claimed: 1,125,339

    Total inserts claimed: 21,829

    Percentage of books claimed (online only) that Google classifies as out of print: 56%

    Percentage of books claimed on Google’s numbers: about 10%

    50,000 rightsholder
    responses,

    87% choosing to participate in some form

    13% opting out altogether.

    Percentage of books claimed by publishers: 71%

    Percentage of books claimed by authors: 29%

    Copyrights & Campaigns:

    Remember when we were told how peer-to-peer networks would be used for benevolent purposes, like making available the King James Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and The Odyssey? (See n.3.) Well, not so much. From a “census” of files available on BitTorrent conducted by Princeton University student Sauhard Sahi and Professor Ed Felten, a frequent critic of the entertainment industry and its copyright enforcement efforts:

    Overall, we classified ten of the 1021 files, or approximately 1%, as likely non-infringing, This result should be interpreted with caution, as we may have missed some non-infringing files, and our sample is of files available, not files actually downloaded. Still, the result suggests strongly that copyright infringement is widespread among BitTorrent users.

    Ars technica

    The data appears to be “anonymous” only in the sense that it consists of IP addresses and not usernames. When deployed by an ISP, however, linking IP addresses to one’s own user accounts is trivial.

    Do ISPs even have the authority to install such systems on their network? “Anonymous” or not, DPI tools might be considered wiretap devices, and a group called Privacy International promptly complained to the European Commission about the issue (during the debates over a similar DPI-based ad-serving system called Phorm, the UK government made clear it would not do much to stop such trials).

    Today, the European Commission indicated that it took the Privacy International complaint seriously and would watch Virgin’s actions closely.

    The BBC also went to Virgin, asked a couple of obvious questions about how CView would work, and elicited some amazing responses from an ISP spokesman.

    “He admitted that potentially 40 percent of Virgin Media’s customers could have their data scrutinised and confirmed that it has no plans to inform them beforehand. He also conceded that it would not be technically difficult to link up deep packet inspection technology with the IP addresses which would identify individuals but stressed that was not the plan currently.”

    Ars technica

    On Thursday, Macmillan CEO John Sargent met with Amazon representatives to discuss the pricing of the publisher’s titles on the Kindle e-book reader. Negotiations didn’t go so well, with Sargent wanting to exercise absolute control over the prices of e-books sold through Amazon. According to the New York Times’ sources, Macmillan wanted Amazon to raise prices from $9.99 to $15.

    Since launching the Kindle, Amazon has kept the price of best-sellers steady at $9.99, reportedly taking a loss on each title in order to make content for its e-book reader more attractive and drive hardware sales. That hasn’t gone over too well with some publishers, but the dispute with Macmillan is the first one to carry over from the boardroom into public.

    In an advertisement (via Silicon Alley Insider) that ran Saturday in Publishers Lunch, Sargent gave his company’s side of the story. He says that Macmillan would make less money under a new distribution model that it will be using with other retailers (including Apple) beginning in March. Called the agency model, it has Amazon and other retailers taking a 30 percent commission on all sales, but with the publisher setting the price on each title. New releases would retail for between $12.99 and $14.99, while older titles would be as cheap as $5.99. Amazon would prefer to go with a one-price-fits-all model.

    Yahoo! News

    LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – The first hour of the final season of ABC’s “Lost” has leaked online, and the reaction is not what industry insiders expected.

    Though preview content for heavily serialized dramas such as “Lost” are typically and frantically consumed online by fans, the sixth season of the ABC hit has managed to build such an epic level of anticipation that many fans are doing the unthinkable: refusing to watch the leaks.

    When the opening scene from the premiere popped up online after a fan promotion Friday, users of one popular social network site voted to “bury” the video.

    “Why spoil it now?” wrote one fan with the moniker MyWhiteNoise. “I’d rather watch it in hi-def and surround sound than ruin the surprise and watch some (low-quality) video.”

    To TV executives, such statements are like something from an alternative universe, the polar-bear opposite of how young, Web-savvy viewers typically respond to content. Fans usually embrace any short cut that skips the linear TV and advertiser-supported experience.

    “We never had a show like ‘Lost’ before that had these kind of fans that love it so much that they don’t want to know what happens before the premiere,” said Michael Benson, co-executive vice president of marketing at ABC. “Fans feel like they own this thing, just like we do.”

    On Monday, fan commitment was given an even greater test when the entire premiere episode appeared on YouTube. The video was taken from hand-held cameras discretely shooting during a fan screening on Oahu. The Hawaii event itself was a revelation — can any other TV drama rally 12,000 fans to an island in the South Pacific? Some flew in just to see the 44 minutes of video that ABC will air Tuesday night.

    NOT INTERESTED

    Yet when the inevitable YouTube copies appeared Sunday, many videos received only a few hundred hits as online fans registered their lack of interest in crummy bootlegs. “Are people so impatient that they would rather watch a cell phone camera version of the ‘Lost’ premiere than wait one day?” Kyool wrote on Twitter.

    The lavishly shot “Lost” is the original Must-See HD drama. Yet for its final bow, ABC’s marketing effort has shown no new footage, which producers wanted to keep under wraps. Until last week, all trailers used material from previous seasons, which the ABC marketing team tried to turn into an advantage.

    “We wanted to go back and retell the stories of the characters and the larger situation that they’re in,” said Marla Provencio, co-executive vice president of marketing at ABC.

    Catching up viewers on the complicated drama has always been a big part of the network’s strategy with “Lost,” but never more so than this year. After a serialized drama peaks, its ratings usually fall in a downward trajectory as infrequent viewers perceive themselves to be further and further behind the story. Ratings for the season premiere of “Lost” have fallen each year since Season Two. Reversing that trend is a major challenge, and ABC has aired repeats (complete with on-screen pop-up information) and has circulated various forms of recap videos online.

    Though viewers tend to tune in for a show’s last episode, the final season as a whole typically isn’t as fortunate. Industry estimates have “Lost” tracking about the same as last year, which would be a victory if the show manages to maintain its previous rating. But — as with the online reaction to the video leaks — ABC is hopeful that “Lost” will surprise.

    “‘Lost’ is like ‘American Idol,’ it’s not your everyday show,” Benson said. “From the buzz we’re seeing right now, there’s an obsession with this show. So who knows?”

    Readwriteweb

    According to 4chan’s Twitter account and status update blog, they have been “explicitly blocked” by the Verizon wireless network.

    Google shuts down music blogs without warning | Music | guardian.co.uk

    In what critics are calling “musicblogocide 2010”, Google has deleted at least six popular music blogs that it claims violated copyright law. These sites, hosted by Google’s Blogger and Blogspot services, received notices only after their sites – and years of archives – were wiped from the internet.

    “We’d like to inform you that we’ve received another complaint regarding your blog,” begins the cheerful letter received by each of the owners of Pop Tarts, Masala, I Rock Cleveland, To Die By Your Side, It’s a Rap and Living Ears. All of these are music-blogs – sites that write about music and post MP3s of what they are discussing. “Upon review of your account, we’ve noted that your blog has repeatedly violated Blogger’s Terms of Service … [and] we’ve been forced to remove your blog. Thank you for your understanding.”

    TorrentFreak

    Last week an Italian court ruled that ISPs should block access to The Pirate Bay. A few days later this block was enforced, but it is doubtful that the blockade will affect the piracy rate at all since other torrent sites are experiencing a massive increase in Italian visitors.

    tpbThe Italian Pirate Bay case came to an end last week after a lengthy legal battle. The Court of Bergamo concluded that The Pirate Bay was engaging in criminal activity by linking to torrents that point to copyrighted material.

    The judge ordered all Italian ISPs to block the site’s DNS and all current and future IP-addresses. A few days later the blockade went into effect, preventing millions of Italians from accessing The Pirate Bay.

    Many Italians described the ruling as outrageous and labeled Italy as “the new China,” but, as with most technical measures taken to hinder file-sharing, the Pirate Bay blockade is relatively easy to circumvent. True Pirate Bay fans can sign up at a free VPN service to regain access or simply move on to one of the many Pirate Bay alternatives.

    The latter is what hundreds of thousands of Italian Pirate Bay users are doing.

    The owner of BTjunkie has informed TorrentFreak that he has seen a huge jump in traffic from Italians after the blockade was enforced. His site today received 50% more Italian visitors compared to a week ago, indicating that Italian Pirate Bay users are not planning to stop using BitTorrent.

    The problem remains that the Court ruling sets a worrying precedent, and leaves the door open for many more censorship requests to be made against other popular torrent sites. A virtual cat and mouse game will be the result, with the only beneficiaries being the lawyers.

    The last few weeks were busy. I had many media appearances partly because of the p2p study, partly because of the interest generated by these appearances.

    On the recently released p2p study:

    On other issues in the media:

    origo

    Februártól nem ad ki több új DVD-t és Blu-ray lemezt a Fórum Home Entertainment, amely többek közt az Alkonyat és A Da Vinci-kód kiadója volt. A cég partnereinek filmjei ennek ellenére valószínűleg nem válnak hozzáférhetetlenné: hamar új otthonra találhatnak.

    Index – Kultúr – Nem kell a briteknek Burton csodaországa

    Milliók kíváncsiak a Tim Burton által 250 millió dollárból megálmodott Alice Csodaországban 3d-s világára, de lehet, hogy több ország bojkottálja a filmet a Disney megrövidített moziforgalmazása miatt.

    A Disney úgy döntött, hogy az angliai március 5-ei bemutatása után 12 héttel már meg is jelenteti dvd-n és Blu Rayen a filmet a szokásos minimális 18 hetes vetítés helyett, hogy a marekting a dvd fogyásra is hasson. A moziforgalmazók cserébe bojkottálnák a filmet, írta a dailymail [1].

    A Disney komoly veszteséget könyvelhet el, ha rövid határidővel hozza kereskedelmi forgalomba az Alice Csodaországbant [2]. Több mozihálózatnak sem nyerte el a tetszését, attól tartanak, hogy a potenciális nézők inkább kivárják a három hónapot és megveszik a dvd-t, ahelyett, hogy beülnének a filmre.

    Angliában az ország három legnagyobb hálózata – az Odeon, a Vue és a Cineworld – is bojkottálná a mozit. A négy legnagyobb holland moziüzemeltető cég a moziüzemeltetők szövetségén keresztül már a hét elején nyílt levélben jelezte, hogy nemcsak a Burton-film, de más Disney-darab sem kerülhet holland mozikba az adott keretek között. Az olasz mozihálózatoknak sem tetszik a Disney döntése.
    07

    A Disney a bojkott mellett a jegyáron is veszíthet: számítások szerint 40 millió eurós bevételtől eshet el. A mozihálózatoknak békülésként máris 97 centet ajánlottak fel, minden eladott jegy után, és ez az alku is 8 hétig tartana. Általában 65 cent jár minden eladott jegy után, a 3d-s vásznakon vetített produkciók esetében 90 cent. Két fejest is küldtek a hálózatok vezetőihez, hogy találjanak megoldást a problémára.

    I am reading Adrian Johns’ The Nature of the Book. For the first few hundred years the biggest problems pirates were causing was that they mutilated, transformed, abridged, etc. the texts, causing great concern for the authors. Exact copying was in this sense a rare achievement and a secondary problem. Now we seek to protect transformative uses of copyrighted materials by CC licenses and such, but condemn non-transformative copying. Ironic, but i can hardly believe, that the concerns of Martin Luther were (can be) dissipated by post-modernist intertextuality, or by technological development.

    Grace and peace! What is all this, dear sirs, that one should openly rob and steal what belongs to the other, thus ruining one another? Have you now become street robbers and thieves? Or do you really imagine that God will bless and cause you to prosper through such knavery? I have gone on with the postils up till Easter, when they were secretly abstracted from the printing-press by the compositor, who maintains himself by the sweat of our brow, and who himself conveyed my writings to your most estimable town, where they were hurriedly printed and sold before the whole was finished, to the great detriment of all concerned. But I would even have put up with all this injury, had they not treated my books as they did — printing them so hurriedly and falsely — that when they reach my hands I scarcely know them to be mine. Some bits are left out, here they are displaced, there falsified, and other parts not corrected. And they have learned the art of writing Wittenberg on the top of some which have never seen Wittenberg. This is downright knavery. So let every one beware of the postils for the six Sabbaths, and let them sink into oblivion, for I do not acknowledge them as mine. Therefore take warning, my dear printers, who thus steal and rob. Other towns on the Rhine — Strassburg, etc., do not do this; and even if they did, it would not harm us so; for their publications do not reach us in the same way as yours do, being so much nearer. For you know what St. Paul says to the Thessalonians: “That no man go beyond and defraud his brother in any matter, because that the Lord is the avenger of all such.” One day you will experience this. Should not a Christian out of brotherly love wait for a month or two before he copies his work? We have put up with this till it has become unbearable, and has prevented us going on with the printing of the prophets, as we do not wish to see them spoiled, so greed and envy are delaying the spread of the Divine Word, and the fault lies at your door. Indulge your greed as much as you will, till we Germans are called brutes, but pray do not do so in the name of God. The judgment will most surely descend. May better times soon come. Amen.

    Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    The Baen Free Library is a digital library of the science fiction and fantasy publishing house Baen Books where (as of December 2008) 112 full books can be downloaded free in a number of formats, without copy protection. It was founded in autumn 1999 by science fiction writer Eric Flint and publisher Jim Baen to determine whether the availability of books free of charge on the Internet encourages or discourages the sale of their paper books.

    The Baen Free Library represents an interesting experiment in the field of intellectual property and copyright. It appears that sales of both the books made available free and other books by the same author, even from a different publisher, increase when the electronic version is made available free of charge.

    The Millions: Confessions of a Book Pirate

    Do you have a sense of where these books are coming from and who is putting them online?

    I assume they are primarily produced by individuals like me – bibliophiles who want to share their favorite books with others. They likely own hundreds of books, and when asked what their favorite book is look at you like you are crazy before rattling of 10-15 authors, and then emailing you later with several more. The next time you see them, they have a bag of 5-10 books for you to borrow.

    I’m sure that there are others – the compulsive collectors who download and re-share without ever reading one, the habitual pirates who want to be the first to upload a new release, and people with some other weird agenda that only they understand.

    Prezi created for the
    Circuits of Profit: Business Network Research Conference

    January 28, 2010.
    Auditorium,
    Central European University
    http://www.ceu.hu/cns/circuits

    Slashdot Stories (10)

    “Google has found a way to let iPhone owners use Google Voice, launching a Google Voice Web app that runs on iPhone 3.0 OS devices, as well as on Palm WebOS devices. The Google Voice application leverages HTML 5’s functionality for running sophisticated Web applications on a browser at speeds matching those of native applications, Google said. The Google Voice-iPhone conflict is one of several issues putting the companies on a collision course, the latest of which involves Apple potentially courting Microsoft to tap Bing as the iPhone’s default search.”

    AAP November Sales Rise 10.9%

    Book sales in November rose 10.9%, to $808.5 million, at publishers who reported to the Association of American Publishers. Sales for the year through November rose 4.9%.

    Among categories:

    * E-books exploded 199.9%, to $18.3 million.
    * Audiobooks jumped 69%, to $18.4 million.
    * Adult hardcover rose 26.9%, to $204.4 million.
    * Higher education rose 24.2%,, to $197.1 million.
    * University press hardcover rose 21.9% to $5.4 million.
    * El-Hi basal and supplemental K-12 jumped 18.4%, to $136.9 million.
    * University press paperback climbed 2.7%, to $4.2 million.
    * Professional and scholarly rose 2.7%, to $57.1 million.
    * Children’s/YA paperback inched up 1%, to $43.9 million.
    * Religious books were flat, at $48.7 million.
    * Adult paperback fell 3%, to $92.3 million
    * Adult mass market dropped 9.8%, to $53.2 million.
    * Children’s/YA hardcover fell 13.5%, to $63.9 million.

    Books | guardian.co.uk

    The family of John Steinbeck has reversed its decision to oppose Google’s controversial plans to digitise millions of books, but a growing chorus of authors led by acclaimed science fiction writer Ursula K Le Guin have registered their resistance to the scheme.

    Index – Kultúr – Az Index-olvasók széttépték a kisfilmeket

    Novemberben startolt az Indavideó Film, azóta elértük az egymilliomodik indítást. A nézők kedvence a Balaton retró, az Üvegtigris 1-2 és a Nyócker lett, a nagy nyertesek pedig az eddig szinte sehol sem látható kisfilmek: egyebek közt a Szalontüdő, az uristen@menny.hu és a Legkisebb film a legnagyobb magyarról.

    BEA 2009: The Truth About Book Piracy : Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits

    According to O’Leary’s subsequent report, “Impact of P2P and Free Distribution on Book Sales,” book piracy wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as some had suggested. While O’Leary’s report had only O’Reilly and Random House as participants, it appeared that some of the publishers’ fears about piracy were unsubstantiated. Only eight frontlist titles published by O’Reilly in 2008 could be located as torrent files. When these books did become available as torrents, the torrents were uploaded to the Internet far later than expected: some 20 weeks after publication date on average. Furthermore, for the titles available as torrents, on average, sales were 6.5% higher for these books during the four weeks after they were uploaded.

    Go To Hellman

    Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly
    that “publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online
    book piracy” comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the
    viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were “loaned”
    last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American
    city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman
    has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities
    totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at
    least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported
    yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.

    From
    what we’ve been able to piece together, the book “lending” takes place
    in “libraries”. On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a
    dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available
    to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange
    for a “card”. But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz
    sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of
    other patrons. Although there’s no admission charge and it doesn’t cost
    anything to borrow a book, there’s always the threat of an onerous
    overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle
    of not paying for copyrighted material.

    To get to the bottom of this story, Go To Hellman
    has dispatched its Senior Piracy Analyst (me) to Boston, where a mass
    meeting of alleged book traffickers is to take place. Over 10,000 are
    expected at the “ALA Midwinter
    event. Even at the Amtrak station in New York City this morning, at the
    very the heart of the US publishing industry, book trafficking culture
    was evident, with many travelers brazenly displaying the totebags used
    to transport printed contraband.

    As soon as I got off the train,
    I was surrounded by even more of this crowd. Calling themselves
    “Librarians”, they talk about promoting literacy, education, culture
    and economic development, which are, of course, code words for the use
    and dispersal of intellectual property. They readily admit to their
    activities, and rationalize them because they’re perfectly legal in the
    US, at least for now.

    Typical was Susanne from DC, who told me
    that she’s been involved in lending operations for over 15 years. This
    confirms our estimate that “lending” has been going on for over ten
    years, beyond even Google’s memory. Our trillion dollar estimate may
    thus be on the conservative side. Of course, it’s impossible to tell
    how many of these lent books would have been purchased legally if
    “libraries” were not an option, but we’re not even considering the huge
    potential losses to publishers when “used” books are resold for pennies
    on the black markets.

    Techdirt

    We were just talking about whether or not countries are really able to push back on the US’s attempts to export draconian anti-competition/anti-innovation copyright and patent policies elsewhere. Michael Geist points us to two cases where US trade representatives are going overboard in trying to get foreign countries to put in place stringent intellectual property rules. The first is in Costa Rica, which is included in the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Yet like with other free trade agreements that the US has agreed to elsewhere, this one includes draconian intellectual property law requirements. I still cannot understand why intellectual monopoly protectionism — the exact opposite of “free trade” — gets included in free trade agreements. At least in Costa Rica, a lot of people started protesting these rules, pointing out that it would be harmful for the economy, for education and for healthcare. So the Costa Rican government has not moved forward with such laws. How has the US responded? It’s blocking access to the US market of Costa Rican sugar until Costa Rica approves new copyright laws. Nice of the US, right? Bankrupting Costa Rican farmers to force Costa Rica to put in place a copyright regime it does not want.

    Then there’s the Bahamas, where US trade representatives are demanding new intellectual property laws, claiming that the country is not in agreement with WTO treaties. Apparently, the USTR is particularly upset about the police force in the Bahamas not cracking down on the sale of unauthorized DVDs, CDs and counterfeit clothing. However, as the Bahamas Chamber of Commerce president notes, nearly all of those counterfeit products actually originated in the US — and that the majority of people doing the buying are US tourists. In other words, the issue is really with the US, but it seems to want everyone else to deal with it.

    24/7 Wall St.

    Apple, which takes 30% of the revenue generated by downloads at the App Store has lost about $140 million from piracy. If Apple’s revenue was between $500 million and $700 million from the App Store since its launch, that is a significant loss. Despite this fact, Apple has been mute on the subject and done nothing to prevent acts of piracy, which is not unlike the stance it has taken on illegal music downloads to iPods. Even though piracy has caused a big financial loss for Apple, the income from the App Store is dwarfed by sales of iPhones and iPod touches. As big a problem as $150 million is for Apple, the $310 million cost of piracy to developers really makes it their problem. Apple intends to ignore the piracy of applications and will focus on the tens of billions of dollars that it makes on its hardware.

    – NYTimes.com

    The man who stole Wolverine opened the door to his Bronx apartment
    with a grunt, his thin frame hunched at the waist, an unlikely villain
    with a bad back and pajama pants. “I’m a scapegoat for this,” said
    Gilberto Sanchez, 47, after flopping down at his desk — the crime scene
    — and dragging on a cigarette. “I’m gonna get crucified.”

    Skip to next paragraph

    Librado Romero/The New York Times

    Gilberto Sanchez, a glass installer and musician, posted a bootleg copy
    of “Wolverine” on the Web and has since been charged with violation of
    copyright law.

    It has been nine months since the theft of the superhero, or more accurately, the superhero’s story. On March 31, someone posted a “work print” — an unfinished copy — of the film “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” on a Web site. It was a full month before the movie, starring Hugh Jackman
    as the famous mutant, was to open in theaters. Hollywood analysts
    called the leak unprecedented and speculated whether its free, albeit
    brief, availability to the public — and the unkind buzz that followed —
    would dampen its box office draw. Mr. Jackman himself was said by the
    studio to be “heartbroken.”

    “The source of the initial leak and
    any subsequent postings will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the
    law,” the studio behind the movie, 20th Century Fox, said the day it
    appeared online. While the studio was up in arms, Mr. Sanchez, a glass
    installer and musician who knows his way around a high-speed computer,
    was watching “Wolverine” in his living room with three grandchildren.
    There were special effects and music missing, but no matter. “So we see
    a string pulling up Hugh Jackman,” he shrugged later.

    Mr.
    Sanchez likes movies as much as the next guy, but detests the cost of
    taking the brood to the theater. He said that he bought a bootleg copy
    of “Wolverine” on the street and posted a copy on the sharing site megaupload.com for the cachet.

    Eight months later, on Dec. 16, Mr. Sanchez was awakened by a knock at 6 a.m., and opened the door to F.B.I.
    agents, who placed him under arrest. He was charged with violation of
    copyright law, arraigned in federal court in Manhattan and allowed to
    return home. He faces the possibility of prison time, maybe in
    California, where his indictment originated.

    The whole affair
    has Mr. Sanchez deeply rattled. “I’m out on bond, waiting for them to
    sentence me or give me a pat on the hand and tell me, ‘Don’t do it
    again,’ ” he said. Someone from CBS called and invited him to appear
    with Mr. Jackman on the “Late Show with David Letterman.”

    No, thanks. “I’m not going to sit next to Wolverine,” he said. “That’s a setup.”

    In
    an interview in his $695-a-month apartment in the Parkchester
    neighborhood, Mr. Sanchez, who was in and out of city jails in the
    1990s on drug charges, told his story.

    It started in a
    neighborhood Chinese restaurant. A man he figured to be Korean entered,
    muttering “DVDs” and “digital” over and over. The sale of counterfeit
    DVDs is nothing new in New York, or in this corner of the Bronx.
    “Koreans set up on these sidewalks every day,” Mr. Sanchez said.

    At
    first, he doubted the claim of digital quality, so the peddler popped a
    copy into a portable player. “I said, ‘Wow,’ ” Mr. Sanchez recalled.
    Hepaid $5 and took the disc home.

    After watching it with the
    grandchildren, he made a copy on his computer and posted it on
    megaupload, where his screen name is “SkillyGilly,” so others could
    share in the fun and he could get props in the movie-loving community.
    He ignored a friend’s warnings — “You’re going to get in trouble; it’s
    not even out yet” — and watched as several other copies surfaced on the
    site.

    At 5 a.m. the next day, that friend called and told him to turn on the TV.

    “Fox
    News is in an uproar for the leak of ‘Wolverine,’ ” Mr. Sanchez
    recalled. “They’re offering a reward.” By then, he said, his copy of
    the movie had been downloaded 198 times, at no charge.

    He was
    scared, but did not imagine he would be blamed. “Some employee had it —
    ‘Hey, take this down to graphics’ — and he stopped off and showed it to
    his friends,” Mr. Sanchez said. “They made more copies, more copies,
    until the Koreans had a copy.”

    Two weeks later, the F.B.I.
    showed up, having tracked “SkillyGilly” through computer footprints.
    Mr. Sanchez said he explained what had happened. “Talk to the Korean,”
    he said he told them. “You keep following leads and you’ll get to a
    warehouse.” But when the F.B.I. asked if he could identify the peddler,
    he said no.

    A few months later, agents took his computer, then
    returned it, he said. Several months passed, and then the agents were
    back with an arrest warrant. Wesley Hsu, an assistant United States
    attorney for the Central District of California, who is supervising the
    prosecution, said financial gain is not necessarily the sole motive for
    so-called pirates.

    “It’s some sort of Internet prestige thing,” Mr. Hsu said. “That’s sort of how the culture works.”

    Mr.
    Sanchez, who speaks to rehabilitation groups — “I’m Gilberto Sanchez,
    I’ve been to jail, I’ve been through this, I’ve been through that” —
    said he has no intention of fighting the charge. “I can’t say no,” he
    said, pointing to his computer. “That’s like DNA.”

    His fate is
    unclear. In 2003, a New Jersey man was fined and put on probation after
    uploading an unfinished print of “The Hulk” before its release. But
    last year, a man who took a copy of “The Love Guru” from a
    tape-duplication company was sentenced to six months.

    An F.B.I. spokeswoman said the investigation into who stole the movie in the first place was continuing.

    Chris
    Petrikin, a spokesman for 20th Century Fox, declined to comment beyond
    the studio’s statement last month after the arrest: “We are supportive
    of the F.B.I.’s actions, and we will continue to cooperate fully with
    law enforcement to identify and prosecute any individuals who steal our
    movies.”

    “Wolverine” went on to gross $373 million worldwide, despite mostly bad reviews,
    and despite the online adventures of a glass installer from the Bronx
    who, a day after his interview, was laid out flat on the floor of his
    apartment, the only comfortable position for his back.

    He tried
    to imagine what Mr. Jackman might say to him if they ever met. He hoped
    it would go something like this: “Hey, you did what you did. You didn’t
    hurt us.”

    TorrentFreak

    Lawyers have presented their final arguments in the trial of Alan Ellis. The prosecution slammed the ex-OiNK admin, saying that the site was set up with dishonest and profiteering intentions right from the start. The defense tore into IFPI and countered by calling Ellis an innovator with talents to be nurtured. Today the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty, and Ellis walked free.

    After a very long wait of more than two years, last week the OiNK trial got underway with the prosecution making their case against Alan Ellis. This week it was the turn of the defense and yesterday both sides had the opportunity to summarize their positions by submitting their closing arguments to the jury at Teesside Crown Court.

    Peter Makepeace, prosecuting, naturally painted an extremely negative picture, labeling the Pink Palace as a place designed from the ground up as a personal money-making machine for Ellis.

    “21 million downloads. 600,000-plus albums. £300,000. This was a cash cow, it was perfectly designed to profit him and it was as dishonest as the day is long,” said Makepeace.

    It is common sense to come to the conclusion that Oink was dishonest, claimed the prosecution lawyer, adding that Ellis knows that it’s dishonest “to promote, encourage and facilitate criminal activity,” and accusing him of telling the jury “persistent, cunning, calculated lies.”

    It would, of course, be dishonest to promote “criminal activity”, but Mr Makepeace should be very well aware that the activity engaged in by OiNK’s users is covered under civil law.

    Switching momentarily from criticism to praise and then back again, Makepeace said that the OiNK website was a “wonderful machine” for sharing music but noted that while the site had a really good brand name, it was a brand synonymous with “ripping off music.”

    University of London professor Birgitte Andersenok gave evidence earlier in the trial, stating that file-sharing didn’t hurt the music industry and led to more sales. Mr Makepeace trashed her evidence.

    “It’s nonsense, it’s flannel, it’s verbiage, it’s garbage,” he told the Court.

    For the defense, Alex Stein said that Ellis had never knowingly acted dishonestly and that in 2004 when OiNK was launched, it was a “brave new world” on the Internet.

    “In many societies he’d be an innovator, a creator, a Richard Branson. His talent would be moulded, not crushed by some sort of media organization,” he said.

    The media organization being referred to by Stein was the IFPI, who he said had never requested that OiNK be shut down, and had instead “sat and watched.”

    Gazette Live reports that Stein went on to launch a scathing attack on the IFPI.

    “They used this site. Their own members used this site to promote their own music and now they’re crushing him. Maybe he grew too big for them, maybe they’ve taken a different marketing approach. I don’t know. But it was decided that this site should be taken down.

    “All of us here are being manipulated to some sort of marketing strategy by the IFPI. If anybody’s acting dishonestly it’s them,” he said.

    At the end of the two week trial the jury returned a unanimous verdict (12 to 0). Alan Ellis is not guilty of Conspiracy to Defraud the music industry. He walked out of Teesside Crown Court a free man today, his name cleared.

    The verdict cannot be appealed and Ellis can finally put the past behind him and move on.

    ed peto — fake books


    A fake book cart in the French Concession, Shanghai – Nov ‘08

    Crudely bound, yet functional copies of English language texts

    SHARETHIS.addEntry(
    {
    title: “Fake Books”,
    url: “http://edpeto.com/2008/11/12/fake-books/”
    }

    ); 

    2008 folyamán szisztematikus méréseket végeztünk néhány, Magyarországon meghatározó jelentőségű bittorrent trackeren a célból, hogy részletes, jó minőségű képet alkothassunk a peer-to-peer feketepiacok működéséről, súlyukról, jelentőségükről a kulturális piacok egészének szempontjából.

    Az így nyert adatokat végül a magyarországi mozipiac elemzéséhez használtuk fel, mivel a mozis disztribúció esetében állnak rendelkezésre nyilvánosan az általunk gyűjtöttekhez mérhetően jó minőségű és részletességű adatok. A most elkészült elemzés tehát a p2p film-feketepiac és a mozifilm-forgalmazás egyes legális csatornáinak egymáshoz való viszonyát térképezi fel, mégpedig a következő három szempont szerint:

    • a feketepiaci kínálat alakulása: mitől függ, hogy melyik film és mikor válik a feketepiacon is elérhetővé?
    • a feketepiaci kereslet alakulása: mitől függ, hogy egy-egy filmnek hány letöltője lesz?
    • a p2p fájlcsere, mint autonóm fogyasztási logika leírása: mi a fájlcserélők, mint önálló tartalom-szerkesztő, tartalom-csomagoló, tartalom-terjesztő közösségek működési logikája?

    Az elemzésben a feketepiac 2008 májusában és júniusában mért forgalmát, a Magyarországon 2004 után bemutatott premierfilmek forgalmazási adatait, valamint a magyarországi mozik 2000 utáni játszási adatait használtuk fel. Az elemzés nem egészen 5000 különböző film mozis és/vagy feketepiaci forgalmára terjed ki.

    A  filmek feketepiaci forgalmát és a moziforgalmazás jellegzetességeit összevető, Lakatos Zoltánnal közösen írott tanulmányunk innen letölthető.

    A feketepiaci kínálat
    A legális forgalmazók szempontjából a legfontosabb kérdés az, hogy meg lehet-e akadályozni a mozis terjesztésbe kerülő filmek kiszivárgását a fájlcserélő hálózatokra, azaz befolyásolni lehet-e a feketepiaci kínálatot. A kutatás eredményei szerint a vizsgálat ideje alatt a feketepiacra kikerült 3600 film háromnegyede olyan alkotás volt, ami csak 2000 előtt, vagy egyáltalán nem volt mozikban, és csak alig 4%, azaz 152 film volt olyan, ami a kikerülése időpontjában a mozikban is látható volt. A vizsgált időszakban a mozikban játszott filmek közül minden ötödik került ki valamilyen formában a fájlcserélő hálózatokra. Azt a – forgalmazók szempontjából megnyugtatónak tűnő – tényt, hogy a feketepiacon elérhető filmek túlnyomó része mozis forgalmazásból már kikerült, archív tartalom, némileg árnyalja, hogy azok a filmek, amik viszont a mozis forgalmazással egy időben a feketepiacon is elérhetők, éppen a komoly PR-ral támogatott, a kiadók nagy várakozásaitól kísért, ezért sok kópiával forgalmazott (többségében nyilván hollywoodi) közönségfilmek közül kerülnek ki. A p2p kiszivárgás esélyét tovább növeli, ha a filmet sokan látják és/vagy nemzetközileg is sikeres. Minél erősebb promóciót kap egy film, annál valószínűbb, hogy kikerül a kalózhálózatokra. A p2p feketepiac kínálatának egy része erősen marketing-vezérelt.
    Egészen más a helyzet a mozik műsorából hiányzó filmeknél. Ez utóbbiak kalózmegjelenését a moziforgalmazás jellemzői alig magyarázzák. Annyit mondhatunk csupán, hogy a kevesebb helyen vetített filmek a mozik programjából kikerülve kissé érdekesebbek lesznek a fájlcserélők számára, és hogy a múltban játszott filmek p2p jelenlétének esélye független a korábbi közönségsikertől, azaz korábban a filmre eladott mozijegyek számától.
    Ez utóbbi jelenséggel függ össze, hogy egyes rétegműfajokba (pl, zenei, dráma, vagy romantikus filmek közé) sorolható filmek p2p elérhetősége akkor ugrik meg, amikor mozikban már nem játsszák őket. Míg a rétegműfajok esetében a fájlcserélő hálózatok archívum-funkciót töltenek be, addig más, esetleg gyorsabban avuló filmeket felsoroltató műfajok (fantasy/sci-fi, kalandfilm) esetében az aktuálisukat vesztett filmek hamar kikopnak a feketepiacról is.

    A feketepiaci kereslet
    A feketepiaci kereslettel foglalkozó szakaszban mindenekelőtt arra voltunk kíváncsiak, milyen tényezőkkel magyarázható az, hogy melyik filmet mennyiszer töltenek le. Azt találtunk, hogy a letöltések számára legnagyobb hatással ismét csak a kópiaszám, azaz a forgalmazói marketing-erő volt.: minél több pénzt költ a forgalmazó a mozis kereslet növelésére, annál többen nézik meg a filmet a fájlcserélők közül is. Nem találtuk azonban nyomát jelentős mértékű helyettesítésnek a mozi és a torrent között: a vizsgált két hónapban vetített filmek esetében 1 millió 650 ezer eladott jegy mellett 158 ezer letöltést regisztráltunk, azaz csak minden tízedik mozinézőre jut egy, a filmet ingyen megnéző fájlcserélő. Az alacsony helyettesítési aránynak az lehet a legfőbb oka, hogy a moziélmény alig, és csak bizonyos műfajok esetén váltható ki egy rossz minőségű p2p kópia kis-képernyős megtekintésével.

    A fenti ökölszabály ez egyes műfajok esetében némileg módosulhat. Az akció/thriller és a bűnügyi filmek az átlagnál kisebb mozis közönséget vonzottak, fájlcsere-forgalmuk mégis jóval átlag feletti volt. E műfajok közönségében valószínűleg felülreprezentáltak a férfiak, sőt a fiatal férfiak ― vagyis az a demográfiai csoport, amelyik a fájlcserélő-populációban is teljes lakosságon belüli arányát jelentősen meghaladó súlyt képvisel. E műfajok közönségének fájlcseréléssel foglalkozó szegmense szinte reflexszerűen lecsap a trackereken megjelenő legújabb „erőszakfilmekre”. Az erőszakfilmek kiugró kalózkeresletével szemben a romantikus filmek az átlagnál nagyobb mozis közönséget, viszont az átlagnál kevesebb fájlcserélőt vonzottak, amire viszont épp a „kettesben mozizás” jelenségére adhat magyarázatot.

    Ami a moziban már nem látható filmeket illeti: a letöltött teljes filmvolumen több mint fele magyarországi mozikban 2000 óta nem játszott produkció. A felhasználók kevesebb, mint 10%-a töltött le kizárólag a letöltés idejében mozikban játszott filmeket, kétharmaduk éppen moziműsoron lévő és mozikban már nem játszott filmeket egyaránt letölt. Meglepően magas, közel 30% azoknak az aránya, akik csak moziban nem vagy régen vetített filmeket töltöttek le.

    A fájlcserélők, mint autonóm fogyasztási közösségek
    A folyamatos jogi fenyegetettség a korábban nyíltan fájlcserélő felhasználókat rejtőzködésre kényszeríti. A zárt ajtók mögé visszavonuló felhasználók kegyeiért számtalan tematikusan, nyelvileg, a felhasználói kör érdeklődésében, a közösség minőségében különböző fájlcserélő oldal verseng egymással. E közösségek mindegyike a maga logikája szerint válogat a világban elérhető számtalan tartalom közül.
    Kutatásunkban három, magyar nyelvű, mainstream, tematikusan nem specializálódott közösség tartalomfogyasztási mintáit vizsgáltuk és azt találtuk, hogy e közösségek tartalomfogyasztása műfaji értelemben strukturálatlan, azaz a fájlcserélők kihasználják az ismeretlen kipróbálásának kockázat- és költségmentes lehetőségét, és tetszés szerint kalandoznak különböző műfajok között.

    A nem specializálódott, mainstream p2p kereslet műfaji strukturálatlansága arra utal, hogy a fájlcserélésnek köszönhetően a tetszőleges ízlésű filmfogyasztó számára az „elkalandozás” saját preferenciájától, új műfajok, stílusok kockázat nélküli kipróbálása nem csupán elvi, hanem a gyakorlatban is kiaknázott lehetőség. A p2p kalózpiac egyik oldalán a tematikus struktúrák sokkal pontosabban jelennek meg, mint korábban ― köszönhetően annak, hogy a speciális tartalomtípusok köré szerveződő közönség kiszolgálása elől eltűnnek azok a méretgazdaságossági korlátok, melyekbe a piaci viszonyok között működő csatornák szükségszerűképpen beleütköznek. Másrészt az általános érdeklődési kört kiszolgáló hálózatok által a fogyasztóiknak felkínált tartalmi kalandozás, exploratív nomadizmus radikálisan különbözik az ezt a lehetőséget legális piacokon a televízió által biztosító channel-surfing, „zapping” élményétől. A p2p felhasználó a „véletlenül odakapcsolok-belenézek-nem tetszik-elkapcsolok” tévés logika helyett a „nem tudom mi ez-de letöltöm-kipróbálom-legfeljebb letörlöm-de az is lehet, hogy archiválom” aktív érdeklődést feltételező logikájával választ a tartalmak között.

    További fontos tényező, hogy ezeken a csatornákon a programot maguk a felhasználók állítják össze: ők kérik, készítik el, szerkesztik be a műsorfolyamba, teszik elérhetővé be a friss kópiákat. A torrent-alapú filmdisztribúció egy viszonylag rövid életciklusú, az aktuális legális kínálatot koncentráltan, a felhasználók ad-hoc érdeklődését pedig fragmentáltan megjelenítő jukeboxhoz hasonlítható, ahol a kereslet az éppen aktuálisan felkerült néhány tucat, esetleg párszáz film között oszlik el. A filmes fájlcsere valahol félúton van a legális piacról mára szinte teljesen kikopott videokölcsönző és a tematikus tévécsatorna között, ahol a kínálatot és a programot a hálózatok közösségét alkotó felhasználók folyamatosan és interaktív módon alakítják. A globális feketepiacon elérhető tartalomkínálat körül helyileg releváns kontextusok alakulnak ki, amelyek a végső soron mindenki számára egyformán elérhető digitális kínálatot a helyi közösség igényei, értékei, érdeklődése alapján szűrik.
    A fájlcsere mint sajátos szabályokkal, modus operandival bíró tartalomdisztribúciós infrastruktúra és a köré szerveződő fogyasztói közösségek térnyerése arra figyelmeztet, hogy a filmes disztribúciót nemcsak az alkotások elsődleges piaci jellemzői (ár, kínálat) felől, hanem a tartalmak fogyasztásának kontextusa, a tartalmak összefűzéséből létrejövő programming oldaláról is kihívás éri. A feketepiacok működése részben megelőlegezi, részben visszaigazolja a kulturális piacok átalakulásának azt a hipotézisét, mely szerint a disztribúciós szűkösség korában a termelők és a disztribútorok által generált és dominált kontextusok helyét fogyasztók által generált és tartalombőséggel jellemezhető kontextus veszi át. Ebben a tekintetben az online feketepiac (Magyarországon legalábbis) egyértelműen hiánypótló szerepet tölt be.

    Broadband consumers to foot £500m bill to tackle online piracy – Times Online

    Proposals to suspend the internet connections of those who repeatedly share music and films online will leave consumers with a bill for £500 million, ministers have admitted.

    The Digital Economy Bill would force internet service providers (ISPs) to send warning letters to anyone caught swapping copyright material illegally, and to suspend or slow the connections of those who refused to stop. ISPs say that such interference with their customers’ connections would add £25 a year to a broadband subscription.

    Ministers have not estimated the cost of the measures but say that the cost of the initial letter-writing campaign, estimated at an extra £1.40 per subscription, will lead to 40,000 households giving up their internet connections. Impact assessments published alongside the Bill predict that the measures will generate £1.7 billion in extra sales for the film and music industries over the next ten years, as well as £350 million for the Government in extra VAT.

    ISPs have called on the content industries to lessen the burden on broadband consumers by contributing to the costs. Charles Dunstone, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, whose subsidiary TalkTalk is the biggest consumer provider of broadband, said: “Broadband consumers shouldn’t have to bail out the music industry. If they really think it’s worth spending vast sums of money on these measures then they should be footing the bill; not the consumer.”
    Related Links

    * Internet pirates will be cut off from 2011

    * Piracy means less money to make films

    * Mandelson targets web piracy after meal with mogul

    BT also stepped up its attack on the plans, which it said represented “collective punishment that goes against natural justice”. John Petter, managing director of BT Retail’s consumer division, said: “Put yourself in the shoes of a small businessman who has a rogue member of staff. Your internet access could get cut off because of the actions of one individual. It really feels like the UK is out on a limb with these proposals compared to the rest of the world.”

    Mr Petter said that the Bill, which is being rushed through Parliament before the general election next year, had been poorly thought out. He said: “The whole tenor of the way this is being introduced makes us really worried that this is all a false game. It’s like the dangerous dogs legislation, which was introduced quickly and was not effective.”

    The Conservatives, who are broadly supportive of the plans, also called on the Government to spare consumers the bulk of the costs. Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Culture Secretary, said: “It is grossly unfair that Labour expects millions of innocent customers to pay extra each month because of the actions of a minority. By their own admission this will make broadband unaffordable for tens of thousands of people, which flies in the face of government policy to increase take-up in disadvantaged communities.”

    A spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said: “Many of the figures in the impact assessment for the Digital Economy Bill are expressed in ranges and some of the costs will be borne by the rightholders and some by the ISPs. The overall benefits to the country far outweigh the costs.”

    A spokesman for the BPI, which represents the record industry, said: “It is in everyone’s interest that ISPs’ statutory obligations can be discharged as cost efficiently as possible — particularly those law-abiding broadband customers who currently carry the burden of infringers.

    “We are confident that those costs will be a mere fraction of the stratospheric sums suggested by some ISPs, and negligibly small when set against their vast annual revenues.” The latest Star Trek movie was dowloaded illegally almost 11 million times this year, according to Torrentfreak, a download-monitoring weblog.

    This year the FBI started an investigation after an unfinished version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was posted online and watched by thousands of people a month before its release.

    via Copyrights & Campaigns

    ArsTechnica


    Is Sweden, the only country to have sent a member of the Pirate Party
    to the European Parliament, finally giving up its swashbuckling ways?

    When Sweden’s IPRED anti-piracy law
    went into effect earlier this year, Internet traffic across the country
    plummeted overnight—a sign that P2P users, fearing exposure at last,
    were abandoning their existing copyright infringement tools. The Pirate
    Bay defendants were found guilty by a Swedish court earlier this year, and the site’s ISP are now under assault by the music and movie industries.

    The music business insists that the measure are working. Music’s major
    labels say that sales of digital downloads are up 18 percent in the
    first nine months of 2009 in Sweden.

    Ludvig Werner, head of the trade group IFPI Sweden, told the UK’s Guardian newspaper
    that it didn’t matter if people still wanted to pirate; the point was,
    they were doing less of it. “It’s like speeding, put up cameras and
    people will start to ease off the gas pedal. Even if it doesn’t change
    the attitudes, they find legal alternatives because they don’t want to
    get caught,” said Werner.

    Dueling explanations

    As with most statistics in the Copyright Wars, these are hard to
    evaluate. Digital music sales are up, but has copyright infringement
    also dropped? IFPI doesn’t know.

    In fact, there are reasons to suspect that legal actions like IPRED
    aren’t the only drivers of Sweden’s uptick in music sales. As we reported yesterday,
    UK-based music label EMI has reported a worldwide revenue increase of
    4.6 percent in its recorded music business through 2009 to date; surely
    this can’t just be chalked up to tougher antipiracy laws in small
    countries like Sweden and South Korea?

    And Swedish Internet traffic data bounced back soon after the IPRED law came into force and now exceeds the level from the beginning of 2009.

    sweden-internet-traffic-2-years.png

    Credit also has to go the music industry for licensing its music far
    more widely, often to innovative Scandinavian companies like Spotify
    and Nokia, which is offering the Comes With Music plan on selected
    phones.

    But who knows? Perhaps IPRED and The Pirate Bay prosecution
    were real drivers of the change in Sweden; we’ve certainly seen surveys
    in the UK that suggest online infringers will alter their behavior once
    the veil of anonymity is stripped away (which was the point of IPRED).

    If true, the data could help prove a music industry mantra: tougher enforcement can yield results (i.e., battling the pirates is not a hopeless endeavor).

    On the other hand, it seems to suggest that only minimal legal
    tools are needed. IPRED made it possible for rightsholders to subpoena
    ISPs and get subscriber names and information; The Pirate Bay case was
    brought under copyright law. New Internet disconnection laws, ISP
    filtering schemes, and similar invasive measures weren’t required.

    p2pnet news » Blog Archive » RIAA v Tenenbaum: what might have been

    Quoted in the Harvard Law Review, he was referring to the Joel Tenenbaum vs the RIAA farce, going on the final judgment was “both disappointing and absurdly excessive”.

     thestar.com

    Chet Baker was a leading jazz musician in the 1950s, playing trumpet and providing vocals. Baker died in 1988, yet he is about to add a new claim to fame as the lead plaintiff in possibly the largest copyright infringement case in Canadian history. His estate, which still owns the copyright in more than 50 of his works, is part of a massive class-action lawsuit that has been underway for the past year.

    The infringer has effectively already admitted owing at least $50 million and the full claim could exceed $60 billion. If the dollars don’t shock, the target of the lawsuit undoubtedly will: The defendants in the case are Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

    The CRIA members were hit with the lawsuit in October 2008 after artists decided to turn to the courts following decades of frustration with the rampant infringement (I am adviser to the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, which is co-counsel, but have had no involvement in the case).

    The claims arise from a longstanding practice of the recording industry in Canada, described in the lawsuit as “exploit now, pay later if at all.” It involves the use of works that are often included in compilation CDs (ie. the top dance tracks of 2009) or live recordings. The record labels create, press, distribute and sell the CDs, but do not obtain the necessary copyright licences.

    Instead, the names of the songs on the CDs are placed on a “pending list,” which signifies that approval and payment is pending. The pending list dates back to the late 1980s, when Canada changed its copyright law by replacing a compulsory licence with the need for specific authorization for each use. It is perhaps better characterized as a copyright infringement admission list, however, since for each use of the work, the record label openly admits that it has not obtained copyright permission and not paid any royalty or fee.

    Over the years, the size of the pending list has grown dramatically, now containing more than 300,000 songs.

    From Beyonce to Bruce Springsteen, the artists waiting for payment are far from obscure, as thousands of Canadian and foreign artists have seen their copyrights used without permission and payment.

    It is difficult to understand why the industry has been so reluctant to pay its bills. Some works may be in the public domain or belong to a copyright owner difficult to ascertain or locate, yet the likes of Sarah McLachlan, Bruce Cockburn, Sloan, or the Watchmen are not hidden from view.

    The more likely reason is that the record labels have had little motivation to pay up. As the balance has grown, David Basskin, the president and CEO of the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency Ltd., notes in his affidavit that “the record labels have devoted insufficient resources for identifying and paying the owners of musical works on the pending lists.” The CRIA members now face the prospect of far greater liability.

    The class action seeks the option of statutory damages for each infringement. At $20,000 per infringement, potential liability exceeds $60 billion.

    These numbers may sound outrageous, yet they are based on the same rules that led the recording industry to claim a single file sharer is liable for millions in damages.

    After years of claiming Canadian consumers disrespect copyright, the irony of having the recording industry face a massive lawsuit will not be lost on anyone, least of all the artists still waiting to be paid. Indeed, they are also seeking punitive damages, arguing “the conduct of the defendant record companies is aggravated by their strict and unremitting approach to the enforcement of their copyright interests against consumers.”

    The Problem With Music

    The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month. The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never “recouped,” the band will have no leverage, and will oblige. The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won’t have earned any royalties from their T-shirts yet. Maybe the T-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys. Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.

    Steve Albini is an independent and corporate rock record producer most widely known for having produced Nirvana’s “In Utero”.

    Major Labels – Gizmodo


    Tim Quirk was the singer of punk-pop outfit Too Much Joy, signed by Warner Bros. in 1990. Now he’s an executive at an online music service, giving him insight on digital sales data and just how labels fudge their numbers.

    I got something in the mail last week I’d been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero income, and our unrecouped balance ($395,277.18!)* stubbornly remained the same.

    Now, I don’t ever expect that unrecouped balance to turn into a positive number, but since the band had been seeing thousands of dollars in digital royalties each year from IODA for the four indie albums we control ourselves, I figured five years’ worth of digital income from our far more popular major label albums would at least make a small dent in the figure. Our IODA royalties during that time had totaled about $12,000 – not a princely sum, but enough to suggest that the total haul over the same period from our major label material should be at least that much, if not two to five times more. Even with the band receiving only a percentage of the major label take, getting our unrecouped balance below $375,000 seemed reasonable, and knocking it closer to -$350,000 wasn’t out of the question.

    So I was naively excited when I opened the envelope. And my answer was right there on the first page. In five years, our three albums earned us a grand total of… $62.47.

    What the fuck?

    I mean, we all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they’re also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn’t insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid.

    Why It Was So Stupid

    Here’s the thing: I work at Rhapsody. I know what we pay Warner Bros. for every stream and download, and I can look up exactly how many plays and downloads we’ve paid them for each TMJ tune that Warner controls. Moreover, Warner Bros. knows this, as my gig at Rhapsody is the only reason I was able to get them to add my digital royalties to my statement in the first place. For years I’d been pestering the label, but I hadn’t gotten anywhere till I was on a panel with a reasonably big wig in Warner Music Group’s business affairs team about a year ago

    The panel took place at a legal conference, and focused on digital music and the crisis facing the record industry**. As you do at these things, the other panelists and I gathered for breakfast a couple hours before our session began, to discuss what topics we should address. Peter Jenner, who manages Billy Bragg and has been a needed gadfly for many years at events like these, wanted to discuss the little-understood fact that digital music services frequently pay labels advances in the tens of millions of dollars for access to their catalogs, and it’s unclear how (or if) that money is ever shared with artists.

    I agreed that was a big issue, but said I had more immediate and mundane concerns, such as the fact that Warner wouldn’t even report my band’s iTunes sales to me.

    The business affairs guy (who I am calling “the business affairs guy” rather than naming because he did me a favor by finally getting the digital royalties added to my statement, and I am grateful for that and don’t want this to sound like I’m attacking him personally, even though it’s about to seem like I am) said that it was complicated connecting Warner’s digital royalty payments to their existing accounting mechanisms, and that since my band was unrecouped they had “to take care of R.E.M. and the Red Hot Chili Peppers first.”

    That kind of pissed me off. On the one hand, yeah, my band’s unrecouped and is unlikely ever to reach the point where Warner actually has to cut us a royalty check. On the other hand, though, they are contractually obligated to report what revenue they receive in our name, and, having helped build a database that tracks how much Rhapsody owes whom for what music gets played, I’m well aware of what is and isn’t complicated about doing so. It’s not something you have to build over and over again for each artist. It’s something you build once. It takes a while, and it can be expensive, and sometimes you make honest mistakes, but it’s not rocket science. Hell, it’s not even algebra! It’s just simple math.

    I knew that each online service was reporting every download, and every play, for every track, to thousands of labels (more labels, I’m guessing, than Warner has artists to report to). And I also knew that IODA was able to tell me exactly how much money my band earned the previous month from Amazon ($11.05), Verizon (74 cents), Nokia (11 cents), MySpace (4 sad cents) and many more. I didn’t understand why Warner wasn’t reporting similar information back to my band – and if they weren’t doing it for Too Much Joy, I assumed they weren’t doing it for other artists.

    To his credit, the business affairs guy told me he understood my point, and promised he’d pursue the matter internally on my behalf – which he did. It just took 13 months to get the results, which were (predictably, perhaps) ridiculous.

    The sad thing is I don’t even think Warner is deliberately trying to screw TMJ and the hundreds of other also-rans and almost-weres they’ve signed over the years. The reality is more boring, but also more depressing. Like I said, they don’t actually owe us any money. But that’s what’s so weird about this, to me: they have the ability to tell the truth, and doing so won’t cost them anything.

    They just can’t be bothered. They don’t care, because they don’t have to.

    “$10,000 Is Nothing”

    An interlude, here. Back in 1992, when TMJ was still a going concern and even the label thought maybe we’d join the hallowed company of recouped bands one day, Warner made a $10,000 accounting error on our statement (in their favor, naturally). When I caught this mistake, and brought it to the attention of someone with the power to correct it, he wasn’t just befuddled by my anger – he laughed at it. “$10,000 is nothing!” he chuckled.

    If you’re like most people – especially people in unrecouped bands – “nothing” is not a word you ever use in conjunction with a figure like “$10,000,” but he seemed oblivious to that. “It’s a rounding error. It happens all the time. Why are you so worked up?”

    These days I work for a reasonably large corporation myself, and, sadly, I understand exactly what the guy meant. When your revenues (and your expenses) are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, $10,000 mistakes are common, if undesirable.

    I still think he was a jackass, though, and that sentence continues to haunt me. Because $10,000 might have been nothing to him, but it was clearly something to me. And his inability to take it seriously – to put himself in my place, just for the length of our phone call – suggested that people who care about $10,000 mistakes, and the principles of things, like, say, honoring contracts even when you don’t have to, are the real idiots.

    As you may have divined by this point, I am conflicted about whether I am actually being a petty jerk by pursuing this, or whether labels just thrive on making fools like me feel like petty jerks. People in the record industry are very good at making bands believe they deserve the hundreds of thousands (or sometimes millions) of dollars labels advance the musicians when they’re first signed, and even better at convincing those same musicians it’s the bands’ fault when those advances aren’t recouped (the last thing $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man yelled at me before he hung up was, “Too Much Joy never earned us shit!”*** as though that fact somehow negated their obligation to account honestly).

    I don’t want to live in $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man’s world. But I do. We all do. We have no choice.

    The Boring Reality

    Back to my ridiculous Warner Bros. statement. As I flipped through its ten pages (seriously, it took ten pages to detail the $62.47 of income), I realized that Warner wasn’t being evil, just careless and unconcerned – an impression I confirmed a few days later when I spoke to a guy in their Royalties and Licensing department I am going to call Danny.****

    I asked Danny why there were no royalties at all listed from iTunes, and he said, “Huh. There are no domestic downloads on here at all. Only streams. And it has international downloads, but no international streams. I have no idea why.” I asked Danny why the statement only seemed to list tracks from two of the three albums Warner had released – an entire album was missing. He said they could only report back what the digital services had provided to them, and the services must not have reported any activity for those other songs. When I suggested that seemed unlikely – that having every track from two albums listed by over a dozen different services, but zero tracks from a third album listed by any seemed more like an error on Warner’s side, he said he’d look into it. As I asked more questions (Why do we get paid 50% of the income from all the tracks on one album, but only 35.7143% of the income from all the tracks on another? Why did 29 plays of a track on the late, lamented MusicMatch earn a total of 63 cents when 1,016 plays of the exact same track on MySpace earned only 23 cents?) he eventually got to the heart of the matter: “We don’t normally do this for unrecouped bands,” he said. “But, I was told you’d asked.”

    It’s possible I’m projecting my own insecurities onto calm, patient Danny, but I’m pretty sure the subtext of that comment was the same thing I’d heard from $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man: all these figures were pointless, and I was kind of being a jerk by wasting their time asking about them. After all, they have the Red Hot Chili Peppers to deal with, and the label actually owes those guys money.

    Danny may even be right. But there’s another possibility – one I don’t necessarily subscribe to, but one that could be avoided entirely by humoring pests like me. There’s a theory that labels and publishers deliberately avoid creating the transparent accounting systems today’s technology enables. Because accurately accounting to my silly little band would mean accurately accounting to the less silly bands that are recouped, and paying them more money as a result.

    If that’s true (and I emphasize the if, because it’s equally possible that people everywhere, including major label accounting departments, are just dumb and lazy)*****, then there’s more than my pride and principles on the line when I ask Danny in Royalties and Licensing to answer my many questions. I don’t feel a burning need to make the Red Hot Chili Peppers any more money, but I wouldn’t mind doing my small part to get us all out of the sad world $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man inhabits.

    So I will keep asking, even though I sometimes feel like a petty jerk for doing so.


    * A word here about that unrecouped balance, for those uninitiated in the complex mechanics of major label accounting. While our royalty statement shows Too Much Joy in the red with Warner Bros. (now by only $395,214.71 after that $62.47 digital windfall), this doesn’t mean Warner “lost” nearly $400,000 on the band. That’s how much they spent on us, and we don’t see any royalty checks until it’s paid back, but it doesn’t get paid back out of the full price of every album sold. It gets paid back out of the band’s share of every album sold, which is roughly 10% of the retail price. So, using round numbers to make the math as easy as possible to understand, let’s say Warner Bros. spent something like $450,000 total on TMJ. If Warner sold 15,000 copies of each of the three TMJ records they released at a wholesale price of $10 each, they would have earned back the $450,000. But if those records were retailing for $15, TMJ would have only paid back $67,500, and our statement would show an unrecouped balance of $382,500.

    I do not share this information out of a Steve Albini-esque desire to rail against the major label system (he already wrote the definitive rant, which you can find here if you want even more figures, and enjoy having those figures bracketed with cursing and insults). I’m simply explaining why I’m not embarrassed that I “owe” Warner Bros. almost $400,000. They didn’t make a lot of money off of Too Much Joy. But they didn’t lose any, either. So whenever you hear some label flak claiming 98% of the bands they sign lose money for the company, substitute the phrase “just don’t earn enough” for the word “lose.”

    ** The whole conference took place at a semi-swank hotel on the island of St. Thomas, which is a funny place to gather to talk about how to save the music business, but that would be a whole different diatribe.

    *** This same dynamic works in reverse – I interviewed the Butthole Surfers for Raygun magazine back in the 1990s, and Gibby Haynes described the odd feeling of visiting Capitol records’ offices and hearing, “a bunch of people go, ‘Hey, man, be cool to these guys, they’re a recouped band.’ I heard that a bunch of times.”

    **** Again, I am avoiding using his real name because he returned my call promptly, and patiently answered my many questions, which is behavior I want to encourage, so I have no desire to lambaste him publicly.

    ***** Of course, these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive – it is also possible that labels are evil and avaricious AND dumb and lazy, at the same time.

    Boing Boing

    1 .- Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.

    2 .- Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.

    3 .- The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.

    4 .- The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.

    5 .- Authors, like all workers, are entitled to live out of their creative ideas, business models and activities linked to their creations. Trying to hold an obsolete industry with legislative changes is neither fair nor realistic. If their business model was based on controlling copies of any creation and this is not possible any more on the Internet, they should look for a new business model.

    6 .- We believe that cultural industries need modern, effective, credible and affordable alternatives to survive. They also need to adapt to new social practices.

    7 .- The Internet should be free and not have any interference from groups that seek to perpetuate obsolete business models and stop the free flow of human knowledge.

    8 .- We ask the Government to guarantee net neutrality in Spain, as it will act as a framework in which a sustainable economy may develop.

    9 .- We propose a real reform of intellectual property rights in order to ensure a society of knowledge, promote the public domain and limit abuses from copyright organizations.

    10 .- In a democracy, laws and their amendments should only be adopted after a timely public debate and consultation with all involved parties. Legislative changes affecting fundamental rights can only be made in a Constitutional law.

    The Economist

    A world of hits

    Nov 26th 2009
    From The Economist print edition

    Ever-increasing choice was supposed to mean the end of the blockbuster. It has had the opposite effect

    Reuters
    Reuters

    NOVEMBER 20th saw the return of an old phenomenon: the sold-out cinema. “New Moon”, a tale of vampires, werewolves and the women who love them, earned more in a single day at the American box office than any film in history. The record may not stand for long: next month “Avatar”, a three-dimensional action movie thick with special effects, will be released (see picture). This film’s production budget is reportedly $230m, which would make it one of the most expensive movies ever made. “Avatar” will be a great disappointment if its worldwide ticket sales fail to exceed $500m. Yet it is a reflection of how things are changing in the media business that such an outcome is unlikely.

    There has never been so much choice in entertainment. Last year 610 films were released in America, up from 471 in 1999. Cable and satellite television are growing quickly, supplying more channels to more people across the world. More than half of all pay-television subscribers now live in the Asia-Pacific region. Online video is exploding: every minute about 20 hours’ worth of content is added to YouTube. The internet has greatly expanded choice in music and books. Yet the ever-increasing supply of content tailored to every taste seems not to have dented the appeal of the blockbuster. Quite the opposite.

    This is not what was predicted by one of the most influential business books of the past few years. In “The Long Tail”, Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, a technology magazine (and before that a journalist at The Economist), argued that demand for media was moving inexorably from the head of the distribution curve to the tail. That is, the few products that sell a lot were losing market share to the great many that sell modestly. By cutting storage and distribution costs, the internet was overturning the tyranny of the shop shelf, which had limited consumers’ choices. And, by developing software that analysed and predicted consumers’ tastes, companies like Amazon were encouraging people to wallow in esoterica. Such companies did not just supply niche markets—they helped create them.

    “The Long Tail” set off a lively debate. Professors at Harvard Business School questioned whether many companies can profit from selling a little of a great many things. The supply of obscure films and music seems to be growing faster than people are discovering them. Harvard’s Anita Elberse argued in an article last year that only a foolish firm would shift its focus away from the mass market. People in the media business, who have to back their judgments with money, have a different view. In a sense, they say, both Mr Anderson and his detractors are right. At the same time, both are missing the real story.

    “Both the hits and the tail are doing well,” says Jeff Bewkes, the head of Time Warner, an American media giant. Audiences are at once fragmenting into niches and consolidating around blockbusters. Of course, media consumption has not risen much over the years, so something must be losing out. That something is the almost but not quite popular content that occupies the middle ground between blockbusters and niches. The stuff that people used to watch or listen to largely because there was little else on is increasingly being ignored.

    Take American broadcast television. This is an industry in decline, albeit from an immensely profitable peak. The “big four” networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) have steadily lost viewers over the years as eyeballs have wandered to cable networks and, to a lesser extent, online video. Yet the top programmes are holding up well. In the 2000-01 season the most popular show on broadcast television, “Survivor”, was watched by 17.8m households on average. The leader in 2008-09, the Wednesday edition of “American Idol”, drew 16.5m. Less popular shows—fairly funny sitcoms and cheap reality programmes such as “COPS”—suffered far worse. Indeed, the further you look down the prime-time rankings, the more audiences have eroded (see chart 1).

    The fact that the biggest shows continue to draw audiences nearly as big as their predecessors did may not sound impressive. But it has great commercial consequences. As broadcast television has lost audience share, its salesmen have convinced advertisers to pay more and more to reach a given number of viewers. They get away with this because broadcast television is still unchallenged as a mass medium. No other venue, including the internet, can guarantee an audience of many millions on a single evening. So a show that reaches 10m Americans today is worth a lot more than a show that reached 10m at the beginning of this decade. Simon Cowell, the star judge on “American Idol”, reportedly renewed his contract earlier this year for more than $100m over three seasons. He is probably worth it.

    Or take music. Like broadcast television, recorded music is a troubled business. Sales of CD albums are declining thanks to illegal file-sharing and the rise of digital download services such as iTunes, which allow listeners to pluck out the best tracks. Yet hit albums can still sell well. In Britain, where album sales in all formats have declined by 18% since the 2004 peak, those of albums occupying the number-one spot have increased slightly (see chart 2). A recent analysis by Billboard, a trade magazine, found a similar trend in America. There, sales had declined across the board, but the hits were holding up best. Albums ranked between 300 and 400 suffered the greatest proportionate losses.

    One possible reason is that the profile of music buyers has changed. Young fans, who are more likely to follow up-and-coming guitar bands and dance music, are highly likely to download music illegally. In 2008 Britons in their 40s spent more on pop and rock music than teenagers or people in their 20s, according to TNS, a market-research firm. As young people with more unusual tastes abandon music shops altogether, the market becomes skewed towards safe, established pop acts. One of last year’s biggest sellers was the cast recording of “Mamma Mia!”, which features songs by ABBA, a fizzy 1970s pop group. But this is not the whole story.

    Offer music fans a virtually infinite choice of songs free of charge, and they will still gravitate to hits. That has been the experience of We7, a music-streaming service based in London which has 2.5m users. Only 22% of We7’s 4m songs are streamed in any given week, says Steve Purdham, who founded the company. The top 100 artists account for more than half of all streams. Users of Spotify, another ad-supported music service, are similarly unadventurous. Will Page of PRS for Music, which collects royalties for British songwriters, calculates that the most popular 5% of tracks on Spotify account for 80% of all streams. He is counting only the 3m tracks that were streamed at least once between February and July. Another 1.5m were not touched at all.

    “People want to share the same culture,” explains Roger Faxon, head of EMI Music Publishing. Music is an intensely social medium, most enjoyable when it is discussed and shared with friends. Because choice in music—and, to an extent, other media—is collective as well as individual, it is hardly surprising that people cluster around popular products. And Mr Faxon cites another reason, having to do with the advent of online piracy. File-sharing has made virtually all music available for nothing. Yet it has not altogether stopped people from buying. Even enthusiastic pirates will still buy CDs of music that they love, in order to get the cover art or simply to express their devotion. And what people love, it turns out, are hits.

    Although you might expect people who seek out obscure products to derive more pleasure from their discoveries than those who simply trudge off to see the occasional blockbuster, the opposite is true. Tom Tan and Serguei Netessine of Wharton Business School have analysed reviews on Netflix, a popular American outfit that dispatches DVDs by post and asks subscribers to rate the films they have rented. They find that blockbusters get better ratings from the people who have watched them than more obscure ones do. Even the critically loathed “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is awarded four stars out of five. Ms Elberse of Harvard Business School has found the same of ratings on Quickflix, the Australian equivalent of Netflix.

    Perhaps the best explanation of why this might be so was offered in 1963. In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

    This explains why bestselling books, or blockbuster films, occasionally seem to grow not just more quickly than products which are merely very popular, but also in a wholly different way. As a media product moves from the pool of frequent consumers into the ocean of occasional consumers, the prevailing attitude to it—what Hollywood folk call word of mouth—can become less critical. The hit is carried along by a wave of ill-informed goodwill.

    These days it may travel far. Blockbuster films, long among the most international of media products, are now more so. The leading studios have beefed up their foreign-sales arms and learned how to market films that open at roughly the same time all over the world. Sony has done particularly well this year, pulling in more than $1.6 billion in ticket sales from outside America, a record for the studio. Big films such as “2012” and “Angels and Demons” have earned roughly twice as much in foreign cinemas as in American ones.

    Hollywood seems to have exported the blockbuster model, too. Anil Arjun, chief executive of Reliance MediaWorks, reckons ticket sales for the top five films in India grew by 250% between 2004 and 2008. Growing professionalism and a multiplex building boom have lifted the market as a whole, but the biggest films are rising most quickly. In addition, the best Hindi films increasingly serve expatriates in London and California’s Bay Area.

    “New Moon”, newly enthroned

    Blockbusters are also reaching people in more ways. Peter Chernin, who recently stepped down from overseeing News Corporation’s film and television business, notes that technology does not just expand the range of products available. It also gives people much greater choice in how they consume the most popular ones. No longer must people go to a cinema or a video shop if they want to see a popular film. They can get hold of it as a video-on-demand, download it or stream it. “Hits are going to be the single biggest beneficiary of technology,” Mr Chernin reckons.

    In short, just because people have more choice does not mean they will opt for more obscure entertainments. That is especially clear in the book trade. A study of the Australian market by Nielsen, a research firm, found that the number of titles bought each year (measured by ISBNs) has risen dramatically, from about 275,000 in 2004 to almost 450,000 in 2007. Niche titles selling fewer than 1,000 copies each accounted for nearly all the growth in variety. Yet their market share fell. In Britain, sales of the ten bestselling books increased from 3.4m to 6m between 1998 and 2008.

    The bestsellers are gaining in part because of a change in the retail marketplace that affects other media too. High-street bookshops, which carry a reasonable selection of what publishers call “mid-list” and “back-list” titles—that is, modestly popular and somewhat out-of-date books—are struggling. Borders UK, owner of a British chain, is reportedly seeking a buyer for its stores. Such shops are being displaced by online retailers, which offer vast selections of obscure titles, and also by supermarkets, which sell a tiny selection of hugely popular books.

    In newspapers, too, the leading outfits are faring best. The three biggest-selling American publications—the New York Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal—have all held on to subscribers better than the large metropolitan papers that comprise the second tier. That market also has a thriving long tail in the shape of small-town papers. This has less to do with consumers’ tastes than with advertising. The metropolitan papers are suffering because the classified advertisements on which they rely have collapsed under pressure from free listings websites such as Craigslist. Small-town papers also depend on classified ads, but they face less online competition. The nationals rely more on display advertising.

    What is a media company to do? As sales become ever more concentrated, it is becoming both more urgent and harder to establish a foothold near the top of the market. A book or film that fails to attract a mass audience tumbles quickly into the depressed middle. To avoid this fate, should a company spread its development and marketing budget over lots of products, hoping that one or two catch on, or should it bet on just a few? The problem is especially acute in businesses like music, where money is tighter than ever and even the hits are not quite as solid as they used to be.

    The joke answer, proffered by several executives asked these questions, is that media companies should simply churn out hits. This is less of a joke if a firm knows in advance what will prove popular. Of all creative media enterprises, Hollywood is the most confident of its ability to predict demand. Film studios carry out rigorous audience research and adjust production and marketing budgets according to the size of the group they are targeting. The studios have learned that stars are much less reliable generators of profits than films based on known characters and stories. That is why, in August, Disney agreed to pay $4 billion for Marvel Entertainment, a veteran comic-book and media firm that had filed for bankruptcy protection in the mid-1990s.

    Above all, Hollywood has learned that bigger is better. Although small films can do astonishingly well (the latest is “Paranormal Activity”, a cheap thriller that has sold more than $100m-worth of cinema tickets in America alone), they do not do so at all dependably. SNL Kagan, a research firm, calculates that between 2004 and 2008 films costing more than $100m to produce consistently returned greater profits to the big studios than cheaper films did. With DVD sales slumping in the recession and outside financing hard to obtain, the leading studios are cutting back their output of films. But the cuts are concentrated at the bottom end. Studios have shut down or neglected their divisions that specialise in distributing low- and middle-budget films. None has sounded a retreat from big-budget blockbusters.

    Hollywood is one of America’s most stable industries, with the same number of big studios now (six) as in the early 20th century. As both production budgets and risks soar it seems less likely than ever that an outsider will break into the club. On the contrary: the club may eventually shrink. The trend towards blockbusters is likely to suit the most successful studios, with the deepest pockets, the best marketing departments and the greatest ability to wring revenues from a hit by selling DVDs, television rights and toys.

    Of course, not everything can be big. Complex political films; violent cartoons; English folk music—none of these things is likely to produce queues around the block. And a great many hoped-for hits fail: every media company puts out many more misses than hits. What to do with them? One answer, says Mr Bewkes, is to take advantage of the protective power of brands. Television programmes, in particular, do not compete for audiences on a completely featureless playing field. They are shown on channels that attract distinct audiences with different expectations. In the right context, a middling show can survive. “You let the strong brand carry the medium product,” Mr Bewkes explains.

    Another way of rescuing less popular stuff is to charge more for it. In many media businesses it is an accepted principle that such products cost more. Specialist magazines are often expensive. Less popular books cost more than bestsellers, because the latter are discounted. Even television has a successful model for charging more for shows that a smallish group of people feel passionately about, in the form of premium subscription channels like HBO. Yet, with the exception of live screenings of opera and sport, film tickets all cost the same. This is one thing that could change.

    But nobody knows quite what to do. The old-media world of limited choice, in which any product that was not too objectionable was guaranteed a decent audience, was a comfortable place. Pleasing a customer who can choose from several hundred films and television programmes even without getting up from the sofa, by contrast, is an unnerving prospect.

    Gamasutra – Features – iPhone Piracy: The Inside Story

    When indie game developer Bram Stolk detected 1,114 copies of his The Little Tank That Could being played online, he suspected something was up. He had, in fact, sold only 45 copies of the new iPhone game.
    Advertisement

    Stolk had fallen victim to what is being called rampant piracy in iPhone titles, possibly worse than has been experienced for so long on other platforms because of the ease with which it can be perpetrated.

    The Pirate Bay – The world’s most resilient bittorrent site

    Worlds most resiliant tracking

    You might have noticed all the new magnet icons everywhere?

    These are “magnet links”, a link that lets you download a torrent directly in your BitTorrent client, instead of your browser. Most clients supports this (uTorrent, Vuze, rtorrent, whatever) and will get the relevant torrent data over the DHT network.

    And DHT? It’s a de-centralized peer to peer network that all modern clients join by default, even if they are currently not downloading any torrents. DHT can help you find peers and metadata when you choose to start a torrent download.

    (If you want to learn more about DHT this Torrentfreak article might be a good place to start)

    You might also have noticed that the tracker has been down lately? And that the upload page don’t recommend trackers anymore! The development of DHT has reached a stage where a tracker is no longer needed to use a torrent. DHT (combined with PEX) is highly effective in finding peers without the need for a centralized service. If you run uTorrent you might have noticed in the tracker tab of your torrents that the [Peer Exchange] (PEX) row is often reporting a lot more peers than the trackers you might have for that torrent. These peers all came to you without the use of a central tracker service! This is what we consider to be the future. Faster and more stability for the users because there is no central point to rely upon.

    Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.

    By moving to a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), BitTorrent will become less vulnerable to downtime and outages:

    * With decentralized peer acquisition, there is no central tracker that can be down.
    * With decentralized fetching of metadata (torrents) we don’t need to rely on a single server that stores and distributes torrent files.

    (Before you tech geeks out there start complaining about the info_hash in the magnet links being in HEX (“isn’t it supposed to be in base32?”) – No! According to the BitTorrent specification it should be in HEX but the client may choose to also support the old base32 encoding. If your client doesn’t support the HEX encoding, please upgrade to the latest version of you client! If it still doesn’t work, send an email to the developers of your client and ask them to add support for it.)

    This is the future. And the present.

    billboard

    The great hope for digital music was that it would make the recording industry more egalitarian—that up-and-coming bands with pluck and a knack for promotion would be able to get their work to the masses without the backing of record labels. According to “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More”—a 2006 book by Wired magazine editor in chief Chris Anderson—hits dominated the market mostly because shelf space in stores was limited. Digital retail and online media would exponentially increase the choices available to consumers, who would then use online tools to discover products that appealed to them more than the biggest hits.Anderson’s “Long Tail” idea comes from a sales graph that looks like the letter “L” with a curve instead of a corner. On the left are the hits, the 5,000 best-selling titles that would typically be carried by a national chain; on the right, further down the curve, are less popular titles that sell fewer copies. In the physical world, few stores have space for these niche titles, which don’t sell well. But in the digital world, where space hardly matters, Anderson suggested, these titles would collectively account for a far greater percentage of music sales—and of movies, books and other consumer products. The ways we think about popular taste, he writes, “are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching—a market response to inefficient distribution.”

    Index – Tech – Rekordot döntött a magyar internet adatforgalma

    Itthon is sok ezren ugrottak rá az év játékának ígérkező Modern Warfare 2 kalózverziójára. A magyar internet adatforgalma először lépte át a másodpercenként 120 gigabitet.

    Kedden este megdőlt a magyar internet adatforgalmi rekordja: a BIX statisztikáin [1] jól látszik, hogy este hét körül törte át az adatforgalom a másodpercenként 120 gigabites határt, amit eddig csak megközelíteni sikerült, és egészen este tízig efölött is maradt. A csúcs valamikor nyolc óra előtt pár perccel 124,2 Gbit/sec volt.

    Az adatforgalom átlaga egyébként az elmúlt hetekben 70 gigabit körül volt, az esti csúcsidőben rendszeresen 100 Gbit/sec fölé emelkedett. A teljes adatforgalom ennél valójában még több, a statisztika ugyanis csak magyar felhasználók és magyar szerverek közti forgalmat méri, és csak azoknál a szolgáltatóknál [2], akik a budapesti adatcserélő központon átküldik az adatfolyamukat.

    A rekord oka minden bizonnyal az év legnagyobb sikerű videojátékának ígérkező Modern Warfare 2 megjelenése. A kalózverzió 11 gigabájtos csomagját rengetegen töltik le világszerte a fájlcserélő hálózatokról és kalóz FTP oldalakról, a nagy nemzetközi torrentoldalak publikus statisztikái szerint a Pirate Bayen [3] ebben a pillanatban is nagyjából 50, a Mininován [4] 80 ezer felhasználónál megy éppen MW2-letöltés.
    modern-warfare-2 screenshot 20091013211140 original

    Nem új jelenség hogy akár egy videojáték megjelenése rekordmagasságba tudja tornászni az internetes adatforgalmat: kora ősszel, amikor az amerikai tévékben elindulnak a népszerű sorozatok új évadai, rendszeresen megugrik [5] az internet forgalma a letöltők miatt. Egy játék kalózverziója 20-30-szor nagyobb méretű, mint mondjuk egy Dr. House-epizód, ez pedig bőven ellensúlyozza, hogy az érdeklődés a videojátékok iránt ha nem is sokkal, de azért kisebb, mint a sorozatok, vagy mozifilmek iránt.

    Egyáltalán nem meglepő a kalózverzió rengeteg letöltése, ezt sejteni lehetett a játék körüli óriási felhajtásból, és abból, hogy már a nagyjából egy hete a netre kiszivárgott, orosz nyelvű bétaverzióra is nagyon sokan ugrottak rá – mondták el kérdésünkre a Modern Warfare 2 magyar forgalmazójánál. A cég rekordeladásokban bízik, ami itthon több tízezres nagyságrendet jelent.
    call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2-screenshot

    Érdekes, hogy az Amazon adatai szerint [6] nagyjából 10:1 a konzolos és pécés előrendelések aránya, de Magyarországon még mindig több fogy a pécés verzióból, mint az xboxosból és playstationösből. Annak ellenére, hogy pécén egy eladott példányra 7-8 (optimista becslések szerint csak 3, pesszimisták szerint 10) letöltött kalózverzió jut. A Modern Warfare 2-ben az egymás elleni játékot csak a fejlesztő szerverein, legális verzióval lehet kipróbálni, így valószínűleg ebben az esetben valamivel jobb lesz ez az arány a szokásosnál.

    Zeropaid

    Writer and director, while “not excited that people are seeing the film without paying,” love the fact that BitTorrent has given Ink an “enormous amount of exposure.”

    Many of us BitTorrent users are well aware that at best there’s a casual relationship between availability on tracker sites and box office ticket sales.

    For example, The Dark Knight, despite becoming last year’s most pirated movie, also earned more than $1 billion USD worldwide.

    For Indie movie producers, much like up and coming music artists, BitTorrent’s potential is enormous, giving them a worldwide audience and exposure with only the cost of a few mouse clicks.

    Enter the movie Ink.

    Over this past weekend the movie was “ripped off” and uploaded to several BitTorrent tracker sites. While knowing that it would happen eventually, what they didn’t expect was the speed with which the movie would “blow up” afterwards. It’s currently #16 on IMDb’s movie meter and one of the top 20 most popular movies in the world.

    Ink’s writer and director are both pleased with the turn of events. Though obviously not “excited that people are seeing the film without paying” they are definitely enjoying the “enormous amount of exposure” that availability on BitTorrent has given them.

    Yesterday they sent an email to those involved in the project, acknowledging what happened, and also emphasizing their happiness with how piracy has given them “unprecedented exposure.”

    It reads:

    Dear Fans and Friends,

    Over the weekend something pretty extraordinary happened. Ink got ripped off. Someone bit torrented the movie (we knew this would happen) and they posted it on every pirate site out there. What we didn’t expect was that within 24 hours Ink would blow up. Ink became the number 1 most downloaded movie on several sites having been downloaded somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 times as far as we can tell. Knowing there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it, we’ve embraced the piracy and are just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure.

    As a result, Ink is now ranked #16 on IMDb’s ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071804/ ) movie meter and is currently one of the top 20 most popular movies in the world.

    This all started as a result of the completely underground buzz that you’ve each helped us create. We’ve had no distributor, no real advertising and yet the word of mouth that you’ve generated has made the film blow up as soon as it became available worldwide. So many of you came to see the movie multiple times, bringing friends and family and many of you have bought the DVD and Blu-ray from us. All of this built up and built up and suddenly it exploded.

    We don’t know exactly where this will all lead, but the exposure is unquestionably a positive thing.

    Ink hits Netflix ( http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Ink/70125584 ), Blockbuster (http://www.blockbuster.com/browse/catalog/movieDetails/439536 ), iTunes ( http://www.itunes.com ) and many more tomorrow! Remember to get your signed copies, t-shirts and posters at the Ink Store ( http://www.DoubleEdgeFilms.com ).

    Thank you so much for the constant love and support.

    Jamin and Kiowa Double Edge Films ( http://www.jaminwinans.com )

    The letter belies the usual MPAA line that one illegal download equals one lost sale and that file-sharing services and applications, BitTorrent in particular due to its speed, have no useful purpose and should be throttled by ISPs.

    Ink is just but another example of how P2P can put content in the hands of fans where it belongs and I think Jamin and Kiowa would agree.

    Stay tuned.

    Business | guardian.co.uk

    The ContentID system has also thrown up some unexpected market intelligence about Rowan Atkinson’s hapless character. He turns out to be hugely popular in Saudi Arabia. The company that manages the use of Mr Bean footage online, MyVideoRights, says that this creates commercial opportunities for the producer, which can negotiate deals with broadcasters and DVD distributors in the country.

    Ashley MacKenzie, chief executive of MyVideoRights, says better fingerprinting of web content means more companies now feel they are in control of their copyright material. “Up until two years ago Mr Bean and Tiger Aspect couldn’t have done anything. Now we can go into this system and claim back content,” he said.

    TorrentFreak

    Earlier this year, the IFPI gave Norwegian ISP Telenor an ultimatum – block access to The Pirate Bay within days or get taken to court. Telenor refused, IFPI followed through with its threat and the case was heard earlier this month. The decision was announced today. IFPI lost the case and Telenor will not have to block The Pirate Bay.

    tpbThis March, IFPI – backed by several Hollywood movie companies – gave Telenor, Norway’s largest ISP, a warning: block your users from accessing The Pirate Bay within 14 days or we will take legal action.

    Without any legal basis, Telenor refused to comply.

    “This would be the same as demanding that the postal service should open all letters, and decide which ones should be delivered,” said Telenor boss Ragnar Kårhus.

    The verdict in the case was due to be delivered October 30th, but was delayed until today.

    IFPI has lost the case and Telenor will not have to block The Pirate Bay.

    The court ruled that Telenor is not contributing to any infringements of copyright law when its subscribers use The Pirate Bay, and therefore there is no legal basis for forcing the ISP to block access to the site.

    “Obviously we are pleased that the District Court has arrived at this conclusion,” said Telenor’s Ragnar Kårhus in a statement.

    “At the same time it is important for us to emphasize that this case is not about being in favor of or opposed to copyright, but about whether or not it is reasonable to saddle Internet service providers with a censorship role in respect of content on the Internet,” he added.

    Kårhus went on to say that the most important way for IFPI and other rights holders to maintain healthy revenue streams, is to develop business models and services that render the use of sites like The Pirate Bay less attractive to Internet users.

    In making its decision, the court also had to examine the repercussions if it ruled that Telenor and other ISPs had to block access to certain websites. This, it said, is usually the responsibility of the authorities and handing this task to private companies would be “unnatural”.

    Narodowy Instytut Audiowizualny

    The fifth in the Culture 2.0 series entitled “Pirates of the Internet. Cinema, Law and Culture” was devoted to the changes in today’s cinematography, particularly as affected by the Internet. Special guests included: Jakub Duszyński, Artistic Director of Gutek Film, Dawid Marcinkowski, a director and creator of Sufferrosa, an internet interactive film, and Krzysztof Siewicz, a lawyer with the Grynhoff Woźny & Maliński law office and a legal coordinator of Creative Commons Polska.

    Jakub Duszyński opened the meeting with a description of how his attitude to copying films on the Internet has changed. Two years ago he wrote a letter to sites, which provided access to Polish film subtitles, where he accused them of acting to the detriment of cinematography, and particularly of distributors of ambitious cinema, such as Gutek Film. He regarded the translators themselves as members of a partisan culture movement based on ‘pure idealism’ and condemned subtitle providers, for deriving financial gain from advertising. Duszyński referred to the activity of peer-to-peer sites as a ‘leak’, which drove film fans away from the official commercial film circuit. Today, however, he explained that his approach to Internet exchange has changed drastically. Conscious of the existence of the two different, indeed, incompatible worlds, he noted that as a representative of one of them he saw no point in warring against the other, despite the fact that the latter was in competition (often illegal) with official distributors. His view stemmed from the fact that distributors, bound by restrictions of the system of intellectual property, can barely compete with sites which offer immediate access. Duszyński admitted that he was fascinated by the energy and dedication of the people involved in the second, Internet, cinematographic circuit. Meanwhile, he saw that in times of interregnum, which has prevailed, the solution to the problem is still unknown.

    The debate that followed hinted at possible solutions. Firstly, Duszyński talked of the role of film festivals as events which offered experiences that could not compare with downloading films off the Internet. Secondly, according to the other guests, the distributors could still play a role of filters and guides.

    Dawid Marcinkowski talking about his interactive Internet film entitled Sufferrosa followed Duszyński’s presentation. The film is an interesting example of cinema made professionally yet functioning in the non-commercial circuit, usually associated with amateur activity. Firstly, free internet access is its only distribution channel. But most importantly, as Marcinkowski pointed out, the film had come to being thanks to a flexible collaboration of artists who communicated via the Internet and exchanged thoughts on a friendly basis. Their informal relations made it possible to solve issues of copyright to the individual works which make up the film. The story of Sufferrosa reinforces Duszyński’s view that Internet film communities play a key role in today’s cinematography. Sufferrosa, which borrows from many other works, is a prime example of how professionals can use the mechanisms of fan art.

    Krzysztof Siewicz’s talk on how the legal system lags behind the changes in the world of film completed the views presented by the two previous speakers, a distributor and an artist. According to Siewicz, the present legal model treats authors as small children who need support from intermediaries, as in the case of general management organizations representing artists. Meanwhile in times, when the number of authors is increasing rapidly since the creative work is often written into the process of receiving it, the system is causing friction; because it does not acknowledge a situation where thanks to the Internet the author manages without the help of intermediaries. So, Siewicz showed that the unofficial system Duszyński had been talking about did not merely entail people passively participating in the world of cinema, but it was also a system of grass-roots cinematographic artistic work.

    A screening of the Steal This Film 2 documentary wrapped up the meeting. The authors of the film aim to show that it is possible to treat copying as a basic cultural activity; which explains how crucial the Internet and peer-to-peer networks are nowadays. Statements from leading activists for the reform of copyright laws as well as representatives of ‘pirate’ groups rounded up the discussion.

    Alek Tarkowski

    Media | The Guardian

    The UK has become the first major economy where advertisers spend more on internet advertising than on television advertising, with a record £1.75bn online spend in the first six months of the year.

    The milestone marks a watershed for the embattled TV industry, the leading ad medium in the UK for almost half a century. It has taken the internet little more than a decade to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK.

    UK advertisers spent £1.75bn on internet advertising in the six months to the end of June, a 4.6% year-on-year increase, according to a report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. To put this in perspective, in 1998, when the IAB first measured internet advertising, just £19.4m was spent online.

    The internet now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the UK, while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets.

    The IAB originally predicted that internet ad spend would overtake TV at the end of 2009; however, the crippling advertising recession accelerated this by six months. TV advertising fell about 17% year on year in the first half, to about £1.6bn, according to the report.

    The IAB’s figures show that of the total of £1.75bn spent on internet advertising, £1.05bn, or 60%, was spent on search advertising on websites including Google, up 6.8% year on year.

    Online classified advertising grew by 10.6% year on year to £385m, about 22% of total internet ad spend. But online display advertising, such as banners on websites, fell by 5.2% year on year, to £316.5m. This was an 18% share of all internet ad spend.

    Broadband | News | PC Pro

    The temporary closure of the Pirate Bay had the unforeseen side effect of forcing torrent sharers underground and causing a 300% increase in sites providing access to copyright files, according to McAfee.

    In August, Swedish courts ordered that all traffic be blocked from Pirate Bay, but any hope of scotching the piracy of music, software and films over the web vanished as copycat sites sprung up and the content took on a life of its own.

    “This was a true ‘cloud computing’ effort,” the company said in its Threats Report for the third quarter. “The masses stepped up to make this database of torrents available to others.”

    “Pirate Bay is just a redirect site to lead people to sources where they can get media and other files,” McAfee security analyst Greg Day told PC Pro. “Once it was temporarily shut down, those people still wanted the torrents so they went elsewhere, and that meant lots of other sites popped up to take advantage – we saw a 300% increase in sites hosting and distributing movies and software.”

    According to Day, in the days prior to the shutdown, treasure-hunters used anonymising software to gain access and copy the indexes that Pirate Bay used to redirect users to other computers hosting torrents.

    Once the indexed data was in the public domain, open-source code was available to anyone who wanted to help with redistribution of torrents. While the Pirate Bay was offline there were four times as many sites offering access to the torrents.

    “The Pirate Bay example shows how difficult it is to ‘stop’ data once it is on the web,” the report says. “A website can be shut down, but anyone who has accessed the content may still be able to redistribute it.”

    Media Maverick – CNET News

    During a visit to Hollywood last week, I wanted to talk to people who knew a thing or two about the film industry’s burgeoning meltdown. One of the people I sought out was Eric Garland, CEO and co-founder of Big Champagne.

    Beverly Hills, Calif.,-based Big Champagne has collected data on file sharing and sold it to media companies for almost 10 years. Garland’s company has survived all that time, even while making the same sad pitch. He tells the music labels and film studios they are going to be chopped down at the knees by the Internet and online piracy–but that doesn’t mean they can’t survive.

    As anyone might have guessed, almost everybody in media initially told Big Champagne to stick a cork in it. Back in the early part of the decade, nobody wanted to hear it, and Garland logged lots of five-minute meetings. Thanks to his persistence, though, he saw up close how digital technology buffeted the music industry. Now, some of the big labels are striking partnerships with his company.

    What makes Garland an important speaker on this subject is that despite his gloomy message, he’s bullish on both the Internet and movies. His interests and Hollywood’s are aligned, he says, because if the studios don’t survive then he loses customers. He wants them to do well but he just doesn’t think that telling them what they want to hear, the “bedtime stories” as he calls it, is going to help.

    In his interview with CNET, Garland predicted that the film business is in for a period of downsizing and cost cutting; that Hollywood’s digital evolution will likely be similar to the music industry’s but will unfold much faster; and that great wealth will still flow into the sector.

    Question: Your business is watching file sharing. So is it spreading to the mainstream? Is Mom and Dad from Sheboygan pirating content?
    Garland: Oh yes, particularly Mom and Dad in Munich; Mom and Dad in Seville; Mom and Dad in Paris. When we talk about video the reason I single out the European cities is because that’s where people are forced to wait a long time to see content legally. In the digital world, we don’t want to wait three months, six months. We’re just not accepting that anymore…we want it all, we want it right now and even Mom and Pa Kettle are getting to the point where they say if it’s not on, let’s just fire up the computer and watch it. If they want me to wait six months, I’ve got other options. And people don’t really have a conscious or qualms about that, or at least it’s mitigated by their feeling that they are entitled to keep up with the Jones’. It is the Twitter, real-time Internet expectations.

    What we’re seeing is a tremendous pile-on of feature film and television content, led by TV worldwide. In terms of growth, it is eclipsing the sharing of these little music files. I mean most of the new adopter activity, most of the increase in terms of people, transactions, and downloads is coming on the video side.

    That means that this year or next year is going to be Hollywood’s year to really start to lose audience–not just at the fringes but in regular middle-American living rooms. They’ll lose them to the other box, to the smart box.

    “(The music industry) spent a lot of money going back to antipiracy and spent a lot of emotional dollars on vendors who sold them panaceas and told them everything is going to be okay.”–Big Champagne CEO Eric Garland

    Q: Reed Hastings (the CEO of Netflix) wants to see every TV set come equipped with the ability to access the Internet. That will only accelerate Hollywood’s demise, no?
    Garland: Again, I think it drives both. The winner is the one who ultimately wins on the merits, and those are ease of use. Certainly the legitimate markets should win there. It did in music. Remember, iTunes wins in large part because it works so much better than anything else. So, Reed should win. His competitors should win on ease of use. Quality of content? They should at least be competitive in terms of having great on-demand, high-definition, rich audio, video. But when it comes to depth of catalog, that’s where pirate markets have the edge. They have it also in timely delivery. Sorry. Go to Hulu right now and type in 24. There’s just a clipped sort of terse message that says “Sorry about season 1 and season seven…

    Q: Because they want to sell me past seasons on DVD, right?
    Garland: Yes, but Surfthechannel.com, (an online site where users can find links to a plethora of unauthorized shows and films) doesn’t care about that. They’re happy to serve up current and past episodes of “24.” And just like music, Hollywood’s first reaction to that will be “Well, that’s just not fair. That’s jumping the turnstile, that’s breaking the rules. We have to shut that down, because if you remove that option then people will be more patient.” You won’t remove that option, and you’re losing valuable time if you focus on removing that option at the expense of improving that option and bettering that option, beating that option.

    The music people used to say, “How can you can compete with free?” And now you ask anybody in digital music and they’ll tell you, “I’m just trying to compete effectively with free.” They’ve embraced the very condition that up until very recently they said they would reject. I’m telling you, you are going to compete with free. Sometimes you’re even going to win, once you make the commitment to living in the marketplace as it is and not as you wish it were or as it once was.

    Q: That’s got to be hard for people in that industry or in any industry to hear. After hearing that, I almost want to start collecting donations for Matt Damon.
    Garland: But I want to be clear that I was far more bearish on music than I am about Hollywood’s prospects.

    “The film industry will have to chase legal remedies, legislative agendas, all the way to what they view as being the end of the line before they say ‘Okay, so this really is the landscape we’re stuck with.'”–Big Champagne CEO Eric Garland

    Everything that the customer demonstrated that they wanted starting with the original Napster was diametrically opposed to what the music industry needed. Everything that the distributor or the (bandwidth providers) wanted was diametrically to what the music industry wanted. In other words there was no place to hammer out a marketplace that would work for both sides. Customers would say “I want MP3s” and the music industry would say “We can’t do MP3s because we have to have (digital rights management).” The customer would say “deal breaker!” The customer would say “I want every piece of music ever recorded. I want access to everything, everything I can remember dancing to no matter what year I went to prom and I want it right now.”

    Napster said sure. The music industry said “We can’t do that. We can only license these titles.” Deal breaker.

    The customer said “I want to eat all I want at one low price that feels like free.” The music industry said “No my friend, it’s a dollar a track.” There was no point of agreement. Hollywood conversely, is very different.

    Hollywood says we like DRM, we would like to extend to you this content but on terms that we control and the customer says “Yeah, that’s cool. I’ve always been good with that. I like renting. I’ll give it back to you when I’m done.” The music industry says “How come we can’t we do that?” The customer says “No, because it’s not my expectation. It’s not the contract that we’ve had all along.” But in video this is in the contract we’ve had all along. Blockbuster has always given us stuff and we paid for it and then we had to bring it back. We’re good with that. There are all these places where what the online consumer is demanding is actually a workable proposition to Hollywood. There’s a lot of alignment but some really some important places where there isn’t any. There’s no easy fix. When I tell the film studios “The good news is that you want people to rent and not just own and people are happy to do that. Check.”

    I say “You want some DRM–people are accustomed to DRM. There’s DRM on DVDs.” But when you get to one where you want customers to wait two months for a DVD, then they say that’s not negotiable.

    Anybody who really understands the film business will tell you that’s the end of our lives as we know it. That’s the end of our industry as we know it. We have to be able to preserve those windows. We have to regain at least enough control to say you can have it, but not today. And when I tell them you’re never going to get that, that’s when the conversation breaks off and curse words are uttered and we go back to our corners.

    Q: What windows are you referring to? They have windows that allows cable channels and broadcast stations to get exclusive access to a film title for a specific amount of time. But you can’t be talking about theaters too. What is Hollywood if it can’t promise theaters exclusive access to films?
    Garland: I think the theatrical experience is totally viable. We love going to the theater. But when we walk out to the lobby I want to be able to pick up the DVD. If I got my 3D glasses on and my kids say “Can we watch it when we get home?” The answer has to be “yes.” If the answer’s no, the film industry loses.

    Garland: These are tough lessons. By the way, I don’t want to sound like the armchair pundit. You end up sounding not very empathetic. You sound like some ass who says “This is how it’s going to be and if you don’t like too bad.” I’m not trying to be dismissive. I’m not trying to be glib about this. I understand the implication may well be tens-of-thousands of jobs lost, billions of dollars pouring out of the industry, shutterings, downsizings…I’m not trying to make light of that. I’m just telling you that in the final accounting i think some things we now know. Some of them are very unpopular even in concept and some of them are very hard to incorporate into strategic thinking, but that doesn’t make them any less avoidable or inevitable.

    Q: Are paywalls one of the solutions? That’s what Hulu’s leaders are considering.
    Absolutely not. What you have is a very effective antipiracy tool in Hulu, and I’m specifically drawing on the numbers and not just citing anecdotal evidence. People really do prefer the Hulu experience. So you actually have cannibalization, for once, of a pirate market by a legitimate market. You have a legitimate market stealing share and audience away from a pirate market. Put that behind a subscription wall and they’ll just go back.

    Q: But it doesn’t appear that Hulu is making the kind of money that will satisfy content owners, at least those News Corp. and NBC Universal (Hulu’s backers).
    Garland: The cute answer, which is probably the truest answer, is that growing a sector is a privilege and not a right. There is no right size. There is no correct or God-given size for any sector. Why do we get to make movies that cost $300 million to make? Because we have found venues where people will spend more than $300 million on the result. If people spend only $50 million then the price of a movie must be $49 million or less.

    “I’m not trying to be glib about this. I understand the implication may well be tens-of-thousands of jobs lost, billions of dollars pouring out of the industry, shutterings, downsizings…”–Big Champagne CEO Eric Garland

    I think in today’s dollars no one could make “Gone With The Wind” because at the time this movie was made when everyone went to the movies. It was something like 79 percent of the population. The cute answer is that movies will get smaller.

    I know people are tearing out hair and spinning in graves, but maybe “Transformers” has to be made for $75 million next time. Oh my God, what am I saying? Put the words back in your mouth. That is just a pretty plain faced observation. One outcome might mean that in the Digital Age the return on investment on a major International tent-pole franchise is not a billion dollars. It’s a quarter of that or a third. Therefore we have to get our costs in line with the market value.

    When we talk about this in 3 or 5 or 7 years, one thing we will all have to concede is costs have to come down. We don’t have the total control over the distribution chain that we exploited so well as industries for so long. Without that you can’t take advantage of the consumer in the same way.

    Q: I feel like I just heard the doctor give his prognosis and the patient is a goner.
    Garland: It’s just “Lose weight man (laughter). Get on a treadmill, change your diet and lose weight.”

    Q: Has Hollywood given up on fighting piracy?
    You mean has changing the name from “antipiracy” to “content protection” a symbol of a retreat or a softening? No. Not at all. It’s likely that (the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade group of the six major studios) is trying to be more focused, more strategic. They are upping their game because that’s how seriously they take it and that’s how high a priority it is. On the contrary this is not the end, this is early days.

    We now have the benefit of hindsight. We have watched an industry go through this. I think we can say with some confidence we know how this unfolds. What will happen is the studios will exhaust every available remedy and there will be a series of evolutions, meaning they will exhaust one remedy and a new one will present itself. These things will be pursued in tandem. They will pursue technological intervention on the Internet. This goes to the study at NYU that basically says this has had no effect. Ultimately, because they are spending a lot of money and not getting results, they’ll become disillusioned with these vendors. They’ll clean house. But something else will present itself.

    “Well, maybe we were focused on trying to disrupt the networks and we should have focused on a technological solution to mass notification.” Well be on to the next thing. Well spend some number of months–I’m just essentially recounting the music industry’s journey–filing vast numbers of infringement notifications, letting everybody and their granny know you’re infringing our content. They’ll take the temperature and they’ll do surveys and collect data and they’ll try to convince themselves that this is having a real effect in reversing the tide and then after some period it will just not have been convincingly demonstrated to have worked. And they’ll realize that by any number of measures the piracy problem has only grown worse. But they will have to exhaust all of those things and more. They will have to chase legal remedies, legislative agendas, all the way to what they view as being the end of the line before they say “OK, so this really is the landscape we’re stuck with. As much as we didn’t want it, this appears to be it. Now we have to just dive in and make businesses that work here.”

    And that’s where music has only just arrived in this country and note it hasn’t even come close to arriving in a lot of European countries. If you ask Universal Music Group in the U.K. “Are you going to win this war on piracy?” They will say “Oh yes, swiftly and decisively and soon. The rate of peer-to-peer infringement will be down 70 percent in the U.K. in the next few months. They have specific targets. Not here. We’ve exhausted all of those paths. There’s a big gap. If the music industry in this country just now sort of arrived at the conclusion where they say “We just have to play on this field even through it ain’t home court and there isn’t a lot of advantage.” And in some territories, music hasn’t even gotten there yet, then how can Hollywood be there? This is early in the journey. I do think it’s going to be a quicker path. It has to be. The economics are going to come down faster.

    I spent years when everyone ignored what I was saying because I know it’s not pleasant to hear. But my job is to help businesses all over this landscape to get from point A to point B with the least amount of pain. But that means getting smart and getting ready for the transition before the competition. I want them looking in the mirror now and not when it’s too late. It’s tricky. I want these guys to do well but l don’t’ want them to tell themselves bedtime stories. That’s what the music industry did.

    They spent a lot of money going back to antipiracy and spent a lot of emotional dollars on vendors who sold them panaceas and told them everything is going to be okay. “Don’t listen to Eric Garland,” they said. “He’s a gloom-and-doom guy. He gets off on telling you things are going to be terrible. Spend a few million dollars over here and we’ll clean up the Internet for you. Hey, I understand that. I want to open up my wallet for that guy too. It’s comfort food.

    But my message to media companies is they don’t have that kind of time anymore.

    The Independent

    People who illegally download music from the internet also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey, published today, found that those who admit illegally downloading music spent an average of £77 a year on music – £33 more than those who claim that they never download music dishonestly.

    The findings suggest that plans by the Secretary of State for Business, Peter Mandelson, to crack down on illegal downloaders by threatening to cut their internet connections with a “three strikes and you’re out” rule could harm the music industry by punishing its core customers.

    An estimated seven million UK users download files illegally every year. The record industry’s trade association, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), believes this copyright infringement will cost the industry £200m this year.

    The poll, which surveyed 1,000 16- to 50-year-olds with internet access, found that one in 10 people admit to downloading music illegally.

    Movie fans might have to wait to rent new DVD releases — latimes.com

    LA Times

    Some major studios, grappling with sharply declining DVD revenue, are considering a policy to make new releases initially available for purchase only.

    For those who like renting movies, Hollywood may soon have a message: Prepare to wait.

    In an effort to push consumers toward buying more movies, some major film studios are considering a new policy that would block DVDs from being offered for rental until several weeks after going on sale.

    Under the plan, new DVD releases would be available on a purchase-only basis for a few weeks, after which time companies such as Blockbuster Inc. and Netflix Inc. would be allowed to rent the DVDs to their customers. The move comes as the studios are grappling with sharply declining DVD revenue, which has long propped up the movie business.

    2D Boy: I love you, 2D Boy! » Blog Archive

    Since the birthday sale started, about 57 thousand people bought World of Goo off our website.  The average price paid for the game was $2.03 a significant percent of which went to PayPal for transaction fees.  Normally, they keep about 5% of the revenue, but because PayPal fees are structured in a way that they take a larger percentage for smaller transactions, we ended up paying over 13% in transaction fees.  For all purchases of around 30 cents and under, we actually saw no money, PayPal took it all, but they probably ended up losing money on most of those transactions ($0.01) as well, they’re not the bad guy.

    Here’s a histogram for the amount people chose to pay for the game (click for full size image):

    histogram

    One interesting thing about the amount people were willing to pay is that it went up as the days went by before leveling off.  Here’s what it looked like:

    avgprice

    Effect on Other Channels

    This one was a big shocker. Steam sales rose 40% relative to the previous week. Our Steam sales tend to fluctuate and it’s not unheard of for there to be a 25% difference from one week to the next (up or down) but the 40% increase came after a week that saw a 25% increase.  It has been several months since we’ve seen this number of sales in a single week on Steam.

    The effect wasn’t as dramatic on WiiWare. This week saw a 9% increase in sales over the previous week.  Last week saw a 5% fall, and the week before it saw a 2% rise in sales.  9% seems like it’s large enough to have not been entirely caused by normal fluctuations.

    earthtreasury : Message: Creative Work Law for the EU. We have the right to share!

    We Have the Right to Share

    TorrentFreak

    According to new research carried out by music group IFPI, around 40% of Swedes between 15 and 74 illegally share files every single day. The research, carried out through a web survey, reveals that there are 2.8 million sharers in the group, an increase compared to earlier surveys.

    BusinessWeek

    hancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party sits at the top of the list. Below are the Social Democrats (SPD), the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Left Party, the Greens and the Christian Social Union (CSU). And there, at the very bottom, are the Pirates.

    At around 2:20 a.m. local time, when the organization managing the federal elections published the voting results for all of Germany’s 16 federal states on its Web site, the nation saw a new power sitting on the seventh rung of the political ladder: The Pirate Party had managed to get 2 percent of the vote.

    Granted, it’s not enough for the party to enter the German government, since a political party has to get 5 percent of the vote to do that. But for political newcomers like the Pirates, this can be interpreted as a success worth paying attention to. In many large German cities, they even got as much as 3 percent of the vote. And they were particularly popular among first-time male voters, from whom they might have won as much as 13 percent of the vote.

    “This election has shown that the issues we’re campaigning for are important and that we will be more successful in the future,” party leader Jens Seipenbusch said at its post-election celebration. In a short time, his party has become the unofficial representative of Internet activists in Germany who don’t feel any affinity for the other parties and who have been feeling threatened in their natural environment—that is, online.
    CDU Internet Laws Boost Pirate Popularity

    The Pirates have the CDU to thank for their strong result. When it comes to Internet issues, two politicians from the CDU embody the treachery of the grand coalition—that is, the uneasy combination of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) that has been running the country for the past four years: Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, with his laws regarding Internet surveillance and spying, and Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen, with her well-publicized list of banned sites in her campaign to fight online child pornography. Internet activists have suggested that rather than banning the sites, the content should be erased. An online petition started by Franziska Heine against “Zensursula” laws—a word play on the German word for censorship and von der Leyen’s first name—secured more than 130,000 signatures. The petition got a lot of media attention—and so did the Pirate Party.

    During discussions about the law on blocking Web sites, politicians from the grand coalition demonstrated their ignorance about technical aspects of the online world—and a bit of arrogance to boot. That certainly didn’t hurt the Pirates’ numbers in the election. The Pirate Party was founded in 2006, and since the beginning of the year, its membership has increased tenfold. At last count, it had around 9,200 members, which makes it the seventh-largest party in Germany.
    High on Hype, Low on Ideology

    The Pirates’ power was only really recognized after the elections for the European Parliament in June. At that time, the original Swedish version of the Pirate Party made it into the European Parliament with 7.4 percent of the national vote. The German Pirate Party managed to get 0.9 percent. Since then, its proposals championing the free exchange of culture and scientific information on the Internet and a new set of copyright laws have been seen and heard everywhere.

    Still, the young party continues to wrestle with its identity, while its members wrangle with each other. They primarily campaign for strengthened data privacy protection, respecting users’ rights and Internet freedom. And the members recognize this. But the fact that its platform only includes these few items—and that the party seems to lack a deeper ideology—makes the Pirates seem to many much more like a protest party.

    Billy Bragg | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

    A better way to sink internet pirates

    The only way to tackle illegal filesharing is not suppression, but to offer reliable, easy to use, fairly priced alternatives

    Last week the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) convened a meeting of artists at Air Studios in London with the intention of seeking common ground on the issue of what to do about illegal filesharing before the end of the government’s consultation period, which has now closed.

    The statement that we produced is the first real sign that artists are ready and willing to become involved in the debate about the shape of the new digital music industry. There were many views in the room, from those who wished to disconnect illegal downloaders, to those who believed that there was no technical solution to the loss of revenue that the recording industry is experiencing.

    Despite our differences of opinion, we were able to agree on bandwidth restriction as final sanction for egregious offenders. We held back from suspension of internet accounts because we felt it was disproportionate and punitive, but most of all, we held back because we didn’t believe it was in the best interests of our profession.

    The suppression of illegal filesharing is a long-term, highly expensive, technologically fraught strategy with serious implications for personal privacy. It is questionable whether any of the money saved will ever find its way to the artists who have suffered loss of income.

    While the recording industry continues to make threatening noises towards kids who swap music files among themselves, our real enemies, the illegal download sites that make money giving our music away for free, are disappearing off the radar into darknets.

    This is a war that no one can win.

    As the pirates always manage to stay one step ahead of the latest clampdown, the recording industry will continue to ask legislators for ever tighter sanctions, leading ultimately to an internet controlled by and for big business, which can only be accessed by those willing to pay.

    The loss to the creative community would be catastrophic. The internet has made it possible for individual artists to make, distribute and promote their own works with the active support of P2P networks. For new artists to flourish, it is vital that the internet remain free to all.

    We believe that this sense of freedom is the key to constructing a viable digital business model for the recording industry. The successful music sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Spotify all offer free access. The next step is to create “feels like free” services. We need legal networks licenced by record companies that give users access to all the music they want for a subscription fee. We need P2P communities that spread the word for new artists while offering advertising platforms so that an artist whose work is downloaded can receive reciprocal payment from advertising revenue.

    Artists must be prepared to work with the record industry and with legislators on a programme of education aimed at increasing awareness of the damaging aspects of illegal downloading on the livelihoods of the creative community and those who work with us to produce our work.

    However, we will not be able to marginalise the pirates until we can offer accessible, easy to use, fairly priced alternative business models that people will actually want to buy their music from. While we may never be able to sink The Pirate Bay, the challenge we face is to make it look boring, shoddy and unreliable.

    Digital Domain- NYTimes.com

    YOU can buy “The Lost Symbol,” by Dan Brown, as an e-book for $9.99 at Amazon.com.

    Or you can don a pirate’s cap and snatch a free copy from another online user at RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile and other file-storage sites.

    Until now, few readers have preferred e-books to printed or audible versions, so the public availability of free-for-the-taking copies did not much matter. But e-books won’t stay on the periphery of book publishing much longer. E-book hardware is on the verge of going mainstream. More dedicated e-readers are coming, with ever larger screens. So, too, are computer tablets that can serve as giant e-readers, and hardware that will not be very hard at all: a thin display flexible enough to roll up into a tube.

    With the new devices in hand, will book buyers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded without the copyright holder’s permission? Mindful of what happened to the music industry at a similar transitional juncture, book publishers are about to discover whether their industry is different enough to be spared a similarly dismal fate.

    The book industry has not received cheery news for a while. Publishers and authors alike have relied upon sales of general-interest hardcover books as the foundation of the business. The Association of American Publishers estimated that these hardcover sales in the United States declined 13 percent in 2008, versus the previous year. This year, these sales were down 15.5 percent through July, versus the same period of 2008. Total e-book sales, though up considerably this year, remained small, at $81.5 million, or 1.6 percent of total book sales through July.

    “We are seeing lots of online piracy activities across all kinds of books — pretty much every category is turning up,” said Ed McCoyd, an executive director at the association. “What happens when 20 to 30 percent of book readers use digital as the primary mode of reading books? Piracy’s a big concern.”

    Adam Rothberg, vice president for corporate communications at Simon & Schuster, said: “Everybody in the industry considers piracy a significant issue, but it’s been difficult to quantify the magnitude of the problem. We know people post things but we don’t know how many people take them.”

    We do know that people have been helping themselves to digital music without paying. When the music industry was “Napsterized” by free file-sharing, it suffered a blow from which it hasn’t recovered. Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of the industry’s inflation-adjusted sales in the United States, even including sales from Apple’s highly successful iTunes Music Store, has dropped by more than half, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

    A report earlier this year by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, based on multiple studies in 16 countries covering three years, estimated that 95 percent of music downloads “are unauthorized, with no payment to artists and producers.”

    Free file-sharing of e-books will most likely come to be associated with RapidShare, a file-hosting company based in Switzerland. It says its customers have uploaded onto its servers more than 10 petabytes of files — that’s more than 10 million gigabytes — and can handle up to three million users simultaneously. Anyone can upload, and anyone can download; for light users, the service is free. RapidShare does not list the files — a user must know the impossible-to-guess U.R.L. in order to download one.

    But anyone who wants to make a file widely available simply publishes the U.R.L. and a description somewhere online, like a blog or a discussion forum, and Google and other search engines notice. No passwords protect the files.

    “As far as we can tell, RapidShare is the largest host site of pirated material,” Mr. McCoyd said. “Some publishers are saying half of all infringements are linked to it.”

    When I asked Katharina Scheid, a spokeswoman for RapidShare, if the company had a general sense of what kinds of material were most often placed on its servers — music? videos? other kinds of content? — she said she could not say because “for us, everything is just a file, no matter what.”

    At my request, Attributor, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., that offers publishers antipiracy services, did a search last week to see how many e-book copies of “The Lost Symbol” were available free on the Web. After verifying that each file claiming to be the book actually was, Attributor reported that 166 copies of the e-book were available on 11 sites. RapidShare accounted for 102.

    Ms. Scheid said her company complied with publishers’ take-down requests. But the request must refer to a particular file and use the specific U.R.L.; it’s left to the publishers to find all instances of a given book title on RapidShare’s servers. (I can report that RapidShare acted promptly in September when my publisher, Simon & Schuster, asked it to remove an audiobook version of one of my own books and provided the U.R.L. for the one file.) According to Ms. Scheid, the company gets requests to remove about 1 to 2 percent of the files that are uploaded daily.

    To protect users’ privacy, however, she said RapidShare does not attempt to block the uploading of infringing material in the first place: “We don’t do content filtering; we don’t look into uploaded files.” Once a file is removed, the company tries to keep perfectly identical files from being uploaded again, but she listed various ways that determined users can alter the files just enough to effectively circumvent these measures. (My book reappeared on RapidShare a few days after it was taken down.) Hotfile and Megaupload did not respond to requests for comment.

    RapidShare and fellow online storage services say that their services help users share large files easily or store personal data without having to carry around a memory stick. On the F.A.Q.’s page of its Web site, Megaupload depicts its customers as the most ordinary of citizens: “Students, professional business people, moms, dads, doctors, plumbers, insurance salesmen, mortgage brokers, you name it.”

    Publishers and authors are about the only groups that go unmentioned. Ms. Scheid, of RapidShare, has advice for them if they are unhappy that her company’s users are distributing e-books without paying the copyright holders: Learn from the band Nine Inch Nails. It marketed itself “by giving away most of their content for free.”

    I will forward the suggestion along, as soon as authors can pack arenas full and pirated e-books can serve as concert fliers.

    True To You

    Morrissey would like it to be known that he has not been consulted by EMI/HMV/Parlophone with regards to two forthcoming boxed sets of Morrissey singles. Morrissey does not approve such releases and would ask people not to bother buying them. Morrissey receives no royalty payments from EMI for any back catalogue, and has not received a royalty from EMI since 1992. Morrissey also does not approve of, and was not consulted on, the Rhino box of Smiths CDs, or the Warner releases of Smiths LPs on 180 gramme vinyl. Morrissey last received a royalty payment from Warners ten years ago, and, once again, he would ask people not to bother buying the reissued LPs or CDs.

    TorrentFreak

    “The risk that rights holders will remove all content on The Pirate Bay at the date of acquisition is estimated as inexistent by GGF. GGF’s assessment after talks with the entertainment industry is that the majority of the content will remain on The Pirate Bay,” they say.

    Op-Ed Columnist  – NYTimes.com

    The problem is that if people can get the music they want for free, why would they ever buy it, or even steal it? They won’t. According to a March study by the NPD Group, a market research group for the entertainment industry, 13- to 17-year-olds “acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007.” CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent.

    And a survey of British music fans, conducted by the Leading Question/Music Ally and released last month, found that the percentage of 14- to 18-year-olds who regularly share files dropped by nearly a third from December 2007 to January 2009. On the other hand, two-thirds of those teens now listen to streaming music “regularly” and nearly a third listen to it every day.

    This is part of a much broader shift in media consumption by young people. They’re moving from an acquisition model to an access model.

    Even if they choose to buy the music, the industry has handicapped its ability to capitalize on that purchase by allowing all songs to be bought individually, apart from their albums. This once seemed like a blessing. Now it looks more like a curse.

    In previous forms, you had to take the bad with the good. You may have only wanted two or three songs, but you had to buy the whole 8-track, cassette or CD to get them. So in a sense, these bad songs help finance the good ones. The resulting revenue provided a cushion for the artists and record companies to take chances and make mistakes. Single song downloads helped to kill that.

    A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.

    So it was no surprise that The Financial Times reported on Monday that Apple is working with the four largest labels to seduce people into buying more digital albums. It’s too little too late.

    Clay Shirky

    The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

    NYTimes.com

    A Boston University student has been ordered to pay $675,000 to four record labels for illegally downloading and sharing music.

    Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., admitted he downloaded and distributed 30 songs. The only issue for the jury to decide was how much in damages to award the record labels.

    Under federal law, the recording companies were entitled to $750 to $30,000 per infringement. But the law allows as much as $150,000 per track if the jury finds the infringements were willful. The maximum jurors could have awarded in Tenenbaum’s case was $4.5 million.

    The case is only the nation’s second music downloading case against an individual to go to trial.

    Last month, a federal jury in Minneapolis ruled a Minnesota woman must pay nearly $2 million for copyright infringement.

    FT.com / Comment / Analysis

    In April, when a Swedish court sentenced the founders of Pirate Bay to one-year prison terms for promoting copyright infringement on the world’s largest file-sharing website, the music and film industries gave a standing ovation. But their triumph was short-lived.

    The four men, who “tweeted” vigorously on Twitter during their trial, may not be able to communicate so freely from their prison cells. But their struggle for internet freedoms has developed into a political issue: Sweden’s Pirate party, dedicated to the legalisation of file-sharing, won a seat last month in the European parliament.

    The war being waged by the entertainment industry against online piracy was further weakened when its powerful ally and champion of internet policing, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, had his anti-piracy bill watered down by his country’s highest court in April.

    TECHNOLOGY

    Illegal yet ever easier to do

    Illegal file-sharing is almost as old as the internet itself. It began with friends exchanging files on private discussion boards but hit the mainstream with the arrival of Napster in 1999. Napster used peer-to-peer technology but its central index of songs made it vulnerable to legal action. Successors such as Kazaa and Gnutella obviated the need for a central site. The path to Pirate Bay – founded in 2003 – was paved by the 2001 release of BitTorrent, a more efficient form of peer-to-peer technology. Now, the fastest growing form of piracy is streaming video. Streaming – similarly to legal sites such as Hulu and BBC iPlayer – does not require a copy of the content to be downloaded. Viewers can click and watch shows or movies instantly.

    Ten years after the launch of Napster, the first online file-sharing service, the music industry is no closer to solving the problems created by digital piracy. As advances in technology make television, film and video games companies more vulnerable to piracy, that decade-long failure to change consumer behaviour threatens to undermine business models across the media industry.

    Piracy has helped to create momentum around legal and intellectual challenges to copyright law. “Piracy has gone from being a simple argument about infringement or using something without permission to questioning the very basis of copyright,” says Gregor Pryor, a digital media partner at Reed Smith, the international law firm.

    For most music and film fans, its appeal is more simple. With a little technological know-how, they can find and download free copies of the latest releases. Many albums and films appear online before they reach the shops or cinemas.

    In removing the cost of distribution, the internet has proved itself a perfect piracy incubator and has made it harder for those involved to be prosecuted successfully. The Pirate Bay case is due to go to appeal later this year. But the scale of the problem for content owners is worldwide.

    Russia, China, Spain, Mexico and Canada were this year singled out by the US Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus as having the highest rates of copyright infringement, largely as “the result of a lack of political will to confront the problem”. Russia’s lack of progress in respecting intellectual property rights now threatens its accession to the World Trade Organisation.

    “In Russia there is no concept of copyrighted recorded material. They get away with selling it and only paying publishing royalties, not recording ones,” says James Bates from Deloitte, the consultancy.

    The statistics make uncomfortable reading: the music industry has been decimated by online piracy, which remains the default way of consumption for many. For every track bought online, 20 were downloaded illegally last year, according to IFPI, the international music industry lobby group.

    The film industry is fearful of repeating the mistakes of the music business. Hollywood executives have waded into the debate, while large media companies such as NBC are joining forces with trades unions as rising unemployment levels focus their attention on the threat to members’ jobs and incomes from copyright breaches. IFPI has been working with the Motion Picture Association of America to share information on anti-piracy and enforcement.

    Chart showing the market share of download sites by visit

    The statistics are not encouraging, however. A total of 13.7m films were distributed on peer-to-peer networks in France in May 2008, for example, compared with 12.2m cinema tickets sold, according to Equancy and Tera, two Paris-based consultancies.

    But the entertainment industry does not always endear itself to consumers by painting itself as the pained victim. A widely reported study in the UK this year said downloading cost the economy £120bn ($198bn, €139bn). Other industry associations scrambled to lament the losses. But the figure was later revealed to be an error – the estimate was really £12bn.

    Such estimates commonly assume each downloaded album is a lost sale, ignoring other studies that show the most prolific downloaders also buy more music. One of the few people to be hired by the music industry who dared to suggest pirates were also labels’ best customers – ex-Googler Douglas Merrill – left EMI after less than a year.

    An industry that portrays itself as the victim while suing single mothers and other ordinary consumers for big sums has only helped the cause of Pirate Bay and those downloaders who are trying to make an ideological point by stealing music and movies. An anarchic and nihilist foe – which is yet to make a coherent argument for how content production would be paid for in a copyright-free future – is a tough opponent.

    But the majority of file-sharing sites are commercial, not political, in motivation. Few of the pirates want to build a business to take on Universal Music or EMI. Like a market stall selling pirated DVDs, they just want to make a small profit from a virtual commodity and do not mind whose business model they ruin to do so. What started out as a hobby for computer geeks such as Sean Fanning, who developed Napster, has become big business for website owners.

    LEGISLATION

    The battle is on to reshape copyright rules for the internet age

    Internet piracy has become so difficult to control because it is now ingrained behaviour among consumers, analysts say.

    “It’s a social norm,” says Eric Garland of Big Champagne, which tracks file-sharing. “Somewhere along the line in the last 10 years, it became in most places in the world socially acceptable to infringe copyright.”

    A study by Entertainment Media Research found 71 per cent of those file-sharing gave “free music” as their main reason for doing so.

    But the motivation of the individuals uploading copyrighted content to file-sharing networks – who make it possible for others to download – is more complex. “These guys operate a bit like the hacking community and are mostly doing it for kudos,” says Helen Saunders of the BPI, which represents the UK recorded music industry. “They compete with others to be the first to put the content out and are not looking to make a profit.”

    Pirate Bay, the most notorious file-sharing site, sets the ideological bar somewhat higher. Its founders in Sweden sent out a clear challenge when they announced that any proceeds from its sale would go to fund projects on freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openness of the internet.

    That cause will be taken to the European parliament after Sweden elected Christian Engström, the first MEP from the Pirate party. The party’s stated intent is to reduce the term for commercial copyright protection to five years. It also believes that “non-commercial copying and use” – including file-sharing – should be legalised. Content owners argue that few other MEPs share Mr Engström’s views.

    Just as businesses that used to deliver ice to households were unable to make refrigerators illegal, content owners should not be able to use the law to protect an obsolete business model, he says. Instead they should build profitable services around “non-commercial file-sharing”, such as search engines.

    A key plank of the Pirate party’s logic is that copyright was not designed for the internet age. To that end, Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, has devised a system of “copyleft” – a new content licence that encourages the kind of sharing, remixing and non-commercial reuse that is common on the web.

    While some artists have experimented with Prof Lessig’s “creative commons” licence, few content owners see the merits of a debate about copyright. Its protection is still seen by labels and studios as the best incentive to create and invest in content.

    Most piracy sites rely on advertising for their income. Global Gaming Factory X, a group that is planning to buy Pirate Bay, told industry blog PaidContent it could make $40m (€28m, £24m) a month from advertising. But while that figure has been met with scepticism, many sites make substantial sums from advertising placed around other people’s content.

    “These kinds of sites often generate significant profit through advertising and advertisers will pay a lot of money,” says Helen Saunders, head of internet investigations at the BPI, which represents the UK recorded music industry. “Just think about how many people are going on to them. They can be very attractive to companies whose target audience is 16-24 year-olds.”

    . . .

    Questionable legality means most mainstream advertisers try to avoid media-sharing sites such as Pirate Bay and Mininova, even though they attract millions of visitors. Most ads are for gambling, “adult” chatrooms or dubious offers of free iPods. But some big brands – such William Hill and even Microsoft – have found their ads appearing alongside pirated content, even if that was not the advertiser’s intent.

    The ads may not always be genuine – the appearance of such brands boosts sites’ appearance of legitimacy. But more often it is simply a factor of advertising space being sold across “blind” networks of so-called remnant inventory, typically yielding very low revenues for site owners.

    “It’s very much like a spam e-mail business,” says Eric Garland of Big Champagne, a research firm. Low costs and high volumes mean it only takes a few gullible victims to click on an ad – and perhaps be tricked into downloading computer viruses – to turn a profit.

    Pirate Bay, which has about 10m users in more than 30 countries, carries ads for online games, dating, lottery, mobile ringtone and computer screensaver sites. It was alleged by the Swedish government and IFPI to have generated more than $3m in annual revenue from advertising. That would be low for a mainstream media site with such substantial visitor numbers, yet one of Pirate Bay’s founders argued that these figures were an overestimate.

    Recent surveys suggest peer-to-peer piracy is no longer increasing and that legal downloads of digital music at Apple’s iTunes are also starting to plateau. “Music piracy has almost found its high watermark,” says Mr Garland. “Clearly there is a saturation point for digital media.”

    But if peer-to-peer is peaking, new technologies are rising up to replace it. Teenagers are experimenting with techniques – such as swapping computer hard drives or trading songs on mobile phones via Bluetooth – that are near-impossible to detect.

    A more severe new threat to content owners does not rely on swapping songs or movies at all. Streaming video sites – using similar technology to the BBC iPlayer, Hulu or YouTube – allow media to be viewed or heard with just one click. That makes streaming video much less complex to use than Pirate Bay-style sites. Streaming “is a problem emerging so fast that it makes my head spin”, says Mr Garland, who expects it to be the industry’s main concern within a year. Specialised search engines, which aggregate links to these video sites, also operate in a legal grey area but attract substantial traffic by improving the usability of pirating sites yet further.

    As technology speeds ahead of legal precedent, some experts argue that chasing new sites will remain a futile effort. So content owners have turned to broadband operators as their last hope to control internet piracy. By monitoring traffic on their networks, content owners argue, internet service providers could spot breaches of copyright and throw persistent offenders off their networks.

    But the European Commission has now suggested that cutting off an individual’s internet access is an infringement of human rights. That has stymied Mr Sarkozy’s “three strikes and you’re out” proposals. The UK’s Digital Britain report this month stopped short of proposing anything so drastic, instead leaving it to record labels to take legal action individually against frequent file sharers who ignore warning letters from their broadband providers.

    . . .

    Content owners seeking ways to limit the damage are also using their commercial clout to bring broadband operators to the table. In a pioneering deal, Universal Music has agreed to let Virgin Media, the UK cable company, offer an unlimited downloading service to its broadband customers – as long as Virgin also helps Universal clamp down on piracy.

    But even if this “all you can eat” model offers a user as much content as piracy does, it will struggle to compete on price. Whether it is films, TV shows or music, consumers are becoming accustomed to getting what they want for free.

    Before too long, another pirate is likely to face court accused of copyright infringement. The content industry may well celebrate another Pyrrhic victory. Whether motivated by ideology or profit, the media-sharing movement seems set to reinvent itself again and again.

    YouTube Biz Blog

    Last week the world watched in wonder as Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party transformed a familiar and predictable tradition into something spontaneous and just flat-out fun. The video, set to R&B star Chris Brown’s hypnotic dance jam “Forever,” became an overnight sensation, accumulating more than 10 million views on YouTube in less than one week. But as with all great YouTube videos, there’s more to this story than simple view counts.

    At YouTube, we have sophisticated content management tools in place to help rights holders control their content on our site. The rights holders for “Forever” used these tools to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes. As a result, the rights holders were able to capitalize on the massive wave of popularity generated by “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” — in the last week, searches for “Chris Brown Forever” on YouTube have skyrocketed, making it one of the most popular queries on the site:


    This traffic is also very engaged — the click-through rate (CTR) on the “JK Wedding Entrance” video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this newfound interest in downloading “Forever” goes beyond the viral video itself: “JK Wedding Entrance” also appears to have influenced the official “Forever” music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.

    So, what does all of this mean? Despite compelling data and studies around consumer purchasing habits, many still question the promotional and bottom-line business value sites like YouTube provide artists. But in the last week, over a year after its release, Chris Brown’s “Forever” has again rocketed up the charts, reaching as high as #4 on the iTunes singles chart and #3 on Amazon’s best selling MP3 list. We’ve seen similar successes in the past with partners like Monty Python.


    One of our main goals at YouTube is to help content creators effectively make money from the distribution of their content online. That
    they can do so in a way that brings artists and our community together to create fun, spontaneous and inspiring works, is one of the best and most exciting things about YouTube.


    Zeropaid

    The music industry knows how to hang out itself, even if it lacks the correct length pf rope. EMI, certainly reeling from declining physical album sales like the other Big 4 record labels, is now apparently telling independent album retailers that it will no longer sell them CDs.

    That’s right, EMI apparently told them over the phone a few weeks ago, an oddly perverse means of notification, that henceforth it will no longer sell them physical albums and that they must go to “one stops” like Wal-Mart or Best Buy to buy product like everybody else to then in turn sell.

    “Several I have spoken with are so upset that they vow never to buy any EMI catalog again–or any new artist releases either,” says Wayne Rosso, former president of the P2P program Grokster, on his blog. “Only the certifiable hit product that they know will sell. They will no longer take chances on new EMI artists.”

    It’s a odd turn of events for EMI, adding another blow to its physical CD sales while inversely arguing that illegal file-sharing is the real culprit behind declining revenues. If its concerned with losses then why get rid of customers? It just doesn’t make any sense.

    Adding insult to injury is the fact that one stops don’t have nearly the selection needed to maintain an indie retailers bottom line, nor could they ever hope to have a price point necessary to make a living.

    In short, the loss of EMI’s catalog means the job of indie record stores to stay in business just got even tougher.

    Nice job EMI.

    Forbes.com

    A Dutch court ruled Thursday that three men connected with The Pirate Bay Web site must block traffic between it and the Netherlands within 10 days.

    The written ruling by Judge Wil Tonkens concludes that the men have control over the site and ordered them “each separately and together, to stop and keep stopped the infringements on copyright and related rights of Stichting Brein in the Netherlands,” or face a charge of euro30,000 ($42,000) per day.

    Stichting Brein is a Dutch-based organization funded by various copyright holder groups that brought the civil suit against The Pirate Bay.

    It was not clear how the court expected the site’s operators to block traffic to the site, or whether it can enforce its order if they decline or are unable to comply.

    “The Pirate Bay is not a legal person who can be summoned, but a cooperative,” the ruling noted.

    The Pirate Bay provides an index to BitTorrent files, which can be used for trading media such as movies, music and computer games. The site has more than 20 million users globally.

    Beyond Binary – CNET News

    Of all the losses suffered by the music industry, one of the biggest may be the fact that nearly all of the investors that once were building digital music services have moved on.

    “There are not a lot of entrepreneurs involved in this space,” said David Pakman, a music industry veteran and now venture capitalist at Venrock Associates.

    By Pakman’s count, there have been 109 venture-backed digital music start-ups. Fewer than five, though, produced a substantial return, he said.

    “Investors lost a lot of money in this space,” he said, speaking on a breakfast panel at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech conference here. The loss for the industry, he said is that entrepreneurs have moved on to areas like Twitter and Facebook.

    FT.com / Technology –

    Apple is working with the four largest record labels to stimulate digital sales of albums by bundling a new interactive booklet, sleeve notes and other interactive features with music downloads, in a move it hopes will change buying trends on its online iTunes store.

    The talks come as Apple is separately racing to offer a portable, full-featured, tablet-sized computer in time for the Christmas shopping season, in what the entertainment industry hopes will be a new revolution. The device could be launched alongside the new content deals, including those aimed at stimulating sales of CD-length music, according to people briefed on the project.

    Physical album sales have fallen sharply as music retailing has evolved from CD album purchases in retail outlets to digital downloads of songs from online stores.

    Although consumers continue to purchase large amounts of digital music, they are buying individual tracks rather than higher-margin albums.

    Apple is working with EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music Group, on a project the company has codenamed “Cocktail”, according to four people familiar with the situation.

    The labels and Apple are working towards a September launch date for the project, which aims to boost interest in albums by bundling liner notes and video clips with the music.

    “It’s all about re-creating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music,” said one executive familiar with the plans.

    Apple wants to make bigger purchases more compelling by creating a new type of interactive album material, including photos, lyric sheets and liner notes that allow users to click through to items that they find most interesting. Consumers would be able to play songs directly from the interactive book without clicking back into Apple’s iTunes software, executives said.

    “It’s not just a bunch of PDFs,” said one executive. “There’s real engagement with the ancillary stuff.”

    The music companies declined to comment.

    Album sales in the US fell 14 per cent in 2008 to 428.4m units, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks retail sales data.

    The new touch-sensitive device Apple is working on will have a screen that may be up to 10 inches diagonally.

    It will connect to the internet like the iPod Touch – probably without phone capability but with access to Apple’s online stores .

    Apple is gambling that it can succeed where everyone else has flopped, including Microsoft, which tirelessly pushed a tablet-ready version of its Windows operating system as a personal favourite of founder Bill Gates.

    The entertainment industry is hoping that Apple, which revolutionised the markets for music players and phones, can do it again with the new device.

    “It’s going to be fabulous for watching movies,” said one entertainment executive.

    Book publishers have been in talks with Apple and are optimistic about their services being offered with the new computer, which could provide an alternative to Amazon’s Kindle.

    mediabistro.com: FishbowlLA

    But Chris Anderson Said The Future Of Music Is Free…

    BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Why the pirates are on the rise in Sweden

    Newsnight’s Matt Prodger visits Sweden’s Peace and Love music festival in Borlange to investigate what it is about the Swedes that has put them at the heart of a raging debate about internet freedom.

    via mangare

    Techdirt

    Didn’t expect this one. With France pushing forward yet again with a three strikes law, Laurent GUERBY points us to the news that France’s new culture minister, Fredic Mitterand has said that he wished he was downloaded more often (translated by Google from French — Updated to fix poor original translation — thanks Laurent!) and that he got two internet connections, just in case he got cut off by a three strikes law. He also admits that his son downloads unauthorized content often. That’s probably not what the entertainment industry wanted to hear.

    Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com

    This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.
    1984A screen shot from Amazon.com The MobileReference edition of the novel, “Nineteen Eighty-four,” by George Orwell that was deleted from Kindle e-book readers by Amazon.com.

    But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

    This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

    As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

    You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

    The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

    Scary.

    wayneandwax.com

    Songs as Shared Things

    Songs have always been shareable and shared. People, young and old, share songs with each other – by singing or playing them – in a variety of ways and settings, through a variety of technologies and media or other manner of accompaniment (as well as a capella). Songs as recordings are not fundamentally different in this respect. Since the advent of recorded media, people have shared songs in this form as well: played for each other in private and public settings, on personally distributed mixes (mixed tapes / CDs), and, in the age of mp3s, as files sent via email, IM (instant message), torrent, third-party hosting site, or any manner of online sites and services.

    Ironically, today songs are most often shared via a video site, YouTube, which has become a de facto public audio repository. This development and the explosion of music-centered blogs and forums offer evidence, in the form of pervasive and popular practice, of how musical recordings are treated as public culture, things which people send to friends, family, and colleagues, point to and comment on, and remix in the course of their everyday lives.

    To click on a YouTube link in order to access a song (or to send such a link to a friend) would hardly be considered an illegal action on the part of the millions of people who do so each day, and yet the action is hardly different from the Defendant’s use of a filesharing network to access the seven songs in question just a few years ago. Those songs are [links & YouTube stats added 6/30]:

    * Bad Religion – American Jesus [448 results]
    * Green Day – Minority [1,870 results]
    * Incubus – New Skin [266 results]
    * Incubus – Pardon Me [991 results]
    * Nirvana – Come As You Are [4,190 results]
    * Outkast – Wheelz of Steel [21 results]
    * Sublime – Miami [65 results]

    If one searches for any of these songs on YouTube today, one finds numerous instances of each, sometimes numbering in the dozens or even hundreds. Notably, beyond merely presenting the songs, the users who upload the videos frequently add their own elements, personalizing the songs in order to share them with peers and other potential viewers: they add new images, both still and video (including found footage and self-produced material); transcribe and caption the lyrics; sometimes, they edit or remix the audio itself, especially in the case of hip-hop songs (e.g., Outkast) – an interactivity consistent with cultural practice in hip-hop more generally.

    Only in the relatively recent past – within the last century – have songs, in the “fixed” media form of audio recordings, been so strongly regulated as pieces of property whose use by others might be strictly limited. An examination at the level of cultural practice – that is, how songs as audio recordings have been used by people – demonstrates that even in such “fixed” form, songs have continued to serve as a commonplace site of sharing and creative interaction (also known as remixing). This becomes particularly evident in the use of playback technologies such as turntables as creative instruments in their own right (aiding the emergence of hip-hop and disco in the 1970s), an approach powerfully extended by the tools of the digital age.

    Historicizing the Musical Commodity

    The notion of the song as commodity is a relatively recent one, enabled by a certain technological confluence (the advent of recordable media and mass production), and it seems to be fading relatively quickly in the face of a new technological confluence (the digital). As musicologist Timothy Taylor writes in an award-winning article on “The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of ‘Mechanical Music’”: “the music-commodity has to be understood as always in flux, always caught up in historical, cultural, and social forces” (Taylor 2007: 283).

    The album as a commodity form is a particularly illustrative example of this socially and culturally situated flux. The age of the album – roughly, the late 60s to the late 90s – was a fleeting moment, again enabled by a particular set of technologies (the advent of the long-player record, or LP, followed by the cassette and CD). While early album-oriented artists approached the LP form as an artistic opportunity, leading to the emergence of the “concept album,” by the late 90s album offerings were far more typically collections of “filler” material, propelled by a hit or two, sold at exorbitant prices (e.g., $18.99) to customers with no alternatives. At this point, the album is, in most cases, an anachronism, either an indulgent and/or exploitative exercise. Notably, internet vendors such as iTunes or eMusic and other distribution methods (including blogs and filesharing networks) have reinstated the primacy of the single track as the prevailing unit of popular music.

    Reasonable paid alternatives to free downloading have only become available recently, and even then rather unevenly with regard to what is available and in what form. The defunct torrent tracker, Oink – and its ilk – offer(ed) higher quality files, better documented, uncrippled by DRM software, and of a far greater variety than one can find via any of the legally-permitted online music vendors.

    Listening as a Transformative Use

    Listening is an active process, a rich domain of interpretation and imagination, manifesting differently – according to personal idiosyncrasies and cultural mores alike – for each person and in each moment. As anthropologist Steven Feld explains in the oft cited “Communication, Music, and Speech about Music” (Feld 1984), the listening process is, when one considers all that is potentially involved, an enormously complex phenomenon very much centered on the particular listener in question. According to Feld, listening as an act of “musical consumption” involves, among other things: the dialectics of the musical object itself (text-performance, mental-material, formal-expressive, etc.), the various interpretive moves applied by the listener (locational, categorical, associational, reflective, evaluative), and the contextual frames available at any moment (expressive ideology, identity, coherence).

    All of this activity is inextricably social in character, regardless of the musical object in question. As Feld notes, “We attend to changes, developments, repetitions–form in general–but we always attend to form in terms of familiarity or strangeness, features which are socially constituted through experiences of sounds as structures rooted in our listening histories” (85).

    While grounded in communication studies and musical semiotics in Feld’s study, such an interpretation – centering the socially-situated hearing subject rather than the musical object (whether live performance or mp3) – is also consistent with a great deal of literary and media theory from the past thirty years, from Roland Barthes’s infamous 1977 “Death of the Author” to Henry Jenkins’s contemporary theories about spreadability and value.

    Comprehensive Management of Music Rights for Songwriters and Performing Artists – BMG RM.

    Bertelsmann AG and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts &amp; Co. L.P. (“KKR”), announced today that they have agreed to create a joint venture to develop a global music rights management business to which Bertelsmann AG will contribute its BMG Rights Management music rights unit. Upon funding of the transaction, Bertelsmann will own 49 percent in the joint venture and KKR will own 51 percent. Bertelsmann AG’s Hartwig Masuch, currently CEO of BMG Rights Management, will continue as CEO of the new company.

    The new company will benefit from BMG Rights Management’s know-how in licensing and administrating music rights, its large number of music catalogues and artists, the established BMG brand and its experienced management team. KKR will significantly enhance BMG Right Management’s financial position and create new growth potential by providing access to its global network. The partners envisage building a major music rights management business over the medium term through organic growth and acquisitions. KKR expects to contribute to BMG’s development by providing substantial equity investments through its European private equity funds.

    “KKR shares our views on future business models for the music industry. I am excited to work with such a partner. With many high-visibility contracts and the foundation of an international organization in six European countries, it has taken BMG Rights Management only nine months to position itself successfully in the market. Songwriters and performers respond very well to our service oriented approach,” said Hartwig Masuch, CEO of BMG Rights Management and CEO of the joint venture. When BMG Rights Management started its business in October 2008, its rights catalogue consisted of about 200 artists; since then, another 100 contracts with songwriters and other rights owners have been signed.

    “With access to meaningful investment capital, we expect the partnership with KKR to contribute significantly to accelerating the development of the business. We complement each other perfectly for this venture. We both want to broaden BMG’s global reach faster than originally anticipated. In this way we will be able to actively participate in the expected market consolidation,” said Thomas Rabe, Bertelsmann CFO and Chairman of the joint venture. With the music industry at an important turning point, the market for licensing and administration of music rights presents attractive growth opportunities. Among other things, it is driven by the increasing importance of music in the licensing of other areas beyond the recording business, such as broadcast and live performances as well as the synchronization of broadcasting, commercial and movie productions.

    “The music rights sector offers opportunities for significant growth across the globe. BMG has proven leadership and a strong track record of organic growth. Our financial strength combined with BMG’s sector expertise will create a unique platform for building up a global music rights management business,” said Johannes Huth, European Head of KKR. In the context of this transaction, BMG Rights Management will be integrated into the equity fund Bertelsmann set up two years ago. The company will be developed from this platform. KKR’s funds will invest into a new holding company of BMG Rights Management. The foundation of the new joint venture is subject to approval under applicable competition laws. The parties expect to complete the transaction within a few months.

    Total Telecom

    Online video service reinvents itself as technology provider for media companies.

    Joost NV, an online video service launched by the founders of Skype, is retreating from the consumer market and replacing its high-profile chief executive.

    The New York-based company, which provides television programming over the Web, said it would reinvent itself as a technology provider that will enable media companies to publish Internet video under their own brands.

    The move marks a dramatic shift by Joost, which was founded in 2006 but failed to live up to its early hype. Internet users have instead flocked to Google Inc.’s YouTube for user-generated content or sites like Hulu LLC, a joint venture between News Corp., General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal and Walt Disney Co. dedicated to TV programs.

    “In these tough economic times, it’s been increasingly challenging to operate as an independent, ad-supported online video platform,” said Mike Volpi, who will step aside as Joost’s chief executive as part of the restructuring.

    Mr. Volpi will be replaced as CEO by Matt Zelesko, senior vice president of engineering. Mr. Volpi, a key architect of networking giant Cisco Systems Inc.’s acquisition machine during the dot-com boom, will remain chairman of Joost’s board.

    Mr. Volpi said the changes will result in layoffs but didn’t say how many people would be leaving the company. Joost employed about 100 people prior to the restructuring.

    Joost was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, creators of Internet telephone service Skype, but the company got off to a rocky start largely because it required users to download software, while rivals such as YouTube and Hulu let people stream video directly from Web sites.

    Mr. Volpi joined the company two years ago and his first order of business was to relaunch Joost as a streaming Web service, but that improvement wasn’t enough to overcome the company’s early missteps.

    CNET News

    The suit appears to have been initiated by Music Copyright Solutions (MCS), which claims to administer copyrights for more than 45,000 compositions. MCS is named as the lead plaintiff, along with a number of songwriters including Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad fame. These folks allege that Microsoft, Yahoo, and RealNetworks improperly licensed the rights to more than 200 compositions that they offered as on-demand streams or limited downloads via the Zune Marketplace, Yahoo Music, and Rhapsody.

    Surely these companies paid somebody for the rights to offer these songs. But there’s a catch, which TechDirt pointed out earlier Tuesday: these companies may have licensed the rights to the recordings, but that doesn’t mean they licensed the rights to the compositions (also known as publishing rights). As section 23 of the legal filing puts it:

    In order to transmit, perform, reproduce and deliver any sound recording of any musical work via ‘On-Demand Streams’ or ‘Limited Downloads,’ Defendants must first obtain not only the rights for the sound recording itself, but also the rights for the underlying musical composition that is embodied on said musical recording.

    Maybe, maybe not–that’s up to the court to decide. But that’s not the insane part. The insane part is that the plaintiffs are alleging that each time one of the defendants made any recording of a covered song available, that’s a copyright violation, and they’re seeking damages of $150,000 per violation (or the amount the defendants earned from streaming those songs, whichever is more). So, for example, the lawsuit claims that Yahoo Music offered Conway Twitty’s recording of “Fifteen Years Ago” on six different greatest hits albums. The plaintiffs allege that constitutes six copyright violations, which would mean damages of $900,000. Overall, the lawsuit names more than 200 songs, and a far greater number of recordings, meaning that the potential liability for each defendant would be tens of billions of dollars–that’s far greater than the total amount of revenues these companies ever earned from any of these services.

    Digital Media – CNET News

    The Recording Industry Association of America has prevailed in its copyright fight against Usenet.com, according to court documents.

    In a decision that hands the RIAA an overwhelming victory, U.S. District Judge Harold Baer ruled in favor of the music industry on all its main theories: that Usenet.com is guilty of direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement. In addition, and perhaps most important for future cases, Baer said that Usenet.com can’t claim protection under the Sony Betamax decision. That ruling says companies can’t be held liable of contributory infringement if the device is “capable of significant non-infringing uses.”

    Baer noted that in citing the Betamax case, Usenet.com failed to see one important difference between it and Sony. Once Sony sold a Betamax, an early videotape recorder, the company’s relationship with the buyer ended. Sony held no sway over what the buyer did with the device after that. Usenet, however, maintains an ongoing relationship with the customer and does has some say in how the customer uses the service.

    Ars Technica

    After the electoral success of Sweden’s Pirate Party earlier this month, Pirate Parties are a-popping in Europe. The newest ones have appeared in France and the Czech Republic over the last few weeks.

    Umair Haque

    “…Sales of his recordings through Sony’s music unit have generated more than $300 million in royalties for Mr. Jackson since the early 1980’s.”

    Want to know why we have a zombieconomy? Because the beancounters killed the incentives to create real value.

    Let’s use MJ’s tragic death as a mini case-study. $300 million over, for example, 25 years? That’s $12 million a year.

    I’m deliberately leaving out ads, endorsements, concerts, etc., to focus on the the structural problems in one industry: music.

    If the world’s biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels’ pockets. Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that’s how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take.

    Wait a second — that sounds familiar. You can add back in the endorsements, etc. now — they only double the figure: to about $25 million.

    If the world’s biggest pop star only made $25 million a year in total, something’s very, very wrong. Where’s the rest of the money? Why can’t a resource as scarce as the King of Pop capture more value?

    After all, that’s not even mega-rich.

    The world’s top hedge fund “managers” regularly pull in hundreds of millions. That’s an order of magnitude difference.

    No wonder everyone wants to be a banker, investor, or [insert beancounter here]. There’s no money left in anything else.

    That’s the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don’t reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.

    That ‘s not an economy: it’s just a game of musical chairs.

    Hence, no new finance, healthcare, educational, auto, or, yes, music, industry — for decades.

    “…Darkness falls across the land
    The midnight hour is close at hand
    Creatures crawl in search of blood
    To terrorize y’alls neighborhood.”

    Indeed. Everytime you look at today’s economic landscape — you should see the Thriller video playing in your head. Because what we’ve built is a zombieconomy, where little net value is created.

    And MJ’s death-by-financial-desperation should be a case study in that zombieconomy if ever there was one. Yes, he spent money on absurdly ludicrous stuff. But if top hedge fund managers can do it — why couldn’t the world’s most famous singer?

    PS — The ultimate irony? I can’t even link to the Thriller video. It’s unavailable on YouTube in the UK…”due to copyright restrictions”. Lulz.

    LA Times

    Hans Pandeya, CEO of Global Gaming Factor, said he intends to cooperate with studios and record labels to turn Pirate Bay into a copyright-friendly business.

    “We’re a publicly listed company, so whatever we take over has to be legal,” he explained. “To be legal, you have to have content providers who are paid. That’s what we want.”

    Convincing Pirate Bay’s reported 20 million users accustomed to getting content for free into paying customers will an extremely difficult task, but Pandeya said he plans to make an enticing offer.

    “To compete with free file sharing, you have to beat it,” he said. “What’s better than zero? Well, that’s paying somebody $1.”

    Global Gaming Factor plans to pay Pirate Bay users to let their computers be part of a worldwide peer-to-peer system that can transmit data for Internet service providers like AT&T and Comcast. Theoretically, it could vastly reduce the bandwidth costs of ISPs, which are struggling to keep up with the rapidly growing amount of traffic moving through the ‘Net, much of it because of illegal piracy.

    Participating computer owners could use the money deposited into their account to buy and download songs, TV shows or movies.

    The Pirate Bay – A világ legnagyobb BitTorrent trackere

    TPB might change owner

    Yes, it’s true.

    News reached the press today in Sweden – The Pirate Bay might get aquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB.

    A lot of people are worried. We’re not and you shouldn’t be either!

    TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it’s value if the money would be the interesting part. It’s not. The interesting thing is that the right people with the right attitude and possibilities keep running the site.
    As all of you know, there’s not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. It’s the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn’t evolve. We don’t want that to happen.

    We’ve been working on this project for many years. It’s time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!

    If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.

    The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets – quite the opposite. Now we’re fueling up for going into the next gear. TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It’s win-win-win.

    The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don’t worry – be happy!
    Posted Today 10:43 by TPB

    Pandora Internet Radio –

    Dear Pandora Visitor,

    We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

    BBC NEWS

    Napster understood the internet’s potential for decentralised music distribution, and offered it to consumers in a way that was simple to understand and use.

    Many critics have argued that the music industry could have avoided some of the problems it faces today if we had embraced Napster rather than fighting it.

    That’s probably true, and I, for one, regret that we weren’t faster in figuring out how to create a sustainable model for music on the internet.
    Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI

    ZDNet Government | ZDNet.com

    Google is under anti-trust scrutiny for its book publisher dealings. In A Book Grab by Google, Brewster Kahle rightly pleas:

    We need to focus on legislation to address works that are caught in copyright limbo, and we need to stop monopolies from forming so that we can create vibrant publishing environments, and that we are very close to having universal access to all knowledge.

    But we must generalize this access argument beyond books. The issue is beyond just music too – which is a central focus of the debate since the advent of Napster, Morpheus, Kazaa, Grokster, Limewire, BitTorrent, and the litany of file sharing library tools. It includes movies, photography, journalism, textbooks, remixing too.

    In short, it concerns all forms of creative works under copyright. All content has irrevocably collided with the disruptive innovations of the digital Internet and Web.

    Why? Because it involves the natural advent of a global digital public library network on the Web and it is fundamentally at odds with legacy copyright policy enforcement.

    The global digital public library network

    The physical public library system and the emerging digital public library should be understood to be part of a global digital public library network, or GDPLN (”good plan”) — an open network that allows interoperability of all global DPLs.

    Consider the Library of Congress (LOC). It is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution, started with Thomas Jefferson’s personal donation of his own private library. The Library’s mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. It’s the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections. We support it with our taxes.

    Libraries and copyright have a long and uneasy relationship. In 1870, Congress centralized the copyright system inside the LOC. The Copyright Office is in charge of administering compulsory and statutory licenses. It required all authors to deposit in the Library two copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the United States. The place to restructure and rebalance copyright in the digital era is in the LOC &amp; Copyright Office – but it will take administrative leadership, likely Presidential as it did at the advent of radio when President Hoover was involved.

    Today a de facto digital public library exists but copyright has not been rebalanced to embrace it. Our physical public libraries may legally have all content under copyright law but our digital public library may not. This is the root of the fundamental policy gap that is leading to the disruption of the content industries.

    Rebalancing copyright can establish a thoughtful digital public library network policy, end the failed war on digital piracy, adequately compensate creative artists – from journalists and authors to musicians and movie makers – for their works, and legitimize today’s de facto behavior of freely sharing content – under copyright or not – across the Web.

    In the absence of a coherent digital library policy, personal home libraries are shared on peer-to peer networks to fill in holes in the GDPLN collection not provided by Google or digital library initiatives. This is not piracy: it is the natural sharing of home libraries which has occurred since Roman times.

    The copyright war has failed
    Legacy copyright is dysfunctional in the Web era because it struggles to create artificial scarcity alongside a digital public library. Despite the efforts at control, all content flows freely. It should — because the digital library is good for humanity. However, there is no compulsory, subscription or equivalent framework to recognize the existence of the GDPLN that provides a mechanism to collect a pool from its service providers and distribute it to creators of useful arts on the basis of their respective contributions. A similar compulsory solution was somewhat analogously created with the advent of radio.

    Enforcement has failed, will continue to fail, and moreover should fail because it literally attacking the digital public library.

    Consider the absurdity of music enforcement efforts. Look at China, which now gets free ad-supported music downloads in a label-approved deal with Google, while Americans and Europeans are sued for the natural behavior of sharing their private home digital library collections. The litany of harmful and fruitless litigation of GDPLN innovators and citizens continues go grow.

    The private content industry is at war with the public digital library and the innovative companies providing the tools to build it. Paradoxically, copyright’s present policy is killing much of the content industry in the digital age by failing to codify the digital public library network.

    The good of the library outweighs the interests of private library owners, yet we must find balance to compensate the creators of the useful arts.

    Google itself is a product of digital libraries (the Stanford Digital Library Initiative). But under the “safe harbors” of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it can spider, index, link to, and exploit innumerable copyrighted works and pay nothing to the creators of the content. Google presently stores and returns much of the world’s journalism, and it is steadily adding books, music, movies and television programming to complete its collection. It is not obligated to comply with the public library privacy guidelines as detailed at the American Library Association.

    What is to be done?
    Consider a “straw-man” for a win-win global digital public library network policy that balances the needs of society and artists by restructuring copyright and extending physical public library principles to the digital age:

    1. Levy Google as an anchor fee producer, as if it were a radio station – but for all content. Level the playing field for all providers to participate in the GDPLN. Alter the safe harbor for search engine portals and require a royalty pool to be collected in a radio-like solution – but for ALL content.
    2. Establish more uniform privacy policies.
    3. Be open. Allow absolutely all libraries large and small from the LOC to the personal home shared folder to participate, so that new volumes can be added openly by the populace to the library
    4. Encourage uniform metadata standards so volumes are better cataloged and retrieved from all nodes on the library network. Institute rare volume archiving standards so the library doesn’t lose rare content
    5. Permit streaming and downloading, recognize they are indistinguishable. Drop the distinction between webcasting libraries of content that stream it and download libraries of content that download for listening, reading and viewing.
    6. Leverage low cost technology like P2P software instead of suing these important digital library innovations.
    7. Legalize digital copies and distribution of any and all content types to be shared on the library network
    8. Allow remixing to occur liberally with a revenue share model for the original creator and the re-mixer, depending on percentage of content used
    9. Require participants in the library network to provide a slice of their revenue (like the radio model, like Google’s free music in China, or their tax support in the case of public libraries offering digital services) so tax-supported entities provide a slice of their tax support to artists. Distribute it fairly and with regard for the cost of creating a work (movies get more than newspaper articles). Exempt home libraries because they will be taxed to support the public library system as they are today.

    Time is running out. Work on the GDPLN digital library policy must begin. Engagement of the stakeholders with governmental involvement can and must lead to a truly pragmatic and balanced solution as was achieved after the somewhat analogous invention of radio.

    I recognize that a process to achieve such a policy will be arduous. It must involve stakeholders. It does disrupt the status quo and rebalance copyright rather fundamentally. But the status quo is broken. Having dwelled on it for a decade I don’t see any better solution to the dilemma presented by the collision of copyright with the open global digital public library network.

    The Becker-Posner Blog

    Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

    I wonder if Judge Posner will stop writing his blog because I linked to his post.

    Electronic Frontier Foundation

    ASCAP (the same folks who went after Girl Scouts for singing around a campfire)
    appears to believe that every time your musical ringtone rings in
    public, you’re violating copyright law by “publicly performing” it
    without a license. At least that’s the import of a brief [2.5mb PDF] it filed in ASCAP’s court battle with mobile phone giant AT&T.

    This will doubtless come as a shock to the millions of Americans who
    have legitimately purchased musical ringtones, contributing millions to
    the music industry’s bottom line. Are we each liable for statutory damages (say, $80,000) if we forget to silence our phones in a restaurant?

    Ludas Matyi Online

    Fantasztikus elbeszélés

    — Az úgy volt, hogy a huszadik század második felében csökkenni kezdett a mozilátogatók száma — mesélte X., akivel én 2018-ban találkoztam, egy jövőbe tett utazásom alkalmával.
    A filmesek aggódva figyelték ezt a jelenséget és elhatározták, hogy valamit tenni kell. A Filmesek Világszövetsége több alkalommal összeült és zárt ajtók mögött tárgyalt. A televíziósok megpróbáltak bejutni ezekre a megbeszélésekre, de sikertelenül. A legcsinosabb televíziós kémnők is póruljártak, néhányan pedig átálltak az ellenség oldalára, mert filmszerepet kaptak.
    — Egy napon a Filmesek Világszövetsége bejelentette, hogy tizenöt ország közreműködésével filmet készít. A tizenöt ország kormánya megígérte: anyagilag és erkölcsileg támogatja a koprodukciót. A filmesek minden országban statisztákat, ágyúkat, repülőket és csatahajókat kértek és természetesen sok-sok pénzt. A szuper — monstre produkciónak egy főrendezője és tíz rendezője volt; mind készítettek már nagy történelmi filmeket, grandiózus háborús filmeket, tehát óriási gyakorlatuk volt a csapatok irányításában, mozgatásában, a különféle szárazföldi és légi hadműveletekben.
    — Három évi előkészítő munka után a főrendező összehívta a vezérkarát, és közölte velük: hajnalban kezdődik a forgatás. A rendezők összeigazították óráikat, aztán mindenki a saját statiszta-hadseregéhez sietett, ahol lelkesítő beszédeket tartották. Hajnali három órakor a filmesek riadót fújtak és elkezdődtek a felvételek, illetve a „Felvétel” elnevezésű nagyszabású hadművelet. Tizenöt országban egyszerre, összehangoltan.
    — Reggel nyolc órára a filmesek mind a tizenöt országban elfoglalták a fontosabb kormányépületeket, telefonközpontokat, laktanyákat, vasúti csomópontokat. Mire a hadseregek észbe kaptak, már tehetetlenek voltak: a saját, kölcsönadott ágyúikkal, repülőikkel lőtték, bombázták őket. A statiszták lelkesen harcoltak, mert a napidíj elég magas volt.
    Déli tizenkét órakor a harcok lényegében befejeződtek, és a produkció főrendezője közölte a tisztes fegyverszüneti feltételekért könyörgő kormányokkal, hogy a filmesek mind a tizenöt országban átveszik a hatalmat.
    — Nemsokára falragaszok jelentek meg, amelyeken felszólították a lakosságot: őrizze meg a nyugalmát és szolgáltassa be a televíziókészülékeket. A készülékeket beszolgáltatták, de a tévés gerilla-csapatok még sokáig ellenálltak, majd visszavonultak a hegyekbe. Harcuk, bár hősies volt,
    reménytelennek bizonyult. A filmesek néhány nap alatt felmorzsolták őket.
    — A filmrendezők másik intézkedése az volt, hogy letartóztatták minden írót. A Filmesek Világszövetsége közzétette: ezentúl minden filmet a rendező ír meg, tehát az írók fölöslegesek. A költőket nem bántották. A kritikusokat viszont — kevés kivétellel — ismeretlen helyre hurcolták, fekete autókban, az éj leple alatt.
    — Néhány nappal később kötelezték a lakosságot, hogy minden este moziba menjenek. Este hét órától éjfélig. Szombat délután öttől hajnali háromig. Élelmiszert csak az kapott, aki fel tudta mutatni a kellő mennyiségű, lebélyegzett mozijegyet. A filmesek ettől kezdve szabadon kísérletezhettek és nem volt ritka a huszonnégy órás, sőt a negyvennyolc órás film sem, sőt egy alkalommal ötszázhetvenkét óra hosszat tartó filmet is vetítettek. A rendre és arra, hogy senki se hagyja el a nézőteret, felfegyverzett jegyszedők ügyeltek. A lakosság ingyen vett részt a filmfelvételeken és a csinos lányoknak sorozóbizottság előtt kellett megjelenni, s ha szükség volt rájuk, SAS-behívót kaptak.
    Hogy mi történt aztán, arról már nem tudok, mert az informátorom, X., nem jött el a következő randevúra. Mint később megtudtam, valami nagyon hosszú és nagyon unalmas filmet vetítettek, és ő megpróbált megszökni, de szökés közben agyonlőtték.
    Gyorsan visszatértem a XX. századba, hogy figyelmeztessem a világot. No, meg mozijegyem is volt este nyolcra. Egy négyórás koprodukcióhoz, amelyben — az újsághírek szerint — több ezer statiszta szerepel, és állítólag fantasztikus csatajelenetek láthatók benne.
    Emberek vigyázzatok!

    Mikes György

    A Ludas Magazin 1969 augusztus

    BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine |

    Now, the film and TV industry’s anti-piracy drive has gone off down different avenues in different countries. In the UK, the emphasis is on achieving an “attitudinal change” using more subtle means.

    The PR agency Blue Rubicon specialises in this field, typically advising on health campaigns such as the clown smokefree message pictured right.

    Now it is helping the UK film and television industry in “attaching social stigma” to illegal downloading.

    Billboard.biz

    What’s your reaction to the recent Pirate Bay verdict?
    There is a sad irony there that they get a similar verdict and they’re similarly powerless to stop the piracy. For many years, I argued to deaf voices that the industry needed to do some public education campaign about music appreciation. That there wasn’t enough sense that music had value, that it mattered. The record companies themselves weren’t used to being companies that were answerable to the public. Chalk it up to the old flavor of rock and roll, which is “against the man.” Since artists were always against the man, and record labels always represented the man, it didn’t matter that they were giving the artist millions of dollars in advances, they were still the bad guy. Essentially, fans adopted that same anti-record company viewpoint and therefore ripping off the man created some extra joy, not just a convenience factor. All of the good things that the music industry has done over the years, and they have done many – I don’t think any industry has done as much to give back and work in communities and respond to crises – hasn’t really changed that old viewpoint. Now, the only and best the industry can do is focus much more aggressively on partnering with artists to derive revenue from the whole of a musical experience. Artists still need partners. There’s no reason record companies shouldn’t be those partners.

    PC Magazine

    British cable TV operator Virgin Media is to launch an unlimited music download subscription service through a partnership with the world’s largest music company, Universal.

    The music industry has been desperate to boost digital sales in recent years to overcome online piracy, and the agreement comes a day before a British report sets out how the creative and telecoms industries should tackle the problem.

    People familiar with the service said it would cost 10-15 pounds ($16.30-$24.50) per month, which could appeal to parents concerned by children accessing illegal sites.

    The service, which both sides described as a world first, would allow Virgin Media broadband customers to both listen by streaming and download to keep as many music tracks and albums as they want from Universal’s catalog.

    The music will be in the MP3 format, meaning it can be played on the vast majority of music devices, including the iPod and mobile phones.

    The service, which would compete with Apple’s iTunes, is set to launch later this year.

    Virgin said as part of its cooperation with the music industry it would also work to prevent piracy on its network by educating users and would, as a last resort for persistent offenders, suspend Internet access.

    Virgin said no customers would be permanently disconnected.

    Index – Külföld – EP-választás 2009

    Az előzetes eredmények szerint Svérországban két képviselőhelyet sikerült szereznie a Kalóz Pártnak. A szabad fájlmegosztásért harcoló párt a szavazatok 7,4 százalékát kapta meg.

    Ars Technica

    Frank Magid Associates conducted the survey, looking at 693 American Vuze users and 606 American Internet users, all aged 18-44. The most surprising result was that, when surveyed about their moviegoing behavior, Vuze users bought far more movie tickets, rented more films, and bought more DVDs than did the general Internet population.

    Index

    Egy friss felmérés szerint a svéd Kalóz Párt 5,5 és 7,9 százalék közötti eredményre számíthat a jövő heti Európai Parlamenti választásokon, közölte vasárnap az AFP hírügynökség. Az Európai Parlamentben négy százalék fölötti eredmény kell egy mandátumhoz, így a harmadik legnagyobb svéd pártnak komoly esélye van az EP-be jutásra.

    Intellectual Property Watch

    For example, data collection within the film lecturers and students/researchers community revealed two problems: DRM protection of cinematographic works is leading to difficulties in extracting portions of those works for educational use and those difficulties are triggering isolated acts of self-help for academic and educational purposes.

    Free Software Foundation

    We don’t make (much) music here at the Free Software Foundation, so it’s natural for people to wonder why the FSF has been standing up for individuals targeted by lawsuits launched by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Most recently, we filed an amicus curiae brief in the case of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, et al. v. Joel Tenenbaum showing the RIAA’s theory of statutory damage awards to be unconstitutional.

    guardian.co.uk

    Dark Night of the Soul, the hotly anticipated new album by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, will be “released” as a blank recordable CD with a note encouraging fans to download it from an illegal filesharing network. Although the album can be heard through an authorised internet stream, it will not receive an official physical or digital release, the group have announced, due to an unspecified legal dispute with EMI.

    As previously reported, Dark Night of the Soul is the second collaboration between producer Danger Mouse and singer-songwriter Sparklehorse. It features contributions from Iggy Pop, Suzanne Vega and members of Pixies, the Flaming Lips, the Strokes and the Shins.

    Unable to purchase the music, fans are encouraged to buy the project’s accompanying book, with photographs by filmmaker David Lynch, which comes with a blank recordable CD-R. “All [CD-Rs] will be clearly labelled: ‘For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will,'” the website states. The limited-edition book and CD-R cost $50 (£33), or fans can buy a poster and CD-R for just $10 (£6.60).

    The reason for the unconventional release is unclear. “Due to an ongoing dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to release the music for Dark Night of the Soul without fear of being sued by EMI,” the website reads. EMI have released several previous Sparklehorse albums, including the 2006 Danger Mouse collaboration.

    For the moment, the only way to hear Dark Night of the Soul is to download it from an illegal filesharing network, or to stream it from the website of US public radio network NPR. While the NPR stream has been active since Friday, it’s unknown how long it will remain online. “We don’t have a definite take-down date,” producer Robin Hilton told Billboard. “It’s up in the air.”

    And while it’s pretty clear what Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse intend for people to do with the CD-R – that is, download and burn the album – the artists are keeping coy. As the website states, “Danger Mouse … hopes that people lucky enough to hear the music, by whatever means, are as excited by it as he is.”

    Economist Debates

    Steal these words, copy the ideas and pilfer any profit they provide: the debate has reached a conclusion and the floor has sided in favour of the motion. Around three-quarters of the participants support Professor William Fisher, and believe that existing copyright laws do more harm than good.

    Throughout the debate, the margins were largely constant, though support for Professor Justin Hughes, who argued ably against the motion, increased to almost one-third of participants between the opening statements and the rebuttals.

    Professor Fisher stressed throughout the debate that the expansion of copyright curtails recombinant creativity: a system designed to encourage expression was captured by a handful of corporate interests and now holds it back. Among his recommendations are reintroducing a registration requirement for copyrighted works, a form of compulsory licensing and differential pricing. Cleverly, he raised these ideas as the debate drew to a close, thereby escaping scrutiny.

    Professor Hughes maintained throughout the debate that the production of content was not the crux of copyright’s purpose, but the production of high-quality content, and that existing laws do more good than harm in sparking quality with the filament of incentive. Changes in copyright laws are certainly needed, he acknowledged, yet this hardly condemns the system entirely. Rather, it is hard to look at the explosion of free content on the web and conclude that copyright hampers it.

    Meanwhile, in her expert commentary, Jessica Litman of the University of Michigan noted that copyright “intermediaries” like publishers and distributors were needed when the cost of production and distribution was high, but this is no longer so. David Lammy, a British MP who serves as the Minister of State for Higher Education and Intellectual Property (a telling title in itself), believes that “copyright needs to confront these challenges and evolve”.

    Even if the debate did not compel participants to overturn their convictions, it is fair to say that we have all been forced to reexamine our positions, based on the sharp arguments of the debaters, the wise words from guest contributors and the floor’s thoughtful comments. The Economist joins the floor in thanking all the participants.

    Many commentators from the floor wanted copyright scrapped altogether. Often, the argument hinged on the idea that, in practice, it is the distributors of content, not its creators, who profit most from the current set-up. Yet the majority of the floor, regardless of which side one voted for, simply want copyright laws reformed, by striking a new balance between the interests of content owners and the public.

    Specifically, the duration of copyright is considered too long; the scope of protections too broad; the legal penalties too dear. How to make these changes in practice has not been fully aired. It is left to be debated, but in another forum.

    TorrentFreak

    Starting today, Mininova will use a content recognition system that detects and removes torrent files linking to copyright infringing files. The system will also prevent the torrents from being re-uploaded to mininova later on.

    ISPreview UK

    TThe European Parliament has, in its FINAL vote (there have been five so far) on the matter, chosen to retain amendment 46 (138) of the new Telecoms Package
    by a majority of 407 to 57. Amendment 46 states that restrictions to
    the fundamental rights and freedoms of Internet users can only be put
    in place after a decision by judicial authorities, which protects ISPs
    from having to disconnect customers suspected of involvement with
    illegal broadband file-sharing (P2P) downloads.

    La Quadrature du Net
    confirms that the European Parliament has nevertheless adopted a soft
    compromise on issues of network equity: no strong protection against “net discrimination” was adopted.

    A
    formidable campaign from the citizens put the issues of freedoms on the
    Internet at the center of the debates of the Telecoms Package. This is
    a victory by itself. It started with the declaration of commissioner
    Viviane Reding considering access to Internet as a fundamental right.
    The massive re-adoption of amendment 138/46 rather than the softer
    compromise negotiated by rapporteur Trautmann with the Council is an
    even stronger statement. These two elements alone confirm that the
    French ‘three strikes‘ scheme, HADOPI, is dead already.
    ” explains Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net.

    However
    it’s not all good news as the changes do not prevent similar schemes
    from being introduced by individual member states. Likewise nothing
    will forbid ISPs from turning the Internet away from a neutral zone where people have equal access to all content applications and services. [geek]We doubt the Romulans would approve.[/geek]

    The
    strong statement for the access to the Internet as a fundamental right
    demonstrates that the Parliament can be courageous and reject the
    pressure to compromise when essential values are at stake.
    Unfortunately, on issues that appear more technical such as the absence
    of discrimination of services and contents on the Internet, the
    Parliament did not take the full measure of what it is at stake yet.
    Citizens must remain mobilized on these crucial questions,
    ” concludes Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, analyst for La Quadrature.

    Mercifully
    we’re unlikely to see Three-Strikes style legislation in the UK,
    although some rights holders are still privately pushing for it. To
    date the industry as a whole has failed to agree a concrete way forward
    on the matter, although it’s expected that Lord Carter’s final Digital
    Britain report (due in another month or so) may present one. See our ‘To Ban or Not to Ban (Illegal File Sharers)‘ – article for more background to all this.he European Parliament has, in its FINAL vote (there have been five so far) on the matter, chosen to retain amendment 46 (138) of the new Telecoms Package by a majority of 407 to 57. Amendment 46 states that restrictions to the fundamental rights and freedoms of Internet users can only be put in place after a decision by judicial authorities, which protects ISPs from having to disconnect customers suspected of involvement with illegal broadband file-sharing (P2P) downloads.

    La Quadrature du Net confirms that the European Parliament has nevertheless adopted a soft compromise on issues of network equity: no strong protection against “net discrimination” was adopted.

    “A formidable campaign from the citizens put the issues of freedoms on the Internet at the center of the debates of the Telecoms Package. This is a victory by itself. It started with the declaration of commissioner Viviane Reding considering access to Internet as a fundamental right. The massive re-adoption of amendment 138/46 rather than the softer compromise negotiated by rapporteur Trautmann with the Council is an even stronger statement. These two elements alone confirm that the French ‘three strikes’ scheme, HADOPI, is dead already.” explains Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net.

    However it’s not all good news as the changes do not prevent similar schemes from being introduced by individual member states. Likewise nothing will forbid ISPs from turning the Internet away from a neutral zone where people have equal access to all content applications and services. [geek]We doubt the Romulans would approve.[/geek]

    “The strong statement for the access to the Internet as a fundamental right demonstrates that the Parliament can be courageous and reject the pressure to compromise when essential values are at stake. Unfortunately, on issues that appear more technical such as the absence of discrimination of services and contents on the Internet, the Parliament did not take the full measure of what it is at stake yet. Citizens must remain mobilized on these crucial questions,” concludes Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, analyst for La Quadrature.

    Mercifully we’re unlikely to see Three-Strikes style legislation in the UK, although some rights holders are still privately pushing for it. To date the industry as a whole has failed to agree a concrete way forward on the matter, although it’s expected that Lord Carter’s final Digital Britain report (due in another month or so) may present one. See our ‘To Ban or Not to Ban (Illegal File Sharers)’ – article for more background to all this.

    BBC NEWS | Technology

    Each April, the US releases the Special 301 Report, which examines the intellectual property laws of its main trading partners.

    The release generated international headlines last week as countries such as Canada and Israel found themselves on the “Priority Watch List” of countries that the US claims are the world’s worst piracy offenders.

    In all, the US targeted 46 countries. In addition to the usual suspects such as China and Russia, Europe came in for heavy criticism with Finland, Norway, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland all on the Watch list.

    Unrecognised

    The Report yielded predictable lobbyist support from groups such as the International Intellectual Property Alliance and the Motion Picture Association of America, who used the opportunity to chastise the countries on the list for failing to address their concerns.

    Yet the lobby group victory may ultimately prove illusory. By wildly overstating its claims on many countries, the US has undermined its credibility and confirmed criticisms that the report lacks reliability or objective analysis.

    Rather than increasing the pressure for reforms, it seems more likely to be characterised as little more than a lobbyist document that is best ignored.

    For example, in previous years, Canadian officials have done little more than express disappointment with the US findings. According to government documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs has been repeatedly advised that “Canada does not recognise the Special 301 process due to its lacking of reliable and objective analysis, and we have raised this issue regularly with the US in our bilateral discussions.”

    Frustration

    Canada may move beyond behind-the-scenes discussions now that it finds itself on the Priority Watch List alongside China, Russia, and Indonesia. If so, it would likely remind the US that it is compliant with its international copyright obligations. In recent years, it responded to US pressure by becoming one of the few countries to enact anti-camcording legislation. Law enforcement has prioritised intellectual property cases and the law contains tough statutory damages provisions that are regularly used by rights holders to obtain significant judgments.

    Moreover, grouping Canada together with high-piracy nations does not stand up to even mild scrutiny. The Business Software Alliance’s 2008 statistics show that among the 11 other countries on this year’s Priority Watch List for which data is available, the lowest rate of software piracy is 66%. By comparison, Canada stands at 32%, not remotely close to any other country on the list. In fact, Canada’s software piracy rate is lower than all 46 countries named in the Special 301 report.

    Similarly, 2008 data from the US Customs and Border Protection Agency on intellectual property seizures reports that Taiwan and South Korea rank fourth and fifth as sources of seized goods (China is number one), yet both were dropped this year from the Watch List. By comparison, Canada does not even appear in the rankings.

    Frustration with the list is not limited to Canada. Israel was one of twenty countries to submit briefs to the US defending their laws and policies. The Israeli brief anticipated the criticism over the absence of anti-circumvention legislation, rules that provide legal protection for technological protection measures (TPMs).

    It argued that “given the industry objections to TPM, lack of uniform implementation worldwide and its nascent obsolescence, non implementation of TPM can not be the basis for determining that a country, as in the words of the Trade Act of 1974 (19 USC 2242) ‘denies adequate and effective protection of intellectual property rights or deny fair and equitable market access to US persons who rely on intellectual property protection.'”

    Questionable findings

    The US ignored the argument (and its own law) and placed Israel on the Priority Watch list.

    US officials similarly dismissed Finland’s and Italy’s brief.

    Given the US relies heavily on the IIPA report in compiling its list, the lobby group’s claims were also heavily criticised by many countries including Poland, Spain, and South Korea. For example, Spain stated that the “arbitrary conclusions are drawn in this report which on numerous occasions offends Spanish Government action.”

    The Special 301 Report does more than just anger US allies. It also calls into question their ongoing support for US international intellectual property policies such as the negotiation of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the proceedings at the World Trade Organisation against China over its copyright rules.

    In targeting so many countries with questionable findings, the US has now sent a message that this support is not good enough. Copyright law may be in need of reform in many countries, but new laws should come on their terms and in their national interest, not as a result of misleading and inaccurate bully tactics.

    USTR – USTR Releases 2009 Special 301 Report

    Hungary will remain on the Watch List in 2009. Hungary’s National Board Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, established in January 2008, has promoted collaboration on IPR issues between the Government and the private sector, and issued a two-year IPR strategy to combat counterfeiting and piracy. The United States urges Hungary to take concrete steps to implement its IPR strategy and to improve its IPR enforcement regime. Further improvements are needed to ensure that prosecutors follow through with cases against IP infringers, and that judges are encouraged to impose deterrent-level sentences for civil and criminal IP infringement.

    U.S. copyright industries also report that Internet piracy in Hungary is a major problem, and note that the Hungarian Government should provide adequate resources to its law enforcement authorities to combat IPR crime, especially on the Internet. The United States will continue to work with the Hungarian Government to address these IPR concerns.

    Ars Technica

    “Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. […]My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally, my job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary—our customers.”

    Slashdot

    “The NYTimes reported in their June 13, 1897 edition that ‘Canadian pirates’ were flooding the country
    with spurious editions of the latest copyrighted popular songs. ‘They
    use the mails to reach purchasers, so members of the American Music
    Publishers Association assert, and as a result the legitimate music
    publishing business of the United States has fallen off 50 per cent in
    the past twelve months’ while the pirates published 5,000,000 copies of
    songs in just one month. The Times added that pirates were publishing
    sheet music at 2 cents to 5 cents per copy although the original
    compositions sold for 20 to 40 cents per copy. But ‘American publishers
    had held a conference’ and a ‘committee had been appointed to fight the
    pirates’ by getting the ‘Post Office authorities to stop such mail
    matter because it infringes the copyright law.’ Interestingly enough
    the pirates of 1897 worked in league with Canadian newspapers that
    published lists of songs to be sold, with a post office box address
    belonging to the newspaper itself. Half the money went to pay the
    newspapers’ advertising while the other half went to the pirates who
    sent the music by mail.”
    “The NYTimes reported in their June 13, 1897 edition that ‘Canadian pirates’ were flooding the country with spurious editions of the latest copyrighted popular songs. ‘They use the mails to reach purchasers, so members of the American Music Publishers Association assert, and as a result the legitimate music publishing business of the United States has fallen off 50 per cent in the past twelve months’ while the pirates published 5,000,000 copies of songs in just one month. The Times added that pirates were publishing sheet music at 2 cents to 5 cents per copy although the original compositions sold for 20 to 40 cents per copy. But ‘American publishers had held a conference’ and a ‘committee had been appointed to fight the pirates’ by getting the ‘Post Office authorities to stop such mail matter because it infringes the copyright law.’ Interestingly enough the pirates of 1897 worked in league with Canadian newspapers that published lists of songs to be sold, with a post office box address belonging to the newspaper itself. Half the money went to pay the newspapers’ advertising while the other half went to the pirates who sent the music by mail.”

    TorrentFreak

    In Germany, the file-hosting service Rapidshare has handed over the personal details of alleged copyright infringers to several major record labels. The information is used to pursue legal action against the Rapidshare users and at least one alleged uploader saw his house raided.

    Yahoo! Finance

    A defense lawyer in the Pirate Bay file-sharing case said Thursday he will demand a retrial after the judge admitted he was a member of copyright protection organizations.

    A Stockholm court last week convicted four men behind the notorious Web site of helping others commit copyright violations and gave them one-year prison sentences.

    They also were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to entertainment companies, including Warner Bros., Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures.

    Peter Althin, who represented Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde in the case, said he would request a retrial after Judge Tomas Norstrom confirmed Swedish Radio reports that he was a member of two Swedish copyright groups.

    Althin said that constituted a conflict of interest, especially considering that three people who represented the entertainment industry during the trial also held membership in one of the organizations.

    Gizmodo

    A study from the BI Norwegian School of Management has found that those who download free music from services like BitTorrent are also the biggest legitimate consumers of downloadable music.

    In
    fact, among all 1,901 Norway-based study participants (all of whom were
    over the age of 15), it was found that those who downloaded “free”
    music were 10x more likely to download pay music. In other words, music pirates are the music industry’s largest online consumers.

    Note: “Free” music obviously implies pirated music, but it also encompasses legitimate free music download services.

    The findings also included that, in the 15-20 age range, 50% of
    participants had bought a CD in the last six months. So that trusty
    format isn’t dead quite yet.

    Since we relied on Google’s translation from the original Norwegian,
    anyone who speaks the language is encouraged to glean for more
    specifics and post them in the comments. [Survey and BMI Thanks Jon!]

    The Local

    nternet service providers refuse to cooperate with an entertainment industry group’s demand to shut down The Pirate Bay.

    Following yesterday’s conviction of the four men connected with the popular file sharing site, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is demanding that Pirate Bay website be shut down.

    But Internet service providers (ISPs) refuse to cooperate, reports the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper.

    Neither has the judgement slowed down file sharing. Several minutes after the Stockholm District Court delivered the verdict, almost ten billion files were being downloaded.

    The ISPs maintain that the ruling doesn’t apply to them.

    “In part, this is not a legally binding decision, but above all, this is a judgement against Pirate Bay and nothing that effects any service provider. We will not take any action (to block) the contents if we are not compelled to do so,” Patrik Hiselius, a lawyer at Telia Sonera, told Svenska Dagbladet.

    Bredbandsbolaget and Com Hem had the same reply. Jon Karlung, managing director of Bahnhofs, said the judgement does not change anything.

    “We will not censor sites for our customers; that is not our job. I am against anything that contradicts the principle of a free and open Internet.”

    Slashdot

    Quantos writes with word that in Sweden, in addition to a drop in traffic following the introduction of the IPRED anti-file sharing law, the country also saw a doubling of legal downloads. “The sale of music via the Internet and mobile phones has increased by 100 percent since the Swedish anti-file sharing IPRED law entered into force last week, according to digital content provider InProdicon. ‘…I don’t know if this is only because of IPRED, but it is definitely a sign of a major change,’ said managing director Klas Brännström. InProdicon provides half of the downloaded tunes in Sweden via several online and mobile music services.” Meanwhile The Pirate Bay’s anticipated VPN service has seen over 113,000 requests for beta invitations since late last month; 80% are from Sweden. Traffic numbers may begin to rise again once the service goes live.

    Fox fired up over ‘Wolverine’ review – Entertainment News, Technology News, Media – Variety

    Has longtime Fox News entertainment blogger Roger Friedman been fired? It depends whom you ask.

    On Saturday News Corp. released a statement saying the Hollywood gadfly had been “terminated.”

    But on Sunday afternoon Friedman told Daily Variety that he had not been let go.

    Fox News released its own missive when asked on Sunday afternoon if Friedman had been ousted. “This is an internal matter that we’re not prepared to discuss at this time,” a Fox News spokesperson said.

    For its part, the studio weighed in Friday with its own statement, calling Friedman’s actions “reprehensible.”

    Friedman came under fire for posting a review of a pirated version of 20th Century Fox’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” Both Fox News and 20th Century Fox are divisions of parent company News Corp.

    Friedman posted a review of the film Thursday, one day after an incomplete version of the tentpole was leaked on the Internet, a breach that occurred a month before the film’s release and that could potentially cost the studio millions in box office receipts.

    After Friedman’s positive “Wolverine” review hit the Web, the fanboy blogging community, which had largely called for a boycott of any reviews of the film, immediately lobbied for Friedman’s dismissal.

    RopeofSilicon.com, which posted a screen grab of Friedman’s item, echoed the sentiments of many bloggers when it wrote: “Where does FoxNews.com come up with the balls to publish a review of an unfinished illegal copy of a film their sister company is so desperately trying to squelch the existence of?”

    As of Sunday afternoon, Friedman’s Fox 411 blog was still on FoxNews.com’s website; however, the offending “Wolverine” item had long since been pulled and deleted from the website’s cache.

    The whole sequence of events looks like a case of corporate synergy gone awry, as three different divisions of News Corp. couldn’t even agree on the fate of Friedman.

    Fox News’ boss Roger Ailes has strained relations with other News Corp. division execs, and, in fact, the entire Fox News division has an entirely different style than the rest of the company.

    But Fox News is a cable ratings hotshot and contributes mightily to the conglom’s bottom line. Friedman’s posting was bound to cause friction between the two News Corp. divisions especially considering that Friedman’s Fox 411 blog is a top traffic draw for FoxNews.com.

    Studio execs began to hear about Friedman’s post Friday and called for the matter to be addressed by its sister company, though stopped short of asking for Friedman’s ouster. The studio’s statement said: “We’ve just been made aware that Roger Friedman, a freelance columnist who writes Fox 411 on Foxnews.com — an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox — watched on the Internet and reviewed a stolen and unfinished version of ‘X-Men Organs: Wolverine.’ This behavior is reprehensible and we condemn this act categorically — whether the review is good or bad.”

    Calling Foxnews.com an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox was an interesting choice of words, given that they’re sibling companies.

    It took another day — and a torrent of negative press aimed at News Corp. in the blogging community — before News Corp. took action. Late Saturday night, News Corp. released a statement saying: “Roger Friedman’s views in no way reflect the views of News Corp. We, along with 20th Century Fox Film Corp., have been a consistent leader in the fight against piracy and have zero tolerance for any action that encourages and promotes piracy. When we advised Fox News of the facts they took immediate action, removed the post, and promptly terminated Mr. Friedman.”

    Index – Tech – Negyvenmilliós büntetés a fájlcserélők megsegítése miatt

    A filmstúdiók a gatyáját is leperlik annak a francia postásnak, aki részletesen leírta a weboldalán, hogy miként kell letölteni a filmek kalózmásolatait.

    Egy francia bíróság 130 ezer euró, azaz körülbelül 39 millió forint kártérítés megfizetésére kötelezte Sébastien Budin postást, akit azzal vádoltak, hogy illegális filmletöltéshez nyújtott segítséget portálján. A 26 éves filmrajongó az általa létrehozott stationdivx.com webodalra feltette kedvenc filmjeinek az adatait, és azokat a kulcsszavakat, amikkel más rajongók könnyen letölthették a kalózportálokról a filmeket.

    A 20minutes.fr portál jelentése szerint a stationdivx.com több mint egy éven át segítette a letöltőket, és a 130 ezer eurót a 20th Century fox, a Warner, a Disney és a többi filmgyár követelte Sébastien Budintól.

    A postás fellebbezett az ítélet ellen, és azzal védekezett, hogy ugyanazokat a kulcsszavakat a Google-on is meg lehet találni. Szerinte nem sértett törvényt, csak más filmrajongóknak akart segíteni, önzetlenül. A felsőbb fórum döntésére váró Sébastien Budin segítseteknekem (www.soutenezmoi.free.fr [1]) címen új portált nyitott

    wired

    Google on Monday launched free downloads of licensed songs in China, while sharing advertising revenue with major music labels in a market rife with online piracy.

    Lee Kai-Fu, president of Google in greater China, said one reason Google lagged in the mainland search market was because it did not offer music downloads, the missing piece to its strategy in a market where it trails leader Baidu.com.

    Technet

    A Svédországban megalakult, önmagát Kalóz Pártnak nevező csoport elsősorban azok támogatására számíthat, akik a szellemi termékek megosztása, letöltése és másolása ellen kiszabott szigorú büntetések ellen tiltakoznak.

    Mint az EUobserver írja, a svédek több mint 10 százaléka vesz részt valamilyen hálózati fájlcserélő tevékenységben, a 26-35 éves férfi korosztály esetében az arány eléri az 56 százalékot. Ez azt jelenti, hogy akár 1,3 millió is lehet azoknak a száma, akiket a bűnözővé nyilvánítás fenyeget.

    A hobbikalózok a legkülönfélébb foglalkozási, képzettségi és korcsoportból kerülnek ki, ezért rendszeresen figyelik a szerzői jogok szabályozása terén történő változásokat, és várhatóan támogatni fogják a „hálózati radikálisokként” ismert jelölteket a júniusi európai parlamenti választásokon.

    A Kalóz Párt fő célja az on-line kultúra vívmányainak díjtalan használata. Ennek részeként a párt követeli a copyright szabályozás alapvető megreformálását, a szabadalmi rendszer eltörlését, valamint az állampolgárok magánéletének és adatainak háboríthatatlanságát. A KP szerint ezek a célok megvalósíthatóak a mai Európában.

    A Kalóz Párt növekvő népszerűségét jelzi, hogy támogatói és aktivistái száma messze meghaladja a Svédországban hagyományosan népszerű környezetvédő szervezetekét. A kalózjelöltek azt is remélik, hogy az EP-választásokon nagy létszámban tudnak mozgósítani olyan választókat is, akik egyébként passzívan viszonyulnak az uniós ügyekhez.

    BBC NEWS | Technology

    YouTube will not reverse its decision to block music videos to UK users despite a plea from the Performing Rights Society to change its mind.

    It is removing all premium music videos to UK users after failing to reach a new licensing agreement with the PRS.

    Patrick Walker, YouTube’s director of video partnerships said it remained committed to agreeing terms.

    But such agreement needed to be done “at a rate which is sustainable to all”, he told the BBC.

    Thousands of videos were made unavailable to YouTube users from late on 9 March.

    Patrick Walker, YouTube’s director of video partnerships, told BBC News that the move was “regrettable” but that it continued to talk to the PRS.

    “The more music videos YouTube streams, and the more popular those music videos are, the more money YouTube will generate to share with the PRS and its song writers. It’s a win-win arrangement.

    YouTube, however, cannot be expected to engage in a business in which it loses money every time a music video is played – that is simply not a sustainable business model.” he said.

    Steve Porter, head of the PRS, said he was “outraged… shocked and disappointed” by YouTube’s decision.

    In a statement, Mr Porter said the move “punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent”.

    The PRS has asked YouTube to reconsider its decision as a “matter of urgency”.

    This action has been taken without any consultation with PRS for Music and in the middle of negotiations between the two parties
    PRS statement

    The body, which represents music publishers, added: “Google has told us they are taking this step because they wish to pay significantly less than at present to the writers of the music on which their service relies, despite the massive increase in YouTube viewing.

    “This action has been taken without any consultation with PRS for Music and in the middle of negotiations between the two parties.”

    The Music Publishers Association (MPA) joined with the PRS is urging Google to rethink.

    “Music publishers are in the business of getting their music heard by as wide an audience as possible, and websites such as YouTube rely on this music to attract traffic. It is difficult to see how anyone’s interests are served by denying the YouTube community the content they most enjoy,” said MPA chief executive Stephen Navin.

    Lord Carter, the UK’s Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting, has also waded into the debate.

    Giving evidence before the Business Select Committee the minister said he suspected a degree of “commercial posturing on the part of both parties” but said the row was indicative of a wider issue.

    “It is an example of the question of how do you price and fund content in the digital world?” he said.

    “We have had decades of content being funded in one way – via the license fee and advertising – and that model is changing at a rapid speed,” he told MPs.

    Mr Walker told BBC News the PRS was seeking a rise in fees “many, many factors” higher than the previous agreement.

    He said: “We feel we are so far apart that we have to remove content while we continue to negotiate with the PRS.”

    “We are making the message public because it will be noticeable to users on the site.”

    Consumers must be scratching their heads in amazement at such obstacles to delivering legal content in a timely and straightforward fashion.
    Darren Waters, Technology editor, BBC News website

    Read more on the Dot.Life blog

    The majority of videos will be made inaccessible over the next two days.

    YouTube pays a licence to the PRS which covers the streaming of music videos from three of the four major music labels and many independent labels.

    Stream online

    While deals with individual record labels cover the use of the visual element and sound recording in a music video, firms that want to stream online also have to have a separate deal with music publishers which covers the music and lyrics.

    In the UK, the PRS acts as a collecting society on behalf of member publishers for licensing fees relating to use of music.

    YouTube stressed that it continued to have “strong partnerships” with three of the four largest record labels in the world.

    Mr Walker said the PRS was asking for a “prohibitive” rise in the cost of a new licence.

    While not specifying the rate the PRS was seeking, he said: “It has to be a rate that can drive a business model. We are in the business for the long run and we want to drive the use of online video.

    “The rate they are applying would mean we would lose significant amounts of money on every stream of a music video. It is not a reasonable rate to ask.”

    New deal

    YouTube has also complained of a lack of transparency by the PRS, saying the organisation would not specify exactly which artists would be covered by any new deal.

    “That’s like asking a consumer to buy a blank CD without knowing what musicians are on it,” a statement from YouTube UK says on its official blog.

    YouTube is the world’s most popular online video site but has been under increased pressure to generate more revenue since its purchase by Google for $1.65bn in 2006.

    “We are not willing to do this [new licensing deal] at any cost,” said Mr Walker.

    He said the issue was an industry-wide one and not just related to YouTube.

    “By setting rates that don’t allow new business models to flourish, nobody wins.”

    Services such as Pandora.com, MySpace UK and Imeem have also had issues securing licence deals in the UK in the past 12 months.

    Slashdot

    “For years, the content industries having been trying to get laws passed that would stop people sharing files. For years they failed. Then they came up with the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ idea — and it is starting to be put into law around the world. First we had France, followed by countries like Italy, Ireland — and now South Korea: ‘On March 3, 2009, the National Assembly’s Committee on Culture, Sports, Tourism, Broadcasting & Communications (CCSTB&C) passed a bill to revise the Copyright Law. The bill includes the so called, “three strikes out” or “graduated response” provision.’ Why has the ‘three strikes’ idea caught on where others have failed? And what is the best way to stop it spreading further?”

    Newswise Business News

    Abolishing patent and copyright law sounds radical, but two economists at Washington University in St. Louis say it’s an idea whose time has come. Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine see innovation as a key to reviving the economy. They believe the current patent/copyright system discourages and prevents inventions from entering the marketplace. The two professors have published their views in a new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, from Cambridge University Press.

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

    Levine and Boldrin point to students being sued for ‘pirating’ music on the internet and AIDS patients in Africa dying because they cannot afford expensive drugs produced by patent holders as examples of the failure of the current system. Boldrin, the Joseph Gibson Hoyt Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences and Chair of the economics department says, “Intellectual property is in fact an intellectual monopoly that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps.”

    The authors argue that license fees, regulations and patents are now so misused that they drive up the cost of creation and slow down the rate of diffusion of new ideas. Levine explains, “Most patents are not acquired by innovators hoping to protect their innovations from competitors in order to get a short term edge over the rest of the market. Most patents are obtained by large corporations who have built portfolios of patents for defense purposes, to prevent other people from suing them over patent violations.”

    Boldrin and Levine promote a drastic reform of the patent system in their book. They propose the law should be restored to match the intent of the U.S. Constitution which states: Congress may “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and discoveries.”

    They call on Congress to reverse the burden of the proof on patent seekers by granting patents only to those capable of proving that:

    • their invention has social value

    • a patent is not likely to block even more valuable innovations

    • the innovation would not be cost-effective absent a patent

    The authors acknowledge that such drastic reform is unlikely and outline an incremental approach for Congress to gradually reduce the scope of patents, regulation and licensing.

    Nevertheless, their call for changing the system is urgent. The economists compare intellectual monopoly (patents) to medieval trade monopolies which were proven to be economically detrimental. They write, “For centuries, the cause of economic progress has identified with that of free trade. In the decades to come, sustaining economic progress will depend, more and more, on our ability to progressively reduce and eventually eliminate intellectual monopoly.”

    Professors Boldrin and Levine maintain a blog on this topic: www.Againstmonopoly.org.

    Fabchannel Blogpages

    Although a lot of labels are facing serious problems these days, they seem to be incapable of starting meaningful partnerships with more than a few worldwide players. You would think that when the end nears they would come out of their shells and start creating new formats and platforms themselves and with others. But the opposite seems to be true. Their focus is getting even shorter and cash is the only king. That really did it for me. After 9 years of trying we still do not have the fuel to keep our service alive: rights to record the majority of concerts in our venues.

    CNN.com

    Muziic, created by teen developer David Nelson, has built an iTunes-like interface on top of YouTube. The service enables users to stream YouTube’s music to their PCs without fiddling with videos. Users can build playlists and organize songs in a way similar to iTunes.

    CNET blogger Matt Rosoff first wrote about the service and gave it a favorable review. “Any song that’s been uploaded to YouTube is available in Muziic,” Rosoff wrote. “This includes music unavailable on most commercial services, like the full Pink Floyd performance at Live 8 and Led Zeppelin’s one-off performance in 2007.”

    FileShareFreak

    Experienced BitTorrent users know a thing or two about private trackers – some sites are just better than others. This could translate to fastest pre-times of new releases; trackers with the most diversity and number of torrents; community-focused trackers; and even the rarity of an account weighs heavily on what is deemed “in demand”. We scoured high and low on torrent forums everywhere to find out what trackers are in hot demand, and tallied up the results – #1 shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

    To compile this data we visited torrent forums and counted (really!) each and every tracker request that was posted, including ones that were ‘filled’. Our stats went back as far as July, 2008. Sites that were used included:

    Technology | guardian.co.uk

    Today was the last scheduled in the Pirate Bay trial, and the four defence lawyers made their closing statements. They all presented much the same points, the main ones being that the Pirate Bay site didn’t hold any copyright films or music — it merely acted as a search engine — and that no copyrighted content passed through it anyway. The prosecution had failed to produce any uploaders or downloaders, and had not shown their actions were illegal where they happened to live.

    Fredrik Neij’s lawyer, Jonas Nilsson, said that the prosecution had not established that most of the links on the Pirate Bay were to copyright material, but linking to copyright material wasn’t specific to Pirate Bay, it was an internet-wide problem.

    Then there were the financial issues. The prosecution appears to have an exaggerated view of how much money the site made (millions!), and an even more generous view of how much had been lost in the cases presented in evidence (more millions).

    Gottfrid Svartholm’s lawyer, Ola Salomonsson, said there were only four adverts on Pirate Bay, not the 64 the prosecution claimed, so the revenue was closer to 725,000 kronor (£55,846, €62,510, $78,655). That was less than the site’s running costs of 800,000 kronor.

    As for damages of 117 million kronor (£9m, €10.1m, $12.7m), witness Roger Wallis had testified that the content industries benefited from file-sharing. Peter Sunde’s lawyer, Peter Althin, said he personal attacks on Wallis were “pathetic”. As or Sunde, he was just a spokesman for the site and hadn’t done anything illegal.

    Carl Lundström’s lawyer, Per E Samuelson, said (to quote TorrentFreak’s summary) that

    when new technology appears it can be difficult to “see the wood for the trees”. He said that just because something may have been used by people for illicit purposes, should that mean that there should be an attack on the infrastructure as a result? It’s like taking legal action against car manufacturers for the problems experienced on the roads, he said.

    As for Lundström, he “didn’t own the site, nor was he involved in maintaining or coding it.” He was just a “businessman who is only vaguely connected to TPB [via] one of his customers (PRQ),” TorrentFreak reported.

    The prosecution didn’t enhance its reputation during the case, but as Wired pointed out in an editorial, perhaps the defendants didn’t, either. Their previous “swagger evaporated like salt water on a beached schooner once The Pirate Bay landed on the witness stand.” Wired said:

    In the courtroom, the defendants quickly abandoned their revolutionary, free-culture ideals in favor of the simpler philosophy embraced by criminal defendants since time immemorial: I’m Not Responsible.

    Outside the courtroom, “Peter Sunde expressed confidence that The Pirate Bay would win the case,” reports Ars Technica. “A guilty verdict would ‘be a huge mistake for the future of the Internet,’ he said. ‘It’s quite obvious which side is the good side’.”

    It’s equally obvious to the record industry, of course, which sees sites like Pirate Bay destroying the commercial music business. In its report, Billboard quotes Kjell-Åke Hamrén, chairman of SMFF, the Swedish Music Publishers Association:

    “Without compensation the creators’ livelihood is unsustainable. It is therefore of utmost importance that licensing schemes and new legal services can emerge in the digital environment, while at the same time legislation says firmly no to grand scale businesses that are built on copyright infringement.”

    The verdict is due on April 17

    NYTimes.com

    Hollywood may at last be having its Napster moment — struggling against the video version of the digital looting that capsized the music business. Media companies say that piracy — some prefer to call it “digital theft” to emphasize the criminal nature of the act — is an increasingly mainstream pursuit. At the same time, DVD sales, a huge source of revenue for film studios, are sagging. In 2008, DVD shipments dropped to their lowest levels in five years. Executives worry that the economic downturn will persuade more users to watch stolen shows and movies.

    TorrentFreak.com, a Web site based in Germany that tracks which shows are most downloaded, estimates that each episode of “Heroes,” a series on NBC, is downloaded five million times, representing a substantial loss for the network. (On TV, “Heroes” averages 10 million American viewers each week).

    But if media companies are winning the battle against illegal video clips, they are losing the battle over illicit copies of full-length TV episodes and films. The Motion Picture Association of America says that illegal downloads and streams are now responsible for about 40 percent of the revenue the industry loses annually as a result of piracy.

    “It is becoming, among some demographics, a very mainstream behavior,” said Eric Garland, the chief executive of BigChampagne.


    It begins: you can now watch a streaming version of the entire film at channel13.org. http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/

    via Nina Paley’s blog

    Lloyd Kaufman, Chairman of the IFTA, delivers a speech on media consolidation and the dangers it poses to independent art.

    TorrentFreak

    The global amount used by IFPI on lobbying and fighting piracy is £75 million.

    OneSwarm

    Although widely used, currently popular peer-to-peer (P2P) applications are limited by a lack of user privacy. By design, services like BitTorrent and Gnutella share data with anyone that asks for it, allowing a third-party to systematically monitor user behavior. As a result, P2P networks can only be safely used by those comfortable with wholly public knowledge of their activity.

    OneSwarm is a new P2P data sharing application we’re building to provide users with explicit control over their privacy by enabling fine-grained control over how data is shared. Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth. We call this friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing.

    ipoque

    For the Internet Study 2008/2009 ipoque‘s ISP and university customers agreed to provide anonymized traffic statistics collected by PRX Traffic Managers installed in their networks.

    In Germany, Web traffic experienced the fastest and most
    significant growth in absolute terms – from 14 to 26 percent
    – mainly due to file hosting sites – also known as direct
    download links (DDL) such as RapidShare and Megaupload
    – but also due to the increasing media-richness of Web
    pages. This, however, does not include streaming video,
    which has slightly decreased in proportion.

    Moscow Times

    The wisdom of our State Duma deputies is a well-known attribute — second only to their selfish patriotism. Apparently, it was their sense of national pride that moved them to pass in two readings amendments to the Civil Code regarding copyright violations. International trade organizations and a host of Western companies concerned about Russians’ widespread abuse of copyrights laws had been pushing the Kremlin and the Duma for years to strengthen its legislation.

    According to the legislative bill, any unlawful or unsanctioned copying of text, music or pictures from the Internet is subject to criminal prosecution of up to six years in prison.

    In reality, though, it is almost impossible for the average computer user to not violate some copyright law every time he is on the Internet. For example, if you accidentally right click your mouse on some useless picture while browsing the web, you are a criminal. And this is the weakness of the new legislative bill — virtually every Internet surfer is guilty a priori. If the proposed amendments become law, the state will have the luxury of jailing any citizen it wants at any moment, and they would have every legal justification for doing so.

    In addition to surfers, Internet providers would also be liable. Since they are obligated to spy on the Internet activities of their customers day and night, if even a single user posts pirated material on the network the provider could have problems with the law. The only safe path for the provider to take is to be as vigilant as possible, informing the authorities on even the slightest possible copyright violation. This could mean that thousands of web sites and blogs would be wiped out.

    But please don’t think that Duma deputies are inhumane. They have included two mitigating circumstances in the bill that could help Internet users evade a prison sentence. First, you can claim that the alleged copyright violation was caused by “necessary” circumstances. The only problem is that “necessary” is not clearly defined. Imagine court proceedings in which the accused testifies, “My grandmother was suffering from depression and wanted to take her own life. After I downloaded and played her favorite music for her, she decided to live a little longer.” The jury members break into tears and find the defendant innocent.

    Second, a person can evade prosecution if he can prove that he is a comedian. The bill allows for free use of other people’s intellectual property if it is being used as a parody. Now that’s funny, isn’t it?

    And for all of the people who rely on the Internet for automatic translations from English to Russian, the legislation has tried to create a loophole for your free use of these programs in accordance with World Trade Organization rules.

    It appears that WTO membership is a key motivation behind this legislations. For the sake of this prize, lawmakers are willing to sacrifice anything, from citizens’ rights to common sense.

    At the same time, there could be an added bonus for our security siloviki. They also see plenty of opportunities to increase their surveillance of Russians’ Internet activities under the pretext of complying with this new copyright law, of course. As everyone knows, Russia is a free, democratic country, and therefore nobody is thrown in prison because of his political views. But I have a sneaking suspicion that only the Kremlin’s political foes will be the ones who are caught violating this law.

    The only hurdle left for this bill to become law is for it to pass the third reading in the Duma. Usually, the third reading is only for eliminating typos. In this case, you could say the entire legislation is one enormous typographical error.

    Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute of Globalization Studies.

    O’Reilly Radar

    That’s pretty much my view, too. DVDs (mentioned in the note at the start) became a big boon for the studios, once their crazy ideas about self-destructing Divx discs went the way of the Dodo. The studios have a very long history of betting against technology people want, and on technology people don’t want. This is just another such case. The technology people want always wins in the end — no duh — and usually benefits the businesses who fought that technology to the death. Here’s hoping the technology people want — Boxee — doesn’t wind up benefiting the studios fighting it now.

    TorrentFreak

    Mininova’s one million torrents by category

    So how does Mininova compare to the competition, one might ask. Well the Pirate Bay has 765,000 torrents on their site, although they track twice as many files. IsoHunt currently indexes 1,734,435 torrents, and Torrentz searches through 4,070,699. The latter is a meta-search engine though, and doesn’t host any files of its own.

    TechCrunch

    Earlier today we detailed the chaotic history and recent trouble at TotalMusic, an experimental music initiative created by Sony BMG and Universal Music Group designed to rethink the way music was streamed on the web. After a round of layoffs and the shutdown of Ruckus, a streaming music service acquired by TotalMusic last year, the company looked like it was in bad shape. In what will likely be the most official statement we’ll get, Jason Herskowitz, the company’s VP of Product Management, has confirmed in a blog post that the music labels have indeed pulled the plug on TotalMusic

    Ars Technica

    Have you ever wondered how many people around the globe are seeding
    and leeching torrents? The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular torrent
    trackers, has published an interactive map
    with data for each country, both in terms of an exact percentage of
    users and how many connections are going through that country at any
    given time. The statistics may not give a complete picture of P2P
    activity across the globe, but they do offer some insights into habits
    of different users.

    The data points, laid over a Google Map, are shaped and colored
    depending on how many connections are coming out of each location. For
    example, as of publication time, about 5.515 percent of all TPB
    connections are coming from the US, while Canada sits at 2.949 percent
    and Japan at 6.553 percent. China, which is the only country that gets
    the little bonfire icon, represents a whopping 34.822 percent of all
    TPB connections at the moment.

    Have you ever wondered how many people around the globe are seeding and leeching torrents? The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular torrent trackers, has published an interactive map with data for each country, both in terms of an exact percentage of users and how many connections are going through that country at any given time. The statistics may not give a complete picture of P2P activity across the globe, but they do offer some insights into habits of different users.

    The data points, laid over a Google Map, are shaped and colored depending on how many connections are coming out of each location. For example, as of publication time, about 5.515 percent of all TPB connections are coming from the US, while Canada sits at 2.949 percent and Japan at 6.553 percent. China, which is the only country that gets the little bonfire icon, represents a whopping 34.822 percent of all TPB connections at the moment.

    TorrentFreak

    French record labels have received the green light to sue four US-based companies that develop P2P applications, including the BitTorrent client Vuze, Limewire and Morpheus. Shareaza is the fourth application, for which the labels are going after the open source development platform SourceForge.

    irishtimes.com

    A British publisher has come up with the idea of selling reprints of Nazi newspapers to German customers.

    You can imagine the sales pitch: “Week by week, your collection will grow into a fascinating overview of the virulent propaganda that polluted a nation’s psyche and started a war that brought Europe to its knees.”

    The Zeitungszeugen(Newspaper Witnesses) series, juxtaposing reprints with modern analysis and comment, has been a huge hit and the first issue, including pages from Der Angriff– editor Joseph Goebbels – has all but sold out in the German capital.

    And so, as the rest of the world reads about the inauguration of US President-elect Barack Obama this week, tens of thousands of Zeitungszeugenreaders will be catching up with Der Angriff’saccount of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933.

    “We want to give people the opportunity to form their own picture not only of the political events,” says series editor, historian Sandra Paweronschitz, “but also of the era in which these events took place and the attitudes to life at that time, for example by reading the classifieds or the film guide.”

    Historian Wolfgang Benz, who worked on the project, described the reprints of original material as less harmful than the endless series of slick documentaries that run on German television every night.

    But involving several leading German historians in the project hasn’t placated Germany’s Jewish community. Ralph Giordano, one of Germany’s most prominent Holocaust survivors, suggested that the series was an indication that “Hitler was defeated militarily, but not intellectually”.

    On Friday evening, the Bavarian state government slapped a ban on the project just as publishers readied issue two – a reprint of the vitriolic Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party paper.

    Officials in Munich announced that the publication was a breach of copyright it has held since absorbing the assets of the main Nazi publishing house, Eher, in 1945.

    The publishers of Zeitungszeugenhave admitted they were aware of the copyright, but declined to apply for permission for fear of being refused.

    Now the company has vowed to fight a ban they call “an attack on press freedom”.

    That could lead to an interesting legal battle, as some legal observers in Germany have claimed the copyright on the Nazi newspapers has long since expired.

    It is the latest round in a long-running battle in Germany about whether to keep Nazi documents locked up or to distribute them for educational purposes.

    Last year, leading historians called on the Munich government to permit a new German-language publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, to which it also holds the rights.

    They want to see an annotated version on sale before the work enters the public domain in 2015. Then, 70 years after the dictator’s death, far-right fringe parties in Germany plan to flood the country with their own cheap copies of the work.

    Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

    “AT&T and Comcast, two of the nation’s largest Internet service providers, are expected to be among a group of ISPs that will cooperate with the music industry in battling illegal file sharing, three sources close to the companies told CNET News. The RIAA said last month that it had enlisted the help of ISPs as part of a new antipiracy campaign. The RIAA has declined to identify which ISPs or how many. It’s important to note that none of the half dozen or so ISPs involved has signed agreements. But as it stands, AT&T and Comcast are among the companies that have indicated they wish to participate in what the RIAA calls a ‘graduated response program.'”

    Lawrence Lessig | January 8th | ColbertNation.com

    .cc_box a:hover .cc_home{background:url(‘http://www.comedycentral.com/comedycentral/video/assets/syndicated-logo-over.png’) !important;}.cc_links a{color:#b9b9b9;text-decoration:none;}.cc_show a{color:#707070;text-decoration:none;}.cc_title a{color:#868686;text-decoration:none;}.cc_links a:hover{color:#67bee2;text-decoration:underline;}

    Sports Night season 1 episode 4 clip 2
    Happy birthday is copyrighted

    Soundalikes and Disrupted Pleasures

    NewTeeVee

    The accelerating economic downturn is taking its toll on the entertainment industry, with DVD sales lagging and Blu-ray sales disappointing, according to the New York Times. DVD sales are down 4 percent so far this year, the paper reports, citing data collected by Warner Brothers. The results for the third quarter are even worse, with a 9 percent drop overall and a steep 22 percent decline for new titles, according to numbers from Nielsen VideoScan quoted by the Times.

    Meanwhile, free online content is doing better than ever. Hulu attracted 5.3 million unique visitors in October, a nearly 90 percent surge over the previous month. The Pirate Bay doubled the number of simultaneously connected users within the last six months, reaching a total of 25 million peers in November. The site’s admins apparently couldn’t quite believe their logs either, asking somewhat perplexed: “Wtf is going on(?)” The answer, in short, is this: We are in a recession.

    NYTimes.com

    The median time between a film’s U.S. premiere and its leak online now stands at 11 days, up from five days in 2008 and a single day in 2005. The reason for this seems to be that there are fewer and fewer so-called “cam” releases, movies recorded by people with their camcorders in theaters. Maybe all those bag checks, intimidating security guards and night vision goggles actually do have an effect.

    The number of cam releases has fallen sharply this year, according to Waxy’s data. Scene release sites like VCDQuality lists just eight of them, which means that only 30 percent of all movies nominated were filmed in theaters. Last year, the number was still around 55 percent, and 2007 it was closer to 70 percent.

    Hollywood has long fought cam piracy, and some of the measures being used against it made it into the headlines last year. Authorities arrested a man trying to videotape The Dark Knight in Kansas last July, and theater owners started to use night vision goggles in UK theaters to prevent the leak of Quantum of Solace.

    So are the goggles working? While Waxy’s data seems to show that they are, using the Oscars as an indicator for overall piracy trends is fraught with problems. The awards do feature some of the more popular mainstream movies, but big blockbusters like Mall Cop won’t be nominated anytime soon. Smaller movies, on the other hand, may garner a few nominations, but they lack big audience numbers, both in theaters and on P2P networks.

    This seems to be especially true for the 2009 nominations. The list only features one or two real blockbusters; movies like Rachel Getting Married, meanwhile, might fill an indie theater or two, but the film still hasn’t shown up on P2P networks at all. Maybe cammers and the associated release groups just don’t like indie fare.

    Either way, any success on the anti-piracy front is temporary at best. The fact is that most movies are available in DVD quality online long before the original DVDs show up on retail shelves, which results in significant declines in DVD sales numbers.

    Mashable

    Have you checked out Monty Python’s YouTube channel? It’s got a selection of their brilliant (as always) clips, and it’s got links to buy their DVDs on Amazon. As those crazy Monty Python dudes put it,

    “We’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”

    And you know what? Despite the entertainment industry’s constant cries about how bad they’re doing, it works. As we wrote yesterday, Monty Python’s DVDs climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.

    Waxy.org

    Out of 26 nominated films, an incredible 23 films are already available in DVD quality on nomination day, ripped either from the screeners or the retail DVDs.

    NYTimes.com

    After years of futile efforts to stop digital pirates from copying its music, the music business has started to copy the pirates.

    An entrance on Sunday at the music industry’s conference in France, where Nokia said it was expanding Comes With Music.

    Online and mobile services offering listeners unlimited “free” access to millions of songs are set to proliferate in the coming months, according to music industry executives.

    Unlike illegal file-sharing services, which the music industry says are responsible for billions of dollars in lost sales, these new offerings are perfectly legal. The services are not really free, but payment is included in the cost of, say, a new cellphone or a broadband Internet access contract, so the cost to the consumer is disguised. And, unlike pirate sites, these services provide revenue to the music companies.

    “Two thousand nine should be the year when the music industry stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb,” said Feargal Sharkey, a former punk rocker who now heads UK Music, a trade group for the British music industry.

    Slashdot

    “In a study conducted by TNO for the Dutch government the economic effects of filesharing are found to be positive. According to the 146 page report (available for download, but in Dutch) filesharing is good for the prosperity of the Dutch: with filesharing more media are available, even though this costs the media industry some profit. One of the most noticeable conclusions is that downloading and buying are not mutually exclusive: downloaders on average buy just as much music as non-downloaders, but they buy more DVD’s and games then people who don’t download. They also tend to visit more concerts and buy more merchandise.”

    GameDaily

    The final sacred cow that Holtman took a stab at was the issue of piracy. “There’s a big business feeling that there’s piracy,” he says. But the truth is: “Pirates are underserved customers.”

    “When you think about it that way, you think, ‘Oh my gosh, I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it.'”

    “We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia,” Holtman says of Valve. “The reason people pirated things in Russia,” he explains, “is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television — they say ‘Man, I want to play that game so bad,’ but the publishers respond ‘you can play that game in six months…maybe.’ “

    “We found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly,” Holtman says, explaining that Valve makes sure their games are on the shelves in Moscow and St. Petersberg, in Russian, when they release it to North America and Western Europe.

    There are, concludes Holtman, “tons of undiscovered customers,” because publishers look very narrowly at the Western market.

    TorrentFreak

    Every year, RIAA’s global partner IFPI
    publishes a digital music report, which can be best described as a one
    sided view of the state of digital music consumption. For several years
    in a row the report has shown that the sales figures of digital music
    have gone up, but still, the industry continues to blame piracy for a
    loss in overall revenue.

    One of the key statistics that is hyped
    every year, is the piracy ratio of downloaded music. Just as last year,
    IFPI estimates that 95% of all downloads are illegal, without giving a
    proper source for this figure. Interestingly, those who take a closer
    look at the full report (pdf), will see that only 10% of the claimed illegal downloads are seen as a loss in sales.

    Every year, RIAA’s global partner IFPI publishes a digital music report, which can be best described as a one sided view of the state of digital music consumption. For several years in a row the report has shown that the sales figures of digital music have gone up, but still, the industry continues to blame piracy for a loss in overall revenue.

    One of the key statistics that is hyped every year, is the piracy ratio of downloaded music. Just as last year, IFPI estimates that 95% of all downloads are illegal, without giving a proper source for this figure. Interestingly, those who take a closer look at the full report (pdf), will see that only 10% of the claimed illegal downloads are seen as a loss in sales.

    The Register

    A new report suggests that Apple and Tesco, not P2P file sharers, should take the most blame for the woes of the British music industry.

    The report, prepared privately by consultants Capgemini for the Value Recognition Strategy working group, set out to examine the “value gap”, the amount sound recordings revenue has fallen in the UK since 2004. The report remains confidential, but details are starting to emerge.

    The consultants suggest that “format changes” and price pressure from discounted CDs on sale in supermarkets, are most to blame for this “value gap”.

    However, the report gives lie [not “life”, as a typo suggested – ed.] to the idea that P2P file sharing stimulates demand for sales, or is even a neutral factor. This idea has given comfort to the powerful anti-copyright lobby, backed by internet users who want digital music for free – and find endless justifications to avoid paying for it.

    Capgemini calculates that of £480m lost to the industry since 2004, £368m was the result of format changes: principally the unbundling of the CD into an “a la carte” selection of digital songs. Of the remainder, 18 per cent was lost to piracy.

    Add this to the more recent news from p2pnet.net:

    “It is a basic principle of economics that as price increases,
    demand decreases. Customers who download music and movies for free
    would not necessarily spend money to acquire the same product.”

    p2pnet has been saying that for years,
    pointing out RIAA and MPAA claims that files shared equal sales lost
    are pure fiction dreamed up to enable corporate entertainment cartels
    to attack their own customers in a bid to gain control of how, and by
    whom, product is managed and distributed online.

    Now, in a 16-page opinion, “District Judge James P. Jones, sitting
    in the Western Disrict of Virginia, denied the RIAA’s request for
    restitution, holding the RIAA’s reasoning to be unsound,” says Recording Industry vs The People.

    a href=”http://torrentfreak.com/music-piracy-not-that-bad-industry-says-090118/”TorrentFreak/a:blockquoteEvery year, RIAA’s global partner IFPI publishes a digital music report, which can be best described as a one sided view of the state of digital music consumption. For several years in a row the report has shown that the sales figures of digital music have gone up, but still, the industry continues to blame piracy for a loss in overall revenue. One of the key statistics that is hyped every year, is the piracy ratio of downloaded music. Just as last year, IFPI estimates that 95% of all downloads are illegal, without giving a proper source for this figure. Interestingly, those who take a closer look at the full report (pdf), will see that only 10% of the claimed illegal downloads are seen as a loss in sales./blockquote

    guardian.co.uk

    I’m here to praise the music fanatic who holds down a reasonable if unexciting job, turning in a decent day’s work after spending the night in a recording studio or driving back from a gig in Stoke.It is this kind of musician – dedicated, self-sacrificing, self-disciplined – whose efforts are the lifeblood of a host of vibrant music scenes and who will be least affected by the current turmoil in the music industry. Any money they made was only ever ploughed back into music. Lower revenues will certainly make them dig deeper and sacrifice more for their art, but it will not stop the music.

    What the free music revolution threatens is not music per se, but the idea that you have to be a musician full time to be truly creative. You don’t. Too often the commercially viable musician sinks into an effete preciousness that is the death knell of creativity. Being a “full time” musician didn’t seem to spur Axl Rose into making Chinese Democracy any quicker.

    It is time that the importance of day job-supported musicians was more widely recognised – for it is they who will ensure that music will survive the death of the music industry.

    David Barrett says on Pho

    Mininova, founded in January 2005, soon became one of the most successful torrent sites. The site has grown steadily over recent months, and for a few weeks now the millions of daily users have been downloading well over 10 million torrents a day.

    In 2008 the site passed several milestones, and in December Mininova broke a new record of 44.7 million unique visitors in one month. More users download more torrents, and just about every three to four months the site added another million torrent downloads to its counter. Today, just a few days into 2009, Mininova is close to recording the 7 billionth download, a double up compared to a year ago.

    Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that he expects this growth to continue in the new year. “Traffic is still growing according to Quantcast and Google Analytics. Unless something drastically changes, I see no reason why this will be different in 2009,” he commented. – Torrentfreak

    In comparison, iTunes traffic:

    • iTunes has now sold six billion songs (it crossed the 5 billion mark last June).
    • Over 10 million different tracks are available on iTunes.
    • Starting today, 8 million songs are DRM-free, and all 10 million will be DRM free by the end of March.
    • There are now over 75 million accounts on iTunes linked to credit cards.
    • In fiscal year 2008, Apple sold 9.7 million Macs
    • Mac sales grew twice as fast as the overall PC market.

    The last billion songs took about five and half months to sell, which was the same pace more or less that it took Apple to get to its fourth billion (January, 2008) and fifth billion songs (June, 2008). So iTunes sales are no longer accelerating, despite many more iPhones and iPods out there. It makes you wonder what the saturation point is for consumers buying songs from iTunes. One thing to cheer about, DRM is now officially dead (it looks like Apple traded variable pricing for getting rid of DRM), but I’m not sure that is going to spur sales much. – Techcrunch

    Telegraph

    The extremely rare account chronicles a three-year round-the world voyage of the swashbuckling privateer Capt Woodes Rogers, who made a fortune pillaging from pirate ships and Spanish galleons.

    During that journey, Rogers, who was a friend of the author Daniel Defoe, even stopped off at a remote Pacific island and found castaway Alexander Selkirk, who inspired the character and book Robinson Crusoe. He said he found him “wild-looking” and wearing “goatskins”, adding: “He had with him his clothes and bedding, with a firelock, some powder, bullets and tobacco, a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, a Bible and books.”

    Rogers, who left Britain in 1708, had been tasked with “victimising” pirates targeting his fellow British merchants.

    Commanding two 36-gun ships, the Duke and the Duchess, and 333 men, he sailed the South Seas, the East Indies and the Cape of Good Hope, going about his task with great gusto.

    His finest catch was the prized vessel The Great Manila, a Spanish trading ship that sailed across the Pacific with a valuable cargo, including precious stones and exotic silks worth $2 million.

    In 1717, he was appointed the governor of the Behamas by King George I and played a major role in ridding the islands of 2,000 pirates, including Edward Teach, also called Blackbeard. He was pursued by Rogers’ forces and killed.

    The slogan of his epic voyage, “Piracy expelled, commerce restored”, remained the islands’ own motto until independence was declared in 1973.

    It is thought only a hundred copies of his book, A Cruising Voyage Around the World, were printed seven years after Rogers completed his odyssey. One was recently found in a loft in Bristol, where Rogers’ was based, and is expected to fetch £3,000 when it is auctioned on January 21st.

    FT.com / Companies

    EMI, owned by Terra Firma, the private equity group, said full year digital revenues rose 29 per cent to £166m, while Universal, owned by Vivendi, reported 33 per cent growth in digital revenue for the first nine months of its financial year, saying in September it believed digital initiatives could soon return the music industry to growth.

    22 December 2008 – New Scientist

    Will Page and Gary Eggleton at the MCPS-PRS Alliance – a UK body that collects royalties for musicians when their songs are played on air or downloaded – and Andrew Bud from the cellphone software company mBlox have analysed a year’s worth of downloads from a well-known internet music store. They found that of the 13 million tracks available, 52,000 – just 0.4 per cent – accounted for 80 per cent of downloads.

    Recording Industry vs. The People

    In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, the defendant has moved for all court proceedings to be televised over the internet through Courtroom View Network. The motion argues:

    Information
    is the currency of democracy, sunshine laws open government. The
    federal court is open not only as a court of justice but a forum of
    civic education. WE the PEOPLE are the ultimate check in our
    constitutional system of checks and balances, we the people of the
    integrated media space opened and connected by the net in a public
    domain. Net access will allow an intelligent public domain to shape
    itself by attending and engaging in a public trial of issues
    conflicting our society.

    Net access to this litigation will
    allow an interested and growingly sophisticated public to understand
    the RIAA’s education campaign. Surely education is the purpose of the
    Digital Deterrence Act of 1999, the constitutionality of which we are
    challenging. How can RIAA object? Yet they do, fear of sunlight shone
    upon them.

    Net access will allow demonstration by the parties to
    the jury of the nature and context of the copyright infringement with
    which Joel Tenenbaum is charged.

    Net access will allow an
    intelligent public domain to shape itself by attending and engaging a
    public trial prosecuted by a dying CD industry against a defendant who
    did what comes naturally to digital kids.

    Net access will allow
    educational and public media institutions to build a digital archive
    and resource for understanding law akin to Jonathan Harr’s A Civil
    Action reconceived in execution for legal pedagogy in a digital age,
    Another Civil Action. The immediacy of net-based access to court
    opinions already allows lawyers, professors, students, and reporters to
    better keep abreast of the most recent legal developments, but none
    with the immediacy the Net allows.

    If the motion is granted, it will be the first RIAA case of which we are aware to be televised.

    Motion and memorandum of law in support of internet audio-visual coverage
    Declaration of John Shin
    Declaration of Charles Nesson

    Recording Industry vs. The People

    According to a report on Wired.com, the RIAA spokesman claims that the RIAA has not filed any new lawsuits “for months”; according to the Wall Street Journal report
    the RIAA stopped filing mass lawsuits “early this fall”; and the
    Associated Press was apparently told that the RIAA had stopped bringing
    new lawsuits in August.

    Being very familiar with the RIAA’s penchant for “misspeaking”,
    even when under oath, I investigated the matter a bit, and learned that
    a large number of suits have been brought by the RIAA quite recently,
    one as recently as this Monday. Here are just a few. Those marked green were contributed by some of our great readers:

    TweakGuides.com

    PC Game Piracy Examined
    [Page 4] The Scale of Piracy

    TweakGuides.com

    PC Game Piracy Examined
    [Page 4] The Scale of Piracy

    Webisztán –

    Első látásra a hazai Momu.hu (More Music) koncepciója nekem gyanús. Az oldalon regisztráció után egy mp3 adatbázisban keresgélve összeállíthatom a saját playlistemet (rejtélyes okból minimum öt számnak lennie kell benne), és hallgathatom. A készítők szerint ez azért legális, mert csak sorban hallgathatom meg a számokat, nem ugrálhatok köztük és nem tekerhetek bele a felvételekbe. Így az egész egy online rádióként működik, – legalábbis szerintük – jogszerűen. Persze a működés könnyen kicselezhető, elég csak összeválogatni tetszőleges négy számot, és mindig az utolsóként hozzáadni amit hallgatni akarunk, mivel azt játssza le elsőnek.

    Hogy a Momu.hu mennyi jogdíjat fizet a rádióadásokért, azt nem tudom, de abból ítélve nem sokat, hogy az oldalon sehol nem érhető el adat az oldal működtetőjéről, adatfelhasználási elveiről, nincs kapcsolatfelvételi lehetőség, sőt ha már regisztráltunk, tagságunk törlésére sincs lehetőség.

    Slyck News

    If you could total the quantity of unlicensed tracks within the vastness of the P2P community, then apply a reasonable fee to those tracks, you would end up with a very large monetary number. $10 billion? $50 billion? Just how much untapped money, relevant to the music industry, is circulating in the P2P community? MultiMedia Intelligence, who recently stated P2P growth will top 400% in 5 years, has pegged a monetary number to unlicensed music. The number: $69 billion.

    Intellectual Property Watch

    By David Cronin for Intellectual Property Watch
    BRUSSELS – Europe’s copyright rules are ill-suited to an age when millions of music files can be accessed at the click of a mouse, a Brussels conference has been told.

    About eight million tracks by musicians from a wide variety of genres can now be listened to via the internet, a figure that is projected to rise to 12 million by 2012. With the entertainment industry estimating that 90 percent of music downloads are illegal and sales of CDs having declined sharply over the past few years, some technology firms are urging that the whole basis of copyright law needs to be rethought.

    Kurt Einzinger, president of the Internet Service Providers Association (EuroISPA), believes that attitudes to music have changed so fundamentally that the “established copyright regime is not fit for the internet.”

    “I personally have LPs [records] of The Rolling Stones and Cream at home,” he said. “But my kids get a piece of music and they listen to [it] and that’s it. They don’t keep it. They wouldn’t pay one euro or one dollar for listening one time to a piece of music.”

    While acknowledging that there is a “culture of disrespect for copyright rules,” he added that “when downloading, people don’t feel they are illegal, they don’t feel they are doing something wrong.”

    Einzinger was speaking at a conference organised by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that took place in Brussels on November 24 and 25.

    A markedly different view was offered by Feargal Sharkey, former singer with Irish punk-rock band The Undertones.

    Now chief executive of UK Music, which represents artists, record companies, managers and royalty collecting societies, Sharkey contended that the “voice of the creator is frequently overlooked” in the debate about the internet.

    The proliferation of free downloading, he said, is a contributory factor to the often meagre income of artists, citing estimates that more than 80 percent of musicians in Britain earn less than €15,000 euros per year.

    “The copyright system was introduced to protect true originality,” he added, stating that freedom of expression does not confer “a freedom to steal and plagiarise.”

    A ‘memorandum of understanding’ between the British government, the recording industry and technology firms signed during July aims to set up new business models, which allow listeners access to music using whichever means they prefer but in a way that “the creator gets paid,” according to Sharkey.

    Jean Bergevin, a European Commission official handling single market issues, suggested there is considerable confusion about how copyright legislation applies.

    Many internet service providers have claimed that they merely host data and should not be held responsible for whether its content violates copyright law. But Bergevin stressed that the European Union’s directive on electronic commerce, which dates from 2000, does not make such firms “fully exempt from liability.” Once they receive knowledge that copyright is not being respected, they are supposed to take action. Yet he said that the issue of how courts should interpret what constitutes knowledge in such cases is “an issue that might require some clarification.”

    His colleague Jean-Eric de Cockborne, an official dealing with audiovisual policy, described internet piracy as “a massive problem.” While he insisted that “doing nothing is not an option,” he argued that it would be premature to introduce fresh laws.

    “It is unlikely that new punitive legislation will be adopted,” he added. “There is a very strong political view on the need to balance the protection of intellectual property rights with other fundamental rights, in particular data protection and the right to information.”

    Jürgen Becker, vice-president of GEMA (the society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights in Germany), complained that “copyright is not being adequately protected online” and that a “crisis of copyright” has been taking place for the past two decades. His organisation, he noted, has initiated legal action in Germany in a bid to pressurise internet firms into blocking access to websites which breach copyright rules.

    “All rights-owners agree that they do not wish to put up with this any longer,” he said. “But the options open to them in this respect are limited. Only lawmakers – both national and European – are in a position to remedy the situation.”

    Zeropiad

    Kevin Bermeister who, along with Nikki Hemming, created the KaZaA file-sharing software and was sued for millions by the RIAA from 2004 to 2006, has now partnered with Michael Speck who ran the RIAA’s case as the head of its anti-piracy arm, Music Industry Piracy Investigations, have teamed up at Brilliant Digital Entertainment to fight online piracy.

    The company has developed software which will run on an ISPs network
    and enable the “instantaneous conversion of infringing activity into
    legitimate content transactions.” In other words, instead of seeing
    search results for illegally free copyrighted material users will
    instead see legal copies available for instant purchase.

    The incentive for the ISPs to run the software is that they are
    promised a share of the revenue. The legal download is delivered by the
    ISP which then simply adds a charge for it to the customer’s monthly
    Internet bill.

    “When the architecture of the internet that has our technology
    recognises one of those proven illicit files, it blocks it, disconnects
    the link to it and adds to the search results the opportunity to
    purchase the legitimate material,” said Mr. Speck.

    “At that point there is no other information collected – the entire
    action revolves around the identification of the content and action
    taken against illicit content; there’s an absolute protection of
    privacy.”

    NYTimes.com

    Since 2004, Google has been working with university and research libraries to create digital scans of their collections. Of the approximately seven million books that Google has already scanned, four million to five million are out of print.

    Google now makes the content of those books available in its book search service but shows only snippets of text, unless it has permission from the copyright holder to show more.

    Under the agreement, Google will now show up to 20 percent of the text at no charge to users. It will also make the entire book available online for a fee. Universities, libraries and other organizations will be able to buy subscriptions that make entire collections of those books available to their visitors.

    Ars Technica

    If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property policy in the United States, you’ll hear two numbers invoked over and over again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of U.S. jobs supposedly lost to intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP infringement to the U.S. economy. These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus.

    Music Ally

    Warner Chappell will today reveal details of their view of the Radiohead licensing experiment at the “You Are in Control” conference in Iceland, including total sales figures of more than three million for ‘In Rainbows’.

    The UK-based branch of the publishing company licensed all digital rights including master recording rights and image and likeness rights on behalf of the band in a groundbreaking move for them as well as the band.

    Today Warner Chappell’s Head of Business Affairs Jane Dyball will reveal that the digital publishing income from the first licence (for the Radiohead pay what you want site) alone dwarfed all the band’s previous digital publishing income and made a “material difference” to Warner Chappell UK’s digital income.

    The publisher will also confirm that Radiohead had made more money before ‘In Rainbows’ was physically released than they made in total on the previous album ‘Hail To the Thief’. It should be pointed out that Radiohead’s existing digital income was of course low, because they had withheld licensing the likes of iTunes.

    The topline figure, though, is that there were three million purchases of In Rainbows, including physical CDs, box-sets, and all downloads – including those from the band’s own website and from other digital music stores.

    Kosmopolit

    What happened with the “Telecoms Package” (that I have mentioned here and here)? It seems that most of the worrying amendments regarding copyright issues (especially the three strikes approach) were not adopted by the European Parliament. A detailed analysis by La Quadrature du Net will be published in the next days. However, it was an impressive example of digital citizen lobbyism. If you read German head over to netzpolitik.org and heise.de. EurActiv has a long and rather general article on the whole initiative. But it is true: the Internet is rather quiet about this success in the European Parliament as A Fistful of Euros notes. Bashing the EU is much easier, I guess.

    Boing Boing

    Hey suckers! Did you buy DRM music from Wal*Mart instead of downloading MP3s for free from the P2P networks? Well, they’re repaying your honesty by taking away your music. Unless you go through a bunch of hoops (that you may never find out about, if you’ve changed email addresses or if you’re not a very technical person), your music will no longer be playable after October 9th.

    NYTimes.com

    so far, in the eyes of the world, the pirates had been misunderstood. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” he said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”

    The piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago, Somali officials said, as a response to illegal fishing. Somalia’s central government imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the shoreline, Somalia’s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets from around the world. Somali fishermen armed themselves and turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding that they pay a tax.

    “From there, they got greedy,” said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. “They starting attacking everyone.”

    Quart

    Közismert és széles körben bírált gyakorlata az RIAA szervezetnek, hogy illegális letöltés és fáljmegosztás vádjával rengeteg eljárást indított az elmúlt években – ezek jó része peren kívüli megállapodással zárult le, bár nem mindegyik. Kevés védőügyvéd van, aki vállalja ezeket az ügyeket; egyikük a képen látható Ray Beckerman, aki Recording Industry vs The People címmel blogot is ír. Most pedig őt magát fogta perbe az RIAA. Azt szeretnék elérni, hogy bíróság ítélje el a tevékenységét és kötelezze pénzbüntetés megfizetésére.

    Az egyik vád éppen a bloggal kapcsolatos: eszerint Beckerman rendszeresen feltett ide részleteket az éppen folyó ügyekkel kapcsolatban, ezzel próbálva befolyásolni nemcsak a bírósági eljárást, hanem a közvéleményt is, és “szégyenbe hozni a felpereseket”. Másfelől pedig azzal vádolják az ügyvédet, hogy bizonyos ügyekben hamis állításokat tett, így terelve téves irányba a nyomozást, hogy az RIAA ügyészei számára nehezebb legyen a vonatkozó bizonyítékok beszerzése. Az interneten különféle blogokban olvasható híradások természetesen elfogultak, mégpedig az RIAA ellen – mindenesetre több helyütt olvastuk, hogy a lemezipari szervezet vádjai “nevetségesek”, főleg ami a bloggerkedést illeti. Főleg, hogy maga az RIAA is részben pr-tevékenységként, vagyis “felvilágosító kampányként” jellemzi pereskedéseit.

    Technology | Reuters

    NEW YORK (Reuters) – NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co, is teaming up with Google Inc on a multi-year partnership in which Google will act as a broker to sell TV advertising on some NBC cable channels.

    In a joint statement, the two companies said NBC Universal will offer advertising time from several of its cable networks for Google to sell advertising through its Google TV Ads service.

    The deal, set to go into effect in coming months, covers advertising inventory on Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, Sleuth, and Chiller, with more NBC Universal channels possible in the future, the companies said.

    “Advertisers using the Google TV Ads platform can reach NBCU Cable’s national audience and gain access to viewership data at an unprecedented scale,” the NBC Universal and Google statement said.

    Mike Pilot, president of NBC Universal sales and marketing, and Tim Armstrong, Google’s president of advertising and commerce for North America, said that the partnership would make TV ads more accountable.

    Through an existing deal with DISH Network, the Google TV Ads service can report second-by-second TV usage data allowing advertisers to measure viewership of their ads more precisely. The NBC-Google partnership extrapolates on the data supplied by Dish set-top boxes in millions of U.S. homes.

    NBC Universal and Google have also agreed to work together to adapt the Google TV Ad service for use in local TV markets. They are also collaborating on custom marketing and research projects using Google TV Ads to survey audience trends.

    Epicenter from Wired.com

    Less than 24 hours after the season premiere of Prison Break aired on Fox on Monday, it was downloaded close to one million times, according to TorrentFreak.

    Prison Break fans didn’t have to download the show illegally. The show is readily available to stream legitimately on both Hulu and Fox.com, where viewers have to sit through a few commercial breaks, but they can still watch the entire episode legally.

    [Hulu won’t disclose how many people viewed Prison Break on the site on Monday, but the show is one of the top 5 most-popular shows on Hulu today, and it was the most-popular show yesterday. There’s no way of knowing, though, whether the program was watched more on Hulu than it was downloaded illegally.]

    The fact that one million people downloaded the show within 24 hours — a little less than one-sixth of the 6.5 million people who watched Prison Break on TV on Monday night — proves, though, that P2P isn’t going away just because there are legal alternatives now.

    “This is a group of people who define themselves in part by the technology they use and the application of that technology,” says Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight Research. “Chances are that this is only happening in a defined age group. You’d be hard-pressed to find 60 year-old guys passing this stuff off to their buddies.”

    Even if file sharers make up a small slice of the population, the impact is not insignificant. Could networks win these viewers back? The most common complaint about big media companies over the last decade is that they’ve been slow to provide legal alternatives. In this case, however, Fox has gone to great lengths to give viewers an option to watch programs legally online, but die-hard file sharers still aren’t biting.

    “I think a lot of the problem is that the content providers have typically been using business models that extend backwards in time. They have not been able to adapt their intellectual property and business processes to the new reality — essentially that all types of information and media are going to find their way on to a network and will be widely distributed,” says Rosenberg. “Look at the music industry. They simply didn’t have a formula for preventing file sharing until Apple taught them how to do it.”

    Many legal alternatives could be improved, too, says Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, an online media measurement company. Content providers have been slow to offer legal streaming options in many international markets, and there still aren’t many networks that let users actually download files, which is a bummer for collectors, says Garland.

    Also, the networks haven’t necessarily improved upon the experience on pirated sites, so users don’t have much incentive to leave those sites.

    “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” says Garland. “Sites like Mininova or Pirate Bay have been around long before there was Hulu, and why should they stop using a familiar option that works well?”

    AfterDawn

    According to new data figures from PlusNet, P2P traffic has declined significantly over the past year and legal, streaming content has grown exponentially.

    The figures show that P2P traffic is down 8.75 percent year-on-year while streaming content traffic is up 170 percent over the same period. More notably, streaming content traffic is rising almost 9 percent per month, at a very steady pace. PlusNet says with P2P traffic down for the year, P2P only accounts for 26 percent of total Internet traffic, down from an all time high of 36 percent last year.

    The numbers can only mean good things for the industry which has long used P2P traffic as an excuse to block high bandwidth users or charge more for those who use excessive amounts of bandwidth. If these numbers prove accurate, then it seems customers are happy viewing their content legally and the media industry is doing a good job in getting content easily available to consumers who otherwise had no alternative.

    Threat Level from Wired.com

    It was five years ago Monday the Recording Industry Association of America began its massive litigation campaign that now includes more than 30,000 lawsuits targeting alleged copyright scofflaws on peer-to-peer networks.

    Today, the RIAA — the lobbying group for the world’s big four music companies, Sony BMG, Universal Music, EMI and Warner Music — admits that the lawsuits are largely a public relations effort, aimed at striking fear into the hearts of would-be downloaders. Spokeswoman Cara Duckworth of the RIAA says the lawsuits have spawned a “general sense of awareness” that file sharing copyrighted music without authorization is “illegal.”

    “It costs more to hire a lawyer to defend these cases than take the
    settlement,” agrees Lory Lybeck, a Washington State attorney, who is
    leading a prospective class-action against the RIAA for engaging in
    what he says is “sham” litigation tactics. “That’s an important part of
    what’s going on. The recording industry is setting a price where you
    know they cannot hire lawyers. It’s a pretty well-designed system
    whereby people are not allowed any effective participation in one of
    the three prongs in the federal government.”

    NME.COM

    Estelle has seen her latest album, ‘Shine’, and single ‘American Boy’, plummet in the US charts after they were removed from download site iTunes in the country.

    The Wall Street Journal reports that Estelle’s record label, Warner, removed the releases from iTunes in an attempt to encourage fans to buy physical copies of them instead – which earn more money for the company.

    ‘American Boy’ had been sitting at number 11 in the US Billboard singles chart, but it fell to number 37 following its removal from iTunes.

    ‘Shine’ dropped to number 159 in the albums chart, after peaking at number 38.

    A spokesperson for Warner said that the move was part of strategies “uniquely tailored to each artist and their fanbase in an effort to optimise revenues and promote long-term artist development”.

    Index

    “A magyar filmvagyon piacképes részének 70-80 százaléka már ki van adva dvd-n, az elmúlt években nagyon sok jelent meg” – mondja Tolmár külön felsorolva, hogy animációsfilmeket, közönségfilmeket, vígjátékokat volt érdemes megjelentetni. Még ha a nemzeti filmvagyonba tartozó cirka kétezer filmnek ez a piacképes rész csak a tizede is.

    Wired Science from Wired.com

    But in most of the viral and bacterial world, copying genes and having your own copied is a way of life, one that proceeds smoothly without hindering either party. It’s a fundamental property of microbe- and virus-hood.

    “Anything might happen. The virus doesn’t know. It simply does it because it can,” said Koonin. “The ability to do so is simply a byproduct of the ability to replicate DNA.”

    TorrentFreak

    Prosecutors in a German state have announced they will refuse to entertain the majority of file-sharing lawsuits in future. It appears that only commercial-scale copyright infringers will be pursued, with those sharing under 3000 music tracks and 200 movies dropping under the prosecution radar.

    During the last few years the legal climate in Germany has become more and more weighted against file-sharers, with hundreds of thousands receiving threats of legal action. Based on information gathered by anti-p2p tracking outfits, an offense is reported which the public prosecution service is obliged to investigate due to the fact that copyright infringement is a criminal issue in Germany. The ISP of the alleged infringer would then be forced to hand over the personal details of those accused, who would then be threatened with legal action.

    Very often the legal action is not carried out but the threats are used as leverage to get ‘compensation’ from the alleged infringer to hand to the rights holder. It seems that the legal system in German has had enough of this ‘abuse’ of the criminal law system for ‘civil’ monetary gain.

    In an interview with Jetzt.de, prosecutors from the Nort-Rhine Westphalia area state that those sharing files for personal, non-commercial uses, will no longer be the target of a lawsuit.

    Christian Solmecke, a lawyer working at lawyers Wilde & Beuger and currently defending around 500 file-sharers against the German music industry told TorrentFreak: “That means, that the music industry in Germany has no chance to find out the real address behind an IP-address at the moment,” which is clearly a major obstacle for someone looking to take legal action.

    The dividing line between personal file-sharing and commercial file-sharing needs to be defined clearly under the law, and the prosecutors have gone some way in offering this definition. “The guidelines say that no investigation should be done if the damage is lower than 3000 Euros (approx $4,500),” Christian told us. “The guideline says that the damage of trading one song is 1 Euro ($1.50). That means, that you could have 2999 Files on your computer and the prosecutors will not investigate.”

    The damages for a movie are being touted at 15 Euros (approx $22.00) each, so presumably anyone sharing less than 200 movies will be considered a non-commercial file-sharer and should avoid prosecution. However, the prosecutor has indicated that those sharing brand new movies still in theater cannot expect to receive the same treatment.

    Christian told TorrentFreak: “This decision is very new, we do not know what consequences it will have or if all prosecutors in Germany will follow the new guidelines.” However, the German music industry is clearly unhappy, labeling the decision as “a catastrophe” and refusing to accept it.

    Should this decision spread around Germany, P2P tracking outfits such as Logistep AG and the German company Digiprotect will have to look elsewhere to make up their revenue. There are indications that Digiprotect is already branching out into the UK, in a new partnership with everyone’s favorite anti-p2p lawyers, Davenport Lyons.

    TorrentFreak

    The broadcast of the Olympics opening ceremony has been downloaded more than a million times already, and the download counters go up every day.

    paidContent:UK

    One of the UK’s top ISPs is preparing to launch an unlimited music service that would see it pay record labels for songs illegally downloaded by its customers, paidContent:UK can reveal.

    Playlouder MSP (music service provider), which first tried the model for itself back in 2003, said it will facilitate the service for the broadband operator, starting early next year. Co-founder Paul Sanders would not name the ISP, but a source last month told paidContent:UK Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) was holding some kind of talks with the vendor.

    For more on the digital music industry, attend our EconMusic conference on Sep. 23 at the Natural History Museum in London. Early bird ticket sales are now open…

    More after the jump…

    Now that the biggest six ISPs have pledged to reduce illegal downloading on their networks, they need commercial alternatives that will prove similarly enticing – and subscriptions offering tunes-on-tap are emerging as the front runner for consumers already plucking free music from the “celestial jukebox”.

    Playlouder’s service lets users legitimately download from channels like Gnutella, BitTorrent and more – the list goes on – because the “deep packet inspection” technology, installed on the broadband infrastructure, recognises every song downloaded over the ISP network, no matter which protocol, and reimburses rightsholders accordingly. Subscribers to the music package will even be allowed to share tunes amongst themselves because every transfer is anonymously tracked using Audible (NSDQ: ADBL) Magic, but proliferation to non-subscribers will be blocked.

    The effective legitimisation of P2P channels many consider “illegal” could be a watershed – but depends on whether the ISPs can convince customers to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access they’re already getting gratis. The thousands of warning letters they’ve pledged to send may help shepherd freeloaders away from free, creating new markets. Recent research showed 95 percent of UK consumers copy music and last week’s study showing the scale of Radiohead BitTorrents suggested many listeners are loathe to use official legal channels, so a framework that extracts money from P2P, without weening users off their favourite habit, could be a winner.

    “We are confident that we will have something quite good to announce in the next couple of months,” Sanders said. “We’ve just done another round of (seed) finance from senior figures in the financial community and the music community, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that if we didn’t think there was good news coming down the pipe. We’re starting the process of principal finance, we’re looking for about £4 million; it takes us through to profitability because it will essentially finance this first large ISP deal.”

    For Sanders, what is Playlouder’s first ever client in five whole years of operating comes better late than never. Formed out of the early music webzine of the same name, Playlouder in 2003 debuted MSP, its own attempt at an £18-a-month ISP service with bundled music package. Three years in, and squeezed out by the ISP big boys, however, the outfit had signed only a handful of subscribers and was mothballed to a mere R&D project while Playlouder switched to focus on selling the service to the bigger providers.

    On both counts, the service was way ahead of its time, conceived when labels were still advocating DRM. Speaking to me in Playlouder’s reclaimed Hoxton warehouse that is every inch the 90s trendy dot.com HQ, a weary Sanders bares many battle scars from half a decade mediating between those in the often mutually incomprenhesible ISP and music worlds, all in pursuit of the subscription dream. It’s been an uphill struggle that has taken its toll financially, too – asked if the business is supporting itself, Sanders admitted: “No, we have almost no revenue.”

    But now the industry’s growing interest in the subscription music model (Sky, Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Orange et al all launching one) could finally mean real business for Playlouder, and Sanders is in the unique position of having learned more than perhaps anyone in the UK about the emerging consumer model that promises to restore to the music business much of the revenue it’s lost to piracy.

    “Patience is a virtue,” he said. “This is a very slow business, I can tell you. But I haven’t been working on this for five years to decide not to prove the model at the last minute – this is new territory for ISPs and the music industry.” Perhaps hinting at the upcoming ISP deal: “If some things that we know are happening come to fruition, then we should see a breakthrough early next year. It’s not rocket science – give ‘em what they want, ask them to pay for it.” Sanders said subscriptions would bring a “huge amount more” money to music because customers buy only 2.4 albums a year (approx (£24) but would pay £5 per month (£60 annually) for unlimited access.

    Playlouder is licensed to use music from EMI, SonyBMG, several indies and one more big label is on the way, Sanders revealed. So confident is he in what could finally be the realisation of his original goal, however, Sanders has ruled out selling equity to any ISP – despite approaches from both broadband and music providers – hoping instead to sell the service to “as many of them as possible”. The Playlouder system will work on any ISP’s network, Sanders said.

    Internet Evolution –

    In this test, we configured 13 different P2P clients using a total of 10 different P2P protocols to verify detection accuracy. For each of the major P2P protocols – BitTorrent, eDonkey, and Gnutella – we used two different clients. Client implementations of the same protocol may differ slightly, so we wanted to verify whether the devices could detect all implementations of a P2P protocol and distinguish between different clients.

    Other Internet applications like Web sessions, video streams, file transfer, and email were sent alongside the P2P traffic in order to reproduce a typical mix of Internet traffic. The challenge was to detect the P2P protocol traffic volume accurately – not allowing any sessions to escape the device’s attention.

    NYTimes.com

    NBC, which owns the exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics in the United States, spent most of Friday trying to keep it that way.

    NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.

    In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.

    As the first Summer Games of the broadband age commenced in China, old network habits have never seemed so archaic — or so irrelevant.

    “The Olympics to me is a benchmark for how fast we’ve gone with technology,” Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm in New York, said. “Thirty months ago, no one was talking about YouTube. Now, it’s a verb.”

    Two years ago, during the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric, offered only two hours of live coverage on the Internet. This year, it is putting a staggering 2,200 hours online in scores of video feeds.

    But NBC, which paid $894 million for the exclusive rights to the Olympic broadcast in the United States, intends to show some premier events like swimming live on television only to reach a wider audience and charge higher rates for advertising.

    Although the numbers are not yet available, NBC’s tape-delayed version of the opening ceremonies will almost certainly be watched by more Americans than the live Internet streams. Steven J. Farella, the president and chief executive of the TargetCast TCM media agency in New York, said that “if the question is, ‘is this a big issue?’ the answer is, ‘not yet.’ ”

    “Right now, people can go on the Internet to watch, but not enough will because it’s not the same experience,” he added. “People love TV and still like to get entertainment that way.” However, he added, by the Summer Games in 2012, “Olympic ad sales could be turned upside down.”

    But as Internet users reaffirmed on Friday, some viewers are already willing to find some other source and watch what they want, when they want.

    As dancers and acrobats whisked across the National Stadium in Beijing, anonymous users uploaded more than 100 video clips of the ceremony to YouTube, but the site, owned by Google, swiftly removed as many as it could. Similarly, some live video streams on Justin.tv, a popular source for international video, were also removed. According to International Olympic Committee guidelines, the television networks with the local rights to the Games are the only legal sources of video in each country.

    But the media companies were almost always a step behind users who have a seemingly unlimited number of Web sites, especially when bloggers were sharing links to new sources. In Rhode Island, Aida Neary and a colleague huddled at her desk to watch a Brazilian television channel’s live coverage.

    “It wasn’t the best quality,” Ms. Neary said of the video feed, “and I’m sure it will be better on TV, but to watch that flame go up at the same time as the rest of the world was a beautiful, moving thing.”

    Most of the world’s other broadcasters with rights to the Olympics, including CBC in Canada, Televisa in Mexico, the BBC in Britain and NHK in Japan, broadcast the opening ceremonies live on television. “The idea of watching a 14-hour delay is repulsive,” remarked Tracy Record, a blogger in Seattle, who woke up at 5 a.m. to watch the opening ceremonies with her 12-year-old son on CBC.

    Around the same time, American television viewers were treated to a taste on NBC’s “Today” show and regular programming on NBC’s cable sisters, MSNBC and CNBC. Parts of “Today” were taped hours in advance because Matt Lauer, who serves as co-host of the morning show, was due at the stadium to anchor the opening ceremonies with Bob Costas.

    Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics, said in a statement: “We have a billion dollars worth of revenue at stake here, so that means we’re not public television, for better or worse.”

    The International Olympic Committee is permitting networks to stream video this year because geographic blocking technology allows the companies to keep their broadband feeds within national borders. In some cases Friday, users illegally retransmitted the feeds. But in at least one case involving Germany’s ARD broadcast network, the blocking did not occur.

    ARD did not direct its Olympic stream through the geographic protection provided by the European Broadcasting Union, a conglomerate of dozens of national broadcasters that acquired the rights to the Beijing Games for $443.4 million, according to a memo sent to the International Olympic Committee and obtained by The New York Times. Gina Lundby, the sports projects coordinator of Eurovision, the broadcast division of the E.B.U., wrote in the memo that the German network had been prohibited from further streaming “until this matter has been clarified and resolved.”

    Lorie Johnson, an information technology worker in Little Rock, Ark., benefited from the security lapse. She watched the torch lighting from her desk at work.

    “In the age of Internet (almost) anywhere, why be tied to a TV?,” Ms. Johnson wrote in an e-mail message. Television networks “no longer have the same viewer monopoly they had 30 years ago — why don’t they see that?”

    Stuart Elliott, Richard Sandomir and Bill Carter contributed reporting.

    NewTeeVee

    NBC’s delayed Olympics coverage and sports’ fans quest to find pirated livestreams online has officially become the media story of the games. Even the New York Times has chimed in, noting what it referred to as the “game of digital whack-a-mole” between pirates and NBC that took place during the opening ceremony. The network’s fight against unauthorized streams on sites like Ustream.tv and Justin.tv continued all weekend, with streams going down quicker that you can say Dick Ebersol.

    The network may win a fight or two, but the battle is far from over. I’m watching a broadcast of the Cuba vs. the Netherlands beach volleyball game — which NBC’s cable channel USA Network won’t show for another two hours and won’t air online at all — live on my laptop as I’m writing this article, courtesy of some folks in France that relay a live TV signal from heaven knows where. To be fair, there are some occasional hiccups with the video, but the overall quality is actually pretty good. Good enough to keep me engaged, and definitely good enough to question the whole idea of NBC-like restrictions in the age of global online video.

    NBC is not alone in its fight against the Olympics pirates. The state-owned Chinese TV network CCTV sued the Google-backed P2P startup Xunlei last week, alleging it had broadcast parts of the torch relay earlier this year without getting a license from CCTV. The lawsuit was a clear warning shot against the dozen or so P2P TV platforms that have popped up in China in recent years, most of whom responded by putting IP number-based geolocation restrictions on CCTV streams or filtering them outright.

    Sopcast, for example, has blocked access to its CCTV streams, making them inaccessible from within the client’s program guide. But the software also allows users to transmit their own streams, and a number of them use this feature to relay TV broadcasts from all around the world. I gave it a shot this weekend, and quickly found satellite TV feeds from Malaysia in surprisingly high video quality, video feeds from Poland and even a Portuguese video stream that someone apparently was filming off his TV in real time. A little tough on the eyes, but pretty amusing nonetheless.

    Granted, watching pirated TV feeds via P2P TV isn’t always easy. A few other clients left me empty-handed. PPLive, for example, is an official licensing partner of CCTV. The company told us last week that it was going to block access to all CCTV stations for viewers from outside of China, and it has kept its word. Sina Live is a web plug-in that only works with Internet Explorer. The CCTV channels are embedded into Sina’s web site and seemed to be blocked for overseas users as well. At least I think that’s what happened; the language barrier didn’t help. Peercast.org, one of the oldest P2P streaming solutions, featured one Olympics channel, but I couldn’t get it to play on my machine.

    So I decided to stick with Sopcast, and was rewarded with lots and lots of live coverage. Pretty much all the competitions were available in real time. To be fair, a lot of the minor events were also broadcast live on NBCOlympics.com, and in a few some cases the official streams had a much better quality (I’m talking to you, anonymous Portuguese pirate!). Overall, save for the occasional bandwidth hiccup, the quality of the pirated streams was surprisingly good. At least I got to watch the games in full screen, complete with live commentary, and let me tell you: Those sportscasters in Malaysia speak English with less of an accent than half of my neighborhood, me (obviously) included.

    The downside of watching pirated P2P TV streams is that you have to install software from companies that you’re probably going to trust less than NBC, and rightly so. Sopcast for instance, comes bundled with an adware app, but users are reporting online that it can be erased without affecting the performance of the client. I bet many sports fans are willing to take that chance.

    THISDAY ONLINE / Nigeria news / African views on global news

    Microsoft’s attempt at discouraging Intellectual Property (IP) theft especially at the popular Computer Village in Ikeja may not have yielded any positive results, going by recent development in the area.
    According to THISDAY investigation, the aftermath of the anti-piracy crusade launched by the software giant in collaboration with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) earlier in February has only accommodated more people in the illegal trade.

    Positech Games

    A few days ago I posted a simple question on my blog. “Why do people pirate my games?”. It was an honest attempt to get real answers to an important question. I submitted the bog entry to slashdot and the penny arcade forums, and from there it made it to arstechnica, then digg, then bnet and probably a few other places. The response was massive. This is what I found:

    Napi Online

    Egyre nehezebb a zenei kiadók kereskedelmi tevékenysége, mert Magyarországon minden megvásárolt zenei cd-re legalább három-négy illegális másolat jut. Az átlagos forgalom kiadványonként mára egy-két ezer eladott példányra zsugorodott, és már ez is kifejezetten jó eladási eredménynek számít. Az eddigi adatok alapján 2008 talán nem hoz visszaesést a tavalyi évhez képest, miután az elmúlt tíz évben az eladások majdnem felükre estek vissza. Nagyon nehéz érvényt szerezni a szerzői jogoknak is, mert a közvélemény nem tekinti lopásnak a kalózkodást – mondta lapunknak Jeszenszky Zsolt, a Magyar Hanglemezkiadók Szövetsége (Mahasz) és a ProArt munkatársa.

    Korábban az illegális másolatokkal szembeni küzdelem koordinálását a Mahasz nyomozócsoportja végezte, 2004 őszétől a ProArt – Szövetség a Szerzői Jogokért egyesület folytatja ezt a tevékenységet. A legnagyobb gondot a világhálón, a fájlcserélő oldalakon terjedő illegális – legtöbbször mp3 – formátumú zenei másolatok jelentik. Emiatt a ProArt folyamatosan figyeli az internetet. Ha ilyen jellegű anyagok nyomára bukkannak, a csoport tagjai megkeresik a szerverüzemeltetőket, megjelölik a kérdéses illegális fájlokat, majd kérik, hogy töröljék azokat vagy tegyék lehetetlenné a hozzáférést.

    Szakmai vélemények szerint bár a vonatkozó törvények megfelelőek és a bűnüldöző szervek munkája kielégítő, a jogerős ítéleteknek nincs elrettentő ereje. A problémát csak erősíti, hogy a lemezeladás általában a karácsony előtti néhány hétben jár a csúcsra, míg a mélyrepülést a februártól áprilisig tartó időszak és a nyári hónapok jelentik. Mivel a zenefogyasztók pénztárcája általában nem engedi meg a rendszeres vásárlást, a kiadványok közül csak egyet-egyet vesznek meg. A válságra a cd-k prémium verzióinak kiadása sem jelent megoldást, hiszen ezek inkább a gyűjtők számára érdekesek. A fogyasztók java pedig a “casual buyer” kategóriába tartozik, akik gyakran hirtelen, impulzus alapján érdeklődnek egy-egy új előadó iránt és általában ugyanilyen gyorsan el is felejtik azt, tehát nem izgatja őket, hogy mit tartalmaz az extra változat – tette hozzá Jeszenszky.

    A kiadók bruttó nyereségükből fedezik működésüket, ebből fizetik az alkalmazottaikat és a sikertelen kiadványokból származó veszteséget is. Ha folyamatos veszteséggel kell számolniuk az illegális letöltések miatt, kénytelenek csökkenteni kockázatukat és nem költenek például drága, igényes videoklipekre, nem kísérleteznek rétegzenékkel. Ehelyett inkább olyan lemezeket adnak ki, melyek közönsége nem másolja, hanem megvásárolja a zenét. Ezért élte virágkorát néhány évvel ezelőtt a mulatós zene, mert közönségének java nem fért hozzá az internethez, így ők inkább hajlottak a lemezvásárlásra, mint az urbanizáltabb fiatalok. A mulatós mára messze túl van a zenitjén, de a mostanság legsikeresebb kiadványok, a musicalalbumok is hasonló okból fogynak jobban az átlaghoz képest. Az erre fogékony középkorú vagy idősebb közönség ugyanis inkább lemezvásárlásra szocializálódott, mint a letöltésre.

    USATODAY.com

    The success of the video game Rock Band is drumming up revenue for the music industry.

    Virtual rockers downloaded roughly 2.5 million songs in the eight weeks since the game launched on the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 systems.

    Rock Band, developed by Harmonix, which also created Guitar Hero, comes with 58 playable songs including the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter and Metallica’s Enter Sandman. But many more tunes can be downloaded over the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live for prices varying from 99 cents to $2.99.

    Cato Unbound » Blog Archive »

    How relevant is it to declare oneself to be “for” or “against” copyright? Neither the stabilization nor the abolition of the copyright system seems within reach. All we see is a seemingly endless assembly line of new extensions to the law being proposed and enacted. The most recent is the proposed “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA) [1], to be tabled at next month’s G8 meeting in Tokyo, including a clause known as the “Pirate Bay killer” that would force countries to criminalize services that may facilitate copyright infringement, even if not for profit. This is just one example of how copyright law is mutating into something qualitatively different than what it has been in previous centuries.

    Index

    Az adatok alapján a franciák májusban több, mint 13,5 millió filmet töltöttek le illegálisan az internetről, miközben az országos filmközpont 12,2 millió mozijegy eladását rögzítette az adott hónapban. A jelenség “veszélybe sodorhatja a film- és audiovizuális ipart” – jelentette ki az Alpa képviselője a Le Figaro című napilapnak.

    A tanulmány szerint átlagosan havi 10 millió illegális filmletöltés történik az országban. A rekord tavaly decemberben volt, amikor 16,6 millió illegális letöltést számoltak. A törvénytelenül letöltött filmek 66 százaléka amerikai, 19 százaléka francia. A Transformers különösen népszerű, 2007 októbere óta 3,7 millió példányban szedték le a netről. A kutatások egyelőre nem mutatják a letöltések közvetlen gazdasági hatását a filmiparra, de az biztos, hogy a francia dvd-eladás leszálló ágba került.

    Egy tavalyi jelentés szerint a jogvédő szervezetek azt állapították meg, hogy Magyarországon tízből kilenc letöltés illegális, tíz dvd-ből hét nem eredeti. Az okozott kár forintban százmilliárdos nagyságrendű.

    TorrentFreak

    When BuckCherry found out that their latest single had leaked on BitTorrent, they didn’t try to cover this up, or take the file down. No, instead, they issued a press release (update: the press release has been removed, Google cache), where they stated: “Honestly, we hate it when this s*** happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first.”

    This is strange to say the least. Not only because their label, Atlantic Records, is known to release (and spam) tracks for free on BitTorrent sites, but also because the press release was more about promoting the band than the actual leak. Without any hard evidence, we suggested that this leak may have been set up to get some free promotion and publicity, which BuckCherry seems to need.

    Out of curiosity, we decided to follow this up, to see if this was indeed the case. With some help of a user in the community, we tracked down some of the initial seeders of the torrent. A BitTorrent site insider was kind enough to help us out, because BitTorrent is not supposed to be “abused” like this, and confirmed that the IP of one of the early seeders did indeed belong to the person who uploaded the torrent file.

    It turns out that the uploader, a New York resident, had only uploaded one torrent, the BuckCherry track. When we entered the IP-address into the Wiki-scanner, we found out that the person in question had edited the BuckCherry wikipedia entry, and added the name of the band manager to another page.

    This confirmed our suspicions, but it was not quite enough, since it could be an overly obsessed fan (if they have fans). So, we decided to send the band manager, Josh Klemme – who happens to live in New York – an email to ask for his opinion on our findings. Klemme, replied to our email within a few hours, and surprisingly enough his IP-address was the same as the uploader.

    The Swazi Observer

    THE Swaziland National Council of Arts and Culture says it will soon hold yet another copyright awareness campaign.

    “This will be an ongoing activity to raise awareness among the public and the retailers.

    The impact will be seen after a long time and we plan not to stop hosting such a campaign,” Arts and Culture Acting CEO Vusi Nkambule said.

    He said they were also trying to forge unity among the different artists and associations in the country.

    “We will soon have another campaign in Mbabane and we still have to meet to discuss the date.”

    Last Saturday, a Mozambican national who was selling fake CDs was nabbed and brought to the gathering with his stock.

    The CDs were crushed in full view of the gathering to demonstrate that such will not be tolerated. The artists stamped on them while others brought metal rods to smash such.

    The Mozambican, identified as Itu was warned never to be involved in such illegal practice again.

    InformationWeek

    The Higher Education Opportunity Act, passed Wednesday by the House and Thursday by the Senate, promotes education, legal alternatives, and improved monitoring of campus networks.

    If signed into law by President George W. Bush, the bipartisan bill would require publicly funded universities and colleges to teach students and employees about illegal downloading, distribution of copyrighted materials, and related campus policies.

    The bill also requires universities and colleges to create plans to prevent piracy by using technology and to present legal alternatives. The bill would provide grants to support those efforts.

    dslreports.com

    Industry analyst Dave Burstein has an interesting (but margin blown) post over at the interesting people listserv discussing the reality of congestion (or lack thereof) on AT&T’s network. While many in the industry lobbyists use P2P congestion as a bogeyman to justify all manner of policy, AT&T data suggests P2P is actually declining on AT&T’s network. Upstream P2P on cable networks remains a capacity problem, but it’s one that may be resolved by a migration to DOCSIS 3.0. Burstein suggests the debate over throttling is all but dead:

    Easily a third of AT&T’s downstream traffic is now “web audio-video,” far more than p2p and the gap is widening rapidly. Hulu and YouTube are taking over, while p2p is fading away on DSL networks. One likely result is that managing traffic by shaping p2p is of limited and declining use, perhaps buying a network 6 months or a year before needing an upgrade. The p2p traffic shaping debate should be almost over, because it simply won’t work very much longer.

    AT&T writes off that decline in P2P use as a statistical anomaly created by a heavy mix of new customers who don’t use P2P. Still, it suggests that P2P isn’t quite the network demon it’s often painted as. AT&T says that as of June, AT&T traffic was about 1/3 Web (non video/audio streams), 1/3 Web video/audio streams, and 1/5 P2P. Most interestingly, Burstein suggests that capacity upgrades should more than handle growth, without throttling or raising capex, while actually lowering AT&T’s per bit cost per user. On upgrades:

    AT&T has sensible plans to handle the load without disruption. They are already moving from 10 gig to 40 gig in the core, and planning a transition to 100 gig in a few years. The current projections are they can do these upgrades without raising capex, bringing per bit costs down along a Moore’s Law curve and keeping bandwidth costs per user essentially unchanged.

    So if the capacity costs of keeping pace with demand are nominal, does that still make AT&T’s push into metered billing “inevitable?” One gets the feeling that there’s no greater chasm than the one between a lobbyist and network engineer describing the same network.

    | Listening Post from Wired.com

    Radiohead’s “pay what you want” distribution gamble paid-off despite — or perhaps because of — rampant file sharing, according to new analysis from Will Page, chief economist at the MCPS-PRS Alliance, a British rights organization, and Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne.

    Radiohead’s notorious release strategy for In Rainbows, which allowed fans to download it for an optional price with a valid e-mail address, was considered to have been a failure by some because the album became wildly popular on file sharing networks almost immediately upon its release.

    But Garland and Page’s, “In Rainbows, On Torrents” report, slated to be released on the MCPS-PRS website on Friday, indicates that Radiohead’s strategy was a success nonetheless, contributing to the album topping the charts in both the UK and United States and a wildly successful worldwide tour. When it comes to judging whether an album is a success these days, the old metrics just don’t cut it.

    The report found that torrent users traded 400,000 copies of In Rainbows on its October 10 release date, and that it was shared a staggering 2.3 million times by November 3 (chart courtesy of BigChampagne). By comparison, albums by Gnarls Barkley, Panic at the Disco and Portishead released around the same time using conventional means were shared less, the most-frequently shared being Panic at the Disco’s album, which was downloaded 157,000 in a week — nearly three times lower than In Rainbows’ peak day of trading).

    Many within the music industry (including U2 manager Paul McGuinness) will no doubt view these 2.3 million downloads as sales Radiohead lost by giving the album away in a readily-sharable format. And either way, they represent email addresses that Radiohead failed to add into its fan database.

    Will_page_2 Garland and Page admit that server problems on Radiohead’s site almost certainly drove some users to torrent trackers, as did the fact that Radiohead had “signaled” to fans that the album was free. But their most interesting finding about why fans chose to download the album via torrent rather than from InRainbows.com is their hypothesis that users adhere to music acquisition venues regardless of other factors.

    “The venue hypothesis suggests that even when the price approaches zero, all other things being equal, people are more likely to act habitually (say, using The Pirate Bay) than to break their habit (say, visiting www.InRainbows.com),” reads one section of the report. In other words, people tend to develop habits around the acquisition of music; once they find something that works, they tend to keep using it. As the paper mentions, “The Pirate Bay is a powerful brand with a sterling reputation in the minds of millions of young music fans.”

    The hard lesson to the music business here is that it must license venues for music acquisition that fans prefer to file sharing networks or otherwise make the toleration of file sharing part of their business plans. If even Radiohead’s freely available album was torrented 2.3 million times in the first three and a half weeks, how can more traditional offerings successfully clamp-down on file sharing? They can’t, pure and simple.

    In addition, official offerings like InRainbows.com need not be considered to be in competition with file sharing networks, as hard as that may be for longtime music insiders to comprehend.

    “Frequently, music industry professionals suggest that an increase in legitimate sales must necessarily coincide with a commensurate reduction in piracy, as if this were a fact,” says the report. “Yet, the company BigChampagne has made no such consistent observation in nearly a decade of analyzing these data. Rather, it finds that piracy rates follow awareness and interest… The biggest selling albums and songs are nearly always the most widely pirated, regardless of all the ‘anti-piracy’ tactics employed by music companies. Or, to sum up by paraphrasing an earlier argument, ‘popular music is popular everywhere it’s popular.'”

    Exactly. All of this torrenting of In Rainbows contributed to the album making such a big impression on a listening public that’s bombarded with an ever-increasing amount of information. Without its album being so widely traded, would Radiohead’s album have shot to the top of the charts? Would their worldwide tour be such a smashing success?

    Eric_garland_2 Not necessarily, says the report, and we agree. Applying economic principles to digital music, Garland and Page found that “the challenge of achieving popularity (or attention) when the old rules of scarcity and excludability don’t apply (to information goods) the way they used to, changes the monetization game completely.” And Radiohead clearly won that game, regardless of how many times its album was traded online.

    Garland and Page came to the undeniable conclusion that the music industry needs to stop thinking of shared files as lost sales, and start treating them as an aspect of reality upon which they can build part of their businesses.

    As for Radiohead, they can rest easy knowing that while their strategy will now come under increased scrutiny by enemies of file sharing within the industry, that by “losing” the battle for the email addresses of those who downloaded their album via bit torrent, they actually won the overall war for the public’s attention — no easy feat, these days.

    The report is now available here.

    | Bit Player | Los Angeles Times

    RealNetworks reported that subscribers to its paid music services (Rhapsody and Real’s premium Internet radio stations) dropped slighted in the final three months of 2007, from 1.925 million to 1.9 million in the previous quarter. Rival Napster on Wednesday reported a similar drop in the fourth quarter, from about 750,000 to 743,000.

    PC Magazine

    A bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate on Thursday that would allow the U.S. Attorney General to bring civil actions against Americans that violate copyrights.

    The bill, the “Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008”, was scheduled to be introduced on Thursday, according to Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who authored the bill along with Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). The bill’s co-sponsors include Senators Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas).

    The bill is similar to the “Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Act” of the 2007 Congress, which set out to establish a so-called Intellectual Property Enforcement Network (IPEN) made up of the deputy secretaries of the Department of Homeland Security, Justice, the Treasury, Commerce, and State, plus the Deputy Attorney General and other senior government members.

    However, the current bill would pair the IPEN with a designated Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, an advisor who would report directly to the President. Enforcement would be left to the FBI, who would be authorized to form an operational task force to fight copyright crime. An organized crime task force would also be created at the Department of Justice to link copyright violations to organized crime, such as DVD piracy. Five “intellectual property law enforcement coordinators” could be sent overseas to work with local law enforcement.

    “The time has come to bolster the Federal effort to protect this most valuable and vulnerable property, to give law enforcement the resources and the tools it needs to combat piracy and counterfeiting, and to make sure that the many agencies that deal with intellectual property enforcement have the opportunity and the incentive to talk with each other, to coordinate their efforts, and to achieve the maximum effects for their efforts,” Sen. Leahy said in a statement. “The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008 does just that.”

    The proposed bill would also tighten civil IP laws, requiring that an actual copyright be filed before a criminal case can be brought. However, according to the text of the bill, no actual copyright would need to be filed in the case of a civil suit brought by the Attorney General or another individual or company.

    The bill would also explicitly allow documents and records to be seized in the course of a civil copyright-infringement suit. And a “harmless error” provision would allow prosecutors to gloss over minor errors in copyright filings that would otherwise provide defendants a loophole.

    Reactions split across industry lines

    Unsurprisingly, the bill was welcomed by software groups, including the Business Software Alliance. “”BSA and its members commend Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Evan Bayh (D-IN), John Cornyn (R-TX), George Voinovich (R-OH) and others for their leadership on intellectual property issues, as further illustrated today, with the introduction of the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008,” the BSA said in a statement. “This important legislation will go a long way to curbing software piracy which cost more than $48 billion around the globe. The bill will provide US law enforcement with new legal tools to combat software piracy and counterfeiting. It will also provide much needed resources to investigate and prosecute IP crimes and expand the successful program of placing IP attaches in key US embassies around the globe.”

    “American innovators and creators are driving our nation’s economy. Whether they are born of research, technological innovation or the strum of a guitar, creative expression of ideas are the backbone of job creation, growth and surplus trade,” executive director Patrick Ross of the Copyright Alliance added.

    “We urge Congress to act quickly so that copyright owners can see new enforcement measures on the President’s desk this Congress,” Ross said in a statement.

    Public interest group Public Knowledge said it was concerned, however. “We are concerned that several provisions in this bill could have harmful, if unintended, consequences that would harm consumers,” Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of the organization, said in a statement. “The bill rightly targets enforcement of copyright law against commercial infringers, but some of these same enforcement provisions are likely to hurt ordinary consumers.

    “The provisions allowing seizure of equipment may be harmful to consumers,” Sohn added. “Seizing expensive manufacturing equipment used for large-scale infringement from a commercial pirate may be appropriate. Seizing a family’s general-purpose computer in a download case, as this bill would allow, is not appropriate. This bill goes even farther, expanding the penalties under the flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to create new grounds for allowing a family’s computer to be seized if used to circumvent digital rights management, even if for fair uses.

    “In addition, this bill would turn the Justice Department into an arm of the legal departments of the entertainment companies by authorizing DoJ to file civil lawsuits for infringement, forcing taxpayers to foot the bill,” Sohn concluded.

    Computerworld

    “Piracy hurts open source because open source asks people to help give back and contribute code, but they say, ‘Why should I help? I have Microsoft Office for free,'” Suarez-Potts said.

    Around the world, he said, many national governments are realizing that this hurts them, too, because their citizens are then consumers of stolen technology rather than active participants in open-source communities that can help people gain technology skills that benefit workforces and nations.

    By cracking down on software piracy, nations around the globe are starting to see that they can help themselves dramatically by encouraging innovation and creativity — as well as job growth and richer economies — through open-source development, he said.

    “China wants to create workers who can do this and create and sustain wealth,” rather than just sell pirated software that doesn’t improve the lives of the country’s people, Suarez-Potts said. “We will all benefit if they are creating interesting things.”

    Other nations, including India, are making similar discoveries, he said. “They really quite clearly see that they should have their own intellectual ecosystems. China is now embracing open source and is asking how they can work with the international communities; likewise in India and Latin America.”

    guardian.co.uk

    The agreement between internet service providers, the government, and the music industry to send angry letters to music fans who are downloading free music is a smokescreen, intended to obscure the crisis the record industry is facing.

    This agreement has come about as a result of music industry pressure on ISPs who are, after all, facilitating their customers’ free music downloads. If this were an ordinary copyright infringement case, the record companies would put their lawyers onto the ISPs. However, everyone knows that the music industry is using internet sites, particularly the big social networks such as MySpace, to promote their artists.

    It is just not in the music industry’s interest to bite the hand of the ISPs, which provide them with access to potential customers. But on the other hand, the industry does have a case against the ISPs – so what is to be done? I imagine some corporate boardroom representing the ISPs shrugged their shoulders and said “well I suppose we could send them a warning letter”. The industry moguls replied “yeah a warning letter – that’ll do it”.

    But of course a warning letter won’t do it. Without some kind of legal framework to back it up, it’s nothing more than a gesture. The real problem for the record companies is that the ground is changing beneath them. New technology has made it possible for people to acquire music without going through the traditional route of buying objects in a shop.

    Rather than fighting this trend, the industry itself needs to find new methods of collecting royalties. The only real moral argument the industry has that will work with music fans is that the artist should be rewarded financially for providing them with music. Yet everyone knows that historically the record industry has paid artists a fraction of the price paid by the public for albums and singles.

    What needs to happen is for the industry to reverse its priorities, put artists to the fore and pay them a larger share of the price in return for their support in the transition to new business models. It is doesn’t take a huge amount of imagination to conceive of other ways of levying royalties where original music is used. The way we get radio in the UK offers two simple examples.

    On one hand, we have the BBC service, where for the price of the licence fee you can listen to as much radio as you like. On the other hand, there is commercial radio, which is free at the point-of-use to you, the listener. However, the fact that it is free doesn’t mean the music content is not paid for. Royalties are paid to musicians from the sale of advertising that appears between the songs. Either of these two models could be applied to music.

    A licence fee could be paid, allowing you to download as much music as you like, which will be simpler to police as you would need to presumably give your licence number before you download anything. Or sites such as MySpace, which make billions of dollars in advertising revenue without paying for any content whatsoever, could reverse that trend and start paying royalties to musicians and other content providers.

    In an ideal world, such royalties or the blanket licence fee would not be paid to music companies themselves but to an independent collection agency that would pay the money directly to artists. The music industry treats the internet as a threat, whereas for artists it gives us an opportunity to get closer to our audience than ever before. We must be very, very careful that we don’t alienate those fans and make it impossible for the next generation of singer-songwriters to have viable careers.

    The Register

    Thousands – or to be more precise, six thousands – of lucky alleged infringers a week are to be informed of the error of their ways, according to the terms of the deal struck this week between the British government and six major ISPs. They will in the first instance be “informed when their accounts are being used unlawfully to share copyright material and pointed towards legal alternatives.”

    And in the second instance? That is yet to be determined, and the ISPs and rights holders signing the Memorandum of Understanding with the government have been sent off for four months to figure out the ‘or what?’ bit of the deal.

    In the meantime those letters will be cranking out. The targets will be identified by “music rights holders” who will pass the data on to the ISPs, who will then run the system as a trial for three months. So that’s about 70,000 letters in total, the number of suspects being dependent on whether they’re going to bombard the same people with information regarding the unlawful nature of some of their account’s activities, or whether they go for a ‘one per deviant’ rule.

    The evidence of this trial period will be analysed, and depending on what that tells them they’ll agree with Offcom an escalation in numbers, a widening of content coverage (presumably to video), and “a process for agreeing a cap.” That is, not a cap in itself, but a process for agreeing one. This (we speculate) might take into account factors such as cost of stamps to ISPs, level of music business profitability, percentage of deviants in total user base, ratio of ridicule experienced by music industry to ridicule experienced by ISPs, and the price of sardines. Or something.

    The two aspects of the letter – drawing the user’s attention to the infringement and pointing them at legal alternatives – are likely to be important in determining the success of the trial. Some users – possibly, as Feargal Sharkey thinks, most – are likely to be scared off when they learn that somebody’s watching them, but adequate legal alternatives (which the ISPs say they’re going to set up) will have to exist in order for the customers to be directed to them, and to carry on using them.

    It seems doubtful that this will be the case in four months time, when the working group is due to report back back with proposals to deal with the hard cases. Despite fevered reporting in some newspapers, ‘three strikes’ doesn’t figure in this and the measures being considered are light on savagery. “The group will… look at solutions including technical measures such as traffic management or filtering, and marking of content to facilitate its identification. In addition, rights holders will consider prosecuting particularly serious infringers in appropriate cases.”

    The ISPs already do traffic management, so that could just mean more of the same. Content marking would have to be done by the rights holders and would simplify filtering, if they decided they were going to do filtering, while rights holders busting serious infringers is pretty much what rights holders do already.

    Fevered press coverage of a ‘crackdown on filesharers’ seems to derive in the main from the government’s “alternative regulatory options”. These are effectively various things the Nasty Party might do if the preferred option of voluntary measures and a little light rule-making enforced by Offcom doesn’t pan out. One of these light rules will ensure “that all ISPs are required to undertake an appropriate level of action to achieve the desired result.” So the ISPs signing the MOU won’t be disadvantaged by users fleeing to refusenik ISPs, because there will be no refusenik ISPs -“ISPs who choose not to engage in the self-regulatory arrangement would remain bound by the underlying requirement to have an effective policy on unlawful P2P file- sharing.”

    Currently four tougher alternatives to this regime are being floated, and they still don’t include ‘three strikes’. Option A1 proposes legislation making it possible for rights holders to get personal data of infringement suspects on request, rather than having to apply for a court order. This would make it cheaper to sue infringers than it currently is, and could possibly mean an increase in prosecutions, but this only seems possible if the rights holders decided all deals were off, threw their toys out of the pram and went nuclear. Or they might just want to add everybody to their mailing lists, but we doubt that.

    Option A2 seems similarly BPI-friendly. “Typically, under the terms of the contract between an ISP and an Internet service subscriber, the subscriber is not allowed to use the account for illegal purposes. Obliging ISPs to take action to enforce this contractual term in some way, for example to warn, suspend or terminate the Internet accounts of file-sharers, or to use other technical options would avoid lengthy, costly legal action.”

    Getting the ISPs to “implement their own terms and conditions” is one of the BPI’s refrains, and if they were to do this in accordance with the BPI’s wishes, then they’d be warning people, suspending them, kicking them off… Which could indeed end up looking and feeling like three strikes, but these are alternative options, remember – they are not currently on the table.

    Option A3 is basically Option A2, but sitting in between the rights holders and the ISPs would be a third party regulatory body which would assess the evidence, direct the ISP to take appropriate action and hear appeals and complaints. This would be costly and complex – and the government seems not to like it much.

    Finally, Option A4 (there are no B options, or if there are they’re secret) covers filtering equipment. The government seems quite taken with this, claiming:

    “There are technologies available which can filter Internet traffic. These can identify particular types of file (eg music files), check whether the file is subject to copyright protection and then check whether the person offering the file for download has the right to do so. If no such permission is found, the filter can block the download. These technologies vary in their effectiveness and cannot guarantee 100% accuracy given the lack of conformity between different computer and software technologies.”

    And: “If the download is in breach of copyright the filter can block the download before it has been completed. No breach therefore occurs.”

    Which is cool, if true. The rights holder doesn’t lose revenue because there’s no infringement, the ISP doesn’t need to do any threatening or booting, and it “may not require costly regulatory processes to be established or require issues of data protection to be addressed.” It could indeed be the government’s preferred magic bullet if all of that turned out to be true.

    Unfortunately: “Opinion seems to be divided between stakeholders on whether filters could be an effective, long-term, cost-effective way of tackling not only P2P piracy but also other forms of copyright infringement. It might be valuable, in addition to moving forward on P2P, if rights holders and ISPs jointly investigated the technical, legal and cost issues around filters and assessed their utility in addressing unlawful online activity.”

    Which is how the filtering bit got into the brief for the MOU group that’s reporting back in four months. Tune in then to see whether the ISPs and the BPI can save their marriage. ®

    Editor’s Choice | Reuters

    The only real solution is to legitimise the peer-to-peer services. Rather than fighting against music sharing, the music industry should issue licenses that allow royalties to be collected every time a song is shared. The snag, of course, is how to generate those royalties in the first place. The slow uptake of music subscription services proves it’s unfeasible to ask people to opt in to paying 10 pounds a month for music.

    DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE (The Daily Yomiuri)

    The Kyoto District Court sentenced a man to 18 months in prison Thursday, suspended for three years, for distributing popular TV animation footage using the Share file-sharing software without the permission of the copyright holders.

    BBC NEWS

    Hundreds of thousands of UK net users could soon find a letter on their mat from their net supplier saying their account is being used to illegally share files. The letters are one of the most tangible elements of an anti-piracy plan brokered by the government. Here we explain some of the background to the agreement.

    ReadWriteWeb

    When the Yahoo! Music Store closes its doors this fall, the company announced today, past customers dependent on their music “phoning home” to get license approval before playing are out of luck. They’ll be able to continue playing purchased tracks on a single computer, until they make any changes to their operating system.

    Wired 13.01:

    Anathema is a so-called topsite, one of 30 or so underground, highly secretive servers where nearly all of the unlicensed music, movies, and videogames available on the Internet originate. Outside of a pirate elite and the Feds who track them, few know that topsites exist. Even fewer can log in.

    Entertainment News, Home Ent News, Media – Variety

    The second Consumer Home Piracy Market Research, conducted by Futuresource Consulting online last May, involved 3,613 consumers in the U.S. and 1,718 in Blighty.

    Results, released Tuesday, showed that men 18-24 continue to do the most copying and that the U.K. is experiencing a significant increase in copying TV shows on DVD. Last year, 42% of U.K. consumers surveyed said they were copying TV shows. This year, 61% said so.

    Both Americans and Brits showed a preference for copying newly released movies over catalog or library films. In the U.K. during the past six months, consumers copied an average of almost 13 new releases vs. nine catalog/library; in the U.S., consumers copied 7.4 new vs. six catalog/library.

    In both countries the most popular source for copying DVDs was rented or borrowed discs.

    Asked whether they would have purchased the films had they not been able to copy them, 63% of respondents in the U.K. and 77% in the U.S. said they would have purchased all, some or at least a few of the titles, “clearly indicating the scale of the lost revenues to the homevideo industry from home copying,” a summary of the study said.

    Entertainment News, Music News, Media – Variety

    Lewis’ “Bleeding Love” is the year’s biggest-selling track to date, having been downloaded 2.6 million times.

    Sales of vinyl albums are up dramatically as well: 803,000 have been sold in 2008 vs. 454,000 in ’07.

    The Irish Times – Fri, Jul 11, 2008

    In this brave new world, the music companies would have to go much further. They would have to permit individual consumers to copy and distribute their artists’ works: effectively making those the customers both the purchaser and the “reseller”. That risks creating a monster: a legal file-sharing network that would challenge their own role as the chief distributor of music, at the same time as eating into sales of their products, such as CD singles and albums.

    The recording industry has no choice. It is already faced with that monster and at least by placing a voluntary charge on those who are already sharing their music, it has a chance of benefiting from what is now second nature for many net users. The BPI’s plans to hunt down the file- sharers and exile them to a net-free life is simply a continuation of the strategy of prosecuting their own core markets, and criminalising the technologies that could save them. After 10 years, the rhetoric and the sanctions grow louder, but file-sharing shows no signs of slowing down.

    Epicenter from Wired.com

    Studio execs argue that piracy will kill the movie business. So how do they justify the raging success of The Dark Knight?

    “It looks like another indicator that although piracy does hurt business, on a title-by-title level, it’s a more complicated effect,” says Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, a Beverly Hills media measurement company. “Many top-selling titles are among the most-pirated, but they don’t necessarily underperform in the marketplace just because they’re the most pirated.”

    A hit is a hit, says Garland, regardless of whether it’s being illegally downloaded. The astronomical box-office numbers from I Am Legend back up that theory. The movie grossed an estimated $256.4 million, despite the fact that a DVD screener was leaked at the same time as the theatrical release.

    “That’s an interesting case study, because the DVD release wasn’t scheduled until March [after it was released in December], so you had this tremendous gap of many months between when the pirated copy became widely available and the availability of the commercial copy of the DVD, and of course the movie did very well … theatrically, worldwide and on DVD,” says Garland.

    Epicenter from Wired.com

    “For some time, the trend has been that people are moving away from network [TV] to cable,” says David Joyce, an analyst with Miller Tabak & Co.

    The nominations say a lot about the state of television, but they also say a lot about the value of piracy as a marketing tool. It’s probably no coincidence that the most pirated cable programs of 2007 made it to the Emmy nomination table. Cable shows that have historically been totally inaccessible to non-subscribers are now readily available online for download and streaming (both legally and illegally), which could help grow traditional viewership.

    “Some studies have shown that people who watch the shows on TV are more engaged since they can catch up with the shows online,” says Joyce.

    But popularity and critical acclaim still don’t translate into a richly profitable program — there’s a history of canceled TV shows that belatedly get recognition from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

    “Emmys are not financially significant,” says David Joyce. “The Oscars may help sell DVDs, and they may extend a box office run, but Emmys are more of a look in the rear-view mirror.”

    Economist.com

    GLOBAL sales of recorded music fell by 8% in 2007, according to figures released in June by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group. It blamed 70% of the decline on “file-sharing” software, which allows internet users to exchange music and video without paying for it. Industry groups have sued thousands of users of such software, and have supported legislation to criminalise it. But file-sharing has so far proved impossible to stop. And it is not all bad news for the industry, because it can provide helpful insights into music-lovers’ interests.

    For every song that is bought legally, in shops or online, around 20 songs are illegally downloaded, according to BigChampagne, a firm based in Beverly Hills, California, that compiles and sells statistics about file-sharing. Its customers can find out how many times, and where, a song has been illicitly downloaded, for example, what the figure was five weeks ago, what other music its fans like, and so on.

    “It doesn’t make sense to put your head in the sand,” says Ken Bunt, head of marketing at Disney’s Hollywood Records, a BigChampagne customer. One of Hollywood Records’ artists, Jesse McCartney, is particularly popular in Italy, so that might be a good place for a tour, says Mr Bunt.

    David Ross, the editor of Music Row, the largest country-music trade journal, based in Nashville, Tennessee, says the “anti-intellectual argument” not to use such data is emotional nonsense. Music Row publishes file-sharing figures, as well as conventional charts. Such information can help managers promote their artists. Jennifer Bird of Red Light Management, a management agency in Los Angeles, says her agency knows the names and geographic destinations of the 7.5 billion songs swapped in 2007. That is a big help if you are trying to work out whether people are raving about an artist—or merely about a song. And planning joint tours is easier when you know what other music an artist’s fans listen to.

    BigChampagne’s latest venture, launched this month, extends its monitoring to television programmes and films, which are also widely shared online. Knowing what is popular among file-sharers could help broadcasters and film studios when negotiating with advertisers, for example. Hulu, a website operated by News Corporation that offers free, advertising-supported video-streaming, already uses file-sharing statistics to design its programming and to set advertising rates.

    Many music executives were reluctant to take advantage of file-sharing statistics because of the trouble the technology has caused in the industry, says Eric Garland, BigChampagne’s boss. TV stations and film studios, by contrast, are “sprinting through the stages of grief”—and coming to terms with the reality that details of the illegal use of their material can, in fact, be very useful indeed.

    Economist.com

    “MERCHANT and pirate were for a long period one and the same person,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. “Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.” Companies, of course, would strongly disagree with this suggestion. Piracy is generally bad for business. It can undermine sales of legitimate products, deprive a company of its valuable intellectual property and tarnish its brand. Commercial piracy may not be as horrific as the seaborne version off the Horn of Africa (see article). But stealing other people’s R&D, artistic endeavour or even journalism is still theft.

    That principle is worth defending. Yet companies have to deal with the real world—and, despite the best efforts of recorded-music companies, luxury-goods firms and software-industry associations, piracy has proved very hard to stop. Given that a certain amount of stealing is going to happen anyway, some companies are turning it to their advantage.

    For example, around 20 times as many music tracks are exchanged over the internet on “peer to peer” file-sharing networks as are legitimately sold online or in shops. Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there. Having initially been reluctant to be seen exploiting this information, record companies are now making use of it (see article). This month BigChampagne, the main music-data analyser, is extending its monitoring service to pirated video, too. Knowing which TV programmes are being most widely passed around online can help broadcasters when negotiating with advertisers or planning schedules.

    In other industries, piracy can help to open up new markets. Take software, for instance. Microsoft’s Windows operating system is used on 90% of PCs in China, but most copies are pirated. Officially, the software giant has taken a firm line against piracy. But unofficially, it admits that tolerating piracy of its products has given it huge market share and will boost revenues in the long term, because users stick with Microsoft’s products when they go legit. Clamping down too hard on pirates may also encourage people to switch to free, open-source alternatives. “It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not,” Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates, told Fortune magazine last year.

    Another example, from agriculture, shows how piracy can literally seed a new market. Farmers in Brazil wanted to use genetically modified (GM) soyabean seeds that had been engineered by Monsanto to be herbicide-tolerant. The government, under pressure from green groups opposed to GM technology, held back. Unable to obtain the GM seeds legitimately, the farmers turned to pirated versions, many of them “Maradona” seeds brought in from Argentina. Eventually the pirated seeds accounted for over a third of Brazil’s soyabean plantings, and in 2005 the government relented and granted approval for the use of GM seeds. Monsanto could then start selling its seeds legitimately in Brazil.
    Innovators ahoy

    Piracy can also be a source of innovation, if someone takes a product and then modifies it in a popular way. In music unofficial remixes can boost sales of the original work. And in a recent book, “The Pirate’s Dilemma”, Matt Mason gives the example of Nigo, a Japanese designer who took Air Force 1 trainers made by Nike, removed the famous “swoosh” logo, applied his own designs and then sold the resulting shoes in limited editions at $300 a pair under his own label, A Bathing Ape. Instead of suing Nigo, Nike realised that he had spotted a gap in the market. It took a stake in his firm and also launched its own premium “remixes” of its trainers. Mr Mason argues that “the best way to profit from pirates is to copy them.”

    That this silver lining exists should not obscure the cloud. Most of the time, companies will decide to combat piracy of their products by sending in the lawyers with all guns blazing. And most of the time that is the right thing to do. But before they rush into action companies should check to see if there is a way for them to turn piracy to their advantage.

    Channel Register

    The company, in its latest swoop on software piracy, today put out the results of a new study – dubbed Real Thing – which was based on a survey of just 270 children and 1,200 adults aged 16 and above.

    It found that 54 per cent of children between the age of 11 and 16 use file-sharing websites, compared with only 15 per cent of adults.

    Microsoft also claimed that 61 per cent of kids have knowingly bought illegal goods online or through open auction sites. More than 20 per cent see no difference between fakes and the, ahem, real thing.

    One in four 11 to 16-year-olds said they would continue to buy counterfeit goods in the future, while almost 60 per cent of kids questioned said legal versions of music, film and computer programs were too expensive.

    the tech herald

    a court in Quebec has sided with trade group complainants representing the Canadian music and media industries and ordered the immediate closure of music and media file-sharing torrents on Web site QuebecTorrent.com, reports Mediacaster.

    Following the Quebec Superior Court’s ruling, non-profit music and television industry organisations ADISQ and APFTQ were granted an order of permanent injunction against QuebecTorrent, effectively forcing the online service’s full operational closure.

    According to the accusations put forward by ADISQ and AFPTQ, QuebecTorrent was knowingly allowing its service users to illegally share copyrighted music, television shows and movies made by legitimate media producers based in Quebec and also across Canada.

    | Channel Register

    The Business Software Alliance claimed yesterday that software piracy in the US is costing the industry $11.4bn and local government $1.7bn in lost taxes.

    The software multinational lobbying group reckoned that although four out of five pieces of software is legally bought in the US the remaining counterfeit material results in a “tragic” loss of revenues for companies and public services.

    It claimed those losses translated into enough cash for local government to pay for 100 middle schools or 10,800 affordable housing units. Alternatively, said the BSA, 25,000 police officers could be hired and dispatched onto the mean streets of New York, Florida, California and Nevada, presumably to flush out pesky software pirates anywhere they might reside.

    The BSA-sponsored IDC study, available here (pdf), pinpointed eight US states in the report. It found significant variations from the national piracy figure of 20 per cent.

    Arstechnica

    The European Union has proposed a plan to retroactively extend the copyright terms on musical recordings for another 45 years. Apparently, it’s unfair for performers who recorded tracks in their twenties not to keep receiving money for them in their seventies; under the current 50-year copyright term, “this means that income stops when performers are retired.” Funny—we thought that most retirees faced the same problem.

    Yahoo! Finance

    A recommendation to punish Comcast Corp. for blocking subscribers’ Internet traffic should serve as a warning to other service providers, the nation’s top telecommunications regulator said Friday.

    Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said he hopes his action will make network operators sensitive about putting “arbitrary limits on the way consumers can access information on the Internet.”

    The Associated Press reported Thursday night that Martin will recommend to his fellow commissioners that Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.

    Martin provided more details of his proposed disciplinary action in a meeting with reporters Friday.

    Comcast was accused by consumer groups of blocking “peer-to-peer” Internet traffic, where users share large data files using special software. The complaint followed an AP investigation in October.

    Comcast denies it blocks content, but says it uses “carefully limited measures” to manage traffic on its broadband network to ensure all customers receive quality service.

    Martin wants Comcast to stop using its current practice, to tell commissioners where it has used it in the past, and to disclose to the agency and consumers what limitations will be placed on customers under its new traffic management plan, which it hopes to have in place by the end of the year.

    Martin said he is not recommending a fine against Comcast because he wants to use the case as a means of laying out agency policy.

    iCommons.org

    The most frightening nightmare (or the most efficient marketing dream) of every Brazilian film producer has become a reality – and, what’s more, with a Brazilian movie that had not been released to movie theatres yet. ‘Piracy’ has been the most spoken word on the streets and in all media since late July, when Tropa de Elite (‘Elite Squad’), a national production scheduled to be released in November, started being copied and sold by street vendors, and became a social phenomenon in Brazil: 1,5 million people watched the film before it hit the screens, only in the city of Sao Paulo.

    HEXUS.gaming

    On receiving an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast last week for his services to computer gaming, the Northern Irish video game developer, David Perry, whose creations include Earthworm Jim, MDK, Messiah , Wild 9 and Enter the Matrix, believes that the Western games industry will eventually combat piracy problem by offering games for free.

    Perry believes that the western world will soon follow the same business model that has worked well in Asia, where software is offered as a free download and revenue is made from micro-payments for extras such as new characters and weapons.

    Speaking in Belfast after his award, Perry said:

    “They had so much piracy that they decided to stop charging for the games. Instead, there’ll be a charge for things you might want to use in the game.”

    “Your character might have a plain white T-shirt. If you wanted a nicer one you could have it for a dollar. Or perhaps you could buy a magic sword for a knight for a dollar.”

    Though the idea may sound far-fetched, EA has already paved the way for the invasion of free games into the Western world by launching its ‘Play 4 Free’ business model and its first free game, Battlefield Heroes, due for release this summer.

    It remains to be seen whether others will follow, but with an estimated £2bn lost every year due to piracy, developers may not have much of an option.

    IBNLive

    Mumbai: TV actor Rajeev Khandelwal, who’s basking under the success of his debut in recently released film Aamir, is now on a mission to stop piracy. The actor recently released the DVD and VCD of his power-packed film.

    “You can easily get pirated DVDs in the market, which is really unfortunate. So I feel it makes sense to release the original DVD of the film even while it’s still in theatres,” Rajeev said.

    “The film is still hot and there will be many people who would like to keep this as a collectors item. I think it is a wise decision because the market is probably already flooded with the pirated DVDs,” the actor added.

    TorrentFreak

    Jesse Alexander has co-produced and written for both ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lost’, two of the most successful TV-series today. In addition to millions of viewers on TV, both shows are are also extremely popular on BitTorrent. In fact, millions of people share a single episode and this can go on to 10 million downloads per episode.

    One could argue that their availability on BitTorrent actually helped ‘Lost’ and ‘Heroes’ to build a stronger fanbase. With torrents, no-one has to miss an episode anymore which keeps the fans more engaged. So called “pirates” advertise the shows to their friends, or write about it on their blogs. Accordingly, when we asked Jesse Alexander whether he thinks that BitTorrent might have helped to reach a broader audience, he answered with a clear cut “Yes”.

    Not that Jesse wants everybody to get the shows off BitTorrent, but he said that it certainly signals that there is a market for on-demand and interactive TV. “People watching shows such as Lost and Heroes on BitTorrent is the present world reality,” Jesse told TorrentFreak. TV networks have to recognize this, give their viewers more ways to interact with the shows, and find ways to generate revenue from every member of the global audience.”

    “It’s the same for music artists. The reality is, people share music. Artist now make money by driving people to concerts, through community websites, and by offering exclusive events. TV networks are focusing too much on one exclusive product, instead of building a community. This is a mistake I think.”

    The success of Heroes on BitTorrent didn’t pass by the cast of the show unnoticed either. “The cast and the people behind the scenes have all been talking about it,” Jesse said. As an example he mentioned last year’s promotional tour in France, where the actors were recognized by hundreds of fans, even though the show had not even premiered on TV yet.

    Alexander has hit the nail on the head. This is in fact one of the main reasons why shows like ‘Heroes’ are so popular on filesharing networks. It can take up to six months after the US premiere before these shows are aired in Europe, Australia and other parts of the world. Jesse agreed that this is indeed one of the major causes of piracy. “This gap is something that is certainly going to change in the future,” he added.

    Jesse went on to say that in the near future, thanks to the Internet, the viewers of TV-shows will see more interactive components and alternate realities they can participate in. The future of TV will be more international, with real interaction, and shows will be more and more integrated into the core part of an online community.

    When we asked Jesse if he has ever downloaded TV-shows off BitTorrent, he told us: “I can’t confirm or deny, but I’m familiar with all kind of new technologies.” I guess we all know what he’s trying to say.

    It is no surprise that Jesse is more positive towards new technologies than some others in the entertainment industry. Last week we reported on the upcoming “Pirate TV” show that he is working on, together with Matt Mason, the author of ‘The Pirate’s Dilemma’.

    “Matt’s book needs to get a broader audience,” said Jesse. “We want to discuss the negative and the positive side of piracy, and place things in a broader historical context. We want to start a real conversation about the future of intellectual property.”

    We’re happy to join the debate, what about you?

    Information Week

    The Motion Picture Association of America has proclaimed victory with a criminal conviction against a peer-to-peer Web site operator.

    A federal jury convicted 26-year-old Daniel Dove of EliteTorrents.org, a site that distributes movies before their official release. Dove’s conviction on charges of conspiracy and felony copyright infringement marks the eighth successful prosecution stemming from a national crackdown on sites that distribute copyrighted content through P2P networks. It’s the first time a federal jury has handed down a criminal conviction for P2P copyright infringement, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

    Prosecutors said Dove recruited a small group of EliteTorrents members with high-speed Internet connections and served as an administrator as they uploaded pirated content. They said he operated a high-speed server to distribute content through BitTorrent technology.

    Investigators who participated in “Operation D-Elite” uncovered evidence showing EliteTorrents had more than 125,000 members and promoted distribution of about 700 movies, which were downloaded more than 1.1 million times.

    Dove will face sentencing Sept. 9. He could spend up to 10 years in prison.

    Dove’s conviction “sends a clear message that when presented with clear-cut evidence, jurors have little tolerance for the willful, deliberate, and widespread distribution of protected content,” said Dan Glickman, chairman and CEO of the MPAA.

    “The MPAA commends the federal jury in Big Stone Gap, Va., for their thoughtful deliberations in this case and for valuing the protection of intellectual property in the United States,” he said.

    The Register

    The BPI has written to 800 Virgin Media customers warning them to stop sharing music files or risk losing their broadband connection.

    The letters came in an envelope marked: “Important. If you don’t read this, your broadband could be disconnected.” But Virgin told Radio 1’s Newsbeat that the phrase was a mistake and the letters were part of an education campaign. Virgin said it was not making any kind of accusation and that it was possible someone other than the account holder was involved.

    When the Virgin campaign was revealed last month the company assured us that the letters were not part of a “three strikes” process. The BPI has pushed ISPs to warn users three times for copyright infringement before cutting off their broadband.

    The individuals were identified by the BPI which, as we exclusively revealed , is working on a similar scheme with BT. The BPI letter sent on by BT warns of further action including “litigation and suspension by BT your internet connection”.

    At least one Virgin customer who received a letter in June told Newsbeat he was certain it was not him or his flatmates who were responsible for downloading the Amy Winehouse song. He said it was possible that someone had used the flat’s wireless network.

    Will McGree said: “The campaign is doomed to fail. Virgin will lose a lot of customers over this because people don’t like to be accused of stealing music over their morning coffee.

    “It made me feel betrayed. I was under the impression that I paid a broadband company to keep my internet connection protected.”

    The BPI has been busy lobbying the government for stronger laws against file sharing. But the government seems to be resisting the pressure and is instead pushing the music industry and ISPs to get talking to find a licensed, and paid for, form of file sharing.

    Although BT and Virgin are supporting the BPI’s approach others, notably Carphone Warehouse, are refusing to co-operate.

    A survey last month found 63 per cent of internet users were downloading unlicensed music.

    Epicenter from Wired.com

    Jesse Alexander, co-producer of “Heroes” and “Lost,” says file sharing isn’t all bad.

    It’s mighty big of him to admit, given that P2P has undoubtedly eaten profits from his shows — downloads of “Heroes” and “Lost” can run up to 10 million per week.

    Alexander sees the silver lining, though.

    “People watching shows such as ‘Lost’ and ‘Heroes’ on BitTorrent is the present world reality,” Alexander told Torrent Freak. “TV Networks have to recognize this, give their viewers more ways to interact with the shows, and find ways to generate revenue from every member of the global audience.”

    Incidentally, Alexander is also reportedly working on a 13-part TV show about piracy.

    Filmmaker Michael Moore has a similar take: He has said on the record that he doesn’t have a problem with people who download his movies, as long as they don’t make a profit off it.

    Ofcom

    To date, Ofcom has not made a lot of public noise about the piracy issue. But that should not be mistaken for a lack of interest or concern. Our formal locus may be limited. But this sort of piracy is something that affects network operators, ISPs, content creators and consumers – and as the converged regulator we have of course been keeping a watchful eye on developments.

    The issue is critical. An operator investing in next generation networks will not want it clogged up with illegal peer-to-peer content if that means no-one will pay to ensure a return on the investment, as we have seen in some Asia Pacific markets. And content providers, self evidently, do not want illegal traffic undermining their investment in IPR.

    This is a crucial issue for both network providers and content creators. It has not touched every company in these spheres yet, but it will do. We very much hope that a commercial or voluntary agreement can be found to resolve these difficult issues. As the converged communications regulator, if we can play a constructive role in helping to find a common solution in the best interests of companies and consumers we would be very happy to do so.

    Index

    Néhány éve az EliteTorrents az internet egyik legmenőbb torrentoldala volt. A nevéhez hűen eredetileg kiválasztott kevesek titkos oldalának készült, aztán egyre inkább elterjedt a híre, és amikor a Star Wars előzménytrilógia befejező része, a Sith bosszúja ezen az oldalon keresztül szivárgott ki az internetre a premier előtt, a média is felfigyelt rá.

    Az FBI 2005-ben az amerikai filmkiadók szövetségének segítségével elkapta az EliteTorrents üzemeltetőit, és bíróság elé állította őket. Az oldal két adminisztrátorát, Scott McCauslandet és Grant Stanleyt már 2006-ban elítélték, néhány ezer dolláros bírságot, és öt-öt hónap börtönt kaptak (plusz McCauslandnek a próbaidején Windows kell használnia [1], mert az ellenőrző szoftver, amivel az FBI követi az online ténykedését, nem megy Linuxon).

    Két társával ellentétben Daniel Dove a végsőkig ragaszkodott ahhoz, hogy ártatlan, de a vádnak végül sikerült annyi bizonyítékot [2] felhalmozni, ami meggyőzte a bíróságot ennek ellenkezőjéről. Dove a fájlcserélőre a friss tartalmakat feltöltő szűk elitréteg vezetője volt, és 700 film illegális másolatainak megosztását bizonyították rá, amit 1,1 millióan töltöttek le a hálózatról. A büntetése maximálisan tíz év lehet; ha ilyen súlyos lesz az ítélet, az azt jelzi, hogy az amerikai zene- és filmkiadók egyre agresszívabban lépnek fel a fájlcserélők ellen.

    Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

    For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.

    Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.

    On top of long-term changes in the industry, the weak economy is also hurting ad sales, especially in Florida and California, where the severe contraction of the housing markets has cut deeply into real estate ads. Executives at the Hearst Corporation say that one of their biggest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle, is losing $1 million a week.

    Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May.

    Times Online

    Anyone who persists in illicit downloading of music or films will be barred from broadband access under a controversial new law that makes France a pioneer in combating internet piracy.

    “There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone,” President Sarkozy told his Cabinet yesterday as it endorsed the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” scheme that from next January will hit illegal downloaders where it hurts.

    Under a cross-industry agreement, internet service providers (ISPs) must cut off access for up to a year for third-time offenders.

    NYTimes.com

    One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of “Internet metering” in one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

    The Statesman

    The Afrikan Arts Network in partnership with the Copyright Association of Ghana, has announced it will organise a three day Anti-Piracy event, dubbed Afrikan Arts Festival & Award, from the 20th-22nd of August 2008 in Ghana.

    The event which will be under the theme “Piracy: a Bane to Creativity in Africa,” is designed to create a culture of respect for intellectual property, and encourage quality and respect for Africa content.

    The event will also aim at offering a big platform for participants to discuss the dangers of piracy for intellectual property protection in Africa, will also seek to create a culture of respect which will develop a virile distribution network for African content.

    It will also provide a ground for Africa to celebrate the ideals of the Pan-Africanist and African nationalist movements, recognise and reward individuals who have contributed to the immense growth of African arts across her borders besides serving as a commemorative event that will generate and foster a spirit of unity among Africans in the Film and Music industry.

    A joint statement issued by Afrikan Arts Network Ltd and Copyright Office said the event is to further strengthen the combat of piracy. “It beats our imagination to see that musical and film festivals/awards are hosted over the years by stakeholders in Africa without giving space for Anti-piracy discussion. Ignoring piracy in Africa is passing a death sentence on African creative minds”, it said.

    Other events like Film Screening and Premiering, Hall of Fame Induction and Awards night are expected to climax the programme.

    Asva.info

    Zárásként, mert olvastam a kérdések között szeretném megcáfolni, hogy mi ezért az egészért sohasem kaptunk semmilyen anyagi támogatást. Saját pénzből finanszírozzuk a forrásokat, a hw-eket, az internetet és még sorolhatnám, amit nekünk nem fizet ki senki. Köszönet érdemli azokat akik az évek során meg-megújúlva képesek még mindig kitartani emelett a helyzet mellett és továbbra is önzetlenül dolgoznak azért, hogy nektek letöltőknek jó legyen. Külön tisztelet az archívumok kezelőinek akik nem csak a friss filmekkel foglalkoznak, hanem ügyelnek arra, hogy régi gyöngyszemek is letölthetőek legyenek, ha már a magyar kiadók nem tartottak rá igényt! Hamarosan itthon is elérhető lesz a hd sugárzás, kiváncsian várom ki lesz az első igazi hd capper…
    Azoknak akik az elmúlt napok alatt csak mocskolódni tudtak, és hangoztatták, hogy majd jön a helyükre 5 másik: én valahogy nem látom, hogy az eltelt 2 nap alatt jelentkezett volna a megszűnt 5 csapat helyére 25 új másik. Így is telített a piac, talán jobb lenne ha egymás dupeolgatása helyett mindenki olyan munkára szentelné az idejét és pénzét ami még nem elérhető. Ha ezt sikerülne megvalósítani már hatalmas lépés lenne egy jobb warezvilág felé. A rengeteg torrent-csapat miatt pedig ez nem fog megvalósulni, mert így mindenki első kézből fér hozzá a saját csapat releasehez, holott 1 max 2 óra elteltével ugyanaz lenne elérhető minden helyen. De ha nekik egyszerűbb fizetni a sávszélt és a ripboxot a lelkük rajta.
    És bármilyen hihetetlen tényleg letesszük a lantot, igen hiányozni fog egy jóideig, de az ebből fakadó rengeteg időt sokminden másra is fel lehet használni. Köszöntem a figyelmet.

    UiD születik » Blog Archive »

    Szeretnék pár szót szólni, és ezzel a figyelmet kicsit felkelteni, a torrent világban egyre durvábban működtetett új pénzszerzési módszerről amit „etikus mert nem kötelező” felkiáltással próbálnak beadni nekünk.

    Egészen pontosan az sms-sel vagy bármi más módon vásárolt előnyökre gondolok. Néhány torrent oldal előnyöket kínál nyíltan pénz, vagy burkoltan támogatás fejében, és ezt azzal próbálják kifehéríteni, hogy az nem kötelező.
    Nem igaz az, hogy minden ami nem kötelező az emiatt már etikus is. Nézzük egy példán keresztül. Tegyük fel, hogy én kezelem egy csoportnak a kasszáját. A csoport tagjai tesznek bele pénzt és vesznek ki belőle. Persze hosszútávon csak annyit vehetnek ki amennyit beleraknak, én erre vigyázok. Na most ha én azt mondom az embereknek – ha valaki ad nekem x forintot akkor kétszer annyit vehet ki a kasszából – akkor ez etikus vagy sem? Ez annak ellenére sem etikus, hogy nem kötelező. Az előnyt nem a magam „kárára” hanem másokéra adtam.

    Jó lenne ha mindenki felfogná – minden olyan előny ami a le/fel töltési arányt befolyásolja (áttételesen a regisztráció biztosítása is ide tartozik), az a többi felhasználó kárára történik és ezért nem etikus ilyet adni, különösen nem pénzért.

    Intellectual Property Watch »

    Broadcasters also argue that the current relationship between the performers and radio stations is a mutually beneficial one, in which the radio benefits from advertising revenue and artists get free air time, which boosts record sales. They cited Nielson Company data from companies that track the relationship between “spins” of songs on the radio and the resulting sales demonstrate that both artists and record labels reap big rewards for local radio time. Between 14 and 23 percent of industry sales of albums and digital tracks can be attributed to local radio, which provides artists with $1.5 billion to $2.4 billion annually, according to a new study promoted by NAB.

    The Mayor of Budapest has convened a conference on the new anti-graffiti measures of the city. I was invited to give a talk, in which I tried to argue that graffiti is a like fever. It is not the malady itself. It is a sign of deep running problems in society. Fighting against graffiti is like trying to treat cancer with antidepressants.  Fruitless.

    The whole ppt is here. (76Mbyte)

    FT.com print article

    Songwriters and publishers for the first time earned more from broadcasts and legal downloads of their music in 2007 than from the copyright from sales of CDs, new figures show.

    Despite an 11 per cent fall in rights income from physical sales, reflecting the accelerating collapse of the CD market, the main body that collects rights on behalf of UK performers and publishers reported overall growth of 2.8 per cent last year.


    The figures show how such fees charged to broadcasters and online outlets for their use of music are becoming increasingly important to musicians and music companies.

    They underscore a growing argument in the music industry that artists and record labels will have to adapt to the idea that recorded music sales – once the core of the business – will become just ancillary revenue streams.

    The Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society and the Performing Rights Society, which together – as the MCPS-PRS Alliance – reap the rewards of musical creativity for UK artists, said income from broadcasting and online sources increased 7 per cent to £155.5m ($306.7m).

    The money paid to copyright holders from CD sales, by contrast, fell 11 per cent from £170.7m to £151.8m. Overall income reported by the MCPS-PRS Alliance grew from £546.8m to £562.1m.

    Licensing ‘not about fat cats’

    The MCPS-PRS Alliance says its licensing of public music performances, from the 02 Arena to your local hairdressing salon, is “not about fat-cattery but doing something important for people who can’t do it themselves”, write Ben Fenton and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.

    The 2007 figures show that 95 per cent of the alliance’s 50,000 members earn less than £10,000 a year from copyright on their songs, while only 0.01 per cent, or about five superstars, earn over £1m.

    Collecting societies have used such figures as ammunition in their lobbying for an extension to the length of copyright protection for sound recordings. MCPS-PRS and PPL, the other large UK collecting society, failed to persuade a Treasury review of intellectual property regulations to extend recorded music copyright in December 2006.

    At the time, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce praised Andrew Gowers, the review’s author, for resisting the “special pleading by a number of already wealthy pop stars”. In February, however, Charlie McCreevy, European commissioner, expressed sympathy with the collecting societies’ case, saying European performers should enjoy copyright protection for 95 years rather than the current 50 years.

    In all, 78 per cent of the MCPS-PRS membership gets less than £1.50 a day from their creativity, with 37 per cent – 18,500 musicians – failing to register a single penny in rights payments. The bulk of the money collected goes to the big music publishing companies.

    Steve Porter, chief executive, told the Financial Times: “Because we have also made our collection costs more efficient, then for the first time we have been able to distribute more than half a billion pounds to our 50,000 members.

    “For us, the important thing is to be able to collect in new ways and new places to make up for the obvious decline in revenues from CD sales.”

    The burgeoning live music market is also reflected in the new figures, showing a 20 per cent increase in rights collected from businesses staging live gigs and festivals. The sector now produces £17.5m in income. Money from pubs and clubs increased by 4.1 per cent to £40.4m and total public performance revenues were up almost 10 per cent at £133.6m.

    Mr Porter said that despite the threat of illegal music downloading on the internet, which has had a savage impact on CD sales, there was still potential for greater growth in two areas: international usage and legal online music services such as Apple’s iTunes.

    “We have had a 10 per cent increase in international collections and most of that is being generated in central and eastern Europe where collection mechanisms are getting more effective,” he said. “But of course people are banging on tables and saying we should be getting more money out of China and so on. But the fact is that if you don’t have a mature and established collecting-rights environment which says these rights have value, it’s really very difficult.

    “There is no broadcast music right in China, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be one in the future,” Mr Porter said.

    The alliance had set itself the challenge of finding new uses of music that had so far fallen outside the licensing net, he added, citing as examples “the birthday card that plays a song or the toothbrush that plays a jingle”.

    Although online rights income increased by 54 per cent in 2007, it accounted for only £9.7m, a fraction of the value estimated to be lost by illegal downloading.

    Broadcast revenues, especially in television, looked more healthy, with a 10.4 per cent increase to £89.9m. In radio, where rights are calculated as a proportion of advertising revenue, income was flat at £49.5m, but Mr Porter said he expected it to grow in 2008.

    “This year we are looking for more of the same,” he added. Growth in broadcast and online is forecast to approach double-digits again while revenues from CDs is predicted to fall by 17 to 18 per cent on current trends.

    PPL, the UK broadcast royalties collection society, said earlier this month that it would step up a campaign to extract more fees from businesses for their use of music, as new figures showed a 15 per cent rise in performance rights around the world.

    AFP:

    Incidents of piracy have spiked across the world since 2000 but there is no evidence to support fears of extremist groups linking up with pirates for their operations, a new study released on Thursday has found.

    It attributed the rise to the expansion of the global sea trade, congested chokepoints, corrupt officials, shifting spending priorities, lax coastal and port security, and the availability of small arms.

    “Combined with the large number of ports around the world, this growth has provided pirates with an almost limitless range of tempting, high pay-off targets,” said the study by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit organization.

    The study, which was authored by Peter Chalk, said 2,463 actual or attempted acts of piracy occurred between 2000 and the end of 2006, nearly a quarter of them in waters around the Indonesian archipelago.

    Entertainment News, Technology News, Media – Variety

    For the first time, Spain and Greece join usual suspects Russia, China, Canada and Mexico on a congressional list of countries with the highest levels of piracy.

    The Intl. Antipiracy Caucus issued Thursday its annual list of countries “based on levels of piracy and the need for government intervention in lawmaking, enforcement and prosecution of intellectual property theft,” according to the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which supports the caucus.

    The list is essentially Congress’ smaller-scale version of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative’s annual 301 Report. But unlike the 301 Report, the caucus list does not carry with it the authority directly to affect trade relations with any countries.

    Still, the MPAA and the Recording Industry Assn. of America hailed the list, and Hollywood particularly emphasized the inclusion of Spain.

    “The Spanish government’s persistent failure to address Spain’s epidemic Internet piracy problem, which is wreaking havoc on the legitimate market, has caused Spain to appear on the list,” the MPAA said.

    The RIAA said: “Joining China and Russia in ‘the ignominious three’ is Canada, which, notwithstanding numerous public announcements, has failed to join the rest of its partners in the developed world in modernizing its copyright laws to address the challenges — and to seize the opportunities — of the digital age.”

    Science Journal – WSJ.com

    We all bristle at people who put themselves ahead of the common good, whether it is by evading taxes, shirking military service, cheating on bus fares or littering. Many of us will go out of our way to shame, shun or otherwise punish them, researchers have shown. That’s how we foster a community that benefits everyone, even at some cost to ourselves.

    Economists analyzing ingredients of the social glue that holds us all together wonder whether that public spirit of rebuke and reward is an innate human value or a byproduct of the particular society in which we live. Until recently, however, they rarely have reached across cultural boundaries to compare how people in disparate communities actually weigh private gain against public good.

    In the most sweeping global study yet of cooperation, a team of experimental economists tested university students in 15 countries to see how people contribute to joint ventures and what happens to them when they don’t. The European research team discovered startling differences in how groups around the world react when punishment is handed out for antisocial behavior.
    WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz speaks to Kelsey Hubbard about an important study that looked at how people responded to peer pressure in cooperative ventures across many societies.

    In some countries, researchers found, almost no good turn went unpunished. “What kept popping up is this element of retaliation,” said economist Benedikt Herrmann at the U.K.’s University of Nottingham, who reported the experiment this past March in Science. “It took us by surprise.”

    Among students in the U.S., Switzerland, China and the U.K., those identified as freeloaders most often took their punishment as a spur to contribute more generously. But in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece and Russia, the freeloaders more often struck back, retaliating against those who punished them, even against those who had given most to everyone’s benefit. It was akin to rapping the knuckles of the helping hand.

    To explore cooperation across cultures, Dr. Herrmann and his colleagues recruited 1,120 college students in 16 cities around the globe for a public-good game. The exercise is one of several devised by economists in recent years to distill the complex variables of human behavior into transactions simple enough to be studied under controlled laboratory conditions.

    The volunteers played in anonymous groups of four. Each player started with 20 tokens that could be redeemed for cash after 10 rounds. Players could contribute tokens to a common account or keep them all to themselves.

    After each round, the pooled funds paid a dividend shared equally by all, even those who didn’t contribute. Previous research shows that a single selfish individual riding on the generosity of others can so irritate other players that contributions soon drop to nothing.

    That changes when players can identify and punish those who don’t contribute (in this case, by deducting points that can quickly add up to serious money). Once such peer pressure comes into play, everyone — including the shamed freeloader — starts to chip in.

    “Freeloaders are disliked everywhere,” said study co-author Simon Gachter, who studies economic decision-making at Nottingham. “Cooperation always breaks down if people can’t punish.”

    The students behaved the same way in all 16 cities until given the chance to punish those taking a free ride on the shared investment. Punishment was done anonymously, and it cost one token to discipline another player.

    Among those punished, differences emerged immediately. Students in Seoul, Istanbul, Minsk in Belarus, Samara in Russia, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Athens, and Muscat in Oman were most likely to take revenge by deducting points from other players — and to give up a token themselves to do it.

    “They didn’t believe they did anything wrong,” said economist Herbert Gintis at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute. And because the spiteful freeloaders had no way of knowing who had punished them, they often took out their ire on those who helped others most, suspecting they must be to blame.

    Such a readiness to retaliate, researchers said, reflected relatively lower levels of trust, civic cooperation and the rule of law as measured by social scientists in the World Values Survey, which periodically assesses basic values and beliefs in more than 80 societies. In countries with democratic market economies, peer pressure goaded people to cooperate. Among authoritarian societies or those dominated more by ties of kinship, freeloaders instead lashed out at those who censured them, the researchers found.

    “The question is why?” said Harvard political economist Richard Zeckhauser.

    No one is sure. The freeloaders might be angry at being trumped by strangers, or be unwilling to share with people they don’t know. They also might believe they are being treated unfairly.

    But social appearances and the good opinion of others do regulate our behavior. In the only other major cross-cultural study of this sort, Dr. Gintis and his colleagues several years ago examined 15 primitive societies of farmers, foragers, hunters and nomads in 12 countries, not unlike those in which humanity might have first evolved. The researchers found that these people all cared as much about fairness as the economic outcome of a trade. “They care about the ethical value of what they do,” said Dr. Gintis.

    Independent brain-imaging teams in Japan and the U.S. have shown just how valuable approval can be, as they reported in April in Neuron. Researchers at Japan’s National Institute for Psychological Sciences found that when they watched the brain respond to reputation and social status, the excited synapses looked awfully familiar: They were the same ones activated by money.

    Studying peer pressure in 15 countries, economist Benedikt Herrmann at the UK’s University of Nottingham reported on “Antisocial Punishment Across Societies”3 in Science.
    The researchers also ranked the national responses against the World Values Survey4, which periodically assesses values and cultural changes in societies all over the world.
    Searching for the
    origins of economic behavior, an international research team studied 15
    primitive cultures in 12 countries and reported their findings in
    We may be hard-wired to care about social standing, scientists at the US National Institute of Mental Health reported in “Know Your Place: Neural Processing of Social Hierarchy in Humans.”6
    At Japan’s National Institute for Psychological Sciences, researchers reported in “Processing of Social and Monetary Rewards in the Human Striatum”7 that reputation activates the same brain areas as money.
    Free-market philosopher Adam Smith, author in 1776 of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations8 wrote first in 1759 on praise, blame, ethics and human nature in The Theory of Moral Sentiments9.

    TechCrunch

    Microsoft is shutting down its book digitization initiative, which launched in 2006, the company said in an email today (full text is below). The publisher site is already down, the books site itself will be shut next week, and Microsoft posted a blog post on it here.

    The company has digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles to date. Google’s competing product, Book Search, is adding 3,000 books per day to their index, although they have not disclosed the total number of books scanned.

    The New York Times had a good overview of the book digitization process in an article last year. There are also a few examples of some funny stuff getting into the scans.

    Techdirt:

    I’ve been noticing an interesting trend lately. While more folks aren’t totally averse to the idea that they need to somehow embrace “free,” they’re mishandling what they do with “free” and then going on to complain how “free” doesn’t work. The basic problem is this: they hear about the importance of “free” and so they give something away for free. But they don’t have a business model around the free content. They don’t understand the economic forces at work. They just give stuff away and pray… and then whine when nothing happens. As we’ve pointed out before, no one says that “free” by itself pays the bills. You need to have a more complete strategy than that — and it involves a lot more than “give it away and pray.” It’s good that they’re at least trying, but if they don’t understand the real issues and fail at the experiments, they suddenly come back and claim that “free” isn’t the answer, and suddenly rule out all business models involving free. And that is a real recipe for failure.

    Slashdot |

    “I’m an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual. At the same time, I find the current trend of increasing penalties for minor violations, criminalizing civil IP matters, anti-consumer technologies like DRM, and abuse of the legal system by the *AA’s of the world really disturbing. You’d think that by now, there’d be a reasonable solution to the problem of protecting intellectual property while at the same time maintaining the rights of consumers and protecting individuals from absurd litigation, but I have yet to find one. So, I pose these questions to the Slashdot community: 1 — Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it’s illusory? If not, why? 2 — If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn’t require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?”

    Listening Post from Wired.com

    A 25-year-old Brooklyn man has been found guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement in what the Recording Industry Association of America describes as the first-ever federal trial for online criminal copyright infringement primarily featuring music.

    Barry Gitarts was convicted Thursday by a federal jury in Virginia, according to the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. He now faces up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and three years of supervised release. In addition, he must “make full restitution” to record labels.

    This is no mere file sharing case, so if you share the odd file now and again, you don’t need to worry about facing charges like this. Under the pseudonym “Dextro,” Gitarts was charged with administering a server in Texas for an underground file sharing group called Apocalypse Production Crew.

    APC members traded music, games, movies and software amongst themselves but trial testimony portrayed APC as what the RIAA termed a “first provider” or “release group” of pirated content.

    According to the RIAA, evidence presented in the case showed that he received payment from the leader of the group in return for this work.

    Ars Technica

    Hollywood has been granted another victory in its war against piracy, this time at the expense of two linking sites that the Motion Picture Association of America believes profited from enabling copyright infringement. Both ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net have been hit with multimillion dollar judgments recently for copyright infringement of various movies and TV shows.
    Even though ShowStash and Cinematube didn’t host any of these files, both were found guilty of contributory copyright infringement, according to the judges’ opinions, because they searched for, identified, collected, and indexed links to illegal copies of movies and TV shows. Aside from monetary damages, both sites are now prohibited from engaging in further activity that would infringe upon the studios’ work.

    The damages totaled $2.7 million for ShowStash and $1.3 million for Cinematube, neither of which were particularly well-known to the general Internet community. The MPAA doesn’t seem to care much that it gives free publicity to these tiny sites when it makes announcements of its litigation plans, however. The organization apparently hopes that others will merely feel threatened by the prospect of paying out millions of dollars and shut down voluntarily.

    Gizmodo

    While appearing to have double the collection of Apple TV or Vudu, what do you get in Netflix’s 10,000 movie collection? Basically, you get a lot of back catalog (classic movies) and a lot of TV shows (unheard of in rental situations!) right as they hit the market. But you don’t get the same blockbusters on day one release that you’d get from Apple TV or Vudu. That makes the Netflix box and disc system a great supplement to those systems, which seem to specialize in new releases. (Kudos to Saul from the NYTimes for discovering this initially.) The business model behind a flat rate unlimited streaming system is unheard of. Sure, they’re taking a lot of older content, which is inherently cheaper. But think of it this way: For a nine-dollar-a-month account, you can hold off on buying older DVDs or watching TV shows. A box set of Ghost in the Shell or 30 Rock costs over 50 bucks on DVD or by renting individual downloads, but you can stream many of these episodes for nine bucks a month. Buying the Karate Kid, an old movie not on many download services, costs a few bucks on DVD, but I can just watch it whenever I want as long as I’m a Netflix customer. (And consider that the number of great back catalog titles like that will probably outpace new releases you’d find on Vudu or Apple TV.) It’s basically the same as Netflix’s current model, but instead of being limited by the postal service, you’re limited by your spare time and interest in older titles. (And don’t forget Netflix’s disc-by-mail service, which still covers new titles.)

    PC World

    More and more Internet service providers are blocking or throttling traffic to the peer-to-peer file-sharing service. Find out whether you’ve been targeted, and learn how get around the restrictions.

    ars technica

    Handfuls of Windows Vista Media Center users found themselves blocked from making recordings of their favorite TV shows this week when a broadcast flag triggered the software’s built-in copy protection measures. The flag affected users trying to record prime-time NBC shows on Monday evening, using both over-the-air broadcasts and cable. Although the problem is being “looked into” by both NBC and Microsoft, the incident serves as another reminder that DRM gives content providers full control, even if by accident.

    Slashdot

    “The judge in Capitol Records v. Thomas said today he’s thinking about granting a new trial because he may have committed a ‘manifest error of law’ in his jury instructions. He says that his instruction that simply uploading music to a P2P network without any proof that anyone actually downloaded it may conflict with a case in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals that said ‘infringement of [the distribution right] requires an actual dissemination.’ Briefs are due by May 29, with oral argument July 1. The judge invited friend of the court briefs by May 29, as well.”

    Threat Level from Wired.com

    A day after a U.S. judge dinged TorrentSpy with one of the largest fines in copyright history, the lawyer for the torrent-tracking search engine said Thursday the $111 million judgment won’t get paid.

    Nevis-based Valence Media, the owner of TorrentSpy, filed for bankruptcy protection in England last week “and has no appreciable assets,” attorney Ira Rothken said. “This was a Hollywood publicity stunt.”

    The Motion Picture Association of America sued the search engine in Los Angeles federal court, alleging the site facilitated copyright infringement of Hollywood movies. The MPAA won a default judgment last year after TorrentSpy refused to turn over internal documents, and a federal judge levied the $111 million penalty and ordered the site never to return online.

    “It certainly is not a lesson for other search engines to look at what the rules are as they relate to dot-torrent files,” Rothken said. “There was no analysis of the copyright.”

    Elizabeth Kaltman, an MPAA spokeswoman, said “We will pursue enforcement of the judgment.”

    The legality of torrent-tracking services has never been litigated on the merits in the United States, said Charles Baker, a Houston IP lawyer who defended Grokster and is Limewire’s attorney in a case accusing the peer-to-peer software maker of facilitating copyright infringement.

    The MPAA, he said, wants “other torrent owners and operators to look at the $111 million figure and say, ‘I’m getting out of the business.'”

    The TorrentSpy case, Baker said, “is another example of the studios eating these guys to death. They haven’t tried the merits of the case.”

    Gary Fung, the operator and founder of tracking service Isohunt, said the TorrentSpy decision worries him, but he’s not going to cave to Hollywood.

    “I’m worried,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to pay something like a $100 million. I fully know the risk I’m taking.”

    The United States’ largest copyright fine, $115 million, was against the Kazaa file sharing service two years ago.

    The MPAA’s case against Fung is pending in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, a case that is likely to set legal precedent in the United States and perhaps abroad on the legalities of torrent-tracking services that the MPAA claims facilitate wanton copyright infringement.

    The TorrentSpy penalty is being appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, Rothken said. He has already appealed last year’s default judgment in the case that allegedly was built on the back of a hacker who was paid $15,000 to obtain private e-mail and financial information. Both sides are briefing that case.

    Variety

    The inauguration of Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, on May 7 signaled a new era in the battle to combat copyright crime, Konstantin Zemchenkov, head of the Russian Anti-Piracy Organization (RAPO), believes.

    Ten years after the Motion Picture Assn.-backed group was set up to both lobby for and lead front-line assaults against Russia’s massive, organized video and DVD piracy networks, steady progress is being made.

    Criminal law reform has increased maximum prison terms and doubled fines to $20,000 for producers and sellers of pirated product.

    A wide range of new administrative measures, which include requirements to report the purchase and sale of large-scale DVD and video copying equipment, coupled with municipal trading-standards laws, are also being employed to tighten the grip on pirates.

    Stepping up the fight against intellectual piracy offenses is a key part of Medvedev’s strategy to gain coveted Russian membership in the World Trade Organization.

    Russia’s lax record on stemming vast piracy that costs legitimate license holders an estimated $2 billion a year has been among the key stumbling blocks to its getting membership in the world’s top trade club.

    tune-out.com …. a response to the music industry

    There is no digital music battle or piracy war. That is a figment of your imagination, and, every time you preach our digital crimes to us, we ‘tune out’ of your deranged ranting. Your declining profits are the symptom of a business model that is fast becoming irrelevant.

    Harsányi László, a Nemzeti Kulturális Alap elnöke, a rettenetesen kommunikált, internetre kivetendő kulturális járulék ötletgazdája az MTV Este című műsorában a következőket mondta:

    Havi 20-50 forint havi többlet költségért, amit az előfizető fizet továbbra is ingyen lehet letölteni zenét, filmet.

    Bullshit, mondja erre az amerikai. Miért?

    Az Igazségügyi és Rendészeti minisztériumban ezekben a napokban zajlik a szerzői jogi törvény módosítása (IRM/EUJFO/460-15 /2008), mely érinti a magáncélú másolatok kérdését is. Az eredeti előterjesztésben a következő javaslat szerepel:

    “Az SzJSzT 17/06. számú szakértői véleménye és számos szakirodalmi forrás szerint a nemzetközi, közösségi és hazai szerzői jogi szabályozásból következik, hogy a jogellenes forrásból történő magáncélú másolás egyetlen esetben sem megengedett, sem szabad felhasználásként, sem pedig a jogdíjigényre való korlátozás alapján. Ennek az álláspontnak az egyértelművé tételét végzi el a 35. § (8) bekezdésének módosítása.[…]A 35. § új (8) bekezdése értelmében a 35. § (4) bekezdésében meghatározott célokra történő többszörözések is csak jogszerűen létrejött műpéldányról vagy a nyilvánossághoz jogszerűen közvetített műről történhetnek.”

    E javaslat az egyeztetési folyamatban úgy finomodott, hogy csak akkor számít majd jogsértőnek az internetről letöltő felhasználó, ha tudta, vagy tudnia kellett volna, hogy a forrás, ahonnan a másolatot készítette, illegálisan lett közzétéve. Hogy mi az, amiről egy átlagos felhasználónak tudnia kellene azt majd a bíróság dönti el hónapok alatt.

    Harsányi:igazság 0:1, a félidőben.

    Merthogy mitől lehetnének legálisak az internetes letöltések, így a p2p hálózatok is? Ha jogosultak, az őket képviselő szervezeteken (a közös jogkezelőkön) keresztül, vagy egyénileg, díj ellenében engedélyeznék a felhasználást (letöltést és feltöltést). Azaz ha ugyanez az összeg a jogosultak javaslatára az ő zsebükbe folyna, cserébe ők engedélyezhetnék a felhasználást. Erről természetesen szó nincs, ahogy az NKA által elosztott kulturális járuléknak sincs semmi köze a jogosultaknak járó díjhoz.

    Harsányi:igazság 0:2

    A kérdés immár csak az, hogy a fenti kijelentés nyelvbotlás volt, vagy inkább annak a jele, hogy a magyar kulturális ellátórendszer egyik erős emberének fogalma sincs arról a területről, amit irányítani és adóztatni szeretne.

    GigaOM

    As part of the research I’m doing for another piece, I had a long conversation with Danny McPherson, CTO of Arbor Networks, which makes all sorts of network-management and traffic-shaping tools. Arbor is used by dozens of ISPs around the planet and, as a result, McPherson is privy to details about traffic flows and usage patterns across many broadband networks.

    McPherson shared with me some interesting stats and facts about broadband usage and peer-to-peer networking usage patterns. Given that Arbor makes a living selling its technology and products to carriers, it is prudent to maintain a degree of skepticism about the numbers. That said, they are nevertheless interesting enough to share.

    On fixed and mobile broadband networks where consumer services are provided (i.e., NOT interprovider or typical dedicated Internet access for commercial enterprises):

    * 10 percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth.
    * 0.5 percent of subscribers consume about 40 percent of total bandwidth
    * 80 percent of subscribers use less than 10 percent of bandwidth

    This supports the arguments made by some of the larger ISPs, including Comcast. In a recent interview, Comcast Cable CTO Tony Werner told me his company would try and deal with the tiny number of subscribers who use most of the bandwidth by slowing down their connections during peak times. (Personally, I find that to be a distasteful solution, and I believe that folks should learn from newer ISPs like Free.fr and better architect their networks so they can provide more bandwidth for all — without imposing any penalties.)

    The P2P stats are the ones that came as a complete surprise. Like you, I have read many reports that suggest P2P applications account for the majority of the traffic on high-speed networks. But McPherson’s data suggests otherwise:

    * 20 percent of traffic is P2P applications
    * During peak-load times, 70 percent of subscribers use http while 20 percent are using P2P
    * Http still makes up the majority of the total traffic, of which 45 percent is traditional web content that includes text and images. Streaming video and audio content from services like YouTube accounts for nearly 50 percent of the http traffic. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone — streaming TV shows from Hulu and videos from YouTube have been on a major upswing, as noted by our colleagues over on NewTeeVee.

    PC Magazine

    On the heels of its arrangement with BitTorrent , Comcast on Tuesday announced that it would partner with Pando Networks to create a P2P bill of rights for file-sharing networks and Internet service providers.

    Comcast and Pando will meet with industry experts, other ISPs, and P2P companies in order to come up with a set of rules that would clarify how a user can use P2P applications and how an ISP can manage file-sharing programs running on their networks.

    Last month, Comcast announced that it had reached an agreement with BitTorrent whereby Comcast agreed to alter its network management practices, and BitTorrent acknowledged that Comcast has the right to police its own network.

    Comcast’s battle with P2P networks started last year after the Associated Press published an article that accused Comcast of blocking peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent. Comcast admitted to delaying P2P traffic during peak times, but denied that any file-sharing applications were being completely blocked.

    Nonetheless, the FCC has opened an inquiry into the matter. The commission will sponsor a Net neutrality hearing that will address network management practices on Thursday at Stanford Law School, but has yet to take any definitive action.

    The FCC has invited Tony Werner, Comcast chief technology officer, and Robert Levitan, CEO of Pando Networks, to participate in the Stanford hearing, an FCC spokesman said Tuesday night.

    The Comcast-Pando deal is “an interesting idea with potentially important implications for all Internet users,” he said.

    Under the Pando deal, Comcast will run a test of Pando’s Network Aware technology on its fiber-optic network in order to measure performance, speed, distance, and geography as well as the bandwidth consumption impact to the ISP, Comcast said. Pando will also conduct tests on other ISP networks, including cable, DSL, fiber, and wireless.

    The results of these tests are intended to help Comcast move to a protocol-agnostic network management policy by year’s end – which was part of the deal with BitTorrent.

    “We hope to get other industry experts, ISPs and P2P companies together this spring and publish the ‘P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities’ later this year,” Comcast’s Werner said in a statement.

    “By sharing the test methodology and results, all P2P companies and ISPs can learn how to more efficiently deliver legal content,” said Pando’s Levitan.

    The National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) praised the annoucement as “further evidence that private sector collaboration, not government intervention, is the most appropriate way to address complicated technological issues,” NCTA president and CEO Kyle McSlarrow said in a statement.

    The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), which represents P2P and social-networking providers, urged industry participation in the process.

    “The DCIA and our member companies and participants in our working groups believe that private sector initiatives are generally preferable to regulatory measures in such areas,” DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty said in a statement.

    Free Press, which filed the FCC network management petition, was skeptical that the Pando deal would protect consumers.

    “Slick press releases by a dishonest would-be gatekeeper do nothing to protect consumers,” Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press, said in a statement. “The need for Net neutrality remains urgent. The FCC should do its job to uphold the existing bill of rights for consumers and should do so quickly.”

    The Comcast-Pando deal “is little more than the fox telling the farmer, ‘I’ll guard the henhouse, you can go home.’ And that’s all the attention it deserves,” Ammori concluded.

    Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, said the deal was “ludicrous.”

    “Comcast should fix its internal problems with customers being kicked off the Internet service for no good reason, or are disappointed about having programming switched to expensive digital services before it starts pretending to solve the problems of the Internet that it helped to cause,” Sohn said in a statement.

    The Register

    Nokia will be handing over its entire handset profit margin – and more – to the record industry for its “Comes With Music” progamme, according to media analysts.

    The Hollywood Reporter this week reports that Nokia is paying the world’s biggest label, Universal Music Group, $35 per handset to bundle access to the label’s catalogue. Punters are allowed to keep music they download.

    Music business insiders expressed astonishment to us at Nokia’s generosity: it’s seven times what some privately estimated the deal was worth. Paid Content puts the payment to UMG at $33.5 per handset for the first 2.5 million units, falling as volumes increase.

    But what if Nokia succeeds in replicating the deal with other labels? Then the extent of the programme becomes apparent. One blog, basing its estimate on market share, figures the subsidy would rise to $116 per handset. But that’s a lowball figure, we reckon: it excludes publishing royalties, and underestimates the size of the indie sector which is as high as 40pc of the market, particularly with the yoof demographic Nokia wants.

    The back of our envelope shows a figure closer to $150 per handset.

    Either way, that comfortably wipes out any hope of a profit for Nokia on the CWM. The average selling price of a mobile handset is a shade over $100; Nokia’s gross margin around a third of that.

    The pride of Finnish business has been undergoing a crisis of confidence in recent years – making it easy pickings for new media consultants. These are typified by WiReD magazine’s Chris Anderson, who recently lectured the company on the wisdom of giving stuff away. “Zero” was a “Radical Price”, he advised. And “Minus Eighty” sure is a radical profit margin, Chris!

    How the music business must wish it met “paytards” like Nokia every day.

    mp3 newswire

    BBC NEWS | Technology

    The head of one of Britain’s biggest internet providers has criticised the music industry for demanding that he act against pirates.

    The trade body for UK music, the BPI, asked internet service providers to disconnect people who ignore requests to stop sharing music.

    But Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse, which runs the TalkTalk broadband service, is refusing.

    He said it is not his job to be an internet policeman.

    Threat Level from Wired.com

    University of Florida professor Michael Moulton thinks copyright law protects the lectures he gives to his students, and he’s headed to court to prove it.

    Moulton and his e-textbook publisher are suing Thomas Bean, who runs a company that repackages and sells student notes, arguing that the business is illegal since notes taken during college lectures violate the professor’s copyright.

    Faulkner Press filed suit in a Florida court Tuesday against the the owner of Einstein’s Notes, which sells “study kits” for classes, including Professor Michael Moulton’s course on “Wildlife Issues in the New Millennium.”

    Those notes are illegal, Faulkner and Moulton contend, since they are derivative works of the professor’s copyrighted lectures.

    If successful, the suit (.pdf) could put an end to a lucrative, but ethically murky businesses that have grown up around large universities to profit from students who don’t always want to go to the classes they are paying for.

    – Entertainment on The Huffington Post

    After 17 years of running my record label spinART Records, I shut it down. The advent and general adoption of the Internet, digital media and hardware took control of the global music industry away from the record labels and media outlets and handed it to the masses. For the first time in history, through sites like TuneCore, all music creators can choose to be their own record label. There are no longer subjective gatekeepers controlling who gets let “in,” promoted and exposed. The choice is ours. Now, anyone can be famous.

    Engadget

    So last week Deutsche Telekom, owners of the global T-Mobile brand, sent Engadget a late birthday present: a hand-delivered letter direct from their German legal department requesting the prompt discontinuation of the use of the color magenta on Engadget Mobile. Yep, seriously.

    EDRI

    The Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali) issued a press release on 13 March 2008, explaining that the private companies can’t systematically monitor the activities of peer-to-peer (P2P) users that share files on the Internet, for the purpose of identifying and suing them.

    The decision was taken on 28 February 2008 in the very controversial Peppermint case.

    EDRI

    Although initially the Swedish Government promised not to hunt down young people for filesharing, on 14 March 2008, it made a proposal that will allow courts to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to give up IP addresses used for illegal filesharing to the owners of the fileshared material.

    Digital Civil Rights in Europe

    EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal have sued Ireland’s largest ISP, Eircom, demanding that it install filters to prevent users from illegally sharing or downloading music. The action was admitted by Mr. Justice Peter Kelly to the Commercial Court, meaning that it will be heard on an expedited basis.

    Rolling Stone

    Wal-Mart is like no traditional record seller. Unlike a typical Tower store, which stocks 60,000 titles, an average Wal-Mart carries about 5,000 CDs. That leaves little room on the shelf for developing artists or independent labels. There’s also scant space for catalog albums, which now represent about forty percent of all sales.

    – Entertainment News, Chasing Pirates, Media – Variety

    The government of Antigua is likely to abrogate intellectual property treaties with the U.S. by the end of March and authorize wholesale copying of American movies, music and other “soft targets” if the Bush administration fails to respond to proposals for settling a trade dispute between the two counties, according to the lawyer representing the Caribbean island nation.

    The Motion Picture Assn. of America has been closely following the case with tremendous concern, an org official said, fearing that the copying could be extensively damaging and that — worse — a dangerous precedent could be set for other small countries angry at U.S. trade policy.

    “It is not our preferred option to punish the MPAA or others for the U.S. government’s intransigence, but the U.S. has refused to negotiate fairly,” said Mark E. Mendel, who represents Antigua.

    Goods and materials that would be copied include “virtually everything from pharmaceuticals to music, anything with IP protection that can be duplicated, though we’ll go for softer targets first,” Mendel said.

    Antigua has previously suggested it might retaliate as such — with approval from the World Trade Organization — but has never stipulated when. So far, the U.S. Trade Representative has dismissed that threat simply as a negotiating ploy.

    “Antigua would be breaking the law if it did that,” said USTR spokesman Sean Spicer.

    The WTO ruled last year that Antigua was entitled to $21 million in damages because of a dispute with the U.S. over Internet gambling. But Antigua has not received WTO approval to procure its damages via reproducing and selling domestically U.S.-copyrighted goods and materials, Spicer added.

    “They continually engage in disinformation,” Mendel responded. “The reality is, yes, we have to go before WTO and request their authorization for IP sanctions against the U.S., but we can do that at any time and the WTO will agree. That is 100% guaranteed.”

    Mendel acknowledged his client would like such entities as the MPAA, the recording industry and Microsoft — orgs that depend on IP protection — to pressure the Bush administration into negotiating a “preferred” settlement, which would allow Internet gambling between Antigua and the U.S.

    But he insisted the threat was neither idle nor empty. “Perhaps the U.S. doesn’t think we’re serious,” Mendel said. “We are.”

    The case dates back to 2003, when Antigua claimed that the U.S. unlawfully prevented Antigua’s online gambling operators from accessing American markets although the U.S. allowed domestic online bets for horse racing. Antigua claimed $3.4 billion in losses and took its grievance to the WTO, which agreed, but awarded only $21 million in damages.

    Mendel said his client has been trying ever since to work out an agreement that would allow online gambling between the two countries, but instead the U.S. has responded by “using every possible appeal, counterattack and side attack it could think of. We’ve been through five separate full-blown WTO proceedings on this and have won every step of the way.”

    The most recent victory was in December, when the WTO ruled that Antigua could exact damages by ignoring IP agreements with the U.S. should a negotiated settlement fail.

    Mendel said the U.S. promised then to respond to proposals for settling the dispute. “We have been waiting for three months already and there’s been nothing,” he said. “If the U.S. doesn’t come in with something by the end of March, my suggestion to the Antiguan government will be to forge ahead and impose IP sanctions.”

    In a letter to the USTR about the potential effects of Antigua’s retaliation, sent prior to December’s ruling granting $21 million in damages, the MPAA wrote: “The proposed retaliation would be impossible to manage. The real and resulting economic harm would vastly exceed any amount the (WTO) might approve, even the grossly exaggerated amount ($3.4 billion) for which Antigua seeks approval, plus the economic harm would extend to other WTO members.

    “MPAA believes it would be very difficult to insulate other WTO members from the effects of Antigua’s proposed retaliation,” the letter continued. “The unfortunate reality is that the failure to offer or enforce adequate protection of intellectual property rights in Antigua could foster abuses in other countries.”

    The Underwire from Wired.com

    South Park fans will soon be able to watch any episode of the seminal animated show free online, thanks to a deal between show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom.

    According to Comedy Central reps, Parker and Stone are the driving force behind South Park Studios, the series’ new online HQ offering free viewing of all 12 seasons of South Park. Currently in its beta format, the site and its episodes are ad-supported, but require no additional fees to view as many episodes as a fan’s heart desires.

    In an appropriately glib statement, Parker and Stone said they were inspired to start the site when they got “really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.”

    New episodes will appear on the site soon after airing on Comedy Central and will remain available for one week. After 30 days, the new episode will return to the site permanently. Parker and Stone insist that the new service won’t affect DVD sales as hardcore fans of the show could still want to own the episodes in “hard copy” form.

    There’s no word yet on whether other genre shows will follow South Park’s new model.

    Official Google Blog

    Here at Google Book Search we love books. To share this love of books (and the tremendous amount of information we’ve accumulated about them), today we’ve released a new API that lets you link easily to any of our books. Web developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book’s viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed a link to that book in Google Book Search on their own sites.

    TorrentFreak

    Following a huge increase in complaints from the music, movie and software industries, the four major Japanese ISP organizations have agreed that they will work with copyright holders to track down copyright infringing file-sharers and disconnect them from the internet.

    MediaPost Publications -&nbsp; – 03/18/2008

    Using CBS as an example, Keane said the online video audience for one episode of “Jericho” boosted the show’s TV ratings by almost a full point: from 4.2 to 5.1. While Keane made no mention of it, this extra audience is especially valuable for a show like “Jericho,” which has struggled to build a larger audience. The show’s hardcore fans saved the show from cancellation once, but it’s hanging by a thread–and another ratings point may help.

    Citing another example from CBS, Keane said that while the Grammys attracted 16.9 million TV viewers–down 15% from the previous year–it also generated 7.9 million online video streams and 4.9 million page views.

    The Huffington Post

    Apple Inc. is negotiating with record labels over a deal to give iPhone and iPod customers free access to the entire iTunes music library if they pay extra for the devices.

    The Financial Times is reporting that the sticking point in the talks is how much Cupertino-based Apple will pay the record labels for the access. The newspaper cites unnamed music industry sources for Wednesday’s report.

    Apple declined to comment.

    The newspaper reports that Apple is looking at offering the unlimited music bundle with for the iPod and iPhone, and also a monthly music subscription service only for the iPhone.

    via Pho

    &nbsp;Written by enigmax&lt;http://torrentfreak.com/author/enigmax/&gt;on March 15, 2008

    Following a huge increase in complaints from the music, movie and software industries, the four major Japanese ISP organizations have agreed that they will work with copyright holders to track down copyright infringing file-sharers and disconnect them from the internet.

    In 2006, a Japanese ISP decided to plan measures to stop their subscribers using file-sharing software, by tracking their activities and disconnecting them from the Internet. The plan didn’t come to fruition as the government stepped in and said that such monitoring might have privacy implications.

    Now, under huge pressure from the movie, music and software industries, the four major ISP organizations in Japan are at it again, and have agreed to take drastic action against online pirates.

    According to the
    report&lt;http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20080315TDY01305.htm&gt;in
    Yomiuri Shimbun, the agreement would see copyright holders tracking down file-sharers on the Internet using “special detection software” and then notifying ISPs of alleged infringers. ISPs would first send out emailed warnings to those traced, then interrupt the Internet connection if action to cease the activity isn’t taken. For persistent breaches, the ISP would ultimately terminate the accounts of its subscribers.

    These four major ISP organizations – which include Telecom Service Association and the Telecommunications Carriers Association – are made up of around 1,000 other ISPs, a large portion of the Japanese market. In collaboration with the copyright holders, the ISPs will set up a panel in April to decide exactly how the system should operate.

    Right now, there is a lot discussion surrounding the suggestion that persistent file-sharers could be banned from the internet. So far there have been proposals in France&lt;http://uk.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUKL2346825720071123?pageNumber=1&amp;virtualBrandChannel=0&gt;,
    the UK&lt;http://torrentfreak.com/illegal-downloaders-will-not-face-uk-ban-080212/&gt;and
    Australia&lt;http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080218-three-strikes-infringement-policy-may-be-headed-down-under.html&gt;
    .

    During December last year we
    reported&lt;http://torrentfreak.com/japanese-file-sharing-population-explodes-071221/&gt;that
    the number of internet users file-sharing in Japan had increased by a 180% in a single year.

    Kevin Kelly &nbsp; writes about needing only 1000 true fans to make a living as an artist. Just to note: I was writing about this in 2006.

    Wired

    Having failed to stop piracy by suing internet users, the music industry is for the first time seriously considering a file sharing surcharge that internet service providers would collect from users.

    Economist.com

    The internet could be a boon for Hollywood—but only if it can conquer its fears

    TO SEE what the future of film distribution might look like, go to a website called ZML.com. It offers 1,700 films for download to personal computers, iPods or other hand-held devices, or to burn to DVD.
    It is inviting and easy to use, with detailed descriptions of each
    movie, editors’ picks, customer reviews and screen stills. And the
    prices are reasonable: “Atonement”, for instance, costs $2.99.

    There is one small catch: ZML.com is a pirate site. Hollywood’s movie studios, which are used to dealing with scruffier crews like Pirate Bay,
    a Swedish outfit, are aghast at how professional the newcomer is. “It
    looks like a fabulous legal website,” says one studio executive.

    The existence of ZML.com
    illustrates why Hollywood is in two minds about the web. On the one
    hand, the internet has brought a potent threat: pirates are plundering
    films and carrying off booty that rightfully belongs to the studios.
    Online piracy costs Hollywood less than the physical variety, ripping
    off DVDs, but the gap is closing. “We are more
    concerned about internet piracy than physical piracy, because
    controlling it is harder,” says Ron Wheeler, head of anti-piracy
    efforts at Fox Entertainment Group. Some in Hollywood believe that
    internet theft could even be the death of America’s film industry.

    On the other
    hand, the internet offers Hollywood a great opportunity—which it has so
    far been slow to exploit. There is every reason to think that people
    will want online access to films, just as they do for music,
    newspapers, television and radio. ZML.com is
    proving that people will pay to download films to see at home when it
    suits them. And once people can buy or rent films on demand, the
    chances are that they will watch more of them.

    The web is
    already making its presence felt in the heart of Tinseltown: this
    year’s Oscars extravaganza, which is due to take place on February
    24th, nearly fell victim to a strike by writers over pay for the
    distribution of their work on the internet. But for the time being
    Hollywood is mostly stuck in the physical world. Every year it sends
    thousands of heavy, expensive reels of film to cinemas by road. Only in
    the past year or so has it started an effort to send out some across
    the ether as ones and zeros. The DVD is a digital format, to be sure, but it comes in shrink-wrapped plastic.

    Some studios
    are enthusiastic about the internet. “In 2008 we will move full speed
    ahead online,” says Thomas Lesinski, president of digital entertainment
    at Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles. “It’s the great hope for new
    revenue for the movie business.” But the industry has by and large been
    slow: studios have only tentatively backed legal online film-download
    services. Television, by contrast, has been much faster to embrace the
    internet.

    The choice of what is legally available online today is patchy. For instance, London buses are carrying ads for FilmOn.com,
    a new download service. It promises “tons and tons of great movies”,
    but you will not find “Mulva 2—Kill Teen Ape!” near the top of many
    people’s lists. The internet has lots of legal sites like this, which
    promise thousands of top-class titles but in truth resemble the worst
    shelves of a bad video-rental store. ZML.com has a far better collection than most legitimate services do.

    Another legal site, MovieFlix,
    based in Los Angeles, makes its money from independent films, student
    movies, straight-to-video titles and other eclectic fare. Its founders,
    Opher Mizrahi and Robert Moskovits, stay away from Hollywood studios
    because of their high fees. MovieFlix, which had revenues of $1.2m last
    year, is rare among download sites: it turns a profit. “We are the
    cockroaches of this space,” says Mr Mizrahi, “and we are survivors.”

    Many better-funded services have fared far worse. Movielink,
    which the studios themselves set up in 2001, with about $150m of
    start-up capital, was sold last August to Blockbuster, a video-rental
    chain, reportedly for less than $20m. CinemaNow,
    which counts Microsoft and Cisco Systems among its investors, started
    offering movies online in 1999 and is not yet making a profit, to the
    surprise of its chief executive, Curt Marvis. Back then, he says,
    everyone thought that selling films online would be a huge business by
    now.

    Nor are the
    studios making much money online. They have dozens of deals with
    internet services around the world. Warner Bros, for instance, supplies
    small selections of its films to 38 separate digital-distribution
    services, according to Screen Digest, a research firm in London. In
    2006, estimates Screen Digest, online distribution of movies generated
    a total of $58m in America and western Europe. Screen Digest expects
    this to rise to $1.2 billion by 2011. But that is still below 5% of its
    forecast for total home-entertainment revenue.

    Consumer-electronics
    firms are longing to supply Hollywood films. According to Screen
    Digest, online viewing is most likely to take off on services based on
    their devices. So far, people have been most interested in buying films
    for gadgets such as Apple’s iPod or Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Apple’s
    iTunes has captured almost 80% of the download-to-own market; the Xbox
    has won more than 70% of online rentals.

    At the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
    in Las Vegas in January, everyone was waiting for Apple to announce
    that iTunes would start selling new movies from all six leading
    studios. Hitherto, only Disney had granted Apple access to new releases
    (Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, sits on Disney’s board); a couple
    of other studios were giving it older titles. In the event, Apple’s
    deal was disappointing: it got the go-ahead from all the studios only
    to rent their films, not to sell them. According to a person familiar
    with the negotiations, however, this was because of the Hollywood
    writers’ strike over new media. Now the studios are waiting to see
    whether actors walk out over the same issue. When the labour troubles
    are past, Apple is likely to get a proper download-to-own deal with all
    six studios. For Hollywood, this would be a big step towards the
    internet.

    There are two
    broad reasons for Hollywood’s tardiness. The main one is the industry’s
    aversion to making big changes to its business model. In part this is
    because it takes so much risk in its day-to-day operations. “Every
    weekend, we sit on pins and needles watching to see if our films will
    flop,” explains a studio executive, “and that doesn’t encourage
    risk-taking in the business as a whole.” There is a less defensible
    explanation too: “Hollywood’s value system is not necessarily about
    growth,” says Dan Jansen, who runs the Boston Consulting Group’s media
    practice. “It’s about recognition for films.”

    For the moment, most people are still happy with DVDs, so the studios have had little incentive to switch to an unproven new format. The DVD
    business is huge, bringing in $23.4 billion in America last year,
    against $9.6 billion from the box office. The studios are terrified of
    damaging that source of revenue. In 2006, when Disney made a deal with
    Apple to sell movies via iTunes, Wal-Mart, America’s biggest retailer,
    reportedly threatened to retaliate: the internet, after all, bypasses
    it. Wal-Mart accounts for about 40% of DVD sales in the United States and if it sharply cut shelf-space for DVDs,
    the lost sales would far outweigh new digital sales in the near term.
    At the end of last year Wal-Mart shut its ten-month-old movie-download
    site. Now that it no longer has a foot in the internet camp, studios
    expect it to take a harder line against any further efforts they may
    make to favour online distribution.

    Not everyone agrees, however. Wal-Mart and other big retailers rely heavily on DVDs
    to bring higher-income people into their stores, says a studio
    executive. “So they don’t have a leg to stand on threatening to pull
    shelf-space.” For this reason, he believes that Hollywood should be
    able to cultivate online revenues without greatly disrupting its
    existing businesses.

    In any case, there are now signs that the DVD
    boom has come to an end—which should also encourage the studios to
    worry less about Wal-Mart and to move faster online. After its growth
    slowed in 2005 and 2006, spending on DVDs fell
    by 3% in 2007 (see chart 1). Some in the industry are pinning their
    hopes on fancier, “high-definition” discs—another physical
    format—rather than on the web. But so far, sales of such discs have
    been minuscule—largely because of a war between two formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray. Although the war ended this week, when Toshiba said it would abandon HD DVD, high-definition discs are unlikely to bring growth back to the home-entertainment business.

    Indeed,
    Hollywood’s desire to preserve its existing business rather than
    embrace a new one echoes its misgivings a few years ago about the DVD
    itself. In 1997, when the new format was about to be born, three
    studios, Paramount, Disney and Twentieth Century Fox, came out against
    it, remembers Warren Lieberfarb, who is widely credited with having
    fathered the product as it is today. They were worried that selling DVDs
    for $18 apiece would cannibalise their sales of video cassettes to
    rental stores for $65 each. None of the three studios is proud of that
    episode now.

    Moreover, as
    well as boosting sales overall, the internet will make it easier for
    the studios to make money from their libraries—bricks-and-mortar
    retailers, after all, have limited shelf-space, and mostly stock new
    releases. Digital sales yield a higher profit margin too. Virtual
    distribution does away with manufacturing, packaging, transport and
    inventory costs. At the moment, the studios get $18 per film from a
    Wal-Mart or a Best Buy and about $16 for a digital sale, but because of
    the lower costs they make about $3 more on each film when sold
    electronically.

    A bigger risk
    than angering Wal-Mart is that Hollywood will be undone by internet
    pirates. Imaginative, reasonably priced legal products are the best
    antidote to piracy: anti-piracy heads at the studios, indeed, clamour
    for well stocked, convenient movie-downloading services. Fox’s Mr
    Wheeler says that content owners should offer people “ubiquitous access
    to our products online at reasonable prices”. Mr Wheeler also hopes
    that internet-service providers can be drafted into the fight. In
    November France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, backed a proposal to
    require ISPs to detect and cut off conspicuous pirates. Britain’s government is said to be considering a similar law.

    The second
    reason for Hollywood’s sluggishness is that the studios and the
    consumer-electronics industry have not overcome three technological
    hurdles. Downloading a film still takes a long time—in America, about
    30-40 minutes on average (see chart 2). Movies in high-definition
    format would take about four times that. But broadband speeds are
    increasing all the time. In Japan and South Korea it now takes between
    five and ten minutes to download a film in standard definition.

    Another
    obstacle is that most people want to watch films on television, not on
    personal computers—especially if they have wide, “home-theatre” TV screens. Products connecting PCs
    and televisions have been available for years but have not caught on,
    because they are hard to install and operate. That is changing. Apple
    has just overhauled its linking gadget, Apple TV, to make it easier to use. At the CES
    in Las Vegas, says Alan Bell, Paramount’s chief technology officer, new
    televisions and set-top boxes that connect directly to the internet
    were on show, “so the PC is not the bottleneck in getting digital content from internet services to the TV screen that people saw a year ago.”

    The last
    hurdle, and perhaps the highest, is the lack of common standards among
    websites and devices. “Imagine if you went to Wal-Mart to buy a new DVD player and then found that your DVDs
    from Best Buy didn’t work on it,” says Mitch Singer, chief technology
    officer of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Movies on the internet, he
    says, is “a format war on steroids”. Each download store sells
    different usage rights. Hollywood is trying to do something about this.
    Late last year a group of studios, retailers and consumer-electronics
    firms met to discuss an idea of Mr Singer’s for a standardised
    electronic movie product called Open Market. But the talks are at an
    early stage, and it will be tricky to get companies such as Apple and
    Microsoft to agree to common standards.

    Hollywood’s
    dealings with the consumer-gadget companies also betray its habitual
    caution. The studios fear that Apple could become the Wal-Mart of the
    internet—a giant with power to push them around, continually pressing
    prices down. Maintaining pricing online is a particular worry. “People
    think that if it’s online it should be free,” says one studio head. One
    answer to pricing pressure online, though not a complete one, would be
    to experiment with putting advertisements around films. Last year
    Paramount gave a selection of films to a service called Joost
    that streams them free, supported by advertising. Movies are doing very
    well on the service, says Mr Lesinski. Paramount plans to conduct more
    online experiments in 2008, he says. The lion’s share of its library
    and all its new releases will be on the internet within a year or two.

    Short of
    selling films on it, Hollywood certainly knows how to use the internet
    to its advantage. Its use of viral online marketing is one of the most
    sophisticated of any industry. Jeff Berg, chairman and chief executive
    of ICM, a talent agency, says that about 8% of
    the total marketing spending on films goes to the internet; in five
    years’ time, the web will take 20%. Paramount’s “Cloverfield”, a
    low-budget monster movie shot as if by an amateur with a camcorder,
    earned $40m in its opening weekend in American cinemas last month,
    crushing the competition. It built its audience on the internet: a
    mysterious trailer for another, unidentified movie led to a website and
    started an online treasure-hunt for more clues. Popular movie websites
    such as aintitcool.com buzzed for months about the mystery film.

    Creatively,
    too, Hollywood is harnessing the internet. Studios are using it to find
    global pockets of interest. “If there’s 1m people around the world who
    are interested in ice-fishing,” says Jeremy Zimmer, co-founder of
    United Talent Agency, “we can make a movie for them.” Studios are using
    their customers’ opinions to shape their films. “Snakes on a Plane”,
    for instance, started off in development as a horror film. As the
    project got attention online its maker, New Line Cinema, listened, and
    changed the plot to be more comic in tone. Blowtorch, a young media
    company making video content for 18- to 24-year-olds, is pushing this
    further. It will allow audiences to influence its movies via the web.
    They will be invited to vote on elements of a film’s soundtrack, an
    actor’s wardrobe, or even character development.

    Don’t lose it in your popcorn

    ICM‘s
    boss believes that the internet will lower barriers to entry for new
    film-makers. “Sites will spring up specialising in independent films
    and short movies,” says Mr Berg, “and these will be showcases, similar
    to film festivals.” Jaman.com, a download service for independent films from around the world, is a good example. The makers of “Indoctrinate-U”,
    an independent film about a lack of free speech at American
    universities, have used the internet to build an audience. The movie’s website
    invites people to sign up with zip codes; if enough do, local
    screenings are arranged. United Talent Agency has set up a special
    internet unit, UTA Online, to find and develop
    new talent. The new unit encourages people to get in touch—unheard of
    in the original “don’t call us” business.

    In the long
    term, many people expect that the internet could undermine Hollywood’s
    system of exclusive “windows”. Cinemas get a film to themselves for a
    period of weeks, then it goes to DVD, then to
    video-on-demand and online services, then pay-cable television, and so
    on. And many films are still released in different countries at
    different times, usually starting in America. The system is a gift to
    pirates. But the studios are wedded to it, especially the cinema
    window.

    The internet creates immediate global awareness of movies, says Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, a DVD
    rental-by-mail company, so the studios are increasingly choosing to
    release films at the same time everywhere. They have already shortened
    their windows, he says, and that could be a step towards getting rid of
    them. As people buy home-theatre systems and the convenience of the
    internet makes it even harder to get people out of their homes, the
    cinema window will come under ever greater pressure.

    It will
    doubtless take Hollywood a few more years to work out how to deliver
    films over the internet. Meanwhile, studios and retailers are poised to
    introduce movie-download kiosks, using flash memory. Several companies,
    such as MOD Systems, of Los Angeles, have cut
    download times to a few minutes; Ireland’s Porto Media claims a time of
    17 seconds. The idea is to put kiosks in such places as shops, airports
    and petrol stations. Using Porto Media’s system, films are downloaded
    onto a tiny device (pictured) which plugs into dock attached to a
    television. Kiosks could hold more titles than physical video shops and
    would never be out of stock. Twentieth Century Fox is looking at
    several competing kiosks, says Mike Dunn, head of the studio’s
    home-entertainment unit. It will test them this year.

    “The
    flash-memory-enabled kiosk is an interim solution which overcomes many
    of the weaknesses of the present model and the current deficiencies of
    the internet,” says Mr Lieberfarb, who is on the board of MOD
    Systems. Customers will get used to downloading films and transferring
    them between devices, which will prepare them for proper online
    distribution. Kiosks will make money for retailers too, so that they
    could help the studios keep Wal-Mart and others sweet. That is the kind
    of careful step forward that even Hollywood can dare to take.

    Index –

    A magyar filmek jogait kezelő Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum a sorozatos jogviták miatt úgy tűnik, még mindig nem tudja ellátni a feladatát. “Filmtörvény van, de nem működik. A régi filmek forgalmazói jogaival a gyártó stúdiók rendelkeznek – utal Schweier László, a Filmarchívum munkatársa a jelenlegi helyzetre, ami zűrzavarosabb, mint Petőfi sorsa a segesvári csata után. – Nekik pedig úgy látszik, nem fontos, hogy dvd-n is megjelenjenek.”

    Karl Sigfrid

    Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet. Politicians who play for the antipiracy team should be aware that they have allied themselves with a special interest that is never satisfied and that will always demand that we take additional steps toward the ultimate control state. Today they want to transform the Internet Service Providers into an online police force, and the Antipiracy Bureau wants the authority for themselves to extract the identities of file sharers. Then they can drag the 15-year-old girl who downloaded a Britney Spears song to civil court and sue her.

    &nbsp;| TorrentFreak

    Talented independent filmmakers are benefiting immensely from having their movies distributed for free on BitTorrent. Films that might never have been heard of before are now being watched by millions of people.

    Los Angeles Times

    A few days ago I came across an Op-Ed submission that called for file sharing to be decriminalized. The editors here decided not to run it, but it intrigued me for a couple of reasons. First, the author, Karl Sigfrid, is a member of the Swedish Parliament from the Moderate party — a pro-business party that’s akin to this country’s Libertarians (except in Sweden they’re more than just a fringe group). Second, although he covered much of the same ground earlier this year in a Swedish paper, Sigfrid’s new piece added another provocative contention: that unauthorized downloading isn’t actually theft.

    Arstechnica

    Certainly the MPAA has the right to fight illegal downloads of its material, and it certainly has the right to go after those making a profit by ripping off its DVDs. But the rhetoric around “piracy” (a term used far too broadly) simply doesn’t fit with reality. If piracy is killing the movie business, it’s doing so in exactly the same way that home taping killed the music business in the 1980s.

    Arstechnica

    P2P startup AllPeers announced today that it would be closing its doors due to insufficient growth.

    &nbsp;- Israel Culture, Ynetnews

    The Haifa District Court two weeks ago ordered the three largest internet service providers in Israel to block access to the Israeli file-sharing site httpshare, this following a petition levied by the 12 largest record companies in Israel.

    &nbsp;| Digital Media Wire

    Skyrider, a developer of monetization technology for peer-to-peer networks, has raised $5 million in new financing, from previous investors Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures and Velocity Interactive Group, VentureBeat reports.

    Mountain View, Calif.-based Skyrider is developing technology that can be used to insert ads on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

    The company has previously raised $8 million and $12 million financing rounds since its founding in 2006.

    Arstechnica

    Filtering all Internet traffic to look for signs of illicit file-swapping has been a hugely controversial idea, criticized on grounds of privacy, efficacy, cost, and long-standing “safe harbor” principles that apply to network operators such as ISPs and phone companies. But a new study out from UK media lawyers Wiggin suggests that, if it works, such filtering could actually curtail “digital piracy” by 70 percent.


    Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

    “It looks like Trent Reznor’s new Nine Inch Nails album experiment is a success. Among the various options he gave fans, the most expensive was the $300 Limited Edition Ultra Deluxe Package. It took just over a day for that package to completely sell out, earning Reznor $750,000 in revenue from just that option alone.”

    Gamasutra –

    Below are the results of Reflexive.com sales and downloads immediately following each update:

    Fix 1 – Existing Exploits &amp; Keygens made obsolete – Sales up 70%, Downloads down 33%

    Fix 2 – Existing Keygens made obsolete – Sales down slightly, Downloads flat

    Fix 3 – Existing Cracks made obsolete – Sales flat, Downloads flat

    Fix 4 – Keygens made game-specific – Sales up 13%, Downloads down 16% (note: fix made after the release of Ricochet Infinity)

    From the results above, it seems clear that eliminating piracy through
    a stronger DRM can result in significantly increased sales – but
    sometimes it can have no benefit at all. So what does that mean for the
    question about whether a pirated copy means a lost sale? The decreases
    in downloads may provide a clue to that

    As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading
    the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number
    together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for
    every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000
    pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.

    &nbsp;- News – The Phoenix

    “While networks may have legitimate network issues and practices, that does not mean that they can arbitrarily block access to certain network services,” said FCC chairman Kevin Martin. “The commission is ready, willing and able to step in if necessary to correct any practices that are ongoing today.”

    Asva.info

    A jelentések azt mutatják, hogy a legelterjedtebb fájlcserélő protokoll, a BitTorrent letöltéseinek fele TV sorozat. A szám lenyűgöző, és a tendenciák szerint ez még tovább emelkedik.

    FT.com print article

    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

    Readers of these columns have heard me lament&nbsp;
    in the past about the fact that intellectual property policy is an
    “evidence-free zone”.&nbsp; It is the trickiest of regulatory matters to get
    the right level of intellectual property protection – giving incentives
    to creators and distributors, yet not overly burdening future
    innovators or imposing unnecessary monopoly prices on
    consumers.&nbsp;Getting this balance right should be a matter of empiricism,
    not faith. We do, for example, have good evidence about what kind of
    policies on database rights and on state generated data&nbsp;
    – such as maps, traffic and weather information – actually work
    best.&nbsp;In each case, the European Union has picked a plausible&nbsp; position
    – stronger rights will mean more production and innovation – and seen
    it convincingly falsified through empirical analysis.

    The same is true with the length of our copyright term.&nbsp;Brilliant economists, including five Nobel laureates,
    have pointed out that our current copyright terms are far too long. We
    extend copyright long beyond the time necessary to provide incentives
    to create and distribute.&nbsp;One recent economic study suggests that the
    optimal term is 15 years.&nbsp; Others have
    recommended even shorter terms. I would favour 28 years, renewable for
    another 28 if the author desires. We give life plus 70. Worse, since as
    much as&nbsp;98 per cent of all copyrighted material is currently commercially unavailable
    that means we lock up most of our culture just at the moment when we
    could have been digitising it and putting it on the web for the world
    to share.&nbsp;A system that required renewal for a modest fee in order to
    keep the copyright would solve these problems.&nbsp;We have signed treaties
    that forbid us from doing anything so sensible.&nbsp;

    At the end of last year, I did note a ray of hope.
    In two cases, both in Europe, policymakers had actually looked at
    evidence in order to decide what to do! The Commission studied the EU
    database market to see if the database right was doing any good.&nbsp; It was not.&nbsp;The UK government commissioned the Gowers Review
    of intellectual property policy to see whether we should extend the
    term of sound recordings retrospectively – a nice example of suggesting the price should be renegotiated upwards after the work was already done.
    Having already&nbsp; “paid” for the recording through 50 years of
    protection, consumers were now to be forced to pay again for another 20
    years. The Gowers Review carefully analysed the evidence, and
    commissioned a really excellent economic study
    that is occasionally almost readable by ordinary mortals. They came to
    the same conclusion every single disinterested academic policy review
    has&nbsp; come to: “Policymakers should adopt the principle that the term
    and scope of protection for IP rights should not be altered
    retrospectively.”

    But it was not to be.&nbsp;Faced with a tidal wave
    of pressure by publishers of databases, who liked their monopolies very
    much, thank you, the Commission shamefully gave in and left the
    directive in place.&nbsp;While the British government showed more spine
    on sound recordings, the European Commission has now announced that it
    thinks the copyright over sound recordings should be extended to 95
    years! (70 was not enough.) Charlie McCreevy,
    the internal market commissioner, has declared that this will harmonise
    protection: composers already get the longer term.&nbsp; He also argues that
    consumers will not pay higher prices as a result, though the best empirical study on
    works out of copyright shows exactly the reverse.&nbsp;That is the point of
    intellectual property rights, after all.&nbsp; (The Gowers Review had
    carefully considered and rejected&nbsp;the argument that extension would
    warm the firesides of many a nameless and superannuated session
    musician. Because of the music industry’s rapacious contracts, the vast
    majority of the benefits will flow directly to the corporations that
    lobbied for it.)

    Mr McCreevy’s harmonisation argument –
    appropriate given the subject – is worth thinking through.&nbsp;Political
    scientists tell us that there are types of issues where we can almost
    guarantee that the state will get things wrong; cases where the
    benefits of some proposed policy go to a small and well-organised lobby
    of repeat players while the much larger costs fall on a wider and less
    well informed public. That is why it is so important to have policies
    that are justified with facts rather than faith. We can hope that a few
    policymakers who actually believe in the public interest will look at
    the evidence and hold the line.&nbsp;But now comes the harmonisation
    argument.

    In every capital in the Organisation for Economic
    Co-operation and Development, lobbyists agitate for intellectual
    property rights that are wider, deeper and above all, longer.
    Remember, in intellectual property we only ever harmonise upwards.&nbsp;(Mr
    McCreevy did not consider for a moment the idea that we should reduce
    the protection for compositions to match that of sound
    recordings.)&nbsp;Intellectual property only harmonises to the highest level
    of protection. What that means is that the lobbyists only need to win
    once, in one country. Then they will use the seductive language of
    harmonisation to bring everyone else into line internationally.&nbsp;And
    then?&nbsp;The process begins again. “I hear Mexico has an even longer
    copyright term. Fairness demands that we harmonise with that!”&nbsp; The
    band plays on – but always higher, higher –&nbsp; we&nbsp; long ago stopped
    looking at the score.&nbsp;

    &nbsp;James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds professor of law at Duke Law School and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. His new book, The Public Domain: An Environmentalism for Information, will be published this autumn by Yale University Press

    Los Angeles Times

    For the first time last year, nearly half of all teenagers bought no compact discs, a dramatic increase from 2006, when 38% of teens shunned such purchases, according to a new report released Tuesday.

    The illegal sharing of music online continued to soar in 2007, but
    there was one sign of hope that legal downloading was picking up steam.
    In the last year, Apple Inc.’s iTunes store, which sells only digital
    downloads, jumped ahead of Best Buy Co. to become the No. 2 U.S. music
    seller, trailing Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

    &amp;nbsp;- International Herald Tribune

    “There are more people availing themselves of free intellectual property than at any time in history,” said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne Online Media Measurement, which tracks digital traffic. “The content companies could knock out tens of Pirate Bays, and they will still face the same problem.”

    Envisional, a research firm in Cambridge, England, estimates that
    nearly 18 million people are connected to peer-to-peer file sharing
    services at any one time, up from about 15 million a year ago. Because
    the latest generation of file-sharing systems is more efficient than
    older programs, the increase in the amount of material being exchanged
    is probably even larger, said David Price, head of piracy intelligence
    at Envisional.

    Digital Music News

    How should paid downloads be priced? Apple believes in a uniform pricing scheme, majors want a tiered structure, and most music fans want everything for free. Somewhere in-between lies Amie Street, a company that sets download pricing based on user demand.

    That means that songs start at free, and ramp to 98-cents if the demand is great enough. But is the model working? Just recently, the group announced the addition of catalog from Beggars Group, Matador Records, and Polyvinyl Recording Co. The list of bands includes Interpol, Sigur Ros, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Devendra Banhart, Belle and Sebastian, Architecture in Helsinki, and other indie luminaries.

    But it remains unclear if the sales story is developing, at least at this stage of the game. In a discussion Monday, company cofounder and chief marketing officer Joshua Boltuch declined to offer sales figures or average pricing data. Boltuch did point to strong album purchasing, and an album-to-single sales ratio of 1:1. “We attribute this incredible ratio to our fan-driven pricing model finding the best market price for albums, and therefore maximizing sales,” Boltuch explained.

    TechRadar.com

    Spare a thought for the people over at file-sharing website The Pirate Bay – they’re being attacked from all sides at the moment.

    Following recent lawsuits and calls for ISPs to monitor illegal file sharing activities on websites such as The Pirate Bay, now artists Prince and The Village People are to sue the file-sharing website in a Swedish court, according to news website E24.se.

    “We’re looking at damages of millions of dollars, and we will act in both US and Swedish courts,” John Giacobbi, president of law firm Web Sheriff, said in a statement. The law firm specialises in copyright issues, E24.se reports.

    Other artists, including Van Morrison and copyright holders of Chet Baker’s back catalogue, can also be included in the lawsuit, Giacobbi said.

    Arstechnica

    The race is on to get the last word in on the Comcast/BitTorrent
    controversy.
    With ten days left to file, telcos, trade, and advocacy groups are
    sending the Federal Communications Commission their statements on
    whether Comcast and other ISPs purposefully degrade peer to peer
    traffic, and if so, what to do about it. Not surprisingly, the debate
    pits broadband content providers and advocacy groups against the big
    telcos, cable companies, and their trade association backers.

    Just about every big phone company has filed a statement challenging the FCC’s authority to deal with this problem. AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest all submitted lengthy remarks on February 13th, the last day for comments on the proceeding (parties can still reply to comments through the 28th).

    The Industry Standard

    One of Denmark’s largest ISPs said on Wednesday it will fight a court injunction mandating that it shut off access to a file-sharing Web site, in what could be a closely-watched battle with the music industry in Europe.

    Tele2 met with representatives of other ISPs on Monday and decided to challenge the injunction, said Nicholai Pfeiffer, Tele2’s chief of regulations.

    As a result, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is understood to have filed on Tuesday a further justification for the injunction with the court, Pfeiffer said.

    Tele2 has complied with the injunction and blocked its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay, a Web site that hosts torrents, or small information files used to download larger files from the BitTorrent P-to-P (peer-to-peer) network. The IFPI alleges that Danish Internet users are using BitTorrent to download, without authorization, copyright content that they found using The Pirate Bay’s list of available torrents.

    No other Danish ISP has been ordered to shut off access to The Pirate Bay. However, IFPI plans to send letters this week to other Danish ISPs asking them to also block The Pirate Bay, said Jesper Bay [cq], spokesman.

    “Whether they are going to do that or not, it’s up to them,” Bay said, adding that IFPI hasn’t decided whether to pursue more injunctions.

    Bay said the injunction has two purposes: It sends a signal to ISPs that they have a responsibility to stop piracy and to users that downloading copyright content without permission is illegal.

    The content the IFPI objects to is actually hosted on the PCs of users around the world. The torrents coordinate the download of file fragments from different PCs, and those fragments are eventually linked together to form a complete file that can then be uploaded to other machines. BitTorrent has many legitimate uses, including software distribution, and is used by some media companies to deliver their content.

    The record industry has employed companies specializing in file-sharing forensics to track down individual Internet users it says are sharing copyright content illegally. It also sought to shut down Web sites such as The Pirate Bay that are part of the P-to-P network.

    The Danish court concluded that Tele2 was assisting in copyright infringement. Tele2, as well as other ISPs that have come under pressure, maintain they are blind to what their customers transmit on their networks and should not be responsible for policing content.

    “Our overall view is we don’t actually want to take sides in this dispute between IFPI and The Pirate Bay,” Pfeiffer said.

    The Pirate Bay said on Friday that traffic from Denmark has shot up 12 percent since Tele2’s block was imposed. The Pirate Bay also set up an alternative Web site for Tele2 customers giving them instructions on how to circumvent the block.

    Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay faces trouble in its own waters. In Sweden, charges of profiting and encouraging copyright infringement are pending against four people involved with the Web site.

    p2pnet.net

    Four years after being shut down by Swiss authorities, Christian Riesen (aka Simon Moon), owner of the Edonkey link site Sharereactor.com, has been guilty of copyright infringement and ordered to pay 4700 Swiss francs (about $4,268).

    “I have sold the ShareReactor.com domain,” Riesen posted in 2006.

    “The new owner has now put it back online, with some of the old crew and some content. ShareReactor still is an ed2k website, and still features the same contents (and more) it was known for before.”

    Meanwhile, Sharereactor.com attracted up to 250,000 visitors per day, according to an Afterdawn interview with Moon from October 2004, says P2P Blog, going on:

    “Moon also revealed in that interview that he paid about 5000 dollars per month for the bandwidth of the site, which means that the total judgement is worth less than one month of Sharereactor’s operating costs.”

    The site, under new ownership, wasn’t online for long chiefly because ED2K was usurped by Bittorrent, says the story, observing all that’s left is, Host www.sharereactor.com is under construction.

    “The site is hosted on a server that also is home to a hand full of sites registered to or maintained by simon Moon’s company ‘Riesen Industries’, which, according to Swiss news outlets, is now operating from Canada,” adds P2P Blog.

    Arstechnica

    File-sharing service RapidShare has been dealt a blow by a German court and faces severe penalties if it fails to take appropriate measures against the uploading of copyrighted content by its users. The Düsseldorf Regional Court ruled against RapidShare last week in a case brought on by the German version of the RIAA, GEMA. GEMA hailed the decision as a huge victory, and concluded that RapidShare could face shutdown if it’s unable to comply.

    Had this involved a US court, the outcome would have been different. In the US, web site operators can
    (and do)
    argue that the Safe Harbor provision in the DMCA protects them from
    liability as long as they remove infringing content after being
    presented with a takedown notice. In Germany (and many other
    countries), there is no equivalent to protect sites like RapidShare,
    meaning that RapidShare almost has little but to comply with the
    ruling. According to GEMA, the court said that RapidShare must “take
    such measures as involve the risk of its business model becoming much
    less attractive or even having to be discontinued entirely.”

    International Herald Tribune

    Singers and musicians should earn royalty fees for 95 years — almost double the current 50-year limit, a European Union official said Thursday as he promised to draft new copyright protection rules.

    “If nothing is done, thousands of European performers who recorded in the late 1950s and 1960s will lose all of their airplay royalties over the next ten years,” said EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, the union’s internal market chief. “These royalties are often their sole pension.”

    People are living longer and 50 years of copyright protection no longer give lifetime income to artists who recorded hits in their late teens or early twenties, he said.

    Most European composers and lyricists currently receive lifetime copyright protection which is passed on to their descendants for another 70 years. The new EU rules would not change that.

    But the change would mean that performers would get the same 95-year copyright period enjoyed by their U.S. counterparts.

    BBC NEWS | Technology |

    UK net firms are resisting government suggestions that they should do more to monitor what customers do online.

    The industry association for net providers said legal and technical barriers prohibit them from being anything other than a “mere conduit”.

    The declaration comes as the government floats the idea of persistent pirates being denied net access.

    And in the US one net supplier has admitted to “degrading” traffic from some file-sharing networks.

     at Jonathan Zittrain

    Seems increasingly likely.

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    Sunstein, C. R., & Ullmann-Margalit, E. (2001). ‘Solidarity goods’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 9(2), 129-149. more…

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    Toldy (Schedel), F. (1838). ‘Néhány szó az írói tulajdonról’, Athenaeum, 705-717. more…

    Torrubia, A., Mora, F. J., & Marti, L. (2001). ‘Cryptography regulations for e-commerce and digital rights management.’ Computers & Security, 20(8), 724-738.

    Torsson, P., & Fleischer, R. (2005). The Grey Commons, 22C3. Berlin.

    Towse, R. (2002). Copyright in the cultural industries. Cheltenham, UK ; Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar.

    Towse, R. (2006). ‘Copyright and artists: A view from cultural economics’, Journal of Economic Surveys, 20(4), 567-585.

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    p2pnet.net

    Two weeks ago we reported on Greens EFA launching the pro-filesharing campaign “I Wouldn’t Steal“. With new editorials in Swedish newspapers coinciding with The Pirate Bay’s charges, it seems the Green Party is looking to push the issue forward, thereby supporting The Pirate Bay.

    In recent years, the Swedish Green Party, which holds 19 seats in parliament, has taken a clear stance on filesharing. Following the raid on The Pirate Bay in 2006, the party board released a memo entitled “Free the files!”in which they suggested to fully legalize non-commercial filesharing.

    p2pnet.net

    This year was Mininova’s third birthday and almost by way of celebration, yesterday it announced several new features, one of them offering musicians a new way to reach potential listeners.

    “In close cooperation with the guys from BitLet, we added a ’stream this music’ button to torrents containing music (MP3/OGG Vorbis) files (example),” says Niek on the Mininova blog.

    This lets users play the music right in their browse, without nedding downloads from a BitTorrent client.

    But, it’s only enabled on distributed (featured) torrents and, “Artists who’re interested in this feature are invited to sign up for the free Mininova Content Distribution service.

    Reuters.com

    COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – A Danish court has ordered Denmark-based Internet service provider Tele2 to shut down its customers’ access to the popular file-sharing site Pirate Bay, Danish IT magazine Computerworld reported on Monday.

    Computerworld said on its Web site that a court had ordered Denmark’s Tele2 — one of the Nordic country’s largest Internet providers — to close access to the site at the request of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

    On its Danish Web site, the IFPI said Frederiksberg county court had ordered an Internet provider to shut down its customers’ access to The Pirate Bay.

    “The provider had agreed to follow the order and it is expected that other Internet service providers will voluntarily follow the court order,” the organization said.

    Tele2 Denmark was bought last year by Norway’s Telenor from Swedish telecoms operator Tele2 and has about a 4 percent market share of Denmark’s roughly 2 million Internet subscriptions.

    Tele2 and Telenor were not immediately available to comment, however, Tele2’s regulatory director Nicholai Pfeiffer told Computerworld Tele2 would abide by the ruling.

    Other large Danish Internet service providers said they would not immediately follow the order.

    The restriction is another blow for the Internet-based music and film sharing site. Last week four men linked to Pirate Bay were charged by a Swedish prosecutor with conspiracy to break copyright law.

     Listening Post from Wired.com

    The major labels, eager to wrest control over digital music pricing and distribution from Apple, are considering a project called Total Music that would allow them to charge device manufacturers, cellphone service providers, and other businesses $5 per month for the right to let their customers listen to free music. At this point, Total Music is being championed by Universal Music Group and Sony/BMG, but the other two majors could be interested too.

    But there’s at least one problem with the plan. When an entire industry colludes to set terms and pricing, the Department of Justice tends to get interested for antitrust reasons.

    Apparently, that is what is happening. According to the Music Ally newsletter, the DoJ has served Universal and Sony/BMG with notices to find out more about Total Music, and has also requested information from Warner Music Group and EMI (see update below).

    Mi2N – Music Industry News Network

    * Total revenue of $989 million increased 7% from $928 million in the prior-year quarter, and grew 1% on a constant-currency basis.

    * Digital revenue was $141 million, or 14% of total revenue, up 9% sequentially from $130 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 and up 41% from $100 million in the prior-year quarter.

    * Operating income decreased 45% to $44 million from $80 million in the prior-year quarter. Operating income in the first quarter includes an $18 million impairment charge related to Bulldog Entertainment, an entertainment services company purchased in May 2007, a business we have since exited.

    * Operating income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA) fell 8% to $129 million from $140 million in the prior-year quarter.

    * Net loss of $0.11 per diluted share, which reflects the previously noted $18 million or $0.12 per share impairment charge, declined from net income of $0.12 per diluted share in the prior-year quarter.

    Intellectual Property Watch »

    CANNES – Music industry 1.0 is dead, but 2.0 has not arrived quite yet. New models for making money from music and music rights are being looked for desperately at the world’s largest music fair, Midem, this week in Cannes.

    | News | This is London

    Music fans around the world faced confusion today as it was announced they would be able to download unlimited, free songs without breaking the law.

    A revamped online file-sharing service had vowed to offer a catalogue of 30million free songs that are compatible with iPods, but record labels have denied they had granted permission to share the songs.

    Qtrax, which makes its debut today, is the latest online music venture counting on the lure of free songs to draw in music fans.

    The key to their revolutionary venture was thought to be advertising, which they hope will pay the bills, namely record company licensing fees.

    The New York-based service was among several peer-to-peer file-sharing applications that emerged following the shutdown of Napster, the pioneer service that enabled millions to illegally copy songs stored in other computers.

    But Warner Music said it had not authorised the use of its tracks by Qtrax – and later Universal Music Group and EMI followed suit, saying they did not have licensing deals with Qtrax and discussions were continuing.

    Justin Kazmark, a spokesman for New York-based Qtrax, has declined to comment.

    Rough translation: But no. Of course not. Never. Who on earth would want to listen all the music of the earth? Sometimes I ask a friend to download me something. Me? Never. I ask my brother to do it for me. No, seriously. I tried once, but there were so many viruses. And anyways, I don’t listen too much music nowadays.

    Where do you make money?

    Live performances. Royalties. TV.

    BBC NEWS | Technology

    In February 2006, a part-time Canadian music student established a modest, non-commercial website that used collaborative wiki tools, such as those used by Wikipedia, to create an online library of public domain musical scores.

    Within a matter of months, the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) featured more than 1,000 musical scores for which the copyright had expired in Canada.

    Within two years – without any funding, sponsorship or promotion – the site had become the largest public domain music score library on the internet, generating a million hits per day, featuring over 15,000 scores by over 1,000 composers, and adding 2,000 new scores each month.

    In mid-October this year the IMSLP disappeared from the internet.

    Universal Edition, an Austrian music publisher, retained a Canadian law firm to demand that the site block European users from accessing certain works and from adding new scores for which the copyright had not expired in Europe.

    The company noted that while the music scores entered the public domain in Canada 50 years after a composer’s death, Europe’s copyright term is 20 years longer.

    WireD

    But some labels will disappear, as the roles they used to play get chopped up and delivered by more thrifty services. In a recent conversation I had with Brian Eno (who is producing the next Coldplay album and writing with U2), he was enthusiastic about I Think Music — an online network of indie bands, fans, and stores — and pessimistic about the future of traditional labels. “Structurally, they’re much too large,” Eno said. “And they’re entirely on the defensive now. The only idea they have is that they can give you a big advance — which is still attractive to a lot of young bands just starting out. But that’s all they represent now: capital.”

    Wired

    In the first month, about a million fans downloaded In Rainbows. Roughly 40 percent of them paid for it, according to comScore, at an average of $6 each, netting the band nearly $3 million. Plus, since it owns the master recording (a first for the band), Radiohead was also able to license the album for a record label to distribute the old-fashioned way — on CD. In the US, it goes on sale January 1 through TBD Records/ATO Records Group.

    While pay-what-you-will worked for Radiohead, though, it’s hard to imagine the model paying off for Miley Cyrus — aka chart-topping teenybopper Hannah Montana. Cyrus’ label, Walt Disney Records, will stick to selling CDs in Wal-Mart, thank you very much. But the truth is that Radiohead didn’t intend In Rainbows to start a revolution. The experiment simply proves there is plenty of room for innovation in the music business — this is just one of many new paths. Wired asked David Byrne — a legendary innovator himself and the man who wrote the Talking Heads song “Radio Head” from which the group takes its name — to talk with Yorke about the In Rainbows distribution strategy and what others can learn from the experience.

    Center for Social Media at American University

    When college kids make mashups of Hollywood movies, are they violating the law? Not necessarily, according to the latest study on copyright and creativity from the Center and American University’s Washington College of Law.

    The study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration. The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances.

    The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News

    HYDERABAD: It’s a game of technology versus creativity. And the Telugu film industry is the obvious loser in this game. Nowadays, the pirated version of any movie hits the market within a week after the movie release. The Telugu film industry suffers a loss of Rs. 200 to Rs. 300 crore, according to a survey conducted by Motion Pictures Association (MPA) of US and AP Film Chambers of Commerce (APFCC).

    BusinessWeek

    In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Quart » Hírek »

    Kétszer annyi zenét töltöttek le pénzért Nagy-Britanniában a karácsony utáni hétben, mint egy éve ugyanekkor, illetve fele annyit, mint amennyit 2004-ben egész évben. A közel hárommillió letöltés a legnagyobb mennyiség, amit hét nap leforgása alatt valaha elértek. A legnépszerűbb letöltések között Timbaland, Amy Winehouse és The Pogues, viszont albumokat még mindig cd-n vesznek az emberek (mármint a szigetországban).

    A British Phonographic Industries (BPI) szerint a letöltések részben a karácsonykor ajándékozott mp3-lejátszók népszerűsége miatt ugrottak meg ennyire. Egészen pontosan 2,95 millió letöltés volt az év utolsó hetében Nagy Britanniában, ami egyrészt kétszer annyi, mint a tavalyi karácsony utáni átlag, viszont ha az éves 77,5 milliót nézzük (ami szintén a tavalyi duplája), akkor 2007 heti átlagának is csupán nem sokkal több, mint kétszereséről van szó, ami a karácsonyi szezont tekintve azért nem tűnik olyan iszonyatosan meglepőnek. Ettől függetlenül persze heti rekordmennyiségről van szó, sőt, 2004-ben, amikor a legális zeneletöltés beindult, egész évben 5,8 millió letöltés volt. Matt Phillips, a BPI szóvivője szerint bár számítottak rá, hogy nagyobb mértékben töltenek majd le az ünnepek után, rekordmennyiségre nem számítottak. Egyébként a karácsonyt megelőző héten is magasabb volt a letöltések száma, mint az éves átlag, egészen konkrétan kétmillió.

    Wolfe’s Den Blog – InformationWeek

    Innocent consumers are being bothered by another round of the record industry behaving badly, via more lawsuits and anti-copying threats. This time, though, I’ve got a solution. We should do what we do to children who misbehave: Take away their privileges. Here’s the deal.

    Motley Fool

    As I’ve said before, a good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value. If it starts to pursue paying customers — which doesn’t seem that outlandish at this point — then I guess we’ll all know the extent of the desperation. Investor, beware.

    Fool.com

    Published reports in both Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal claim that News Corp.’s (NYSE: NWS) 20th Century Fox has inked a deal with Apple to provide video rentals through the iTunes storefront.

    Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

    “The antitrust counterclaims imposed by Lime Wire against the RIAA record companies have been dismissed. In a 45-page decision (pdf), the Court relied principally upon the holding of the United States Supreme Court in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly that ‘A party’s obligation to provide the grounds of his entitlement to relief requires more than labels and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action will not do.’ Ironically, the Twombly decision was the authority upon which the RIAA’s copyright infringement complaint was dismissed in Interscope v. Rodriguez.”

    New York Times

    Nokia, the telecommunications company, and the Universal Music Group, the recording company, said on Tuesday that they would offer unlimited free downloads of Universal songs to buyers of certain Nokia phones as a way to promote cellphones as media devices and to develop new revenue for a music industry struggling with piracy.

    Under the agreement, Universal will let users download its entire catalog at no cost for 12 months, and keep the songs at the end of that time. Users will be able to download the songs to new Nokia phones or to their computers via mobile or fixed-line broadband connections.

    Mashable!

    or so they say. According to the Wall Street Journal, Nielsen has partnered with Digimarc to create something called the Digital Media Manager; a service offering media companies the ability to track copyrighted video content online.

    How does Nielsen plan to tackle the tough task of tracking copyrighted video? Well, they’ve got the expertize on analyzing data, and they’ve already digitized about 95% of US TV programming for the purpose of their ratings service, which definitely helps. Still, many have tried – Audible Magic, for example – and haven’t exactly succeeded, mostly thanks to the fact that today you can effortlessly encrypt data which makes it impossible to analyze. We’ll have to wait and see what Nielsen and Digimarc have in stock. One thing is certain: this move will not make them the most popular company around.

    WSJ claims that Nielsen has approached Google and News Corp with their service, which is nearly finished and might be officially announced as early as today.

    [origo] 

    Néhány napja levetette a Kossuth kiadó Rejtő Jenő hangoskönyvetit a Magyar Elektronikus Könyvtár (MEK) polcairól – december végén azonban visszakerülhetnek József Attila művei, mert megszűnik a szerzői jogvédettség. Helycserék a virtuális világban.

    Whitechapel

    I used to download lots of scans, but now I’m going through a period of mild moralizing. Now I’ll only download something if it’s woefully out of print (Zenith, Moore’s Miracle Man, Flex Mentallo), or if I already own it and it’s hidden away in a box somewhere (Alan Moore’s Supreme).

    I would love to have a legal digital comics download service. I’ve run out of shelf space, but I’ll be damned if I wouldn’t pay for a digital complete run of Jack Cole’s Plastic Man.

    Wired

    This year, 22 percent of all music sold in the US will move through iTunes. “If iTunes gets up to 40 or 50 percent, they’ll have too much power for anyone else to enter the business,” says James McQuivey, who analyzes the digital music industry for Forrester Research. If the labels want out, they have two choices: Find a way to unseat the iPod or allow iTunes’ competitors to sell unprotected files that can play on Apple’s ubiquitous device.

    BLDGBLOG

    A warehouse is being constructed to house the books that no one’s reading.

    “The warehouse is extraordinary,” the Guardian writes, “because, unlike all those monstrous Tesco and Amazon depositories that litter the fringes of the motorways of the Midlands, it is being meticulously constructed to house things that no one wants.” Those “fringes” are outside London.
    “When it is complete next year, this warehouse will be state-of-the-art, containing 262 linear kilometres of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen environment. It will house books, journals and magazines that many of us have forgotten about or have never heard of in the first place.”

    Intellectual Property Watch

    French record labels and Internet service providers (ISPs) have agreed on a ground-breaking plan to fight online music piracy. Among other things, the 23 November memorandum of understanding requires Internet access providers to experiment with filters to block infringing files.

    Making ISPs shoulder more responsibility for copyright violations on their networks while leaving intact their immunity from liability for content for which they are “mere conduits” represents a sea-change in the interpretation of the European Union E-Commerce Directive, said attorney Winston Maxwell of Hogan & Hartson.

    Ars technica

    The Copyright Alliance, which counts the MPAA and RIAA amongst its members, has sent letters and questionnaires to presidential candidates in an effort to determine where they stand on issues relating to intellectual property law. In a copy of the letter seen by Ars, Copyright Alliance executive director Patrick Ross says he speaks “on behalf of the 11 million Americans employed in the creative industries,” and asserts that piracy reduction is essential.

    Ars technica

    The Copyright Alliance, which counts the MPAA and RIAA amongst its members, has sent letters and questionnaires to presidential candidates in an effort to determine where they stand on issues relating to intellectual property law. In a copy of the letter seen by Ars, Copyright Alliance executive director Patrick Ross says he speaks “on behalf of the 11 million Americans employed in the creative industries,” and asserts that piracy reduction is essential.

    | Mark Cuban’s blog – CNET Blogs

    I’m not a Comcast customer. I happen to get service from Verizon, ATT and Time Warner at various locations where I pay for internet service.

    If I was a Comcast customer, I would tell them, as I am now telling all the services I am a customer of:

    BLOCK P2P TRAFFIC , PLEASE

    As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders. Thats right, P2P content distributors are nothing more than freeloaders. The only person/organization that benefits from P2P usage are those that are trying to distribute content and want to distribute it on someone else’s bandwidth dime.

    Does anyone really think its free ? That all the bandwidth consumed with content being distributed by P2P isn’t being paid for by someone ? That bandwidth is being paid for by consumers. Consumers who pay for personal, not commercial applications. When consumers provide their bandwidth to assist commercial applications, they are subsidizing those commercial applications which if it isn’t already, should be against an ISPs terms of service.

    Thats not to say there isnt a place for P2P. There is. P2P is probably the least efficient means of distributing content in the last mile. Comcast, Time Warner, etc should charge a premium to those users who want to act as a seed and relay for P2P traffic. After all, that is why P2P is used, right ? For content distributors to avoid significant bandwidth and hosting charges. That makes it commercial traffic far more often than not. So make them pay commercial rates.

    That will stop P2P dead in its tracks. P2P isnt so good that people will use it when they have to pay for all the bandwidth it consumes. It will die a quick death. That will speed up my internet connection.

    thats a good thing.

    So hang in there Comcast

    m

    a user comment on slashdot…

    Slashdot |

    A major ISP in the city I resided in in Romania help alleviate demands on bandwidth to and from the outside world by just setting up a DC++ server for their customers where they could share music and movies with other people in the same city. Seems easier to do than trying to ban all manner of P2P traffic. Too bad that sort of thing would never fly in the U.S.

    Google Public Policy Blog:

    Some forms of censorship are entirely justifiable: the worldwide prohibitions on child pornography and copyright infringement, for example. Others, however, are overbroad and unwarranted. When a government blocks the entire YouTube service due to a handful of user-generated videos that violate local sensibilities –- despite our willingness to IP-block illegal videos from that country –- it affects us as a non-tariff trade barrier.

    FT.com / Home UK /

    Anti-piracy moves ‘hurt sales’By Andrew Edgecliiffe-Johnson for Financial TimesPublished: November 20 2007 02:00 | Last updated: November 20 2007 02:00Retailers are urging the music industry to drop piracy protection for online downloads after new figures showed the average Briton has bought fewer than three digital tracks in the past three years.Incompatible proprietary technologies, aimed at defeating rampant piracy in the digital music era, are instead “stifling growth and working against the consumer interest”, said Kim Bayley, director-general of the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA).Her warning comes as high street retailers and digital music specialists watch pre-Christmas sales trends nervously. The music industry makes at least 40 per cent of its revenues in the fourth quarter, but the traditional sales build-up has started later than usual.Although Leona Lewis – the X Factor winner backed by Simon Cowell’s Syco label – this month notched up the highest first-week album sales for a debut artist, album volumes are down 11 per cent, or 12m units, for the year to date, according to the Official UK Charts Company and Music Week.Recorded music companies had been “quick to complain” that the slide in CD sales had not been offset by growth in digital music, Ms Bayley said, but their embrace of digital rights management (DRM) systems “might have added to the slow take-up of legal digital services”.Just 150m tracks have been downloaded legally in the UK over the past three years, she added. “Sadly, that amounts to an average of less than one 79p per download per head of population per year.”The ERA’s appeal comes as more companies experiment with the DRM-freeMP3 format, following a pre-emptive challenge in February by Apple’s Steve Jobs. Most recently, Universal Music this month began offering its classical and jazz catalogue in MP3 format.In April, EMI “unlocked” its catalogue, charging consumers a premium for DRM-free versions of its music on Apple’s iTunes store, and has since signed deals with other digital retailers for MP3 files encoded at more than twice the quality of standard audio files.”There are certainly experiments, but there’s still a certain element of resistance within the music industry,” Ms Bayley said. “At the moment, [DRM] just puts consumers off,” she said, adding that confusion about formats was driving people toward illegal downloads.She cited research this month that found consumers were almost four times as likely to choose an MP3 file as a DRM-protected track when the two were offered alongside each other.The ERA, which represents high street retailers and online sites, said it was making the appeal now in the hope that music companies would drop DRM protections before the Christmas season and the January sales rise, when consumers load up the iPods they receive at Christmas.

    [dive into mark]

    When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

    Silicon Alley Insider

    iTunes buyers who want to purchase Jay-Z’s newest album, the soundtrack to the American Gangster movie, are out of luck. That’s because the rapper insists that fans buy the entire album, not individual tracks, and Apple’s (AAPL) online store won’t allow that.

    Jay-Z’s not the first artist to stay off of iTunes because of an album vs. tracks dispute (other notable holdouts include Radiohead). But is the first time he’s had a problem with it: You can buy much of his earlier music, track by track, on iTunes today. What gives?
    Jay-Z is also the titular head of Universal Music Group’s Def-Jam label, and his boss Doug Morris has become one of Apple’s (AAPL) loudest critics, so it’s easy to imagine that Jay-Z’s move had something to do with that — note that album will be sold via Amazon (AMZN), which is trying to create an iTunes competitor with UMG’s help.

    Maybe the rapper is sincere when he says he wants fans to experience the entire album as a whole, just like they’d watch a film all the way through instead of scenes. Or it may just be Jay-Z wishing he could dial the clock back to the late 90s, when people who wanted to buy an individual song had no choice but to buy the album it was on — a lousy deal for consumers but fantastic for the music business.

    Whatever the motivations are, the result will be the same: Fans who want to acquire Jay-Z’s music legally have lost their easiest and most widely used option, which means they’ll be that much less likely to pay for it at all.

    Kalóz (Warez) Blog

    Beavatom a kedves emberek róla, hogy igen! a Moobs szerverét is lefoglalták, de a szerver átkerült egy ideiglenes szerverre több mint 3 órára ! Este fél 9-re szereztünk egy másik szervert, így most a moobs újra megy hál istennek! fél perc alatt több mint 400-an voltak rajta 😀 tehát azért elég jól le lett terhelve azonnal a szervergép 🙂

    Na minde jót! a Moobs örökké fog élni, mivel hatalmas összegeket tudunk lekaparni az oldalról(havi 2 milió forint volt eddig a max.) 🙂

    Üdv. Egy admin

    Mashable

    NBC Direct, the free service from NBC that lets you download full episodes of The Office, 30 Rock, Scrubs, Heroes and more, has gone live on the NBC site.

    Currently in beta, and originally scheduled to launch in October, the new video viewing service allows you to download the latest episodes of NBC shows directly to your computer for viewing in a special player. Getting set up to do this is rather annoying. First off, it’s Internet Explorer only, then once you download the player, if you don’t have the latest .NET framework, you’ll be downloading that also. Next: Windows Media needed a security update on top of it all. On a Mac? Sorry, can’t help. Outside of the US? You’re out of luck too.

    The Social – CNET News.com

    In his keynote speech on Wednesday morning at the Media and Money conference hosted by Dow Jones and Nielsen, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner talked about writers as though they were a minority group that he didn’t particularly understand well. “I like writers. Some of my best friends are writers,” he said as though attempting to save face. But nevertheless, his foremost epithet for the ongoing Writer’s Guild of America strike was “stupid.”

    “I see stupid strikes, and I see less stupid strikes. I see smart strikes,” Eisner said in the keynote, which was structured as a conversation with Neil P. Cavuto, senior vice president and managing editor of Fox Business News. “This is a stupid strike.”

    The problem, Eisner said, is that the Writer’s Guild is lobbying for a bigger cut of the profits from digital distribution–and according to the former Disney chief, those profits simply aren’t there. Eisner, now the head of a private investment firm called The Tornante Company, has launched an online video studio called Vuguru, and said that it’s still more or less a fruitless labor. Vuguru’s debut series, a serial mystery called Prom Queen, “didn’t make money,” he said.

    The INQUIRER

    Serbia is one of the worst places in the world for pirated software, according to the Business Software Alliance. Dragomir Kojic of the Business Software Alliance (BSA) claims that illegal software accounts for more than 78 per cent of the IT market in Serbia.

    The average salary in Serbia is about 300 Euros a month, but the average cost of software of Voleware is about 800 euros. While Microsoft has looked at reducing software costs in places like China, the poorer places in Eastern Europe are often overlooked.

    xinhuanet

    Bangladesh has been found to have a software piracy rate of 92 percent, which is number one in the Asian Pacific region and the fourth highest in the world, local newspaper The Daily Star reported Wednesday. A report, Global Software Piracy Study 2006, conducted by IDC, the IT industry’s leading global market research and forecasting firm, warned that the software piracy in Bangladesh is crippling the local industry and costing local retailers 90 million U.S. dollars a year. The report shows that 92 percent of software used on personal computers in Bangladesh had been pirated in 2006.

    The average annual income in Bangladesh is only US $380, and malnutrition and illiteracy are widespread. (www.islamic-relief.com/projects/bangladesh)

    TorrentFreak

    OiNK didn’t carry any content, its users did. Taking out the OiNK site didn’t remove a single song from any of OiNK’s users libraries and they are taking their collections with them as they migrate to other sites, ready to share another day.

    TorrentFreak

    With the demise of oink, many music aficionados were left with little in the way of similar sites. However, true to the hydra phenomenon, a week later and several new sites have sprung up to replace it. We asked the admins of two of these sites for their future plans.

    TorrentFreak

    “I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted.”

    TorrentFreak

    Mininova reached another milestone as they just passed the 3 billion .torrent download mark. The impressive number of 3 million daily users now download almost 10 million .torrent files a day.

    TorrentFreak

    The Pirate Bay is featuring the Swedish glam rock band “Lamont” on their frontpage. Unlike the major record labels, Lamont recognizes the power of filesharing and they give away their album for free. Not without success, over 100,000 people downloaded their album in less than 24 hours, numbers that other artists can only dream of.

    Boing Boing

    Gracenote, the company that usually provides the album information when you rip a CD, launched an interesting Music Map application that shows the “popularity” of artists and albums by region and country in many parts of the world. It does this based on how often Gracenote’s database is queried about particular albums or artists.


    Link to Flash map

    Ars technica

    A handful of consumer groups, including members of the Savetheinternet.com coalition, have asked the Federal Communications Commission to stop Comcast from interfering with BitTorrent and other P2P traffic. A new complaint (PDF) filed by Public Knowledge and Free Press accuses Comcast of “secretly degrading” P2P traffic, calling it a violation of network neutrality principles, and asks the FCC to enjoin Comcast from blocking P2P traffic in the future.

    The complaint comes in the wake of revelations the Comcast is using Sandvine to actively interfere with and block some BitTorrent, Gnutella, and even Lotus Notes traffic. The ISP is using forged TCP reset packets, which tell both ends of a connection that the other party has reset the connection, to accomplish the task. Comcast admits to managing traffic on its network to ensure a “good Internet experience” for all of its customers. The company argues that its management techniques will occasionally “delay” traffic, but denies that it blocks or degrades traffic, despite evidence to the contrary.

    Silicon Alley Insider

    Napster’s 2Q highlights: Revenues are up 24% y/y, to $31.6 million, and the company has stopped burning cash. The lowlights: It’s no longer burning money because it’s retreating from its core business: Selling all-you-can-eat music subscriptions. A year ago the company spent $8.5 million on sales and marketing, and this quarter that number had shrunk to $5 million.

    The results: six months ago the subscription music service had 830,000 subs, three months ago it had 770,000, and now it has 750,000. The company says that last drop was expected, because kids stop using the service during the summer. But it’s not as if those numbers will swell this fall: NAPS projects only a 4% revenue increase for next quarter.

    So instead of talking up its core subscription business, Napster is now pinning its hopes on the mobile industry. Music on your cellphone may one day be a real business, but hard to see why Napster is going to be the company that will capitalize on it. In the meantime, Napster has concluded that PC-based music subscriptions aren’t a growth business — the same conclusion that Yahoo! Music, RealNetworks and MTV have already come to.

    demonbaby:

    In a few short years, the aggressive push of technology combined with the arrogant response from the record industry has rapidly worn away all of my noble intentions of clinging to the old system, and has now pushed me into full-on dissent. I find myself fully immersed in digital music, almost never buying CDs, and fully against the methods of the major record labels and the RIAA. And I think it would do the music industry a lot of good to pay attention to why – because I’m just one of millions, and there will be millions more in the years to come. And it could have happened very, very differently.

    The Register

    The record industry is pressing the UK’s ISPs for a deal that would see persistent illegal file sharers automatically booted off the net.

    High-level talks between the ruling council of internet trade body ISPA and the Music Publishers Association are aiming to settle the historic tension between the two industries.

    Comments from a government Minister yesterday hint that an unlikely bargain could be approaching. Lord Triesman said talks are “progressing more promisingly than people might have thought six months ago”.

    People familiar with the negotiations say the ISPs would prefer a financial penalty to a full disconnection.

    The providers are concerned that terminating access is a disproportionate response. The internet is rapidly becoming an essential part of national infrastructure for consumers, they argue, not merely a source of entertainment.

    And from the ISPs’ perspective, the government is sending out mixed signals on the issue.

    The Rawking Refuses To Stop! :: When I said I wanted to be your blog

    What I’m saying is, the lack of a legitimate, legal service with the same quality, ease and variety of OiNK is a huge, gaping hole in the music business right now and if anyone wants to make money on a recording ever again, you guys had better fill it the hell up.

    mudd up! » archive »

    Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7″ on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12″, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring. The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…

    The Canadian Press

    LONDON – British and Dutch police shut down what they say is one the world’s biggest online sources of pirated music Tuesday and arrested the website’s 24-year-old suspected operator.The invitation-only OiNK website specialized in distributing albums leaked before their official release by record companies, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said.

    Many among OiNK’s estimated 180,000 members paid “donations” to upload or download albums, often weeks before their release, and within hours albums would be distributed through public forums and blogs across the Internet. Users were invited to the site if they could prove they had music to share, the IFPI said.

    The IFPI said more than 60 major albums were leaked on OiNK so far this year, making it the primary source worldwide for illegal prerelease music.

    Prerelease piracy is considered particularly damaging to music sales as it leads to early mixes and unfinished versions of artists’ recordings circulating on the Internet months before the release.

    Police in Cleveland, in northeast England, said they were tracing the money generated through the website, expected to amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

    The arrest of a 24-year-old IT worker at a house in Middlesbrough, northeast England, followed a two-year investigation by Dutch and British police and raids co-ordinated by Interpol.

    Cleveland police said the man, whose name was not released, was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright law.

    OiNK’s servers, in Amsterdam, were shut down by Dutch police, the IFPI said.

    “OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of prerelease music online,” said Jeremy Banks, the head of the IFPI’s Internet Anti-Piracy Unit.

    “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online.”

    and an OINK user who thinks otherwise…

    “Personally i’ve never downloaded a pre-release album on oink (don’t need oink for that, every public tracker has those kind of releases). I like OiNK because you could find that extremely-rare edition that you’d have died for and you could listen to it and decide if that was worth your money.
    If you couldn’t find a release on oink, those record probably simply did’t exist.

    oh…i’m so sad…”

    Slate Magazine

    the tough-guy act typified by the music industry of the early 2000s, and recently in the case of the $222,000 fine imposed on Jammie Thomas, may be going out of fashion. Instead, media companies—particularly in television and film—are at least sometimes practicing a mellower concept called “tolerated use.” They watch and see whether infringements are actually harmful or not before sending out their copyright pit bulls.

    Slate Magazine

    Tolerated lawbreaking is almost always a response to a political failure—the inability of our political institutions to adapt to social change or reach a rational compromise that reflects the interests of the nation and all concerned parties.

    Nigeria Village Square

    Rioting broke out yesterday in the northern Greek port of Thessaloniki as Nigerians, mainly young demonstrators, confronted the Police in that country after the death of a Nigerian immigrant.Greek television showed footage of dozens of smashed windows and several damaged cars. Police said the victim, whose name has not been made public, had been selling CDs and DVDs illegally, and that he jumped from the first floor of a cafeteria to escape a police inspection. His injuries were fatal and he died on the spot.

    kottke.org

    Marginal Revolution and CNN (and New York magazine and Reddit and etc.) asked their respective readers: how much did you pay for In Rainbows, Radiohead’s new album which is only available as a pay-what-you-want download.

    Wanganui Chronicle

    Richard Storey, director of operations for the New Zealand Federation Against Copyright Theft (NZFACT), said independent research two years ago showed piracy was costing the film industry in New Zealand about $70 million.

    “The projected loss of revenue for DVD stores is anywhere from 15 to 20 percent of their annual income,” Mr Storey, who heads the NZFACT investigation team, told the Chronicle yesterday.

    His comments came in the wake of the court appearance of two Wanganui people charged with making and selling pirated DVD movies.

    Dion Heemi Williams, 26, was ordered to pay reparations of $5000 and sentenced to 200 hours’ community service while his girlfriend, Renee Waterman, 21, was sentenced to 100 hours’ community service when they appeared in the Wanganui District Court on October 3.

    On August 2, Wanganui police raided Williams’ home and seized 266 pirated DVDs including Transformers, Disturbia and The Break Up, titles recently released or yet to be released in cinemas.

    TorrentFreak

    IFPI.com, the domain that used to belong to The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry or (IFPI) – an infamous anti-piracy organization – is mysteriously transferred to The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay team says it will use the domain to host the newly founded International Federation of Pirate Interests.

    Los Angeles Times

    It was the first major event for the Copyright Alliance, a new organization formed by deep-pocketed content producers from Hollywood, Silicon Valley and other regions. The Washington-based group intends to make a unified case to Congress that its members’ industries are a vital component of the U.S. economy and need to be protected from piracy.

    Together, they make a powerful lobbying group.

    The association lured congressional staffers with free gourmet sandwiches and DVD-size cookies to a room filled with big-screen TVs, laptops and glossy brochures. Capitol Hill aides took turns playing video games such as “Madden NFL 08” and “Super Mario Bros.” at one booth. At another, they lined up for autographs from soul singer Isaac Hayes.

    And in a demonstration of the clout behind the Copyright Alliance, the group lured powerful House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) to speak at its coming-out party. “When you walk into this room,” Conyers told the crowd, “copyright becomes real.”

    Yahoo! News UK

    Britney Spears’ music label filed a copyright infringement suit on Thursday, accusing the popular Internet gossip site PerezHilton.com of posting unauthorized recordings from her forthcoming album.
    (Advertisement)

    The lawsuit came a day after Jive Records, part of Sony BMG Music Entertainment’s Zomba Label Group, announced that it would release “Blackout” two weeks earlier than originally planned because some tracks had been leaked online.

    “Blackout,” Spears’ first album of new material in four years, is now slated to reach stores October 30 in the United States and a day earlier internationally.

    The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, accuses PerezHilton.com and its proprietor, Mario Lavandeira, of illegally obtaining and posting at least 10 completed songs and unfinished demos during the past three months.

    The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages and a court order barring further infringement by the site.

    TechCrunch

    P2P music sharing and sales service Grooveshark has raised their level of compensation for sharing music from 10 cents to 25 cents a track, their entire profit on each sale.

    Ars technica

    Anirban Banerjee, Michalis Faloutsos, and Laxmi Bhuyan collected more than 100GB of TCP header information from P2P networks back in early 2006 using a specially-doctored client. The goal of the research was a simple one: to determine “how likely is it that a user will run into such a ‘fake user’ and thus run the risk of a lawsuit?” The results are outlined in a recent paper (PDF), “P2P: Is Big Brother Watching You?”

    Digital Media Wire

    A recent survey of 980 U.S. teens conducted by Piper Jaffray found that 64% said they download music illegally, down from 72% a year ago, while 36% said they purchase music from online services, up from 28% last year.

    Among online retailers, 79% said they used iTunes, down from 91% a year ago; RealNetworks’ Rhapsody and Napster each claimed 2% of market share, while 16% said they purchased digital music from a catch-all category of “other” services.

    The survey also found that 82% of teens who own an MP3 player also own some form on an iPod, up from 79% in 2006.

    Three percent said they already owned an iPhone, with 9% saying they expected to by one in the next six months.

    The Harvard Crimson

    “We lose 44 percent of what we lose through piracy on college campuses. There is no academic freedom in downloading a copy of the ‘Bourne Ultimatum’ while it’s out in theaters.”

    coolfer

    Inspired by an archive-digging post by Jason Kottke, here are some industry-related articles I’ve dug up since the New York Times opened up its online archives (back to 1981). I’ve enjoyed reading about industry changes, Napster and the emergence of the Internet given knowledge of how the industry and technology has developed over the years.

    The Telegraph

    Artists are increasingly making their fortunes from live events rather than records. In North America alone, figures by industry monitor Pollstar show ticket sales have more than doubled to $3.6bn (£1.8bn) in the past five years. The Rolling Stones made $139m from touring last year, and more the year before. Stuck behind computer screens all day, we enjoy our mass gatherings, and those who followed the Stones in their youth can afford £200 to see them on stage today.

    With both new and established acts now capable of making money without the backing of a big company, McGee says record labels are being left out of the loop. He scoffs at their efforts to make up lost ground by developing into “multimedia entertainment companies that can manage bands and share in live income”.

    But try they must. Revenues from record sales in Britain have dropped by more than £130m since 2004. The true cost to the industry could be far greater. TNS, the market researcher, looked at the spending habits of file-sharers between 2003 and 2005 and estimated a £1bn loss to the country in retail spend.

    Ars technica

    After just four hours of deliberation and two days of testimony, a jury found that Jammie Thomas was liable for infringing the record labels’ copyrights on all 24 the 24 recordings at issue in the case of Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas. The jury awarded $9,250 in statutory damages per song, after finding that the infringement was “willful,” out of a possible total of $150,000 per song. The grand total? $222,000 in damages.

    CNET News.com

    An AT&T executive on Wednesday sought to defuse fears that forthcoming tools aimed at identifying pirates on its network will harm the average Net surfer’s online experience.

    The planned tactic is “not about heavy-handed tactics that go after the vast majority of our customers that want to consume content legally,” AT&T assistant vice president of regulatory policy Brent Olson said at an antipiracy summit here hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It’s about making more content available to more people in more ways going forward.”

    Market wire

    Movie piracy continues to be the thorn in the side of the Indian, Chinese and U.S. film industries. According to the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA), India suffered industry losses of $180 million (US) in 2005, the vast majority of which were to the local film industry. In China where the piracy rate is estimated at 93%, meaning that there is virtually no legitimate market for filmed content, the losses from movie piracy are estimated at $2.7 (US) billion.

    Despite the negative impact of piracy on India and China’s film industry, the problems continue to be fueled by challenged regulatory systems.

    Elizabeth Kaltman, MPAA’s Communications Director explains, “Lack of enforcement resources and attention are key to the piracy problem in India, as is the lack of any real deterrent sentencing from the judiciary. Unquestionably one of the foundations of China’s piracy problems is the lack of market access accorded to foreign films (non-Chinese films). China’s theatrical exhibition quota, frequent imposition of ‘blackouts’ on the theatrical release of foreign films, and restrictions placed on home video distributors, give movie pirates a tremendous market advantage.”

    Read the coverage on the ongoing Capitol vs Thomas trial here.

    It is full of gems, like:

    “Gabriel [RIAA counsel] asked if it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music which they have purchased, even just one copy. Pariser [BMG’s chief anti-piracy lawyer] replied, “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy’,” she said.

    Times Online

    10%: proportion of music sales worldwide that come from internet downloads

    10,000: people in 18 countries threatened with legal action

    20bn: tracks are illegally downloaded each year

    14%: of broadband users regularly engage in illegal file-sharing

    795m: estimated number of legal downloads bought last year

    4m: songs can currently be purchased online

    £1bn: what legal music download market is worth

    25: illegal downloads for every legitimate music purchase

    Dear customer, we regret to announce that the Virgin Digital service is due to close.

    We will be taking no new customers from today, Friday 21st September.

    On Friday the 28th September we will cease selling tracks and access will be for current Club users only.

    On Friday the 19th October the site will close for all customers.

    If you have purchased tracks from the service then we recommend that you back up your music files – Information about backing up and re-downloading your tracks

    Business Week

    An ethics group is urging Congress to scrutinize Google Inc.’s copyright controls after finding hundreds of apparently pirated movies available on the Internet search leader’s Web site.

    In letters sent to several lawmakers Wednesday, the National Legal and Policy Center excoriated Google for allowing its video-hosting service to become an online theater for showing and promoting illegally copied movies.

    The nonprofit group, which says it has no financial ties to the movie industry, is best known for helping to expose a 2003 corruption scandal involving the Air Force and Boeing Co. that landed two executives in jail.

    The grievances made to Congress focused exclusively on content found on Google’s Web site rather than the company’s more popular YouTube subsidiary that is being sued by Viacom Inc. for alleged copyright infringement.

    The harsh critique echoes similar complaints that have asserted Google is more interested in boosting its audience — and potential profit — than protecting the intellectual property of Hollywood studios, record labels, authors and publishers.

    Google says it adheres to federal law by removing unauthorized content whenever asked by copyright owners.

    But that method has proven to be woefully inadequate, said Ken Boehm, chairman of the nonprofit National Legal and Policy Center.

    TECH.BLORGE.com

    Amazon’s long awaited DRM-less music download store just hit the web, and, for a moment there, I thought it might have become vaporware. Thankfully, that didn’t turn out to be the case, giving me a chance to put the store through its paces. Here’s my review of the Amazon MP3 Download Store.

    Amazon is going out on a limb here, offering DRM-less MP3 tracks at 256kbps at $0.89 per song. DRM-less music download stores have been done before, but they usually lack in music selection. Amazon is looking to change the music download world by giving users the opportunity to do anything they want with their music while offering a huge selection of both popular and unpopular/underground artists, but does it do this well?

    The Pirate Bay – A világ legnagyobb BitTorrent trackere

    Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we’ve been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers.

    While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.

    The companies that are being reported are the following:

    * Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
    * Emi Music Sweden AB
    * Universal Music Group Sweden AB
    * Universal Pictures Nordic AB
    * Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB
    * Atari Nordic AB
    * Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd
    * Ubisoft Sweden AB
    * Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB
    * Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB

    Stay tuned for updates.

    The New Yorker

    The Piracy Paradox
    by James Surowiecki September 24, 2007

    T

    In 1932, a group of American fashion manufacturers found themselves beset by a proliferation of cheap knockoffs. Designs, then as now, were not protected by patents or copyrights, so the manufacturers decided to take direct action to stop the copying. They set up the Fashion Originators Guild of America to monitor retailers and keep track of original designs; if you look at vintage dresses from the thirties, you can find labels reading “A registered original design with Fashion Originators Guild.” Retailers selling knockoffs were “red-carded,” and guild members wouldn’t sell their merchandise to red-carded stores. This was unpopular with the retailers, but it seems to have put a damper on the copying. The only hitch in the plan was that it was illegal: in 1941, the Supreme Court ruled that the manufacturers’ arrangement violated antitrust law, and the knockoff artists stayed in business.

    In the decades since, copying has remained ubiquitous in the fashion industry. Fashion-forward but low-priced retailers like H & M and Zara have flourished, thanks to their ability to take designs from Milan to the mass market. Private-label designers for major department stores trumpet the fidelity of their imitations. And almost as soon as hot new designs appear on the runway, photographs and drawings of them are on their way to Chinese factories that can produce reasonable facsimiles at a fraction of the cost. Designers are as annoyed by this as their prewar forebears were, and so Congress now finds itself considering a bill, pushed by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, that would give original designs a legal protection similar to copyright.

    Designers’ frustration at seeing their ideas mimicked is understandable. But this is a classic case where the cure may be worse than the disease. There’s little evidence that knockoffs are damaging the business. Fashion sales have remained more than healthy—estimates value the global luxury-fashion sector at a hundred and thirty billion dollars— and the high-end firms that so often see their designs copied have become stronger. More striking, a recent paper by the law professors Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman suggests that weak intellectual-property rules, far from hurting the fashion industry, have instead been integral to its success. The professors call this effect “the piracy paradox.”

    The paradox stems from the basic dilemma that underpins the economics of fashion: for the industry to keep growing, customers must like this year’s designs, but they must also become dissatisfied with them, so that they’ll buy next year’s. Many other consumer businesses face a similar problem, but fashion—unlike, say, the technology industry—can’t rely on improvements in power and performance to make old products obsolete. Raustiala and Sprigman argue persuasively that, in fashion, it’s copying that serves this function, bringing about what they call “induced obsolescence.” Copying enables designs and styles to move quickly from early adopters to the masses. And since no one cool wants to keep wearing something after everybody else is wearing it, the copying of designs helps fuel the incessant demand for something new.

    The situation is not necessarily easy on designers, who have to keep coming up with new ideas rather than being able to milk a trend for years. But it means that in the industry as a whole there is more innovation, more competition, and probably more sales than there otherwise would be. And the absence of copyrights and patents also creates a more fertile ground for that innovation, since designers are able to take other people’s ideas in new directions. Had the designers who came up with the pinstripe or the stiletto heel been able to bar others from using their creations, there would have been less innovation in fashion, not more.

    If copying were putting a serious dent in designers’ profits, it might slow the pace of innovation, since designers would have less incentive to produce good work. But while knockoffs undoubtedly do steal some sales from originals, they are, for the most part, targeted at an entirely different market segment—people who appreciate high style but can’t afford high prices. That limits the damage knockoffs do, as does the fact that fashion is one of the few industries in the world where people are still willing to pay a considerable premium to own original brands instead of imitations. (That’s why counterfeits, which pretend to be original products, are illegal.) The best evidence of this is the fact that luxury-goods makers, far from cutting their prices in response to the knockoff boom, have instead been able to raise prices consistently. In fact, given the importance to fashion of what the law professor Jonathan Barnett calls “aspirational utility”—the enjoyment people get from imitating the life style of the rich and famous—one might think of knockoffs as being like gateway drugs: access to the lower-quality version makes buyers all the more interested in eventually getting the real stuff.

    The fashion industry is not alone in its surprising mixture of weak intellectual-property laws and strong innovation: haute cuisine, furniture design, and magic tricks are all fields where innovators produce new work without being able to copyright it. This doesn’t mean that we can always do without copyrights and patents, and fashion has unique characteristics that limit the damage that copying can do: it’s relatively cheap to come up with new designs, there’s a culture of novelty, and people are willing to pay more for the right brands. But we should be skeptical of claims that tougher laws are necessarily better laws. Sometimes imitation isn’t just the sincerest form of flattery. It’s also the most productive. ♦

    Zeropaid

    Server operators start closing down operations there after courts rule can be held liable for $28,000 USD in damages for each song it facilitates the illegal sharing of.

    Over the past two weeks, ED2K users have been noticing that their very-reliable German-based servers have been disappearing. First, about a dozen “Big Bang” servers started refusing connections. Shortly afterward, the half-dozen “DonkeyServer” servers stopped indexing the users’ files.

    With no word from the operators as to why the servers are no longer functioning, network users worldwide have been speculating as to the reason.

    Now it appears that the root cause of the server disruption has been linked to a recent judgment by a regional German court in Hamburg (Az. 308 O 273/07). The ruling clearly defined a monetary value for which to hold server operators liable for the illegal file-sharing of copyrighted music they facilitate.

    Even though a server may not contain any actual portion of a copyrighted song, if the mere facilitation of the copyright infringement is found to have occurred the server operator can then be held liable for 20,000 Euro (about $28,000 USD) per song!

    Businesswire

    “SpiralFrog is committed to solving music piracy by changing the way people discover music with free content, an engaging site and finally offering a real alternative to illicit file-sharing,” said Mohen.

    “Our Apologies.

    At this time, the SpiralFrog Web site is available only to residents of the United States of America and Canada.” sais Spiralfrog.

    Back to piratebay.

    CCIA

    Fair Use exceptions to U.S. copyright laws are responsible for more than $4.5 trillion in annual revenue for the United States, according to the findings of an unprecedented economic study released today. According to the study commissioned by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and conducted in accordance with a World Intellectual Property Organization methodology, companies benefiting from limitations on copyright-holders’ exclusive rights, such as “fair use” – generate substantial revenue, employ millions of workers, and, in 2006, represented one-sixth of total U.S. GDP.

    The exhaustive report, released today at a briefing on Capitol Hill, quantifies for the first time ever the critical contributions of fair use to the U.S. economy. The timing proves particularly important as the debates over copyright law in the digital age move increasingly to center stage on Capitol Hill. As the report summarizes, in the past twenty years as digital technology has increased, so too has the importance of fair use. With more than $4.5 trillion in revenue generated by fair use dependent industries in 2006, a 31% increase since 2002, fair use industries are directly responsible for more than 18% of U.S. economic growth and nearly 11 million American jobs. In fact, nearly one out of every eight American jobs is in an industry that benefits from current limitations on copyright.

    Ars Technica

    A new peer-to-peer music service developed by a “team of enterprising college students” has a novel twist on the music sales business: give users a cut of the sales. Grooveshark is currently in beta and claims to have signed a number of independent labels up for its service. All the sales traffic will go over a P2P network, and users will be “rewarded” for sharing their music.

    P2P-based music stores are nothing new. Indeed, a number of P2P networks have tried to go legit after running afoul of the RIAA, none with any notable success. The most recent example is LimeWire, which recently announced plans to begin selling MP3s encoded at 256Kbps. LimeWire has managed to sign on a couple of notable distributors, including Nettwerk Productions, home to Avril Lavigne, Sara McLachlan, and the Barenaked Ladies, among other acts.

    There are a couple of significant differences between LimeWire and Grooveshark’s business models, however. First, LimeWire will start out as a direct-download site, with the P2P component coming later. Also, Grooveshark’s virtual tip jar feature appears to be unique among the P2P music stores.

    Grooveshark is banking on users being attracted to the idea of getting a cut of the action when someone downloads a track from their PC. At 99¢ per non-DRMed MP3, the user’s cut isn’t going to be much more than a few cents after the artist, label, and Grooveshark take their share, but it may be enough to convince some music fans to sign up for the service and share some of their bandwidth.

    Zeropaid

    There’s an interesting article expected to be published in a forthcoming issue of Windows Middle East magazine that argues that film licensing restrictions have made illegal file-sharing in the Middle East the only real option with which to acquire movies online.

    Apparently due to film licensing restrictions, which tend to cover distinct geographical regions – most often the US and Europe – Western films such as Pulp Fiction or Shrek 3 cannot currently be licensed for online distribution to end users in the Middle East, meaning internet surfers here simply cannot download content legally online.

    “Due to the paid-for movie download market still being in its infancy, and as such online distribution licenses only covering the so-called ‘developed’ markets, net users here in this region don’t currently have a moral, legal means of paying to download their favorite films,” commented Matt Wade, the editor of Windows Middle East.

    The Windows Middle East team discovered therefore that the only option available to film buffs who are looking to download movie content there is to use illegally use P2P and file-sharing software.

    For all the reports the MPAA throws around about “calculated” losses due to piracy, it’s reports like this that make me me even more suspect of their conclusions. Some countries and regions lack true consumer choice and some of the viewing options afforded other countries like the US, and so to say that the blame falls entirely on them for not being able to see a movie on the MPAA’s terms is just silly.

    If the MPAA is serious about fighting piracy then it has to learn what the RIAA still can’t figure out – give consumers what they want! Has capitalism become that difficult?

    Listening Post – Wired Blogs

    If you’re looking for a way to grab music from peer-to-peer networks without that nagging feeling that you’re depriving a starving artist of her next meal (or a label exec of that Learjet upgrade), Grooveshark might help. It’s a P2P app like Limewire or Kazaa, except you have to pay for tracks (“around $0.99”). The artist/label takes their cut, and then Grooveshark splits the remainder 50/50 with the user who uploaded the track to the buyer.

    Once the service launches (it’s in private beta), you’ll be able to purchase tracks via the web, but you’ll need to run a small client (Linux/Mac/Windows) in order to share. The system apparently selects the highest bitrate file available when you purchase a track, and all tracks are delivered in the unprotected MP3 format. Artist information is created and edited using a wiki-style collaborative system. Bands and artists whose music is not already shared by Grooveshark users can share their own music in order to seed it into the system.

    This is an interesting concept, but one problem is likely to be the size of the music catalog, because songs aren’t available unless the artist/label want them to be. Grooveshark says “it has gotten interest of a ton of independent labels as well as some larger ones (Magnatunes/Naxos/Sheridan Square),” but in order for a store like this to be useful, it has to be truly comprehensive.

    One way to solve the problem would be to allow all music to be sold through the site, only paying the artists and labels who register — sort of like SoundExchange does.

    Update: Grooveshark is in fact going to index songs from any label so the catalog problems I mention above shouldn’t be a factor. Problem solved?

    We’re back!

    Suprnova has been down for some years due to some heavy pressure from the copyright lobby. The former owner sloncek donated suprnova to The Pirate Bay – and as you know, we like to kick ass and bow for noone!

    We were going to keep this site a secret until we had finished it, but of course it leaked, that’s how internet works. So now that the word is out, we’re releasing it!

    Please consider these first weeks/months as a beta test. Since we love all you guys and gals so much we decided to keep it an open beta test.
    That means, please behave, don’t complaint to much and if you discover any weird bugs or problems, let us know.

    Some of you have also already discovered our new forum, Suprbay! Which is a joint forum for both Suprnova and The Pirate Bay. Discuss movies, music, love and whatever with your fellow pirates.

    Finally, some words for non-internet loving companies: This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you.
    You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.

    y’arr!

    o0o

    Institute for Policy Innovation

    “Piracy” of recorded music costs the U.S. sound recording industries billions of dollars in lost revenue and profits. These losses, however, represent only a fraction of the impact of recorded music piracy on the U.S. economy as a whole. Combining the latest data on worldwide piracy of recorded music with multipliers from a well established U.S. government model, this study concludes that recorded music piracy costs American workers significant losses in jobs and earnings, and governments substantial lost tax revenue.

    variety

    Starbucks may not be the powerful promotional partner Hollywood thought it would be.

    Paramount
    Classics’ “Arctic Tale” has become the second pic backed by the coffee
    giant not able to translate the company’s caffeine buzz into strong box
    office. (Starbucks previously backed Lionsgate’s “Akeelah and the Bee.”)

    The
    environmentally focused docu revolving around polar bears and walruses
    has earned $484,000 since bowing July 25. Pic’s widest opening on 227
    theaters occurred in its fourth week of release Aug. 17. It plays in
    158 venues in its fifth frame this weekend.

    National Geographic
    Films produced “Arctic,” as well as surprise hit “March of the
    Penguins,” which went on to earn $77 million for Warner Independent in
    2005.

    Par Classics (a division of Paramount Vantage) had hoped
    the success of the penguin tale would rub off on its own pic and help
    sell more tickets.

    But it also hoped that having Starbucks aboard
    would raise awareness for the film and entice the company’s 44 million
    weekly customers to hit the multiplexes.

    Starbucks installed
    signage and stickers in 6,800 of its stores, printed “Arctic”-branded
    cup sleeves, sold plush walruses and the pic’s soundtrack and sponsored
    discussions in select stores nationwide about climate change. Materials
    for the movie also appear on the company’s website.

    Chain doesn’t
    have video screens in its stores as rival Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf
    does, so footage from a pic it pushes can’t be displayed in stores.

    Campaign runs in stores in the U.S. and Canada through Monday.

    Starbucks
    said it didn’t go further and create a themed Frappuccino, for example,
    because it didn’t want to overly commercialize the tie-in.

    “With
    all of our entertainment options, we are careful to promote our
    products and projects in a tasteful manner and not to interfere with
    the coffeehouse experience,” said Ken Lombard, prexy of Starbucks
    Entertainment.

    Starbucks’ pic deals go beyond a traditional promo
    pact like that of, say, General Motors for “Transformers,” because
    Starbucks collects a percentage of a movie’s profits in return for its
    marketing muscle.

    And that unusual payoff pact winds up putting a
    bigger spotlight on the results of the films the company decides to
    back — especially given that Starbucks does not invest in the
    production of the films it promotes.

    Promo partners are
    increasingly becoming a studio’s best friend, with brands ponying up
    their own marketing dollars to help push pics and make their companies
    seem more appealing to customers through entertainment tie-ins.

    Starbucks
    has long been considered a potential powerhouse for Hollywood,
    especially after helping launch music artists and assisting more
    familiar ones to sell CDs.

    But it hasn’t fared as well on the film front.

    “Arctic
    Tale’s” performance has been chilly so far. Its $484,000 compares with
    the $4 million “Penguins” had earned by the end of its fourth week when
    it played on 132 screens.

    “Akeelah,” the first film Starbucks
    promoted, ultimately earned $19 million. Pic still turned a profit
    given its $8 million production budget (Lionsgate spent around $20
    million to market it). But industryites had expected it to earn more
    given Starbucks’ backing and rhetoric from the Seattle-based company
    that it’s a bona fide entertainment player.

    “We are an innovative
    company that is not afraid to go outside of our comfort zone, and
    ‘Akeelah’ and ‘Arctic Tale’ showed us the coffeehouse can be a means to
    introduce films to our customers they might not normally be exposed
    to,” Lombard said.

    Pics also are a way to associate Starbucks with a particular message — climate change in the case of “Arctic Tale.”

    “We
    introduced ‘Arctic Tale’ to our customers because we want to spark a
    dialogue about environmental issues,” Lombard said. “The coffeehouse is
    a great place to inspire such discussion. There is no more important
    issue facing our planet today than climate change.” The tie-in was an
    “avenue to get people of all ages to talk … and hopefully be inspired
    to be a part of the solution.”

    But studios ultimately want
    Starbucks customers to be inspired to buy tickets; the B.O. tallies
    show that Starbucks may still need to massage its marketing efforts
    when it comes to studio partnerships.

    When it announced the
    “Arctic Tale” deal, Lombard said the company had “learned its lesson”
    as a result of its “Akeelah” campaign, saying it needed to make a
    better effort to let customers know it wants them to “go see” the films
    it promotes.

    “We are still evaluating our ‘Arctic Tale’
    promotion,” Lombard said. “Nonetheless, we are always looking to
    provide tangible customer experiences that educate and inspire
    discussion and go beyond traditional movie marketing.”

    Par
    Vantage and National Geographic Films execs say that while they’re
    disappointed with the B.O. for “Arctic Tale,” they’re happy with
    Starbucks’ effort and look forward to sales of the eventual DVD in the
    company’s stores.

    “They were great partners and awesome to work
    with,” said one National Geographic exec. “They did everything they
    said they would do. I’d work with them again in a heartbeat.”

    Given
    some of the negative critical reaction to the U.S. version of “Arctic
    Tale,” National Geographic Films is lobbying to sell the European
    version of the docu on DVD, complete with a different score, songs and
    narration.

    Starbucks pushed a healthy number of “Akeelah” DVDs.
    It’s also sold other studio titles like Warner Bros.’ “Happy Feet” and
    Sony’s “The Pursuit of Happyness.”

    But then again, a DVD can be easily picked up and purchased as a customer is ordering a grande vanilla latte.

    Read the full article at:
    http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117970763.html

    New York Times, September 2, 2007

    Rick Rubin is listening. A song by a new band called the Gossip is playing, and he is concentrating. He appears to be in a trance. His eyes are tightly closed and he is swaying back and forth to the beat, trying at once to hear what is right and wrong about the music. Rubin, who resembles a medium-size bear with a long, gray beard, is curled into the corner of a tufted velvet couch in the library of a house he owns but where he no longer lives. This three-story 1923 Spanish villa steeped in music history — Johnny Cash recorded in the basement studio; Jakob Dylan is recording a solo album there now — is used by Rubin for meetings. And ever since May, when he officially became co-head of Columbia Records, Rubin has been having nearly constant meetings. Beginning in 1984, when he started Def Jam Recordings, until his more recent occupation as a career-transforming, chart-topping, Grammy Award-winning producer for dozens of artists, as diverse as the Dixie Chicks, Slayer, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Neil Diamond, Rubin, who is 44, has never gone to an office of any kind. One of his conditions for taking the job at Sony, which owns Columbia, was that he wouldn’t be required to have a desk or a phone in any of the corporate outposts. That wasn’t a problem: Columbia didn’t want Rubin to punch a clock. It wanted him to save the company. And just maybe the record business.

    Read the rest of this entry »

    Media Buyer Planner

    This year, internet ad spending in the U.S. will outpace radio, according to a new report from eMarketer. Online spending has already overtaken radio in the U.K., writes Media Life.

    The eMarketer forecast predicts that online ad spending will hit $21.7 billion for 2007 – $1.3 billion more than radio. Internet spending trailed radio by more than $3 billion last year. The report also predicts that web spending will double between now and 2011, where as radio spending will grow by just $2.2 billion.

    eMarketer’s prediction suggests that the internet will surpass radio a year before a similar prediction from ZenithOptimedia, which said back in April that the change would take place in 2008.

    SFgate

    Stanford University and UC Berkeley are among schools that have added teeth to their policies to make students think twice about violating copyright laws. The hope, in part, is to keep students from being sued by Hollywood studios, which consider online piracy a threat to their business and are sparing little expense to track down people who illicitly share songs, television shows and films.

    The penalties are an acknowledgment by the schools that they have been largely ineffective at keeping students from online file-sharing services like Limewire, Ares and Gnutella, where music by top artists can be swapped for free.

    Stanford started a program on Saturday that financially hits students who go astray. If students fail to remove illegal digital downloads from their computers within 48 hours of being asked to do so, the university will sever their campus Internet connections, and they will have to pay $100 to get them restored.

    A second offense will require a $500 reconnection fee. A third infraction will cost students $1,000.

     – New York Times

    NBC Universal, unable to come to an agreement with Apple on pricing, has decided not to renew its contract to sell digital downloads of television shows on iTunes.

    The media conglomerate — which is the No. 1 supplier of digital video to Apple’s online store, accounting for about 40 percent of downloads — notified Apple of its decision late yesterday, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked for anonymity because negotiations between the companies are confidential.

    A spokesman for NBC Universal, part of General Electric, confirmed the decision, but otherwise declined to comment. A spokesmen for Apple declined to comment. The decision by NBC Universal highlights the escalating tension between Apple and media companies, which are unhappy that Apple will not give them more control over the pricing of songs and videos that are sold on iTunes.

    NBC Universal is also seeking better piracy controls and wants Apple to allow it to bundle videos to increase revenue, the person familiar with the matter said.

    NBC Universal is the second major iTunes supplier recently to have a rift with Apple over pricing and packaging matters. In July, the Universal Music Group of Vivendi, the world’s biggest music corporation, said it would not renew its long-term contract with iTunes. Instead, Universal Music said it would market music to Apple at will, which would allow it to remove its songs from iTunes on short notice.

    The action by Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal’s chief executive, will not have an immediate impact on iTunes. The current two-year deal extends through December, so a vast video catalog — some 1,500 hours of NBC Universal’s news, sports and entertainment programming — will remain available on iTunes at least until then.

    Among the most popular NBC Universal shows available for sale on iTunes are “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Office” and “Heroes.” The company has been talking to iTunes about offering Universal movies, but has not done so to date because of piracy concerns.

    The two companies could still reach an agreement on a new contract before their current deal expires. While each side has so far refused to budge, the talks will continue and have been free of acrimony, the person familiar with the matter said.

    But the defiant moves by NBC Universal and Universal Music could embolden other media companies that have been less than thrilled with Apple’s policies. NBC Universal was the second company to sign an agreement with Apple to sell content on iTunes, and its contract stipulated that Apple receive notice of plans to cancel 90 days before the expiration date. Otherwise, the deal would automatically renew according to the original terms.

    Assuming similar provisions in deals negotiated with media companies like CBS, Discovery and the News Corporation, a parade of 90-day windows will be coming due.

    A move by NBC Universal to walk away or withdraw a large amount of content would probably hobble Apple’s efforts to move deeper into the sale of video-focused consumer electronics like the iPhone and a new class of iPods. While Apple’s early efforts in this area depended on music to fuel sales, analysts say video is what will drive much of Apple’s retail business in the future.

    The iTunes service wields incredible power in the music business, since it accounts for more than 76 percent of digital music sales. And its influence is on the rise: Apple recently passed Amazon to become the third-biggest seller of music over all, behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy, according to the market research firm NPD.

    But the sale of video online is still at a nascent stage. Media giants like NBC Universal are aggressively trying to move into the business — in part to avoid the piracy that has plagued music companies — but the revenue they earn from online video sales does not yet have a material impact on their financial performances.

    So some media companies feel they have the upper hand: Apple, for now at least, needs their content more than they need Apple. And there are an array of companies — like Amazon, Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Sony — that would love to have NBC Universal as a partner to muscle in on Apple’s turf.

    Then there is NBC Universal’s own Hulu.com, a venture in partnership with the News Corporation to build a video portal to compete with YouTube.

    The risks that media companies face in removing content from well-known Web sites involve perception and promotion. NBC Universal could anger consumers by preventing them from easily watching shows and movies in the most popular way — through iTunes and the iPod. Television networks and movie studios have vigorously tried to avoid being branded with the same anticonsumer sentiment that has worked against the record labels.

    And because iTunes is so popular, NBC Universal would lose an increasingly important way of marketing entertainment products, particularly fledgling television shows, to consumers.

    For months, most media companies have grumbled that Apple underprices video and audio content as a way to propel sales of a much more significant profit center: iPods and related merchandise. (One noteworthy abstainer from the grumbling is the Walt Disney Company, which has Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, as a board member.)

    The iTunes service has sold songs for 99 cents each since its beginning four years ago, except for the recent introduction of songs without copy protection. Episodes of television shows sell for $1.99, with movies priced at $9.99.

    NBC Universal and other companies say they want to increase prices by packaging content— say an episode of “The Office” with the movie “The 40- Year-Old Virgin,” because they both star the comedian Steve Carell.

    In the past, Apple has argued that a range of pricing would complicate the iTunes experience and squelch demand.

    Helsingin Sanomat – International Edition – Culture

    On Wednesday evening in a house occupied by young squatters in the Helsinki district of Vallila, films downloaded from the Internet were being shown for free in what is called the Pirate Cinema.
    About 20 young people sat on threadbare chairs to watch the film Planet Terror by Robert Rodriguez. The projection system involves a laptop computer and a video projector. Popcorn and drinks are sold on the side.

    CNET News.com

    [O]ne preservationist believes the answer might be found in an expression that most curators don’t consider art–online pornography.

    “I guarantee that a wealth of pornography from the late 20th century will survive in digital distributed form (because) it’s a social model that’s working extremely well,” said Kurt Bollacker, digital research manager at the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit fostering several digital-works preservation projects. Bollacker spoke Thursday at a symposium called “New Media and Social Memory” at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

    He held up the adult industry–always the digital pioneer–as one example of a self-selected community on the Web that swaps images and videos so regularly and widely that that activity will ultimately help preserve an archive over years. Similarly, he pointed to successful niche archives like the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME, a collective of programmers who preserved video games from the 1980s with CPU and hardware emulators.

    The Entertainment Merchants Association

    Fall 1975 – The Sony Betamax goes on sale in the U.S. The LV-1901 console, consisting of a SL-6200 video cassette recorder (VCR) and a 19″ Sony Trinitron television set, retails for $2,495. A table-top recorder/player deck (the SL-7200) is marketed the following spring for $1,400. (Sony stopped offering the Betamax VCR as a consumer product in the U.S. in 1993 and ceased production of the device altogether in 2002.)

    by Douglas Galbi on August 19th 2007

    From 1985 to 2004, video rentals from U.S. public libraries grew 340%. Over the same period, video rentals from U.S. commercial rental businesses grew 140%. Public libraries’ video rental activity did grow from a smaller base: 70 million videos loaned in 1985 (6% of the number of videos commercial outfits turned in that year), to 300 million videos loaned in 2004 (12% of the number of videos rented commercially). The growth of video lending from public libraries has been amazing, and largely unnoticed.

    Pricing is probably a large part of the explanation for this performance differential. The average price for commercially renting a video in 1985 was $2.38. The average price for borrowing a video from a public library in 1987 was $0.39 (30.4% of libraries charged for borrowing video, and those libraries charged an average of $1.29). In 2004, the average price for commercially renting a video was $3.43. The average price for borrowing a video from a library was then approximately zero. Lower price induces greater demand, and free (zero price) is a highly appealing price.

    This video example does not depend on some of the factors thought to be producing the death of paid text content. From 1985 to 2004, there wasn’t a proliferation of free video content on the web. I would guess that, overall, commercial video rental stores have a video inventory that most persons would value more highly than the video inventory of a library. Consumer may like free content. But video is quite expensive to consume. Given that the average video takes perhaps an hour and a half to watch, the higher inventory value of commercial video rental firms might have easily outweighed the lower video rental price from libraries. But it didn’t.

    Persons seem to have a high time-discount rate in content choices. The benefit of watching a relatively good video comes later than the cost of paying the rental fee. A high discount rate lowers the importance of the former, and raises the importance of the later. So perhaps a significant part of the challenge of making a paid content model work is delivering benefits soon relative to payments.

    * * *
    The table below summarizes the facts. Subsequent notes describe the sources and estimates.

    U.S. Public Libraries and Video Stores
    1985 2004 % inc.
    total public library circulation 1150 2010 75%
    video share of library circulation 6% 15%
    video borrowing price from libraries $0.50 0
    videos borrowed from libraries 69 302 337%
    video rental price from video stores $2.38 $3.43
    videos rented from video stores 1100 2592 136%
    All counts in millions. Video includes Betamax, VHS, and DVDs.

    Sources

    Public library circulation: For 1985, interpolated from figures for 1983 (Goldhor (1995)) and 1990 (NCES/ALA). The Goldhor figures are given in Galbi (2007a). For 2004, figure from NCES.

    Video share of public library circulation: Dewing (1988) presents results from a survey in early 1987 of about 3000 public libraries having video cassette collections. The survey received 841 valid responses. Id. p. 69, Table 6.19, gives average tapes loaned, by size of the community the public library served. The survey did not include data on total library circulation. Using NCES Public Library Statistics for 1987, I calculated average circulation per week for the four community size categories used in reporting the video survey results (less than 20,000; 20,001 to 50,000; 50,001 to 100,000; greater than 100,000). Average videos loaned were 18%, 7.5%, 7.7%, and 7.4% of average library circulation for the four community size categories, respectively. Responses in the smallest community size category may not have been representative of all small libraries in that category. Since the video survey addressed only public libraries having a video collection, the survey doesn’t account for the zero circulation share in libraries that didn’t have a video collection. For a conservative estimate of the growth rate, I estimate the 1985 video circulation share to be 6%. One small additional piece of evidence: In West Virginia about 1984, the Morgantown Public Library reported that video circulation accounted for more than 6% of annual circulation. See Caron (1984). The video share estimate for 2004 is based on the data in Galbi (2007b). While the data could support a higher estimate for the video share in 2004, I’ve used a rather low estimate to generate a conservative estimate of the growth rate.

    Videos borrowed from public libraries: Calculated from library circulation and video share.

    Video borrowing price from libraries: Dewing (1988) pp. 70-71 provides the data on prices for borrowing videos from libraries in 1987. Most libraries (73%) had a loan period of about a week. I roughly estimate the price in 1985 to be $0.50, and also roughly estimate the price in 2004 to be 0. The later estimate is based on the declining purchase price of videos and personal knowledge of library operations. Elgin (1992), p. 12, recorded that libraries that eliminated charges for borrowing videos experienced increased video borrowing.

    Video rentals from video stores: From EMA, A History of Home Video and Video Game Retailing.

    Video rental prices: EMA gives the 1985 average price. I calculated the 2004 average price from rental units and total rental revenue (Adams Media Research data).

    References

    American Library Association [ALA], Public Libraries in the United States Statistical trends, 1990-2003.

    Caron, Barbara (Fall 1984), “Video Cassettes in the Public Library,” West Virginia Public Libraries; cited in Elgin (1992) p. 6.

    Dewing, Martha, ed. (1988), Home Video in Libraries (Boston, Mass.: Knowledge Industry Publications).

    Elgin, Romona R. (1992), Comparison of Book and Video Circulation in Public Libraries, Student Report, Northern Illinois University, Department of Library and Information Studies.

    Galbi, Douglas (2007a), Book Circulation Per U.S. Public Library User Since 1856, available at galbithink.org

    Galbi, Douglas (2007b), “library users like audiovisuals,” available on purplemotes.net.

    Goldhor, Herbert (1985). A Summary and Review of the Indexes of American Public Library Statistics: 1939-1983. Library Research Center Report (Eric Document # ED264879). Urbana, IL, Illinois University.

    National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], Public Libraries.

    hvg.hu – hírek szünet nélkül :

    A francia rendőrség őrizetbe vett egy középiskolai diákot, mert a fiú lefordította az utolsó Harry Potter-kötet első három fejezetét angolról franciára, s feltette az internetre.

    Az Aix-en-Provence-ban élő 16 esztendős diák a fordítással és a netes közzététellel nem kívánt anyagi haszonra szert tenni, ennek ellenére lehet, hogy vádat emelnek ellene szerzői jogok megsértése miatt.

    A fiút hétfőn vették őrizetbe, de kedden már elengedték. A honlapot, amelyre feltette a szöveget, lezárták. A Harry Potter és a halálos szentek című befejező kötet hivatalos francia fordítása októberben lát napvilágot, a fordító az eredeti mű hivatalos megjelenése, azaz két hete dolgozik az átültetésen.

    A Harry Potter-sorozat befejező része a világ leggyorsabban fogyó könyve: a megjelenést követő első 24 óra alatt 11 millió példányban kelt el. A teljes sorozat hét kötete több mint 325 millió példányban kelt el és mintegy 64 nyelven jelent meg világszerte.

    hvg.hu – hírek szünet nélkül :

    A francia rendőrség őrizetbe vett egy középiskolai diákot, mert a fiú lefordította az utolsó Harry Potter-kötet első három fejezetét angolról franciára, s feltette az internetre.

    Az Aix-en-Provence-ban élő 16 esztendős diák a fordítással és a netes közzététellel nem kívánt anyagi haszonra szert tenni, ennek ellenére lehet, hogy vádat emelnek ellene szerzői jogok megsértése miatt.

    A fiút hétfőn vették őrizetbe, de kedden már elengedték. A honlapot, amelyre feltette a szöveget, lezárták. A Harry Potter és a halálos szentek című befejező kötet hivatalos francia fordítása októberben lát napvilágot, a fordító az eredeti mű hivatalos megjelenése, azaz két hete dolgozik az átültetésen.

    A Harry Potter-sorozat befejező része a világ leggyorsabban fogyó könyve: a megjelenést követő első 24 óra alatt 11 millió példányban kelt el. A teljes sorozat hét kötete több mint 325 millió példányban kelt el és mintegy 64 nyelven jelent meg világszerte.

    A judge in the city of Pécs has sentenced two individuals caught accidentally with 85 and 735 illegally copied CDs and DVDs to seven and eighteen months suspended prison term and 2 million HUF penality. The damage was 12 million HUF. The prosecution has not appealed the decision.

    ASVA.hu

    Precedens értékû, jogerõs ítéletet hozott a Pécsi Városi Bíróság a napokban egy évek óta húzódó, szerzõi jogokat sértõ kalóz-ügyben – adta hírül az ASVA, az Audiovizuális Mûvek Szerzõi Jogait Védõ Közcélú Alapítvány. A bírói döntés értelmében a két elkövetõ hét hónap, illetve egy év hat hónap szabadságvesztésre és összesen több mint 2 millió forint pénzbírság megfizetésére ítéltetett. A jog 1992 óta ad lehetõséget arra, hogy a szerzõi jogok megsértését akár szabadságvesztés kirovásával is sújtsa a bíróság
    Az 2004 nyara óta húzódó ügyben az egyik elkövetõt 85 rendbeli, a szerzõi jogok üzletszerûen elkövetett megsértésének bûntettében és szerzõi, vagy szerzõi joghoz kapcsolódó jogok védelmét biztosító mûszaki intézkedés kijátszásának vétségében találta bûnösnek a pécsi bíróság, így õt halmazati büntetésként hét hónapi szabadságvesztésre, míg társát, aki 735 rendbeli, a szerzõi jogok üzletszerûen elkövetett megsértésének bûntettében találtatott bûnösnek, 1 év hat hónap börtönbüntetésre ítélte a bíróság. Mindkét esetben a szabadságvesztés végrehajtását próbaidõre felfüggeszti a bíróság.

    The official Hungarian translation of the last HP book is due in February 2008, but fans can’t wait: they started to publish the translated parts (as they proceed) online.

    The internet has killed the release windows, and now it raises the question: can legitimate publishers afford to wait with the translations, or they need to create an international secure infrastructure of translators, who are able to produce the localized version by the time of the release of the originals?

    (note: the chinese fan-tran is available in full)

    Index – Neten az új Harry Potter magyar kalózfordítása

    Már magyarul is hozzáférhető az interneten a Harry Potter napról-napra bővülő kalózfordítása. Sőt a kalózfordítás kalózfordítása is. Ezernyi topic született már a témában, szavazni is lehet, hogy melyik a jobb. A hivatalos Harry Potter jövőre jelenik meg magyarul.

    I super interesting talk with the late Jack Valenti from 2004. Well worth a read (or download the audio version if you like).

    MIT

    Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), will discuss the impact of digital technology on the entertainment industry. Drawing on his experience as an advocate for major producers and distributors of entertainment programming for television, cable, home video, he will discuss the promise and the dangers of emerging technologies for the production and distribution of films and TV shows.

    Times Online

    Pirated software worth more than $500 million (£242 million) has been seized by authorities in China as part of a joint operation run by Chinese police and the FBI.

    The syndicates targeted by the raids in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong are believed to have distributed more than $2 billion (£968 million) worth of counterfeit software to countries around the world, including the UK.

    Chinese police arrested 25 people and shut down six manufacturing and retail facilities as part of the operation, which was described by officials in China as “an unprecedented co-operative effort” with the FBI.

    More than 290,000 counterfeit software CDs were seized by the Chinese Public Security Bureau (PSB), including 47,000 which contained fake Microsoft products, such as the Windows Vista operating system and the Office suite.

    IndyStar.com

    BigChampagne’s clients say ignoring file sharing wouldn’t make sense. “It’s a fact of life at this time,” says Rich Meyer, Mediabase’s president and executive vice president at Premiere.
    Joe Fleischer, BigChampagne’s vice president for sales and marketing, says the legality of grabbing music is a separate issue from the insight into people’s taste the downloads offer. He notes the company incorporates legal, paid downloads from sites like iTunes into its data, though they represent a fraction of all downloads.
    Currently, says Emmis radio head Rick Cummings, the download information is not as helpful as the phone calls known in the business as “call-out” research, in which people listen to clips of songs and rate them. But at some point, the download data are “going to be the primary method of research.”
    It’s getting harder to do passive call-out research, Cummings says, because “people don’t have time, they have their phone blocked.” But Emmis perseveres with the calls, in part because it reaches a slightly different listener that way — people who don’t necessarily buy or download music regularly but who like to listen to the radio.
    Filesharers tend to be bigger music fans than radio listeners and generally warm to new songs faster. But basing a playlist exclusively on downloaders’ tastes could end up alienating more passive listeners, Cummings says.
    It also isn’t easy to tell which medium influences the other more. “When a radio station adds a song, you oftentimes see an immediate bump in downloading activity” in that city, says Meyer of Mediabase.

    Funny, I linked to the Techcruch story on the new HP book two days ago and through the trackback link thousands of visitors have arrived to Warsystems. Welcome. Now Techcruch has received a notice and takedown letter from the lawyers of the US HP publisher to stop distributing any copyrighted material (I guess that would be the photo of the title page they run along the article, and the link to the link from where the book can be acquired). This is either a dumb PR move as some suggest, or these guys simply don’t get it.  The revolt around the leaked HD-DVD key was a lesson never learned (and be assured, it will never be forgotten either). Dumb. As I write this, in Cambridge, MA, thousands of kids are running around yelling abracadabra and waving wands, and queuing in front of bookstores to be the first to get the official copies in the morning, and they do not have the slightest idea that they are nothing more than a sad-to-see victims and human billboards of a cold-as-the-sound-of-the-cash-register marketing blitz to publicize this franchise, which in my opinion will eventually be a never ending story, just like the James Bond franchise.

    I wonder whether these lawyers will bother busy beeing after the book turns out to be the biggest grossing book release in history?

    Techcruch

    I, the undersigned, certify under penalty of perjury that the information in this notification is accurate and that I am authorized to act on behalf of J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books and owner of copyright rights therein, and Scholastic Inc., exclusive U.S. publisher of the Harry Potter books, including without limitation the cover and all other art incorporated therein (collectively, the “IP Owner”). I have a good faith belief that the materials identified below are not authorized by the IP Owner, its agent, or the law and therefore infringe the IP Owner’s rights according to state and federal law. Please act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material or items claimed to be infringing.

    ABC News

    Forget about digging a hole with a spoon to escape from prison. Four federal inmates are accused of going above and beyond that call.

    The four were indicted Tuesday on allegations that they copyrighted their names, then demanded millions of dollars from prison officials for using the names without authorization.

     Компьютерра-Онлайн– Kompyuterra-Onlayn

    Writer Sergei Kuznetsov has published an open letter about the scandal over the web.
    Recall that in early April, a company KM Zone “, which reportedly has the exclusive right to publish books on the Internet hundreds of authors, filed suit against several libraries, including the famous” Library collection. “
    The total claims amount to half a million dollars.
    “All my life stood for freedom and the free distribution of texts on the Internet. I defended this principle when he was a journalist, and continue to defend, as I have already got three of the book.
    I think that any novel must sooner or later be available on the Web, just like a book becomes available in the library.
    I believe that presenting the text books on the Internet is not a “publication” in the legal sense (and the court case against Sorokin Chernov, was in my view).
    I am convinced that a book in the library collection, and other such meetings are only for the benefit of writers (and many writers from Victor Pelevin to Boris Strugatskogo – this share my position).
    I am sure that one reader, who read the book on-screen or in print, are those few who will go and buy it, read the first few chapters.
    I know quite a few examples of commercially successful books, the texts of which are in the public domain.
    Suffice it to mention Boris Akunina : Fandorine of all novels are in the Library collection, although they occupy the first place in the ratings, and even sales of conventional online shopping.
    I am proud that collections in the Russian Internet are disproportionately similar foreign online libraries.
    I am pleased that as another proof that Russia and in the electronic age is literary, book country.
    I am pleased to think that the tradition of the Soviet samizdat still alive.
    I said it when he was a journalist and still say this now : The writer is not the enemy.
    It is the principle of free access to books on the Web remains inviolate.
    Perhaps if my novel was something on the Internet a few days after the paper, I would like to ask the owner of the site at the time pripryatat it, but in any case, I would not accept this man as a “pirate”, but as a fan, which I can only be grateful for the publicity of I wrote.
    All of this, of course, applies only to be free of charge : I know that someone is taking money for online access to my books, I have tried to stop this.
    That is why I was so unhappy history with KM.ru.
    As we know, this site will not only raise money for access, but drove on the library collection, which published “Amphora” prohibited publication of his books online.
    Apparently as a banned all-KM.ru, “library collection” to anyone.
    I submitted that the authors’ Amfory “that have existed at the time to deploy their books on the Web, will be forced to accept the fact that law-abiding Moshkov removes them from the text of a library.
    Fortunately, followed by the explanation that “Amphora” would not prevent the authors to place their text, just the mere publication states that it does not transfer these rights.
    As for me, personally, signing their copyright treaties, I am always careful not to transfer the rights to publish in computer networks.
    “Amphora” has been in this situation at an altitude : Other publishers may in fact be derived from the digital library books.
    I know that many writers share my views on copyright in the Internet.
    Perhaps they have already transferred their rights to electronic publication of its publishers.
    Treaty hindsight is not correct, but the new books and new contracts.
    Therefore, I appeal to my colleagues who believe in the free flow of information on the Internet, to the dozens of writers who have already agreed Maxim Moshkovu to publish his books.
    Friends and colleagues!
    Make publishers the folly of bans on the publication of books on the Web!
    Failing this, still do not convey the right to publish on the Internet, transfer to computer networks, the right of communication to the public by wire, and so on.
    These rights are not needed and publishers, they are still unable to reap profits from them.
    At the time, we voluntarily gave Maxim Moshkovu right to publish our books on the Web, do we get them back to the first desire of our publishers?
    If you support the idea of free flow of information on the Internet, to support its case.
    This win, you win your reader will win Russian literature. “

    (Traslated from Russian by Google)

    TP

    “Gerichtsverfahren gegen die Bibliothek Moschkow wegen systematischer Verletzung des Gesetzes über das Autorenrecht” – so steht es im anti-utopischen Cyberpunk-Roman [extern] “Das Spinnennetz” von Aleksei Andrejew aus dem Jahr 1998. Die Prophezeiung des bekennenden Futurologen ist nun Wirklichkeit geworden.

    China knowledge

    Adobe Systems, one of the world’s largest and most diversified software giants, is cranking up harsher measures to stamp out rampant software piracy in China as it endeavors a 50% year-on-year revenue growth in the Mainland.

    A recent global software piracy study by the Business Software Alliance revealed that China’s piracy rate had retreated by 10% within three years from 92% in 2003 to 82% last year. The legitimate software market in China has been expanding, increasing to nearly US$1.2 billion in 2006, a rise of 88% from 2005.

    However, losses incurred from software piracy remains as one of the highest in the world, at US$5.43 billion.

    In addition, the software vendor is also dishing out incentives such as a 60% discount on its Chinese CS3 for Chinese users in a bid to strengthen its foothold in one of the largest consumer bases in the world.

    [origo]

    Hogy pontosan mennyivel növeli meg az eladásokat a honosított program, valójában csak becslés, hiszen nincs összehasonlítási alap: ha egy program megjelenik magyarul, nem valószínű, hogy ugyanazon a piacon az angol változatával is próbálkoznának. Tóth Tibor, a tavaly alakult, tehát kevés honosítási tapasztalattal bíró, de lengyel anyacégük többéves ismeretei révén mégsem teljesen kezdő disztribútor vállalkozás, a CD-Projekt munkatársa tudomása szerint Lengyelországban 40-60 százalékkal nyomta meg az eladásokat, hogy lefordítják a szoftvereket.

    Techcrunch

    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, the latest and last of the wildly popular Harry Potter books that is due to go on sale this weekend, has hit BitTorrent. Various torrents of the novel consist of photographed pages (as above) with reading quality that isn’t perfect, but for desperate fans readable enough. Whilst the validity of the hype surrounding Harry Potter may be subject to debate, what the leaking of the book does demonstrate is that the days of the mainstream media and publishers strictly controlling the dissemination of information has well and truly past; simply where there is a fan with a will, there is a way.

    For educational purposes only, the Harry Potter book can be found by searching The Pirate Bay.

    techwack

    Belgian music copyright group SABAM has been reported to have asked the country’s leading telecom company Belgacom to commit to blocking or filtering illegal music file sharing.

    This report was first published by the Belgian daily Le Soir which claimed that the telecom company has been given eight days to react.

    Incidentally, this new development takes place just days after a Belgian court’s decision which ordered Belgian ISP, Scarlet to implement measures to block or filter copyright-infringing material on p2p networks like torrents.

    A spokesman for Belgacom however responded back in a statement: “As access provider our role is simply to transport information. We are not opposed to technical solutions but under the sine que none condition that they do not hamper our clients’ privacy.”

    This is interesting because I see adult entertainment companies as good preliminary indicators to future trands. If they decide to side with MPAA, that it is a bad news for file-sharers.

    XBIZ.com

    Adult industry members have announced formation of the Global Anti-Piracy Agency, a nonprofit trade organization dedicated to combating content theft, from illegally downloaded Internet content to illegally reproduced DVDs. Initial funding for GAPA has been provided by Sureflix Digital Distribution, Inc., parent company of gay distribution network Maleflixxx.

    “This is really in recognition of a problem that everyone is aware of and is affecting everyone in the industry,” GAPA Interim Executive Director Caryn Goldberg told XBIZ.

    GAPA estimates that illegal downloading, file-sharing and other forms of piracy are costing adult industry producers, distributors, retailers, cable operators, VOD and mobile providers nearly $2 billion a year in lost revenue.

    “We’re not talking so much about a guy that downloads a couple of videos illegally, although that is a problem. It’s all the file-sharing services. Look what the recording industry did to Napster. It’s these gross infringements, like file-sharing and BitTorrent.” said Goldberg.

    Chicago Tribune

    Jelinek, 60, has been posting chapters of the new book, “Neid” (German for “Envy”), as she writes them. The first two chapters of the work she describes as a “mixture of blog and prose” are already available on her site, www.elfriedejelinek.com, and there are more to come.

    “It’s a wonderfully democratic method, publishing a text on the Internet,” Jelinek told the AP.

    No comment – Tóth Benedek blogja

    Egy korrekt ügyintézés és egy csapat hőzöngő igazságbajnok. Bravó mindekettőjüknek. Plusz a Homár közönségének.

    Név, ügyfél-azonosító: Tóth Benedek, **** [takarás tőlem – T.B.]

    Tisztelt Ügyfelünk!

    Ezt a levelet a Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (továbbiakban Warner Bros.) értesítését követően küldjük Önnek

    A Warner Bros. évek óta működtet internetmonitor-rendszert, amely
    minden országban és minden fájlcserélő rendszeren figyeli a feltöltött
    és megosztott, a Warner Bros. tulajdonát képező szerzői jogvédelem
    alatt álló tartalmakat.

    A Warner Bros. e rendszer alapján jelezte Társaságunknak, hogy az Ön
    IP címéről az internetre feltöltésre és/vagy fájlmegosztásra került
    egy, a Warner Bros. tulajdonát képező szerzői jogvédelem alatt álló
    filmalkotás.

    Az alábbi IP cím az adott időpontban az Ön internet-előfizetői hozzáférésének azonosítására szolgált.

    IP cím: 84.2.***.*** [takarás tőlem. T.B.]
    Időpont: 2007. 5. 9. 23:49
    Film címe: 300
    File neve: CD1_nep-300-xvid-cd1.r07
    File mérete: 14,648k
    Fájcserélő hálózat: BitTorrent
    Felhasználónév: –

    Ezúton tájékoztatjuk Önt, hogy a szerzői jogvédelem alatt álló
    filmalkotás interneten történő megosztása, vagy internetre feltöltése
    megsértheti a hatályos jogszabályokat, és az alábbi következményeket
    vonhatja maga után:

    – a hatályos magyar jogszabályok és a T-Online Magyarország
    Internetszolgáltató Zrt. Általános Szerződési Feltételei (ún.: ÁSZF)
    szerint korlátozhatja, vagy megszűntetheti az Ön internet szolgáltatási
    szerződését.

    – a Warner Bros. és hazai jogi képviselete hatósági eljárást kezdeményezhet Ön ellen az általa észlelt IP cím alapján,

    A fenti következmények elkerülése érdekében kérjük, hogy:

    – azonnali hatállyal szüntesse meg a fent megnevezett szerzői jogi
    védelem alá eső filmalkotás és további, a Warner Bros. tulajdonát
    képező filmek feltöltését, megosztását az internetre, illetve a
    fájlcserélőkre, továbbá harmadik személyek irányába.

    – törölje ezen tartalmakat a merevlemezéről (Hard Disc) és adathordozóiról

    – azonnal jelezze Társaságunknál, ha valaki feltételezhetően visszaélt az Ön adott időpontban használt IP címével.

    Jogi megjegyzés

    A T-Online Magyarország Zrt. nem adta és a jövőben sem adja ki az Ön
    személyes adatait harmadik fél, így a Warner Bros. számára, és nem
    monitorozza előfizetői adatforgalmát. Ezt a levelet a T-Online
    Magyarország Zrt a Warner Bros. által átadott IP címek és időpontok az
    előfizetői adatokkal való párosítása után készítette. Tájékoztatjuk
    továbbá, hogy a hatályos jogszabályok alapján a hatóságok megkeresésére
    előfizetői adatait az internet szolgáltató köteles kiadni.

    Egyúttal tájékoztatjuk Önt, hogy a Warner Bros. nem kap másolatot erről a levélről.

    Kérjük a fentiek tudomásulvételét!

    Tisztelettel,
    T-Online Magyarország Zrt.

    Budapest, 2007. július 2.

    Economist.com


    Jul 5th 2007

    From The Economist print edition

    Faced with shrinking profits, record labels are touting a new approach

    Get article background

    IT HAS become a familiar refrain. For years record labels, citing tumbling CD sales
    blamed on internet piracy, have decried the decline of the music
    industry. The reality is rather more subtle, as Edgar Bronfman, the
    chairman of Warner Music, a big record company, pointed out last month.
    “The music industry is growing,” he told an investor conference in New
    York. “The record industry is not growing.”

    Indeed. Seven
    years ago musicians derived two-thirds of their income, via record
    labels, from pre-recorded music, with the other one-third coming from
    concert tours, merchandise and endorsements, according to the Music
    Managers Forum, a trade group in London. But today those proportions
    have been reversed—cutting the labels off from the industry’s biggest
    and fastest-growing sources of revenue. Concert-ticket sales in North
    America alone increased from $1.7 billion in 2000 to over $3.1 billion
    last year, according to Pollstar, a trade magazine.

    Frustrated
    record companies have responded by trying to get their artists to spend
    more time promoting records and less time touring and endorsing
    products, says Jeanne Meyer of EMI, another big
    record label. “Sometimes you’ve got a tug of war going on,” she says.
    Yet the more labels spend on marketing pre-recorded music, the more
    they raise their artists’ profiles and boost their other, more
    lucrative, sources of income. Pre-recorded music, no longer the main
    cash cow, increasingly serves merely as a marketing tool for T-shirts
    and concert tickets. The best seats for The Police’s world tour this
    summer cost over $900; the group’s entire catalogue on CD costs less than $100.

    Record labels have come up with a remedy: the “360° contract”. Instead of settling for a cut of CD sales,
    they increasingly offer artists broader contracts that encompass live
    music, merchandise and endorsement deals. Such deals, also known as
    multiple-rights or all-rights contracts, are particularly important in
    regions with rampant CD piracy, such as Africa,
    Asia and Latin America. “The market has made it necessary—we’ve got to
    look for something else,” says Manuel Cuevas, an industry executive in
    Mexico City. His company, the Mexican subsidiary of a major label,
    decided earlier this year to adopt the 360° model. “It’s a discussion
    you have with every new artist now,” says EMI‘s Ms Meyer.

    Although
    record labels like the idea, artists are unsurprisingly less keen. Few
    established artists have accepted 360° deals, though the labels trumpet
    the exceptions, including Robbie Williams, the Pussycat Dolls and Korn.
    It is more profitable, the artists say, to stick with artist-management
    agencies, which have traditionally handled the job of cultivating
    careers beyond the realm of recordings.

    Management
    agencies are also considered to have more respect for their artists’
    interests. Record labels, for example, have been criticised for
    obtaining rights to the names of artists and bands for use in internet
    addresses. Some clauses stipulate that name ownership applies even
    after contracts expire or artists die. This can prevent musicians from
    launching websites to promote tours, sell merchandise, and communicate
    with fans as they see fit. “Record companies don’t exactly give many
    artists the warm, fuzzy feeling,” says Gary Bongiovanni, the editor of Pollstar.

    Musicians
    with small fan bases and little business experience are much more
    receptive to the idea of 360° deals. There is no shortage of aspiring
    artists, and some will become big names. Juha Ruusunen, the founder of TWU,
    a small management agency for heavy-metal bands based in Jyväskylä,
    Finland, says European labels have begun to sign up new talent with
    360° contracts. As record labels move more aggressively into the
    artist-management field, Mr Ruusunen worries that his agency might
    struggle to compete.

    Building a
    roster of 360° talent, one deal at a time, is slow going. It is quicker
    for labels to buy artist-management agencies. Last month Universal
    Music made a £104m ($205m) offer for Sanctuary, a struggling British
    label with a management arm that represents musicians including Elton
    John and Robert Plant. Sanctuary also owns two other artist-management
    companies and runs Bravado, a merchandising operation. Sanctuary’s
    shareholders will decide whether to accept Universal’s offer, which is
    considered generous, this month.

    For its part
    Warner Music has expressed interest in Front Line Management, one of
    America’s biggest agencies. And last month Warner announced the
    formation of Brand Asset Group, an artist-management joint venture with
    Violator Management, a firm that negotiates roles for rappers in films,
    advertisements, video games and TV programmes,
    and licenses their names and images to promote drinks, books and
    clothes. (Its clients include 50 Cent, Diddy and Busta Rhymes.)

    The shift
    away from recorded music is due in part to the recognition that touring
    and merchandise are more lucrative. But it may also be a consequence of
    internet piracy, as free downloads give music fans more money to spend
    on other things. Jwana Godinho, the director of Música no Coração, a
    concert promoter in Lisbon, thinks many music lovers have a “mental
    budget” that they are prepared to spend on music, and have switched
    their spending from CDs to tickets and merchandise.

    The logical
    conclusion is for artists to give away their music as a promotional
    tool. Some are doing just that. This week Prince announced that his new
    album, “Planet Earth”, will be given away in Britain for free with the Mail on Sunday,
    a national newspaper, on July 15th. (For years Prince has made far more
    money from live performances than from album sales; he was the
    industry’s top earner in 2004.) Outraged British music retailers were
    quick to condemn the idea. As far as the record industry is concerned,
    it is madness. But for the music industry, it could well be the shape
    of things to come.

    Los Angeles Times

    Album sales continued their downward slide in the first half of the year but sales of digital tracks are up almost 50% over this time last year.

    A total of 229.8 million albums were sold in the U.S. from Jan. 1 to July 1, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures released Wednesday. That’s a 15% decrease compared with the same period last year. Meanwhile, digital track sales increased 49% to 417.3 million this year.

    floridatoday.com

    Whether it’s a professional recording taken from a Web site or an accordion player singing a Jimmy Buffet tune in a small venue, the industry is working to collect royalties for whoever wrote the songs.

    ARS TECHNICA

    The news for the motion picture and television industries is not so good. BitTorrent has become far more popular: “We’ve seen real, dramatic growth in BitTorrent usage,” notes Garland. That has resulted in a greater average population of seeders and leechers per torrent. In May 2006, the average torrent had 817,588 people participating. 12 months later, that figure had jumped to 1,357,318 seeders and leechers: a 66 percent year-over-year growth rate.

    p2pnet.net

    Hollywood is using its frightening political clout to once again coerce Sweden’s elected and appointed authorities into a step ultimately aimed at closing down its nemesis, The Pirate Bay.

    And this time it’s using child pornography as its weapon.

    eKantipur.com – Nepal’s No.1 News Portal

    KATHMANDU, July 5 – Surprised that you can buy expensive foreign books at cheap prices in Nepal?

    It’s not that foreign publishing houses reprint cheaper editions for Nepal. The books are dirt cheap, thanks to a growing book piracy industry in Nepal – at least one industry seems to be booming amidst the economic slump.

    Leading book distributors in Kathmandu say pirated books account for up to 30 percent of space in most bookstores here. And the price of the pirated version is often less than half the original price.

    Take for instance, Charles Van Doren’s A History of Knowledge, published by Ballentine Books, New York. The original price of the book is USD$ 14, but you can buy its pirated version for around Rs 300. At least two pirated versions of this book are available in the market. Pirated versions of Samuel P Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, published by Penguin India, is so widely available in Nepal that it has rendered the original version of the book a rare commodity in Kathmandu.

    The most pirated books are fast-moving college textbooks and popular novels for mass consumption.

    Sophie’s World, a novel by Jostin Gardner, is a case in point. The book, published by Berkely Books, New York, costs USD$ 7.99, but you can buy the pirated version for half the original price. At least four pirated versions of the novel are available in the market.

    Madhav Maharjan, owner of Kathmandu’s leading book store, Mandala Book Point, concedes that pirated books are widely available in the market and warns of their long term damage. “Students and readers may get books at cheaper prices, but the notoriety it will earn the country is too costly.”

    He says foreign publishers can make available books at cheaper prices if the university here were to make a formal request in this regard.

    According to a bookseller at Kirtipur, university reference books on management, sociology, economics and English are among the most pirated. Cambridge’s Meaning into Words, Reading Between the Lines, Intermediate English Grammar; Longman’s Plays in One Act and Literary Appreciation; and Oxford’s Elements of Literature are some college books that have been pirated.

    When asked why he sells pirated books, he quipped, “Why should I fear to sell such books if others are doing it without any qualms?” He argued that it was difficult to survive in the market without selling such books.

    According to him, piracy racketeers eye any book that can sell over 500 copies. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology and Colin’s Dictionary of Sociology have been illegally reproduced. So is the case with International English Language Testing System (IELTS) books.

    Recently, boarding school books too have fallen prey to piracy. For example, Learning to Communicate, by Oxford University Press, and Essentials of English Grammar and Composition, by Sultan Chand Publication, have been bootlegged.

    Book piracy has been rendered easy by new technologies. To reprint a book illegally, all that one needs is two copies of the original, a flatbed scanner, a computer and an offset press. With these facilities, any book can be reproduced in multiple copies.

    The adoption of modern technology in piracy also makes it difficult for people to identify the pirated book from the original one.
    Some book sellers in Kathmandu are also taking advantage of this and are selling bootleg versions as original books.

    “If you are not aware that the book you are buying is a pirated one, they may even charge you full price,” says a bookseller at Bhoatahiti in the capital, requesting anonymity.

    Piracy in Nepal has became such a serious issue that Cambridge University Press even published a notice a few months ago in leading national dailies cautioning the buyers against the pirated books.

    Kiran Shakya, official at Nepal Copyright Registrar’s Office, says that there is a racket of publishers actively involved in the illegal printing of books.

    “Most foreign books are priced beyond the reach of most Nepali students, and this has encouraged book piracy in Nepal,” he argues.

    Shakya is of the opinion that if foreign book publishers strike a deal with Nepali publication houses, books could be produced at a cheaper price, thereby curbing the scale of bootlegged copies.

    Rajan Sigdel, a student at TU, says that students like him, who are from modest family background, have been able to study Masters in English only due to cheap pirated books.

    He has a point. For instance, The Bradford Introduction to Drama and Critical Theory Since Plato, both prescribed books, cost USD$ 83 and USD$ 100 respectively.

    The Inquirer

    RATHER THAN STOPPING P2P sites in their tracks, the Motion Picture Association of America has decided to set up a few of its own.

    However, the sites have been built by the MPAA outfit Media Defender as honeypots in a bid to entrap P2P users.

    Once a person has logged onto one of the sites, the MPAA records the sharers IP address and then sues them into a coma for a huge wodge of cash.

    One site has been identified as MiiVi.com. It has a user registration, forum, and “family filter”, offers complete downloads of movies and “fast and easy video downloading all in one great site.”

    The site offers software which it claims is to speed up downloading process. However it actually searches your computer for other copyrighted files and reports back to the MPAA laywers.

    PC World

    A court has ruled that the Belgian ISP Scarlet Extended SA is responsible for blocking illegal file-sharing on its network, setting a precedent that could affect other ISPs in Europe, according to a recording industry group.

    In this report, we revisit our “Long Tail” thesis on the entertainment industry. As we
    wrote last year, digital technology and economics are loosening the barriers to entry
    in the video production business. In our view, this augurs a significant increase in
    supply of video content from many sources, which could lead to slowing growth for
    incumbents and a shift in value from content creators to aggregators/packagers of
    content in the middle of the supply chain that can best connect users’ individual
    tastes with theoretically infinite choice. This report delves further into this theme and
    addresses key questions we have received from investors and industry contacts on
    this topic.

    LINK

    LSE

    Platforming is for low budget films, foreign films, idiosyncratic films. Blitzing is for expensive films; those that might turn into ‘blockbusters’ – but also those that might be too expensive to expose to audience opinion, too expensive to ‘discover’ that demand is low.

    Tech news blog – CNET News.com

    “I don’t agree with the copyright laws,” Moore said during a press conference three years ago. “I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it as long as they aren’t doing it to make a profit off my labor. I would oppose that.”

    CNET News.com

    In the end, nobody really knows what effects copyright infringement has on a movie’s earning potential, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University. Zittrain does, however, see one benefit from the controversy.

    “The real benefit of this kind of leakage,” Zittrain said, “is that it pressures Hollywood to think outside of the box instead of hoping the Internet will just go away.”

    Los Angeles Times

    Universal Music Group declined to renew its yearlong deal to license songs to Apple Inc. in the most public clash to date between a record label and the top retailer of digital music.

    The largest of the four major labels informed Apple last week, people familiar with the matter said Monday.

    Universal has no plans to stop selling music over Apple’s iTunes music store, which sells a majority of digitized tracks in the U.S., the people said.

    But top Universal executives wanted the right to offer exclusive tracks to other Web retailers that could emerge, such as Amazon.com.

    Under the previous deal with Apple, Universal was obliged to sell on iTunes any music it sold digitally elsewhere.

    Times Online

    The music download website whose activities threatened to scupper Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has been shut down.

    The site, Allofmp3.com, was quietly closed as the Kremlin sought to end criticism from the United States that Russia was failing to clamp down on music and video piracy.

    The site had attracted 5.5 million subscribers buying songs for between 10 and
    20 US cents each, compared with 99 cents at Apple’s American iTunes store
    and 79p in the UK.

    Most customers were in Russia, but it was estimated to be the second most
    popular download site in Britain after iTunes. It was set up in 2000 by six
    computer programmers, who initially developed the site for their personal
    use then built it into a business earning a reputed $30 million a year.

    The Mp3Sparks.com site looks virtually identical and claims to offer thousands
    of albums by popular artists for around 15 US cents per song. Bon Jovi’s
    latest disc, for example, was on offer for $2.11.

    MediaServices said that the site was registered with the Russian Licensing
    Societies, which it claimed had the right under Russian law to “grant
    licences and to collect royalties for the use of music without necessarily
    obtaining permission from the copyright owners”.

    The company’s website said that it paid 15 per cent of proceeds to the
    licencing societies for distribution to copyright holders. It added that it
    was considering an additional payment of 5 per cent to performing artists,
    whether or not they owned the copyright, “despite no legal requirement to do
    so”.

    CNET News.com

    “Everybody forgets that when the VCR was first developed, most of the uses were infringing copyright,” von Lohmann said. “There was no Blockbuster or legitimate way to rent movies back then. It’s vital to leave room for innovation. You have to give technology a chance to develop into something.”

    Meanwhile, Charnley and von Lohmann agree the studios must offer a more attractive proposition than the one being dangled by file sharing. They essentially have to learn to compete with free downloads.

    “Ironically, if the studios changed their business model, that would put Napster’s progeny out of business,” Charnley said. “If they offer something that’s legal, easy to use and affordable–these sites are useless.”

    “we believe that not every song, not every artist, not every album, is created equal.” – Edgar Bronfman Jr., chairman, Warner Music Group

    New York Times

    The Universal Music Group of Vivendi, the world’s biggest music corporation, last week notified Apple that it will not renew its annual contract to sell music through iTunes, according to executives briefed on the issue who asked for anonymity because negotiations between the companies are confidential.

    Instead, Universal said that it would market music to Apple at will, a move that could allow Universal to remove its songs from the iTunes service on short notice if the two sides do not agree on pricing or other terms in the future, these executives said.

    Universal’s roster of artists includes stars like U2, Akon and Amy Winehouse.

    Representatives for Universal and Apple declined to comment. The move, which comes after a standoff in negotiations, is likely to be regarded in the music industry as a boiling over of the long-simmering tensions between Mr. Jobs and the major record labels.

    With the shift, Universal appears to be aiming to regain a bit of leverage — although at the risk of provoking a showdown with Mr. Jobs.

    Music industry attacks Sunday newspaper’s free Prince CD | | Guardian Unlimited Business

    The eagerly awaited new album by Prince is being launched as a free CD with a national Sunday newspaper in a move that has drawn widespread criticism from music retailers.

    The Mail on Sunday revealed yesterday that the 10-track Planet Earth CD will be available with an “imminent” edition, making it the first place in the world to get the album. Planet Earth will go on sale on July 24.

    One music store executive described the plan as “madness” while others said it was a huge insult to an industry battling fierce competition from supermarkets and online stores. Prince’s label has cut its ties with the album in the UK to try to appease music stores.

    The Entertainment Retailers Association said the giveaway “beggars belief”. “It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career,” ERA co-chairman Paul Quirk told a music conference. “It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music.

    “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday.”

    Ars Technica

    “Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” NBC/Universal general counsel Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.” Cotton’s comments come in Paul Stweeting’s report on Hollywood’s latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.

    UPDATE 14/16/2007: Weedshare is officially dead

    “Shared Media Licensing operates the DRM technology known as “Weed.” When a file is protected by Weed technology, that file may be played up to 3 times for free. After this, if the user wishes to continue to play the file, he or she must pay for it. The price for any given file is set by the rights holder. The file can be copied to other users for free, whether across the Internet or otherwise. If the file is copied onto another machine, the file can be played 3 times without payment. When a user purchases a file, the rights holder receives 50% of the money paid by the purchaser and 15% of the purchase price goes to Shared Media as a processing fee. The remaining 35% of the purchase price is shared among those who previously purchased and distributed the music. This payment system is designed to encourage users to actively distribute authorized files.
    Heart supports the use of peer-to-peer technology and believes that it is a very efficient means of distributing music. Encrypted with “Weed” technology (www.weedshare.com), “Jupiter Darling” was released on the Internet and has been shared on P2P networks. Heart’s “Weed” files outsold those on Apple’s iTunes during the third week of their availability on both services.” – Mark N. Cooper
    http://www.weedshare.com/

    Reuters

    Top online video service YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world’s largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google Inc, will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner’s permission, legal, marketing and strategy executives at YouTube told Reuters in an interview on Monday. The so-called video fingerprinting tools, which identify unique attributes in the video clips, will be available for testing in about a month, a YouTube executive said. “The technology was built with the Disney’s and Time Warner’s in mind,” Chris Maxcy, YouTube partner development director, said, adding that, since early this year, Google has been testing audio-fingerprinting tools with record labels. These tools will be used to identify copyrighted material, after which media companies can decide if they would like to remove the material or keep it up, as part of a revenue-sharing deal with YouTube, which can sell advertising alongside it. Once proven to work, the technology could be used to block the uploading of copyrighted clips, YouTube product manager David King said. It aims to make the tools widely available to any copyright owner later this year. YouTube has come under fire from several other traditional media companies, which say it has dragged its heels in offering reliable ways to identify video clips uploaded by regular users without permission. Unable to reach a distribution agreement, MTV Networks-owner Viacom Inc.  sued Google and YouTube for more than $1 billion in damages in March, charging the company with “massive intentional copyright infringement” after demanding the removal of clips of its popular shows “Colbert Report” and “Daily Show,” hosted by comedian Jon Stewart. Media companies have eyed the wildly popular video-sharing site as a mixture of opportunity and threat as they seek to reach consumers wherever they spend time. On one hand, they view YouTube as a powerful promotional medium to drive viewers back to television or their own sites. On the other, YouTube’s traffic has soared as users upload copyrighted shows globally onto the service. Nine months ago, YouTube said such tools would be made available to media companies for testing by the end of 2006. But the reliable identification of content has proved a complex task that required Google to develop its own technology tools. Maxcy said other media companies planned to test the technology, but he declined to name these other parties. “There are a couple,” he said, referring to Disney and Time-Warner. “There are more that we can’t talk about right now,” he said. YouTube officials said they have quietly been testing ways to help identify the audio tracks of video clips with major record labels using technology from privately held Audible Magic as early as the first two months of 2007. These tools will be made available to all content owners later this year depending on the results of the tests, YouTube executives said on Monday. “It’s typically not something we talk about,” Maxcy said, adding, however: “We wanted to clear the air.” Maxcy said that over time, Google planned to add additional layers of technology to better spot content on its service.

    Los Angeles Times:

    AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so.

    The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president.

    The nation’s largest telephone and Internet service provider also operates the biggest cross-country system for handling Internet traffic for its customers and those of other providers.

    Lawrence Lessig

    Engadget reports that “the head honcho of Macmillan Publishers” lifted a couple Google laptops at a recent BookExpo America, and then when he returned them, retorted “hope you enjoyed a taste of your own medicine,” and “there wasn’t a sign by the computers informing him not to steal them.”

    So this betrays an astonishing level of ignorance, even for a “head honcho.”

    Remember (and I did a 30 minute preso here to explain it) Google Books proposed to scan 18,000,000 books. Of those, 16% were in the public domain, and 9% were in copyright, and in print. That means, 75% of the books Google would scan are out of print but presumptively under copyright.

    The publishers and Google already have deals for the 9%. And being in the public domain, no one needs a deal for the 16%. So the only thing the publishers might be complaining about is the 75% which are out of print and presumptively under copyright.

    With respect to these, Google intends to index the books, and make them searchable. If a hit comes through the search engine, Google offers snippets of the text relevant to the search. The page includes links to libraries where the book might be borrowed; it includes links to book stores where the book might be purchased. And, I take it, if the “publishers” were to choose to publish the book again, it would also include a link to that publisher.

    Finally, any author who wants to be removed from this index can be removed. As with Google on the net, anyone can opt out.

    So vis-a-viz a computer sitting at a demonstration booth at a conference, is the “head honcho’s” action like Google’s?

    Shirky: File-sharing Goes Social

    Small amounts of social file-sharing, by sending files as email attachments or uploading them to personal web servers, have always co-existed with the purpose-built file-sharing networks, but the two patterns may fuse as a result of the Crush the Connectors strategy. If that transition happens on a large scale, what might the future look like?

    Most file-sharing would go on in groups from a half dozen to a few dozen — small enough that every member can know every other member by reputation. Most file-sharing would take place in the sorts of encrypted workspaces designed for business but adapted for this sort of social activity. Some users would be members of more than one space, thus linking several cells of users. The system would be far less densely interconnected than Kazaa or Gnutella are today, but would be more tightly connected than a simple set of social cells operating in isolation.

    It’s not clear whether this would be good news or bad news for the RIAA. There are obviously several reasons to think it might be bad news: file-sharing would take place in spaces that would be much harder to inspect or penetrate; the lowered efficiency would also mean fewer high-yield targets for legal action; and the use of tools by groups that knew one another might make prosecution more difficult, because copyright law has often indemnified some types of non-commercial sharing among friends (e.g. the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992).

    O’Reilly Radar >

    As part of our continued effort to understand the impact on book sales of the availability of free downloads, I wanted to share some data on downloads versus sales of the book Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, by Leif Madsen, Jared Smith, and Jim Van Meggelen, which was released for free download under a Creative Commons license.

    Jeremy McNamara of nufone.net, which operates one of the mirrors, provided us with download stats, which we were then able to compare with book sales. Our goal of course, is to help publishers understand whether free downloads help or hurt sales. The quick answer from this experiment is that we saw no definitive correlation, but there is little sign that the free downloads hurt sales. More than 180,000 copies were downloaded from Jeremy’s mirror (which is one of five!), yet the book has still been quite successful, selling almost 19,000 copies in a year and a half. This is quite good for a technical book these days — the book comes in at #23 on our lifetime-to-date sales list for the “class of 2005” (books published in 2005) despite being released at the end of September. You might argue that the book would have done even better without the downloads, especially given the success of asterisk and the importance of VoIP. But it’s also the case that the book is far and away the bestseller in the category, far outperforming books on the same subject from other publishers.

    Meanwhile, we saw a huge spike in downloads starting at the beginning of this year, but didn’t see a corresponding drop in print book sales, other than the continued slow erosion that’s typical of books in print (especially one that’s heading towards a second edition.) However, we did see the book’s first fall from grace, dropping from an average run rate of about a thousand copies a month to about six hundred back in March 2006 coming at about the same time that we start showing the free downloads, but we’re not sure whether or not that is just because we don’t have earlier download data — we believe that the book was available online sooner after publication even though Jeremy didn’t start his mirror till March. (Next time we do a book available for free download, we’ll be careful to collect accurate data from the start of the project.)

    In any case, this kind of sales drop is not completely inconsistent with the sales pattern from many other books. And for authors who want to reach the widest audience, it’s certainly possible that even if free downloads did shave a percentage from sales, the tradeoff is worth it (see Piracy is Progressive Taxation)

    Interactivist Info Exchange | “Pirate Autonomies”

    Autonomous communications systems require three functional elements: the means of production, transmission facilities and informational raw materials. The spread of the commodity PC has taken care of the first. The second has been confronted through innovative digital techniques — peer to peer [p2p] networks to pool bandwidth and streaming technologies — and through the illegal occupation of the airwaves by pirate radios and more recently street televisions [Telestreet], and in some countries through public cable access and even independent satellite broadcasting initiatives [DeepDish TV, NoWarTV, Global Radio].

    The last element has proven the most challenging as access to the audio-visual lexicon that can engage a wider public is constrained by a system of property rights — copyrights and trademarks — that denies the possibility of recycling the works of others — whether to convey our argument or contest that of another.

    The end of the copyright system

    If I had been asked thirty years ago what I would become, what I would do on my 61st birthday, i.e., today, I would have predicted many things: grandchildren, Lake Balaton, maybe even death, but I would never have thought I would spend the occasion alone, in prison, writing a diary. Imprisoned for violating copyright, for the possession and use of age-old music and movies without permission.

    Read the rest of this entry »

    Boing Boing

    “Open Source Cinema is trying to put together a collaborative documentary about copyright in the digital age. They’ve travelled the world and have loads of raw footage available under creative commons which anybody can download, remix, and upload again! The script is also completely editable by users. The finished documentary is to be screened on the documentary channel and in many theaters. They need help, however: people, get editing!”

    http://opensourcecinema.org/

    Ars Technica

    Take the case of Ohio University, which earned its place on the RIAA’s dishonor roll by being the recipient of almost 1,300 copyright infringement notices. The school reacted by banning P2P on campus, a move that’s being watched by other schools.

    When we first reported on the Ohio U. moves, we heard from a few students at the school who said that they had long since moved to darknets because of the fear of getting caught. As it turns out, despite Ohio U’s ban on P2P, darknet Direct Connect hubs are running on campus.

    MarketWatch

    It’s same kind of situation with this mysterious number that cracks the DVD encryption. First of all, nobody, myself included, knows what to do with the code. It is practically useless.
    Nobody, myself included, knows what to do with the DVD code. It is practically useless.
    If the lawyers did nothing, it would have languished as a curiosity with perhaps a few crackers developing some software with it. The end result would be a few cracked copies of DVDs running on a few computers here and there.
    Because of the lawyers and the nasty letters, now everyone online knows how important this number must be. Boom! Now users get to work on it.
    Heck of a job, lawyers.
    Investors should be aware of the overall dangers the legal profession present to companies, and how its current and generalized naiveté can sink fortunes overnight. While I know of no corporation that has been bankrupted by this sort of fiasco, it will happen eventually if lawyers doesn’t catch up with the times.
    Or perhaps some executives should think for themselves.

    Australia hands over man to US courts – National – theage.com.au

    BEFORE he was extradited to the United States, Hew Griffiths, from Berkeley Vale in NSW, had never even set foot in America. But he had pirated software produced by American companies.

    Now, having been given up to the US by former justice minister Chris Ellison, Griffiths, 44, is in a Virginia cell, facing up to 10 years in an American prison after a guilty plea late last month.

    Griffiths’ case — involving one of the first extraditions for intellectual property crime — has been a triumph for US authorities, demonstrating their ability to enforce US laws protecting US companies against Australians in Australia, with the co-operation of the Australian Government.

    In some corners of the Australian legal community, however,
    there is concern about Griffiths’ case. In a recent article for the
    Australian Law Journal, NSW Chief Judge in Equity, Peter
    Young, wrote: “International copyright violations are a great
    problem. However, there is also the consideration that a country
    must protect its nationals from being removed from their homeland
    to a foreign country merely because the commercial interests of
    that foreign country are claimed to have been affected by the
    person’s behaviour in Australia and the foreign country can
    exercise influence over Australia.”

    via newswire

    – Decline compounds 12% drop in 2006 – the largest year-over-year
    decrease in Canada since the advent of widespread unauthorized
    file-swapping in 1999
    – Unabated counterfeiting and Internet file-swapping cited as primary
    factors in decline
    – Recording industry, other business groups step up call for government
    action against piracy

    The Pirate Bay is experimenting with the tipping model. I wish them all the best.

    Playble – Paying Artists for Free Music

    The Pirate Bay has started a unique collaboration with the members of the Swedish rock band Lamont and their manager Kristopher S. Wilbur. After lengthy discussions about the future of the record industry and its implications for the many talented artists and songwriters around the world, we discovered that we held the same vision. The shared insight that the record industry—with its current business model—is outdated inspired the birth of Playble.com.

    This innovative music site will allow users to download music by artists for free and still support them financially. Playble.com will give companies with strong brands the opportunity to support music and artists directly. Welcome to Playble.com.

    NYC Makes Film Piracy a Misdemeanor – Forbes.com

    With the summer blockbuster movie season just ahead, City Hall and the Motion Picture Association of America are warning that secretly videotaping films is now a misdemeanor in New York City.

    Days before the highly anticipated Spider-Man 3 opens nationwide, Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed legislation into law on Tuesday that upgrades film piracy from a violation with a $250 fine to a misdemeanor that carries up to six months in jail and criminal penalties of up to $5,000.

    Market capitalization
    Cisco: 162.24B, Time Warner: 78.95B

    2006 Gross Profit
    Cisco:

    18.747B, Time Warner:
    17.811B

    Cisco addresses legit P2P in Supervisor enhancement – CBRonline.com

    Cisco Systems has unveiled both a product enhancement and a series of architectural templates to enable enterprise networks to address the challenge of legitimate peer-to-peer apps such as the Groove feature in Microsoft Office.

    The product side of the announcement involves a deep packet inspection capability, delivered via a hardware upgrade to the Supervisor engine on its flagship 6500 switches, essentially introducing additional Cisco-designed ASICs to handle “DPI at multi-gigabit rates,” said Neil Walker, the company’s head of product marketing for core and foundation technologies in Europe.

    There arises a need to be able to differentiate between good P2P and bad, which is where the Programmable Intelligent Services Accelerator (PISA) upgrade to Supe32 comes in. “It’s akin to what we’re doing on the carrier side with the P-Cube technology for broadband policy management,” said Walker.

    “There the carrier can determine who you are, what you’re doing and the bandwidth you’re consuming to do it. In this case, we’re enabling enterprises to enable wanted P2P and block the unwanted,” he went on. “For instance, two employees might be allowed to exchange IM messages, but not if one of them has just accessed some sensitive data on an internal database.” PISA is not, however, in any way based on the P-Cube technology, but rather the result of internal development, he went on.

    The Register

    Serial internet investor and musician Peter Gabriel today took the wraps off We7, a free at the point of use music download service where tracks are paid for by 10-second adverts spliced to their beginning.

    The tracks will be MP3-encoded, and unencumbered by DRM, the firm said. A representative told The Register that the files will be encoded at 192Kbps.

    Advertisers will pay We7 between £0.30 and £0.60 per download, and by listening to an ad-supported song a few times the consumer wins rights to access a version without a commercial. The firm is quoted in today’s Times saying “three, four or five” listens will be needed.

    The ads will be demographically-targeted on age, location and gender, but the option will be there for fans to pay for tunes sans-sponsorship from the get-go if they want; the rep said that 320Kbps was under review for these customers. The We7 site also has a limited Last.fm-style social recommendation facility.

    The Register

    While ADSL providers are imposing caps and resorting to traffic throttling, Vodafone has slipped in a clause allowing it to charge different amounts for mobile bandwidth depending on the application, though how it will do so is unclear.

    Vodafone’s new pricing model for data comes in on 1 June and at a glance seems fair enough – if you use less than 0.5MB in a day you’re charged at a penny for every 5KB you use (£2 a MB), go over that and the next 14.5MB is free, then you’re back to a penny for every 5KB used.

    Most users should fall somewhere in below the 15MB limit, and the current rate is £2.35 a MB, so everyone should be better off.

    Well, not quite everyone.

    Slipped in to the conditions of use is a clause stating that VoIP and peer-to-peer services (P2P) are excluded from the offer, billed separately at £2 a megabyte, with a minimum of 5 pence per session. Skype is listed as an example of a VoIP service, but the definition of P2P is much broader, including “instant messenger services, text messaging clients, or file sharing”.

    Vodafone won’t comment on how it’s going to identify such traffic, though there are concerns that anything other than web browsing might be considered peer-to-peer and thus be subject to the separate charge. Encrypted connections could well fall foul – it would be impossible for Vodafone to identify the application being used, leaving anyone regularly and securely checking email open to high charges.

    Vodafone does say it’ll be offering a mobile internet tariff, but isn’t revealing any details and it’s likely it’s waiting to see how customers respond to the new data pricing before making a decision.

    CE Pro §

    Manufacturers, dealers, and champions of digital rights everywhere can rejoice: Video server maker Kaleidescape has beaten the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA).

    The DVD CCA, which licenses the Content Scramble System (CSS) for protecting DVDs, had claimed that Kaleidescape breached a contract when it created products that enable (indeed encourage) individuals to copy protected DVDs onto hard-drive servers.

    Kaleidescape argued, first and foremost, that nothing in the DVD CCA licensing agreement prohibits the development of products that allow users to copy their DVDs. (For the full background, see “Copy Protection Group Sues Kaleidescape.”)

    Indeed, that’s exactly what Judge Leslie C. Nichols ruled today in the non-jury trial at the Downtown Superior Court of Santa Clara in San Jose, Calif.: There was no breach of contract.

    BBC NEWS

    BBC shows such as Doctor Who and EastEnders are to be
    made available on-demand after the BBC’s iPlayer service was given the
    green light.

    The service – which will launch later this year – allows
    viewers to watch programmes online for seven days after their first TV
    broadcast.

    Episodes can also be downloaded and stored for up to 30 days.

    The BBC Trust gave the iPlayer the go-ahead after consultations with members of the public.

    BBC iPLAYER

    • iPlayer will allow viewers to catch up on TV programmes for seven days
    • Some TV series can be downloaded and stored for 30 days
    • Viewers will be able to watch shows streamed live over the internet
    • Users will not be able to download programmes from other broadcasters
      Classical recordings and book-readings are excluded from iPlayer

    Jobs says Apple customers not into renting music | Technology | Reuters

    Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs indicated on Wednesday he is unlikely to give in to calls from the music industry to add a subscription-based model to Apple’s wildly popular iTunes online music store.

    “Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it,” Jobs told Reuters in an interview after Apple reported blow-out quarterly results. “The subscription model has failed so far.”

    His comments come as the company he co-founded gears up for contract renewal negotiations with the major record labels over the next month.

    Since Apple launched iTunes in 2003, it has sold more than 2.5 billion songs and now offers increasing numbers of television shows and movies.

    Many in the music industry hope iTunes will ultimately start, in effect, renting music online, so record companies can make more money from recurring income. But Jobs said he had seen little consumer demand for that.

    “People want to own their music,” he said.

    Michael Geist – U.S. Copyright Report More Rhetoric Than Reality

    [The] differences between the U.S. and Canadian economies – the U.S. is a major exporter of cultural products and has therefore unsurprisingly made stronger copyright protection a core element of its trade strategy while Canada is a net importer of cultural products with a billion dollar annual culture deficit – means that U.S.-backed reforms may do more harm than good.

    p2pnet has conducted an online poll on file-sharing. As the ads for the poll were run on p2p advocacy sites and services in the grey zone like allofmp3.com, the results are clearly not representative, but tell us a great deal about how file-sharers think about these issues.

    p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site

    THE SULTANS OF SPIN – final results, as of April 21, 2007

    Number of accesses: 3,860

    Number of responses: 1,108

    Do you share files online?

    Total Responses: 1,080

    Yes – 69.1% (746)

    No – 30.9% (334)

    Have the RIAA sue ’em all lawsuits persuaded you to stop sharing?
    Total Responses: 1,077

    Yes – 5.9% (64)

    No – 94.1% (1,013)

    How do you rate your chances of you becoming an RIAA victim?

    Total Responses: 1,078

    Guaranteed, if I keep on sharing – 1.9% (20)

    High – 2.5% (27)

    Medium – 10.5% (113)

    Low – 50.4% (543)

    Zero, even if I keep on sharing – 34.8% (375)

    So Yahoo got busted because of linking to infringing content. That is not a very good news to anyone in the search business: my estimate is that the majority of any content in the search services’ indexes is infringing to a certain extent from the Colbert Report clips on YouTube to blog entries like this one. The DMCA in the US and similar laws in other countries may shield search engines from liability  at least till the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit ends with another conclusion. I wonder if the reason behind the Yahoo China decision is the lack of such a safe harbour.

    But nevertheless, this is a very dangerous road to go down. If it turns out that search engines are liable, because they link to infringing content, that would effectively end the web-search  as such.

    washingtonpost.com

    A court has ordered Yahoo Inc.’s China subsidiary to pay $27,000 for aiding music piracy, the company and a music industry group said Tuesday.

    The ruling came amid U.S. pressure for Beijing to stop rampant copying of music and other goods.

    The lawsuit filed by the International Federation of Phonographic Industries accused Yahoo China of violating copyrights because its search engine linked to sites that carried 229 pirated songs. It was filed on behalf of 11 recording companies including Sony BMG, Warner Music, EMI and Universal Vivendi.

    “We’re very pleased with the outcome,” said Leong May Seey, Asia regional director for the federation.

    “We think it is a step in the right direction in creating a legitimate online music service in China.”

    The ruling Monday by the No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court ordered Yahoo China to pay 210,000 yuan ($27,000) in damages, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Court employees declined to confirm the report or release any other information.

    Reuters.com

    China’s infamous movie pirates have done it again — “Spider-Man 3” is already being sold on Beijing’s streets almost two weeks ahead of its U.S. premier.

    Costing just over $1 apiece, the pirated DVDs appear to be of the actual movie, complete with a picture of the hero in a new, black spider suit which he wears for some of the film.

    There is even a warning on the back, printed in Chinese, against pirating the product.

    “It’s too expensive to go to the cinema to watch movies,” said Beijing resident Duan Nana. “This has a lot to do with why people are rushing to buy fake DVDs and watch movies at home. It’s very common and it’s logical.”

    Yahoo! News

    Amazon, which is considered the best bet to challenge iTunes’ supremacy in the digital world, is shooting to launch its MP3 digital download store in May, a target date it has yet to publicly acknowledge. (Amazon declines comment.) Meanwhile, sources familiar with the situation say Universal Music Group plans to test the sale of unprotected digital music files, including some of its classical music catalog conceivably including titles by
    Andrea Bocelli, at the new Amazon store and other outlets.

    via zeroPaid

    Qtrax, the upcoming first legal ad-supported P2P network due to launch this September, has announced today that it has added content from Sony BMG Music Entertainment to its offerings of free MP3s.

    Through this agreement, Qtrax users will be able to access songs for a predefined number of times for free, most likely five when it comes to the most popular artists. Each time a user plays a track, the Qtrax player will also offer fans click-to-buy purchase options. Users will also have to view some sort of advertising before each song is played.

    “We are pleased to announce that we have completed this agreement with Qtrax, and look forward to working with them as part of our ongoing campaign to build new opportunities for our artists within the digital marketplace,” commented Thomas Hesse, President, Global Digital Business & U.S. Sales, Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

    Qtrax, which plans to debut in September, already has deals in place to offer content from Warner Music Group and EMI Group as well.

    Two Hungarian music lover/journalist/artist from the Hungarian language Quart music blog tried to purchase two songs they recently reviewed: an Arcade Fire album and an LCD Sound System album from various online services. The whole article is here in Hungarian, I try to sum up their experiences in English:

    iTunes
    The iTunes store doesn’t accept Hungarian bank-cards. This option is out.

    eMusic
    Huge catalog of indie records, but sadly nothing from the big 4, so no Universal distributed Arcade Fire and no Warner distributed LCD.

    Rhapsody, Napster
    They don’t accept Hungarian bank-cards either.

    Zune Marketplace
    Zune is not sold in Hungray.

    Sony Connect
    The songs are tied to Sony devices, which they do not own.

    Yahoo! Music Jukebox
    This service had serious performance problems, after 20 minutes of trying and several complete freezes they have given up trying.

    Allofmp3.com
    Perfect service, great prices, but (percieved as?) illegal, and they wanted to play by the rules.

    Beatport.com
    Great service, but neither of the desired bands are in the catalog. So they have bought something else, in mp3.

    Audio Lunchbox
    Like eMusic.

    Dalok.hu
    This Hungarian service is run by the collecting society of performing artists. For little more than 0.50 USD one can buy songs from Hungarian performers. Works great, the price is right, through the catalog needs some expansion.

    Songo.hu
    Half a million songs in this Hungarian music store, but no LCD or Arcade Fire. Expensive and wma-bound.

    T-Online Zeneáruház
    The first service where they could find at least a song from the new LCD album. But this is the last good thing that can be said about this service: expensive, wma-bound, extremely user-unfriendly.

    Mp3music.hu
    Small, but friendly store run by CLS records. No AF or LCD.

    So at the end of the day, instead of buying two full albums, preferably in mp3 format, they ended up having only one song in wma. What do music companies think, what will Hungarian potential music buyers do when they realize that even though they are part of the European Union, even though they are willing to pay for music, all they experience is the utter failure of the market?

    I would really appreciate if you could share your experiences with us here about how y

    ’07 b.o. a record in waiting

    Boxoffice coin in the U.S. ought to tip the scales at slightly less than $10 billion this year, an all-time record, followed by a couple years of anemic growth as higher ticket prices offset slightly declining attendance.

    That’s the word from Wedbush Morgan Securities, which issued a 40-page report Friday on the state of the exhibition industry. Wedbush concludes that the dour predictions of new technologies dooming the movie theater were overblown and reiterates that it was the poor quality of movies that caused exhibition revenue to stagnate, or worse, from 2003-05.

    “Consumers are showing, through their continued attendance, that pay-per-view, DVDs and streaming media may be increasingly close substitutes for a movie-watching experience, but they are not as close of a substitute for an evening out,” Wedbush analyst William Kidd wrote.

    Consumers with the most entertainment gadgets and services also are the ones who go to movie theaters most often, according to Nielsen Entertainment/NRG data.

    For example, among moviegoers who see an average of 10.5 films in theaters each year, 46% of them are Netflix subscribers and 68% have a home theater. Among those who see just 7.1 movies in theaters each year, 16% subscribe to Netflix and 16% have home theaters.

    Michael Geist – The Unintended Consequences of Rogers’ Packet Shaping

    For the past 18 months, it has been open secret that Rogers engages in packet shaping, conduct that limits the amount of available bandwidth for certain services such as peer-to-peer file sharing applications. Rogers denied the practice at first, but effectively acknowledged it in late 2005. Net neutrality advocates regularly point to traffic shaping as a concern since they fear that Rogers could limit bandwidth to competing content or services. In response to the packet shaping approach, many file sharing applications now employ encryption to make it difficult to detect the contents of data packets. This has led to a technical “cat and mouse” game, with Rogers now one of the only ISPs in the world to simply degrade encrypted traffic.

    VPN networks, any SSL encoded traffic (including your mail service), and privacy are the victims. See the next post to put this news into context.

    Commenting the WSJ article, FindLaw’s Marci Hamilton discusses what should be done with the underground torrent trackers and guerrilla libraries. She has a very dangerous idea: controlling the data flow on the internet to filter not only the usual suspects like child predators, child accessible porn sites, but infringing content (classified as someone’s property that is being used without their permission) as well – because “it is the American way”. But why stop there Marci? If you agree with the content industry policing my internet traffic, and yours and every other American’s, then you sure agree with allowing the Church of Scientology, Dow chemical, the DoD, Halliburton, Senate members, who oversee the page-program and Diebold to do the same and prevent us from accessing things they wish to hide from us. I am sure as hell that lots of people want to control information they believe its theirs. I wish you lived just a few month in a in a dictatorship where there was a near total control of information flows, so you knew what you are talking about. Because what you propose seems to me a Stalinist way more than anything else.

    Yahoo’s pathetic face-saving concerning their Chinese failure should serve you as a stark warning:

    “Yahoo! is distressed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the internet. We call on the US Department of State to continue making this issue of free expression a priority in bilateral and multilateral forums with the Chinese, as well as through other tools of trade and diplomacy, in order to help secure the freedom of these dissidents.

    We have not had time to review and analyse the lawsuit being filed today, and so it is premature for us to comment on the specifics of this case.

    However, the concerns raised about the Chinese government compelling companies to follow Chinese law and disclose user information are not new. Companies doing business in China must comply with Chinese law or its local employees could be faced with civil and criminal penalties.

    We believe deeply in human rights, and as a company built on openness, we strongly support free expression and privacy globally. Yahoo! has worked in different ways to address issues that arise at the intersection of human rights and technology. We’ve engaged formally with other information, communications, and technology companies, human rights organizations, the U.S. government, academic institutions, and socially responsible investors on initiatives to promote free expression and privacy. We’re committed to remaining actively involved in exploring new approaches to protect and promote human rights globally.” (via The Register)

    Sure. Thanks. I would rather opt for an internet infrastructure where no private companies or governments can peep into my communication.

    FindLaw’s Writ – Hamilton:

    It took lawsuits and threats to universities to bring file-sharing sites like the early Napster somewhat under control, and it will doubtless take similar measures here. No doubt, these measures will be at least somewhat effective: Once any potential advertisers understand the illegal nature of the service they are supporting, and their own possible legal exposure, they are likely to take their dollars elsewhere.

    On the other hand, users may still end up being directly charged – or voluntarily paying to keep the sites afloat, as sometimes occurs with popular blogs. In addition, the site creators may continue to work onward for the sheer thrill of lawbreaking and prestige within their communities.

    In sum, the video guerillas are engaging in blatant contributory infringement — and that justifies shutting down their sites. But how? When one site closes, another may open soon after. Enforcement remains very expensive for the copyright owners – and that is a serious problem.

    There is, however, at least a silver lining here. It is in everyone’s interest to encourage the wealthy television and motion picture industries to research technological means of setting up effective “fences” and “alarms” on the Internet. Instead of chasing infringers, we need better means of preventing poaching in the first place.

    After all, we will not have creative and original works of art – such as television shows and movies worthy of copying — unless those investing in them can ensure a return on their investment. Moreover, “fences,” “alarms,” and tracking devices have important side-benefits, too: They can be used to protect our children, prevent predation or catch predators, and shut down child-accessible pornography sites. The copyright industry has an opportunity here to protect its own wealth, which is the American way, but in so doing, it can also contribute to the greater safety of every American.

    Kevin J. Delaney. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Apr 17, 2007. pg. A.1

    newtube-wsj.gif“It’s out there — you just have to hunt around for it a bit,” says the 28-year-old Mr. [Sam Martinez]. Like many similar sites, YouTVpc relies heavily on video-sharing sites outside the U.S., such as a French outfit called Dailymotion and Ouou.com in China. Mr. Martinez estimates that about 40% of the shows and films on the site — including episodes of “Desperate Housewives” and Fox’s “Prison Break” are provided by Ouou.com.

    Last year Mr. Martinez’s childhood friend, Mr. [Billy Duran], built on the idea and created a site called “VTele” as an assignment for a computer-science class at Central New Mexico Community College. Through it, users could view TV shows and movies that he and Mr. Martinez copied from DVDs and uploaded to the school’s computer servers. The 23-year-old Mr. Duran says he got an “A” on the project. But within a month, the site attracted so many users that some of the school’s computer servers crashed. Administrators threatened Mr. Duran with expulsion.

    Mr. Duran dropped out of Central New Mexico, and the two friends relaunched the site in September. At first it relied on volunteers to store video files on their own servers, until a user pointed Mr. Martinez to Dailymotion. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh — gold mine!'” recalls Mr. Martinez. “We had all 18 seasons of ‘The Simpsons’ in two hours.”

    Read the rest of this entry »

    via CeskeNoviny

    A case of illegal music file sharing on the Internet has resulted in a court sentence for the first time in the Czech Republic, police officer Libor Macek who deals with such cases told journalists today.

    The perpetrator, who used the name Lubsoft on the Internet, caused damage of more than one million crowns. He received a suspended sentence of seven months in prison.

    globeandmail.com

    Chinese intellectual property officials rejected U.S. criticism of China’s anti-piracy efforts, insisting they are cracking down and saying countries such as Canada are worse offenders.

    The officials said the
    scale of Chinese enforcement is growing, with 235 criminal cases taken
    to court last year and 73 million DVDs, books and other products
    destroyed.

    They rejected suggestions Chinese limits on imports of books and
    movies is driving demand for pirated copies. A second U.S. complaint to
    the WTO last week said Beijing has failed to live up to promises to
    remove restrictions the import and distribution of books, newspapers,
    magazines, CDs, DVDs and video games.

    Industry groups said the lack of legitimate products is feeding Chinese demand for pirated movies, music and other goods.

    “I don’t think it is a good argument that restrictions on imports
    of books and audio-video products led to rampant piracy,” Mr. Wang [a spokesman for the Chinese National Copyright Administration,]said.

    THE BEAT » Blog Archive » Vado on Eyemelt — update

    NRAMA: Since eyemelt.com was launched, a major comics torrent site has stopped trafficking in SLG comics. Did you have any conversations with them to do this?

    DV: No, they did that on their own. That site has always maintained that they would stop making files available from their site when publishers started making their content available for download at an affordable price.

    In February 2005 Venstre and its coalition partner, The Conservartive
    Party, got reelected. Since the 2001 election Venstre has been the
    largest party represented in the Danish Parliament. Venstre holds 12 of
    the 19 government offices in the current government.

    Sorry, for spreading the misinformation. Thx. for the commenters.

    Culture wants to be free! — Unge Venstre

    The Norvegian Liberal Party (Venstre) Congress states that today’s legal frameworks for copyrights are not adapted to a modern society. The balance between consumer demands, a society’s need for openness and access to culture, and the artists’ right to revenue and attribution, must improve.

    The Liberal Party wants to reinstate the balance in copyright law through these following changes:

    • Free file sharing
    • Free sampling
    • Shorter commercial copyright life span
    • Ban DRM

    ShareMonkey :: Find the file origin of p2p movies, mp3s, software and other fileshare downloads

    What’s the route to market for the guy who downloaded a cinema cam of what becomes his favourite movie?

    What about the graduate who now has money to pay for the music that helped her through university?
    ShareMonkey Knows

    We know the album origin of 500,000 of the most shared mp3s. We’ve matched more than 200,000 p2p movies; cams, rips, trailers and extras, to the DVDs they originally came from, and we’re matching more every day.

    We can tell you what album, dvd, game, application or book your download came from – all you do is right click on a file in Windows and choose “Where is this file from?”.

    mp3newswire.net

    The commentary from Investor’s
    Business Daily writer Brian Deagon recants the MPAA’s spin that “in
    2005 alone it lost $2.3 billion to Internet copyright breaches in the
    U.S and $7 billion worldwide, including box-office receipts and video
    sales”.

    The USA Today article tells how the film industry is set to break all box office
    records this year. “Through Sunday, ticket sales are at $2.1 billion, a
    healthy 6% ahead of the same time last year and 5% ahead of 2005, according
    to estimates from Nielsen EDI”, says Scott Bowles who penned this story.
    And with summer crammed with such showcase movies as Spider-Man 3, Shrek the
    Third and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, studio executives already
    are crowing that 2007 could be a record breaker”. According to the article
    “The record was set in 2004 with $9.54 billion in the USA, although 2002
    holds the record for most tickets sold at 1.6 billion”.

    Microsoft changes tune on selling DRM-free songs

    Following digital music pioneer Apple Inc.’s lead, Microsoft Corp. said it will soon sell digital music online without digital rights management (DRM) protection.

    Microsoft’s apparent change of heart on selling DRM-free music came in response to Apple’s deal earlier in the week to sell unprotected content from recording company EMI Group PLC. The company previously claimed that DRM was necessary for current and emerging digital media business models.

    “The EMI announcement on Monday was not exclusive to Apple,” said Katy Asher, a Microsoft spokeswoman on the Zune team, in an e-mail to the IDG News Service today. She said Microsoft has been talking with EMI and other record labels “for some time now” about offering unprotected music on its Zune players in an effort to meet the needs of its customers.

    “Consumers have made it clear that unprotected music is something they want,” Asher said. “We plan on offering it to them as soon as our label partners are comfortable with it.”

    P.B. Hugenholtz, M.M.M. van Eechoud, S.J. van Gompel et al., from U. of Amsterdam, Institute of Information Law have published their report to the European Commission on The Recasting of Copyright & Related Rights for the Knowledge Economy.

    In the document among other topics they discuss the problem of term extension for sound recordings, which in Europe is limited in 50 years. In unison with the UK comissioned Gowers Report they find no reason to extend the term.

    They also address the problem of p2p piracy and conclude (rightly) that the reason behind infringing individual behavior is not the lack of knowledge about copyright, but the copynorms that diverge from what the law thinks about rightful use. As a solution they argue for inviting users to the bargaining table instead of strengthening enforcement:

    “Given the fact that copyright (non)conforming behaviour seems largely influenced by social norms and rational/economic considerations, it would appear that European institutions have limited options to help compliance to copyright law. Consistently seeking input from stakeholders that represent consumers in the policy making process may contribute to a balanced end result, which in turn can lead to a better acceptance of and adherence to copyright norms. But the stakeholders themselves –industry and consumers alike– are clearly best positioned to influence acceptance, for instance through the development of more consumer-friendly business models and informative campaigns, including initiatives like standardised labelling of product features on playability.”

    Word!

    Megjelent a MOKK kötetek közül az első, Halácsy, Vályi kollégák és Barry Wellman szerkesztésében: Hatalom a mobil tömegek kezében. Benne számos, magyarul először megjelenő alapszöveg arról, hogy a technológia által kezünkbe kapott lehetőségek hogyan alakítják át a társadalom, politika, gazdaság jól ismert kereteit. A számos kiváló szöveg között a sajátom is.

    A bemutatóra készült a következő videokommentárom:

    WSJ.com – Login

    In a major break with the music industry’s longstanding antipiracy strategy, EMI Group PLC is set to announce today that it plans to sell significant amounts of its catalog without anticopying software, according to people familiar with the matter.

    The London music company is to make its announcement at a London news conference featuring Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs. EMI is to sell songs without the software — known as digital rights management — through Apple’s iTunes Store and possibly through other online outlets.

    p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site

    WiPeer was developed to allow communication, “in a peer-to-peer manner, between mobile computers, when either there is no access point, or when the access point costs money, or when for privacy reasons, the users do not wish to utilise the access point,”

    The scary thing is, that they are (or should be) all real alternatives, and each and every prank shows a solution to the current problems.

    R.I.A.A. Announces File Sharing Amnesty Program

    In a stunning turnabout, the R.I.A.A. has announced a new amnesty program for computer users who have shared and/or downloaded copyrighted files illegally.

    The new program, christened “Files for Free HD Time”, works like this: you go to a special website setup by the R.I.A.A. where you can upload any previously illegally downloaded files. In other words: give them back and avoid prosecution. Plus, for every 12 files you put back, you will be rewarded with certificates for 120 Free HD Radio minutes which can be used in any city where HD Radio is now operating.

    “We’re very excited about this new amnesty program and our lawyers are especially looking forward to filing much less litigation in the future,” said spokesperson, April Furst.

    To see how many files have already been returned or to return any illegally shared files you may have on your computer, visit the R.I.A.A. Amnesty Website.

    Major labels to disband RIAA

    The Big 4 will be disbanding all existing trade organizations and founding a single new organisation to be called Friends of the Labels which will work with p2p developers and independent artists to formulate ‘fair use’ practices and policies, and creative pricing and distribution structures.

    Lawrence Lessig joins RIAA board of directors

    Lawrence Lessig, best known for his work promoting his Creative Commons foundation, announced today that he will join the Board of Directors of the Recording Industry Association of America. “We’re pleased to welcome Professor Lessig into our cabal, er, uh, association” said RIAA head Cary Sherman.

    Critical Culture

    Karagarga calls itself “a private bittorrent community specializing in arthouse, alternative, cult and classic movies”. I call it: a treasure-trove of world cinema. Want some Jacques Rivette to pass your evening? Take your pick from 14 films. How about some Yasujiro Ozu? There are 39 to choose from. Satyajit Ray? Kazimierz Karabasz? Nicholas Ray? 32. 10. 21. How about a huge list of film noir, a detailed write-up of films from Quebec, or helpful introductions to films, film movements, and filmmakers you haven’t discovered yet? Check, check, and check. In fact, all encompassed, Karagarga’s history of movies contains over 13,000 films! All with passionate discussion, background info, and links to subtitles (some hand-made) in a variety of languages; and all constantly up-kept to make sure the rips are of the highest quality possible.

    What you won’t find at Karagarga, however, are mainstream films, screeners, or anything shot with a camcorder inside a movie theatre. If that’s what you’re looking for, the Internet is already teeming with more than enough sites to tickle your urge. If, on the other hand, you’re interested in a community of worldwide cinephiles dedicated to the preservation and experience of over one hundred years of cinema, come on in, and join. It’s free. It’s fun. You’ll make friends.

    The link below will take you to the sign-up page:

    join Karagarga!

    Oh, and there are some broad time and quantity limits on accepting new members, so, as the curlers say: hurry hard!

    TimesOnline

    About to leak a copy of the new Arctic Monkeys album on the net? Don’t bother unless you’re willing to risk a knock on the door from the Web Sheriff.

    Cutting-edge bands who built a following by letting fans trade MP3 song files are secretly hiring web enforcers to track down and remove unauthorised leaks that might destroy album sales.

    The web detectives trace the source of a leak and individuals found to have deliberately spread copyright-protected material receive a personal visit followed by legal threats.

    This sounds very-very familiar. Adrian Johns has a wonderful article on “Pop music pirate hunters”,  telling the story of early 1900’s British music publishers who used barely legal private enforcement hitmen to intimidate sheet music pirates. Well worth a read.

    CNET News.com

    Like other online publishers, Kink.com has had to puzzle out ways to deal with the perennial problem of copyright infringement on peer-to-peer networks and Usenet. Kink.com’s solution is live shows. In some ways, it’s is a throwback to a more analog era, back when the Grateful Dead encouraged taping and sharing of live concerts (while still charging admission). The band Phish follows the same model today by authorizing taping and Internet sharing for “non-commercial purposes.”

    Earlier this month, Kink.com began streaming live 1080i high-definition video–at a time when mainstream sites such as CNN.com offer jerky, blurry pre-edited clips at roughly one-tenth the resolution of high-def.

    Anti-piracy success and more local movies play a part

    Cathay’s Malaysia president Suhaimi Rafdi said the overall cinema viewership in Malaysia had recorded a double-digit growth for the past two years and Cathay itself recorded a 17 % increase last year.

    “We believe that among the major contributing
    factors to the increase of cinema viewership in the past year is the
    government’s success in reducing pirated VCDs and DVDs,” he said.

    Another factor was the increase in local movie productions. Suhaimi said that 48 local movies were screened in
    local cinemas last year compared with five years ago when only 20
    titles were produced.

    iTunes has 2 million+ songs, napster, MSN music, Rhapsody, eMusic has 1 million + each.

    New York Times

    To date, Last.fm has “scrobbled” 65 million tracks by 8 million artists, in just about every country in the world.

    Just to add another measure. Gracenote (aka CDDB) has info about more than 3.8 million CDs, over 48 million tracks. Looong way to go.

    What I propose is an aggressive six-month trial by a major P2P service (any
    takers?) that could finally give us clear insight into the behavior of
    P2P users. Is it about interoperability, community and deep catalog, or
    is it all about free? We need to know.

    Here’s how it would work: Leave the service exactly as it is: no
    filtering, no DRM, no changes to its current offering of unprotected
    MP3s. The rare tracks, bootlegs-they all stay there. Just charge for
    each piece of content and split the revenue between the service and the
    content owners.

    Read the rest of this entry »

    I guess this also means, that if you don’t have your 60th birthday, and you are not Elton John, then you will never see a 100% of your back catalog online.

    iTunes scoops Sir Elton John catalogue exclusive – iPod/iTunes – Macworld UK

    Sir Elton John this morning revealed plans to make his entire catalogue of releases available exclusively through iTunes starting next week.

    The entire catalogue of 400 tracks will be made available through the store starting 26 March, his artist management agents explained. The music will be available exclusively there until 30 April, when it will be made available through other music services.

    The artist explained: “I’ve wanted my music to be available for digital download worldwide for some time, but I knew that the entire catalogue not just the hits needed care and attention to be released in this way. Now that it’s happening, I’m pleased for the fans’ sake.

    via nettime.

    Call for Support: Link to Google Will Eat Itself by Geert Lovink

    http://www.networkcultures.org/geert/2007/03/22/call-for-support-link-
    to-google-will-eat-itself/

    Google Will Eat Itself (http://www.gwei.org/) announced that is now
    fully censored on all Google Search-Indexes worldwide. What a scandal!

    The idea behind GWEI is simple:

    Google Will Eat Itself generates money by serving Google text
    advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money GWEI
    automatically buy Google shares. GWEI buys Google via their own
    advertisment. Google eats itself – but in the end “we” own it. By
    establishing this autocannibalistic model we deconstruct the new
    global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-
    based economic model. After this process GWEI hands over the common
    ownership of “our” Google Shares to the GTTP Ltd. [Google To The
    People Public Company] which distributes them back to the users
    (clickers) / public.

    Let’s break the silence and put a link to this project on our sites
    and blogs: http://www.gwei.org. Give Google back to people! GWEI is
    an interesting case how to imagine a new global public sphere. How to
    reverse privatization and rethink a truely public Internet without
    the Googles and Yahoos.

    Thanks for your support!

    The GWEI-Team
    Vienna, Bari, Turin, March 2007

    UBERMORGEN.COM (Lizvlx/Hans Bernhard), Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo
    Cirio
    http://www.gwei.org

    Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply Rise in Downloading Fails to Boost Industry

    “Sales are so down and so off that, as a
    manager, I look at a CD as part of the marketing of an artist, more
    than as an income stream,” says Mr. Rabhan. “It’s the vehicle that
    drives the tour, the merchandise, building the brand, and that’s it.
    There’s no money.”
    Jeff Rabhan, who manages artists and music producers including
    Jermaine Dupri, Kelis and Elliott Yamin

    Read the rest of this entry »

    TorrentFreak

    If the likes of the MPAA, RIAA and IFPI are to be believed, file-sharing is causing worldwide havok, costing billions of dollars and creating unemployment. It’s true that some people are feeling the P2P effect; they’re called ‘physical pirates’ and one of them says that file-sharing has ruined his business.

    I am researching for my talk to be delivered to the International Intellectual Property Program at Chicago-Kent Law School.

    This is how I have found what I believe might be the real message of Hollywood to its customers. It is not the oft quoted rant of Jack Valenti about the Boston strangler, but something screenwriters, producers, actors, directors and the rest have to say to the millions of people worldwide.

    Perhaps on the rare occasion,
    pursuing the right course…
    …demands an act of piracy…

    Piracy itself can be
    the right course?

    Excerpt from the movie The Pirates of the Caribbean – The Curse of the Black Pearl.

    For the (not so) rare occasions where piracy can be the right course see:
    Bodo Balazs: Robin Hood Digital

    At least this is what proprietary software people prefer…

    Microsoft executive: Pirating software? Choose Microsoft!

    At the Morgan Stanley Technology conference last week in San Francisco, Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes commented on the benefits of software counterfeiting. “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else,” he said. “We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products. What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software.”

    Off the shelf | News | Guardian Unlimited Books

    It’s been suggested that 85% of published information is not available online. So where is it?

    The Library of Congress in Washington DC is the largest library in the world with about 29m books among its 130m items, while the British Library has about 13m catalogued books.

    In May 2006, the New York Times estimated that at least 32m books have been published since the days of Sumerian clay tablets. Another estimate has suggested that the human race publishes a book every 30 seconds

    In 1450, new titles were published at a rate of 100 per year. In 1950, that figure had grown to 250,000. By the millennium, the number published exceeded a million.

    It’s estimated that of all the books ever published, more than 95% are out of print

    I had an AHAAA moment last night reading Martha Woodmansee’s „ The Author, Art, and the Market”. She wrote „ As my sketch of writers’ struggles suggests, eighteenth-century Germany found itself in a transitional phase between the limited patronage of an aristocratic age and the democratic patronage of the marketplace. With the growth of a middle class, demand for reading material increased steadily, enticing writers to try to earn a livelihood from the sale of their writings to a buying public. But most were doomed to be disappointed, for the requisite legal, economic, and political arrangements and institutions were not yet in place to support the large number of writers who came forward. What they encountered were the remnants o fan earlier social order.” (p 41-42)

    This made me think about the current imbalance between the p2p technologies, the existing intellectual property regimes, and economic frameworks of culture distribution inherited from the period Woodmansee describes. I have always thought of this imbalance as a relationship between law and technology, or economics and technology.

    I was wrong.

    It is an imbalance between a social practice and a legal-economic framework. Technology has not created that social practice, it simply revealed it, just like a pair of glasses is able to reveal the sharp lines and objects of the world to a short-sighted person. The world, crisp and clear is there, but without the relevant technology we were not able to see, not to mention recognize it.

    We should not forget, that p2p file-sharing technology is one of the very few inventions that did not need the slightest effort to propagate it. There was no money and time spent on manufacturing a demand, there was no need to advertise, sell it, no smart campaigns, no exact targeting was needed. It fitted naturally and seamlessly to an existing need in all of us. If this is true, than the question is no longer whether we can bend the technology to the current legal-economic framework, or vice versa, or if there is a compromise between these two. Because one needs to change the underlying social need to curb piracy, the need to have instant access to _everything_, at the lowest price possible, from people who think the same.

    Every effort that does not address this need is doomed to fail: if you take away the glasses from someone who had the few moments of clear vision will do everything he can to get out of the blurry shadows again.

     – International Business Times –

    Tired of being turned away at the theater box office when a movie’s
    sold out? Unhappy there’s no art-house theater in your neighborhood to
    cater to your hoity-toity theatrical tastes?
    Those days could be ending, say representatives of Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment and a company called Digital Cinema Implementation Partners.

    The three are working on a new digital film delivery system that, if successful, could give theater operators the flexibility to put a popular movie on an extra screen as quickly as the demand for it arises. At the same time, theater operators could boot out a surprise stinker and even book in for a day or two an art-house film with a small but devoted audience.

    “Our goal really is to have the easiest, fastest, most reliable, most cost-effective content delivery technique possible to the theaters we represent,” said Travis Reid, Chief Executive of Digital Cinema Implementation Partners, which is working with Warner Bros. and Universal.

    The process, still in the early stages of development, would use satellite and broadband delivery systems to beam digital films directly to theaters, rather than have them copied onto hard drives and delivered by hand, as for the most part they are now, said Darcy Antonellis, Warner Bros.’ executive vice president for distribution and technology.

    That kind of rapid delivery, Reid said, would allow theater operators the flexibility to economically market niche films that could be shown for just a day or two to a targeted audience. It would also allow operators to quickly find more screens for surprise hits.

    “We believe that if we can make that a very efficient process, very fast, they’ll be able to respond to audience demands more,” he said.

    Beaming an encrypted version of a digital film directly to the theater should also cut down on film piracy and bootlegging, Antonellis said, by eliminating the number of opportunities for people to get their hands on the movie as it is transit.

    DCIP is owned equally by the Regal, AMC and Cinemark theater chains, which have 14,000 screens in North America. The new system would be available to those and other interested theater operators, Reid and Antonellis said. About 2,200 U.S. theater screens currently show digital films.

    Officials with the venture wouldn’t offer a date by which they hope to have the system in place or give a cost estimate.

    “I think the latter part of this year we’ll likely be doing some testing,” said Antonellis. “Our hope is as things progress and … as the projectors roll out there will be a lot more activity.”

    New York Times

    In remarks prepared for delivery on Tuesday to the Association of American Publishers, the associate general counsel of Microsoft, Thomas Rubin, argues that Google’s move into new media markets has come at the expense of publishers of books, videos and software.

    Mr. Rubin’s comments echo arguments at the heart of a 16-month-old copyright lawsuit against Google brought by five book publishers and organized by the Association of American Publishers, an industry trade group.

    “Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people’s content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and I.P.O.s,” said Mr. Rubin, who oversees copyright and trade-secret law.

    Chron.com – Houston Chronicle

    Radio listeners weary of hearing the same songs over and over may have something to cheer about: Broadcasters have tentatively agreed to anti-payola settlements that could shake up music playlists at some of the nation’s largest radio chains.

    Four major broadcast companies would pay the government $12.5 million and provide 8,400 half-hour segments of free airtime for independent record labels and local artists, The Associated Press has learned.

    The agreement is aimed at curbing payola — generally defined as radio stations accepting cash or other consideration from record companies in exchange for airplay. The practice has been around as long as the radio industry and was made illegal after scandals in the late 1950s.

    Two Federal Communications Commission officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because final language has not been approved by the full commission, said the monetary settlement is part of a consent decree between the FCC and Clear Channel Communications Inc., CBS Radio, Entercom Communications Corp. and Citadel Broadcasting Corp.

    The settlement was reached at the same time as a separate deal designed to lead to more airtime for smaller record companies and their lesser-known artists as well as local musicians.

    The American Association of Independent Music, a group of independent record labels, has received a commitment from the same four broadcasters for the free airtime, the officials said.

    In addition to airplay, the broadcasters and the independent labels have also negotiated a set of “rules of engagement” that will guide how record company representatives and radio programmers interact.

    The free airtime would be granted to companies not owned or controlled by the nation’s four dominant music labels — Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and EMI Group.

    Times are definitely changing. no single author, but a single copyright holder. (via kottke, nytimes)

    Music executives judge Jobs, lament losses | CNET News.com

    Apple, digital rights management (DRM) and the public’s willingness to pirate music were discussed, debated and lamented once more by attendees of the Digital Music Forum East conference.

    “We’re running out of time,” Ted Cohen, managing director of music consulting firm TAG Strategic, told the roughly 200 attendees. “We need to get money flowing from consumers and get them used to paying for music again.”

    The call to arms by Cohen, who was moderating a panel discussion titled “The State of the Digital Union,” comes as the music industry suffers through one of the worst slumps in its history.

    CD sales fell 23 percent worldwide between 2000 and 2006. Legal sales of digital songs aren’t making up the difference either. Last year saw a 131 percent jump in digital sales, but overall the industry still saw about a 4 percent decline in revenue.

    That has the industry pointing fingers at a number of things they believe caused the decline.

    At the opening of the conference, some of the panel members lashed out at Jobs. Members said Jobs’ call three weeks ago for DRM-free music was “insincere” and a “red herring.”

    “Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats,” Jobs wrote in a letter that rocked the music industry. “In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.”

    Jobs’ position was perceived by many in the music industry as a 180-degree shift in direction. The view expressed at the conference is that Apple has maintained a stranglehold on the digital music industry by locking up iTunes music with DRM.

    Cohen told the audience that if Jobs was really sincere about doing away with DRM, he would soon release movies from Disney–the studio Jobs holds a major stake in–without any software protection. An Apple representative declined to comment on Tuesday on remarks made by the panel.

    Panel member Mike Bebel, CEO of Ruckus music service, said: “Look, I don’t think anybody is necessarily down on Apple. The problem is the proprietary implementation of technology…and it’s causing everybody else who is participating in the marketplace–the other service providers, the labels, the users–a lot of pain. If they could simply open it up, everybody would love them.”

    The role of DRM
    Panel members–who included Thomas Gewecke, Sony BMG senior vice president, and Gabriel Levy, general manager of RealNetworks Europe–were divided about what the music industry should do about DRM in general.

    Most of the panel members, save for Greg Scholl, CEO of independent music label The Orchard, believe that some form of DRM is necessary.

    Scholl said flatly that DRM doesn’t work. “The idea that DRM gives us choice isn’t right,” he said.

    “The economics of the business are over for good and aren’t ever going to be the way they were before,” Scholl said. This is a position that some in the music industry are starting to warm up to.

    In January, EMI said it was reviewing a request
    by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to allow reverse engineering of
    its digital rights management software. That EMI would even consider
    the proposal was seen in many circles as a step forward by the anti-DRM
    camp.

    Gewecke also defended record labels against the criticism that the
    music industry has its head in the sand and just doesn’t understand the
    Digital Age. He said that Sony BMG is working with technologists and
    retailers, and is constantly is looking for technological solutions to
    some of the industry’s problems.

    He also said that despite all the bad news, there’s plenty for the sector to be encouraged about.

    “We
    routinely talk to companies about what’s different,” Gewecke said.
    “We’re constantly looking for where value is being created in a
    business model. We are being flexible. There’s still an evolution that
    has to happen. I say it’s an optimistic time considering there’s more
    music being listened to now than ever before. There’s more
    opportunities to monetize the music. We want to be out there looking
    for new ideas and companies.”

    arstechnica:

    Earlier this month it was widely reported that EMI was indeed ready to cast DRM into the dark abyss and earn the company the honorable status of being the first major music label to realize that DRM alienates honest customers. As it turns out, the company is indeed open to the possibility of ditching DRM, but they expect to be paid well for it, and the online music retailers aren’t ready to meet their demands.

    EMI is the only major record label to seriously consider abandoning the disaster that is DRM, but earlier reports that focused on the company’s reformist attitude apparently missed the mark: EMI is willing to lose the DRM, but they demand a considerable advance payment to make it happen. According to Bloomberg, EMI has backed out of talks for now because no one will pay what they’re asking. No dollar amounts are known at this time.

    Online music giants Apple and Microsoft, along with smaller players including RealNetworks and Yahoo! Music, sought to indulge EMI’s demands by waving leafy-green dollar bills at the company, but it wasn’t what EMI asked for, and the company subsequently put the talks on hold. Warner’s renewed interest in EMI is likely another contributing factor to EMI’s own cold feet: Warner’s leadership is devoted to DRM, making the DRM-free discussions all the more circumspect.

    | The Register

    Australian TV viewers are waiting longer than ever to view their favourite overseas produced televisions shows, driving them to use BitTorrent and other internet-based peer-to-peer programs to download programmes from overseas, prior to their local broadcast.

    According to a survey based on a sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series’, Australian viewers are waiting an average of almost 17 months for the first run series’ first seen overseas. Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.9 to 16.7 months.

    A survey of TV programmes found that while some aired very close to their US air date, many popular programmes were significantly delayed.

    Average broadcast delays were shortest for TV series’ on the Seven and Ten Networks, at around nine months. The average delay for TV series’ airing on the Nine Network was 22 months, while TV series’ on ABC and SBS aired on average 23 and 30 months behind the US.

    Among popular programs, fans of Nine’s Without a Trace had to wait nearly nine months for an episode that aired in the US. A recent episode of Seven’s My Name Is Earl aired a year after its US broadcast date. Fans of Ten’s American Idol have just seen last season’s finals – nine months after they were seen in America, while Americans vote for the new Idol.

    The ABC recently showed an episode of The West Wing 21 months after its US broadcast date, but Nine’s Antiques Roadshow and SBS’s Iron Chef take the cake with recent first run episodes shown over 11 years after their first overseas broadcast.

    The survey followed a similar survey from two years ago which found the average delay for first run TV programmes on free-to-air TV at the time was just under eight months. Popular prime time TV programmes currently subject to substantial delays including the following:

    * Close To Home (8.6 months)
    * CSI: N.Y. (9.3 months)
    * Desperate Housewives (4.4 months)
    * Grey’s Anatomy (4.9 months)
    * Heroes (4.2 months)
    * House (5 months)
    * NCIS (4.1 months)
    * Third Watch (22.1 months)

    While film and music content owners have attempted to cater for digital consumers through services like iTunes, Australian TV networks appear to be unable or unwilling to change their programming policies or provide new digital based options for consumers that don’t want to wait to view their favourite shows.

    openPR.com –

    As Mr. Gupta explains, “Bollywood is not just India, it is not just for local consumption, but Bollywood is also very voraciously consumed overseas. In addition, there is the ripple effect as Indian culture is quite akin to Middle Eastern and Eastern European culture making Indian cinema stars, Indian movies and Indian songs super hits throughout these regions.”

    However, as the film industry has grown to new levels, so has the problem of video and movie piracy. In fact, in India it is estimated that movie piracy basically nullifies theatre revenue after only 3 months, nearly half that of a typical U.S. theatrical window. This of course significantly cuts into the film industry’s bottom line. As a result the Indian government has made dealing with piracy a priority.

    BELGRADE (Reuters) – Rada Banjanin plans to stay up late on Sunday, fingers crossed that “Babel” will take the best picture Oscar at the 79th Academy Awards.

    Not that she watched the inter-continental saga on the big screen. Rada hasn’t been to the cinema for over a year, but has seen nearly all this year’s Oscar nominees for 2.5 euros ($1.3) a copy in the comfort of her Belgrade living room.

    “I like to see the latest hits, and I get them all on DVD,” she said ahead of the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles on February 25.

    Belgrade’s “King Aleksandar” boulevard is packed with vendors selling the latest movies from cardboard crates on wooden stands, often before they open in European cinemas.

    “The Last King of Scotland” and “Rocky Balboa” were available this week. “The Departed” went on sale months ago.

    This year, the Motown musical “Dreamgirls” is in big demand in Serbia. “Everyone wants ‘Dreamgirls’. But we’ve run out of copies,” said one street vendor, who asked not to be named.

    It’s a poke in the eye for Serbian authorities, who say they have cracked down on the film piracy that gave Serbs one up on the rest of the world while their country sank under war, sanctions and isolation in the 1990s.

    BOSNIA, ALBANIA, MACEDONIA TOO

    Things have improved since then, says Zoran Savic, Serbia’s anti-piracy chief. But according to some estimates, he says, “pirate copies arrive in Belgrade between five and seven days after the movie premieres in the United State”.

    “The main problem here is the copies are so easy to get hold of on the streets, and sometimes via Internet,” Savic said.

    Video clubs offer under-the-counter lists of pirate offers to loyal customers, sometimes including screening copies sent out for review only and marked “not for public viewing”.

    In the United Nations-administered Serbian province of Kosovo, the bootleg trade is wide open.

    At the gates of NATO headquarters, aptly named ‘Film City’, brightly colored four-storey shops sell thousands of pirated films and music CDs, as well as fake Breitling wristwatches.

    The customers are international police officers in an array of uniforms and gun-toting NATO peace troops in camouflage.

    And it’s not only Serbia.

    “It’s the same here in Sarajevo. It’s easy and everyone is doing it,” said Reuters Bosnia correspondent Daria Sito-Sucic.

    In the Macedonian capital, Skopje, correspondent Kole Casule says films such as the James Bond hit “Casino Royale” and Scorsese’s “Departed” sell for 80 denars (1.5 euros).

    Albania correspondent Benet Koleka bought “The Queen” and “Next President” from a Tirana shop loaded with bootlegs.

    Officially, the sales are illegal in all four countries. Of the former Yugoslav republics, only Croatia has clamped down with success on the suitcase DVD trade, says correspondent Zoran Radosalvjevic. “It’s mostly illegal downloads now,” he said.

    WE’RE NO ANGELS

    The fact pirates still thrive in the Balkans will hardly dampen spirits at the Oscar ceremonies.

    But piracy undermines the home-grown movie industry, which is unable to offer good financial rewards because so few people go the cinema. Research shows under 20 percent of the 7.5 million people in Serbia went to the movies in 2006.

    “People don’t have the feeling they are doing anything wrong by buying pirate DVDs and watching them at home,” says Danijela Milosevic of Taramount, which distributes Disney movies here.

    In 2005, Serbian ‘blockbuster’ “Mi Nismo Andjeli” (We’re No Angels) lost an estimated 400,000 cinema-goers when pirate copies hit the stalls just days after the film premiered in Belgrade, according to its director, Srdjan Dragojevic.

    Director Miroslav Momcilovic said his 2006 movie “Sedam i po” (Seven-and-a-half), a bitter-sweet take on the sinking of postwar Serbian society, suffered a similar fate.

    But he didn’t have the heart to put up a fight when he saw fake copies of his own movie being sold on the streets.

    “Pirates have given me such pleasure over the years. I can’t just forget a dozen years of watching those films and turn around and be radically against piracy.”

    BBC NEWS | Technology |

    The International Intellectual Property Alliance, an association that brings together US lobby groups representing the movie, music, software, and publisher industries, last week delivered its annual submission to the US government featuring its views on the inadequacy of intellectual property protection around the world.

    The report frequently serves as a blueprint for the US Trade Representative’s Section 301 Report, a government-mandated annual report that carries the threat of trade barriers for countries that fail to meet the US standard of IP protection.

    The IIPA submission generated considerable media attention, with the international media focusing on the state of IP protection in Russia and China, while national media in Canada, Thailand, and Taiwan broadcast dire warnings about the consequences of falling on the wrong side of US lobby groups.

    While the UK was spared inclusion on this year’s list, what is most noteworthy about the IIPA effort is that dozens of countries – indeed most of the major global economies in the developed and developing world – are singled out for criticism.

    The IIPA recommendations are designed to highlight the inadequacies of IP protection around the world, yet the lobby group ultimately shines the spotlight on how US copyright policy has become out-of-touch and isolated from much of the rest of the globe.

    The IIPA criticisms fall into three broad categories. First, the lobby group is very critical of any country that does not follow the US model for implementing the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Internet Treaties.

    Those treaties, which create legal protection for technological protection measures, have generated enormous controversy with many experts expressing concern about their impact on consumer rights, privacy, free speech, and security research.

    Crain’s New York Business

    Music recording company Warner Music Group Corp. said Thursday its quarterly profit fell 74% due to fewer albums released during the period and soft domestic and European sales.

    Manhattan-based Warner earned $18 million, or 12 cents per share, in its fiscal first quarter ended Dec. 31, down from $69 million, or 46 cents per share, in the year-earlier period.

    Revenue fell 11% to $928 million in the latest quarter.

    Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expected a profit of 24 cents per share on revenue of $944.8 million.

    The company said the market was challenging, especially for its recorded music business segment, and that it faced difficult year-over-year comparisons. Digital revenue grew 45% to $100 in the first quarter but slid 4% from $104 million in the fourth quarter of 2006.

    Revenue for the company’s recorded music business decreased 13% to $800 million on softer domestic and European sales. The company said Asia Pacific sales were helped by strength in Japanese local repertoire.

    Michael Fleisher, Warner Music Group’s chief financial officer, said 2007 results will be weighted to the back end of the year.

    Bloomberg


    Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) — EMI Group Plc, the U.K. record
    company that signed the Beatles, cut its revenue and profit
    forecasts for the second time this year as music sales slump in
    the U.S.

    EMI shares had the biggest slide in two years after the
    company said full-year sales at its recorded music division will
    fall 15 percent and earnings will miss analysts’ estimates.
    London-based EMI last month predicted a 10 percent sales drop.

    The company, which released albums by Robbie Williams and
    Norah Jones in the second half, today reported an
    “unprecedented level of market decline” and “an exceptionally
    high level of product returns.” EMI ousted its top two music
    executives on Jan. 12 after disappointing holiday sales. EMI has
    failed to produce best-selling U.S. albums and lost revenue to
    piracy.

    “EMI has got an awful lot of work to do in terms of
    securing its future,” said Henk Potts, an equity strategist at
    Barclays Wealth. “EMI has specific problems related to its
    company. The artists on its books look as though they are
    underperforming.”

    The shares fell 28.75 pence, or 12 percent, to 210.75 pence
    in London, giving the company a market value of 1.69 billion
    pounds ($3.3 billion). It was the biggest drop since Feb. 7,
    2005, driving the stock to the lowest since Oct. 27, 2005.

    Shares of New York-based Warner Music Group Corp. fell
    $1.27, or 6.6 percent, to $18.12 at 4:01 p.m. in New York Stock
    Exchange composite trading. They’ve fallen 11 percent in the
    past year.

    `Deterioration’

    “This revision to expectations is as a result of the
    continued and accelerating deterioration in market conditions in
    North America,” EMI said today in a statement. Profit for the
    year ending March 31 “will be significantly below current
    market expectations.”

    The North American market for compact discs has contracted
    20 percent this year, EMI said, citing Nielsen Soundscan
    figures.

    “They have always had a problem in the U.S. in terms of
    generating artists’ sales,” said Alex Degroote, an analyst at
    Panmure Gordon. “This Christmas period the release schedule
    hasn’t worked for them at all.”

    EMI, the world’s third-biggest music company, said it will
    give a performance update on April 18 and report full-year
    results on May 23.

    Credit-Default Swaps

    Credit-default swap contracts based on EMI debt rose about
    9,500 euros to 181,000 euros, according to prices compiled by
    Bloomberg. The price is the annual cost in a five-year contract
    based on 10 million euros of EMI bonds and loans. Credit-default
    swaps are used to speculate on a company’s ability to repay
    debt. An increase indicates a deterioration in credit quality.

    EMI has about 990 million pounds of bonds outstanding,
    according to Bloomberg data.

    “There’s very high financial risk associated with this
    company,” Panmure Gordon’s Degroote said. “I would be very
    surprised if the dividend isn’t cut totally.”

    EMI ousted Alain Levy, CEO of the recorded music division,
    and David Munns, the unit’s vice chairman last month. Eric
    Nicoli, then chairman, was named chief executive officer. EMI
    also announced a restructuring in January and said the one-time
    expense of the cost-cutting program will be as much as 150
    million pounds.

    Merger Attempts

    Slumping sales have led Nicoli, 56, to several attempts to
    combine with Warner Music Group, the world’s fourth-largest
    music company, as a way to reduce costs.

    In July, EMI and Warner abandoned $4.6 billion bids for
    each other after a European Union ruling damped prospects for
    regulatory approval.

    In December, EMI ended talks to be acquired by buyout firm
    Permira Advisers LLP, after failing to agree on a price.

    The music company has been counting on releases by Norah
    Jones, Robbie Williams, Keith Urban and the Beatles to boost
    sales in the second half. EMI had none of the 10 best-selling
    albums in the U.S. last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

    Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group led all music companies
    in U.S. album market share last year at 32 percent. It is the
    world’s biggest music company.

    Sony BMG Music Entertainment was second at 27 percent.
    Warner Music was the only company with an increase, up 1 point
    to 18 percent. EMI was fourth in the U.S. with 10.2 percent.
    Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG.

    EMI’s recorded music unit’s artists didn’t win any of the
    top 12 Grammy awards that were broadcast this week. Of the
    categories shown on television, Sony BMG won the most awards
    with five. Universal Music Group won four and Warner took one
    for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Stadium Arcadium.”

    EMI has two divisions: EMI Music, the recorded music unit,
    and EMI Music Publishing, which manages song copyrights. EMI
    reiterated today that the publishing unit “continues to perform
    in line with expectations.”

    Loss

    EMI reported a first-half loss of 30.6 million pounds in
    November, saying sales fell 6.1 percent because this year’s
    release schedule is weighted to the second half more than usual.

    As part of its restructuring EMI combined its U.S. Capitol
    and Virgin labels last month to create Capitol Music Group.
    Jason Flom, head of Virgin Records in the U.S., was named to run
    the new group. On Jan. 31 the company named Lee Trink president
    of Capitol Music and Jeff Kempler chief operating officer,
    reporting to Flom. Both were executive vice presidents at
    Virgin.

    EMI traces its history to the earliest days of recorded
    music, and became known as Electric and Musical Industries in
    1931. During the 1950s EMI released Elvis Presley’s first
    records outside the U.S. and bought Capitol Records, gaining
    Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole and Peggy Lee.

    TheStar.com – Michael Geist

    In recent weeks, Canadians have been subjected to a steady stream of reports asserting that Canada has become the world’s leading source of movie piracy. Pointing to the prevalence of illegal camcording – a practice that involves videotaping a movie directly off the screen in a theatre and transferring the copy on to DVDs for commercial sale – the major Hollywood studios are threatening to delay the Canadian distribution of their top movies.

    While the reports have succeeded in attracting considerable attention, a closer examination of the industry’s own data reveals that the claims are based primarily on fiction rather than fact.

    Warsaw Business Journal Online

    The era of Warsaw’s infamous stadium (Stadion Dziesięciolecia) is coming to an end this year and the ubiquitous sellers of pirated media will no longer need to lamely unfurl plastic tarps over their goods every time the police circle past.

    Which, if any, location will be next to host their ilk is unknown as
    yet, but Polish piracy – as a common practice – is going nowhere.

     

    In Poland the tradition of intellectual-property infringement
    stretches back to the heady days of the VCR, when video cassettes
    containing episodes of Dallas and Dynasty, recorded over to a point
    that skewed sound and picture quality, were swapped under the noses of
    the communist authorities. In many communities, extended family and
    friends would gather to watch the illicit Western programs in what was,
    in its own way, an act of defiance.

     

    Apologists for digital theft might suggest that the Polish
    anti-authoritarian streak is a contributing factor. A more globally
    applicable (and defensible) argument points to the economic disparity
    between more developed, media-rich markets and their poorer brethren,
    in which piracy runs rampant.

     

    There is merit in the second argument. Moreover, there is an
    arrogance implicit in Western nations’ outcry over piracy in
    under-developed nations, particularly when the “best solutions” they’re
    putting forward, along the lines of Microsoft Vista’s integrated
    digital-rights-management (DRM) architecture, do nothing to address the
    root of the problem. These are, in other words, proscriptive rather
    than medicative approaches.

    In dealing with media piracy there is no 100-percent solution –
    theft arguably predates any concept of property. However, reducing the
    rate of piracy in Poland to Western levels is a worthy project.
    Open-source software, web-based programs and digital download all offer
    promise, while bigger players like Microsoft should release products
    priced to the local market, if at the cost of a few bells and whistles. It will take some incentive to get Poles to break with tradition.

    This is the most important thing that has happened on the intellectual property front lately. Former Soviet president Gorbachev asks Microsoft’s Bill Gates not to pursue IP litigation against a high school teacher in Perm who used pirated software in classroom because:

    – he is poor
    – he is dedicated his life to teaching
    – he was just using  pirated software, but has not installed and/or downloaded it,
    – because the possible punishment (imprisonment is Siberia) is disproportionate.

    The situation is super-interesting because if Gates does not do anything (claiming that he cannot, or can but not willing to) intervene, that will create super -bad PR not only for him as a philanthropist and Microsoft, as a company, but for all IP cases as well.

    But by intervening, he admits, that such legal actions around the world are initiated by a handful of individuals like him, and he also admits that there are exceptions from copyright infringement, in some or all of the cases above.

    Seems very much like a loose-loose situation.

    MOSNEWS.COM

    Prosecutors accuse Ponosov, headmaster of a middle school in the Perm region, of violating Microsoft’s intellectual property rules by using computers in his school that contained unlicensed copies of the firm’s software.

    Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Monday asked Microsoft
    co-founder Bill Gates to intercede on behalf of a Russian teacher
    accused of using pirated software in his classroom.

    “A teacher, who has dedicated his life to the education of children and
    who receives a modest salary that does not bear comparison with the
    salaries of even regular staff in your company, is threatened with
    detention in Siberian prison camps,” read the letter, posted on the
    Internet site of Gorbachev’s charitable foundation www.gorby.ru.

    Gawker Media mystery ads appear on YouTube | CNET News.com

    For the past three months, an employee at Gawker Media has posted copyright videos sandwiched between ads for Gawker-owned properties such as Valleywag and Gizmodo.

    Nick Denton, the owner and founder of Gawker Media, acknowledged Friday that the Gawker employee, who goes by the YouTube username Belowtheradar, is the company’s “video guy.”

    Romania ‘built our country on pirated Windows’

    ROMANIAN PRESIDENT Traian Basescu told Microsoft’s Supreme Vole, William Gates III that his country’s IT industry would be nothing if it was not for pirated Windows software.

    Basescu met Gates at the opening of a global technical centre in Bucharest.

    According to Reuters, Basescu said, during a joint news conference with Gates, that piracy helped the younger generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania.

    It also helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world. He claimed that all this piracy “ten years ago” was an investment in Romania’s friendship with Microsoft and with Bill Gates.

    FT.com

    Google’s strategy for its newly acquired YouTube site was dealt a serious blow on Friday when Viacom, the owner of MTV, demanded that all its clips be removed from the user-generated internet company’s site.

    Viacom, which owns youth brands such as Nickelodeon and Comedy
    Central, made the demand after months of negotiations with YouTube and
    Google. It said more than 100,000 affected video clips on the YouTube
    site had generated more than 1.2bn video streams.

    The
    move threatens to wreck Google’s attempts to cement commercial
    relationships with traditional media groups, which supply most material.

    Since
    acquiring YouTube for $1.65bn in October, Google and Eric Schmidt, its
    chief executive, have made a frantic effort to forge relationships with
    traditional media companies. They have managed to sign short-term deals
    with
    CBS, Warner Music, Sony-BMG and Universal Music.

    Discussions
    with Viacom appeared to break down over the splitting of advertising
    revenues from Viacom content. There was also a fight over which company
    would make those sales.

    Viacom executives were frustrated that
    YouTube had failed to implement a content-monitoring system by the
    beginning of the year, as it had promised, so companies could easily
    tell when their material was being posted.

    It accused Google and
    YouTube of reaping all the revenue from their material “without
    extending fair compensation to the people who have expended all of the
    effort and cost to create it”.

    YouTube said it would comply with the request.

    “It’s
    unfortunate that Viacom will no longer be able to benefit from
    YouTube’s passionate audience which has helped to promote many of
    Viacom’s shows,” YouTube said in a statement. “We take copyright issues
    very seriously. We prohibit users from uploading infringing material,
    and we cooperate with all copyright holders to identify and promptly
    remove infringing content as soon as we are officially notified.”

    Viacom
    and other traditional media groups are eager to distribute their
    content to audiences of social networking and user-generated websites,
    which are wildly popular with young consumers. But they are wary of
    losing commercial and editorial control.

    They complain that most
    clips posted on the sites are derived from their copyrighted work and
    have been appropriated without permission.

    Viacom believes it
    has particular leverage because it specialise in youth-oriented and
    short-form video clips. It has previously demanded that clips from
    programmes such as Comedy Central’s Daily Show be removed.

    Under
    US copyright laws, sites are protected from legal action as long as
    they respond in a timely manner to requests to remove unauthorised
    material.
    NBC Universal, Disney and Viacom complain that they have to monitor hundreds of thousands of clips.

    GOOGLE’S MOON SHOT

    by JEFFREY TOOBIN
    The quest for the universal library.
    Issue of 2007-02-05
    Posted 2007-01-29

    Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus
    of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which
    are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an
    enormous database being created by Google. The company is also
    retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities,
    including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library.
    At the University of Michigan, Google’s original partner in Google Book
    Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the
    company’s custom-made scanning equipment.
    Read the rest of this entry »

    Radio listening reaches record high thanks to digital technology | News | This is London

    Radio listening has reached a record high, with more than 45 million people tuning in each week, according to new figures.

    It is the highest figure since industry body Rajar began keeping track of the nation’s listening habits in 1992.

    The rise is being attributed to growing numbers of people tuning in via the internet, digital television or their mobile phones. Some 7.8 per cent of people aged 15 and above listen to the radio via their mobiles, according to Rajar research conducted in the last three months of 2006.

    The figure is 24 per cent up on the same period of 2005.

    A quarter of all 15- to 24-year-olds said they listened to the radio in this way.

    Listening via the internet was up 10 per cent and via digital television up 9 per cent.

    Light Reading

    Ellacoya Networks Inc. , which sampled about 2 million broadband customer connections, reports that Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) traffic now uses 39 percent of network bandwidth in the networks it monitors, while P2P traffic uses only 37 percent.Sandvine Inc. (London: SAND – message board), which sampled some 2.7 million broadband hookups, came back with results similar to Ellacoya’s. Sandvine reports HTTP traffic now uses 38 percent of network bandwidth in North American networks, while P2P usage has fallen to 36 percent.

    Variety.com – Spanish pirates flip for disk drives

    Spain’s uphill battle against piracy is getting steeper.

    The reason: small modem-like boxes, with remote controls and a computer USB plugs. Sold in department stores, they sport names like Best Buy’s Easy Player Jumbo Plus HD 400GB or Argosy’s Mobile Video GDD 400 GB.

    They’re hard disk drives that plug into PCs and then TV sets, allowing downloaded movies easy TV play. Their sales are rising fast. “They’re steady little earners,” said one retailer over the Christmas season.

    Prices have held, ranging from the Easy Player’s E379 ($493) to $194 for a drive from Woxster, a Spanish brand. But with sales ramping up, the drives are increasing capacity and features, such as photo and memory disk storage.

    As hard disk usage seeps from Spanish geekdom to the mainstream, Spanish Internet piracy has hit Himalayan heights. According to consultancy Gfk, 43% of Spaniards pirate movies.

    Now this is public service.

    BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC’s download plans get backing

    TV shows like Doctor Who are expected to be available for download later this year after the BBC Trust gave initial approval to the BBC’s on-demand plans.

    Under the proposals, viewers will be able to watch popular programmes online or download them to a home computer up to a week after they are broadcast.

    But the trust imposed tough conditions on classical music, which could stop a repeat of the BBC’s Beethoven podcasts.

    Full approval of the on-demand plans will follow a two-month consultation.

    BBC NEWS | Business |

    YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”.

    The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.

    Speaking to the BBC after the session, he declined to
    give further details, saying that YouTube was still working out the
    technology and processes involved – both for the rewards system and the
    video clip advertising system.

    Levi’s Turns to Suing Its Rivals – New York Times

    United States Patent and Trademark No. 1,139,254 is not much to look at: a pentagon surrounding a childlike drawing of a seagull in flight.

    But the design for a Levi’s pocket, first used 133 years ago, has become the biggest legal battleground in American fashion.

    Levi
    Strauss claims that legions of competitors have stolen its signature
    denim stitches — two intersecting arcs and a cloth label — for their
    own pockets, slapping them on the seats of high-priced, hip-hugging
    jeans that have soared in popularity.

    So Levi’s is becoming a
    leader in a new arena: lawsuits. The company, once the undisputed king
    of denim and now a case study in missed opportunities, has emerged as
    the most litigious in the apparel industry when it comes to trademark
    infringement lawsuits, firing off nearly 100 against its competitors
    since 2001. That’s far more than General Motors, Walt Disney or Nike, according to an analysis by research firm Thomson West.

    International Herald Tribune

    “FIFA 07,” a video game for soccer fans, costs around €50 in Europe. In South Korea, five million players have downloaded the online version free — yet Electronic Arts, the publisher, is cheering them on.

    Realizing that it was impossible to sell “FIFA Online” in a country where piracy is rampant, Electronic Arts started giving away the game last spring. Once the players were hooked, the company offered for sale ways to gain an edge on opponents; extending the career of a star player, for instance, costs less than $1. Since May, Electronic Arts has sold 700,000 of these enhancements.

    In the traditional media world, as well, readers
    are turning to free: According to the World Association of Newspapers
    in Paris, at least 28 million free newspapers are distributed every day
    around the world, 19 million of them in Europe, where the total has
    doubled over the past three years. And digital over-the-air TV systems
    like Freeview in Britain now offer dozens of channels, providing an
    alternative to pay-TV for consumers who refuse to limit themselves to a
    handful of viewing options.

    Qtrax will resemble illegal file-sharing
    networks, using peer-to-peer technology to help users find and download
    music. But executives hope that the promise of a licensed, safe and
    legitimate service will attract users weaned on digital music but
    unwilling to pay for it.

    “There’s a whole generation of consumers who think free music is a
    birthright,” said Allan Klepfisz, chief executive of Brilliant
    Technologies, which is developing Qtrax. “The closer you are with a
    business model to current consumer behavior, the better your chance of
    success.”

    Worldwide, media spending by consumers and
    business users still handily outstrips advertising, by $944 billion to
    $385 billion, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. But growth in
    consumer spending on media in the United States has slowed sharply in
    the past few years, analysts say.

    Worldwide, PricewaterhouseCoopers expects spending on high-speed
    Internet access, which delivers digitized media, to increase faster
    than outlays on content that traditionally comes with a price tag —
    books, magazines, cinema tickets and CDs, for instance. Global consumer
    spending on Internet access is expected to rise at an 11.9 percent
    annual rate through 2010, according to the firm.

    To be sure, consumer spending on media is not
    going to disappear anytime soon. According to a survey of 130 media
    executives from around the world, conducted recently by Accenture, 31
    percent forecast that subscription models would be the dominant
    business model in five years’ time, with 25 percent opting for
    so-called pay-per-play funding.

    But 37 percent said advertiser financing would be the predominant business model in five years’ time.

    Can media companies adapt to a world in which “free is the new paid”?

    p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site

    Totte Alm asks: The Pirate
    bay is defending file sharing with the argument that artists makes
    their money on live performances, and actors on ticket sales, and that
    home users and poor students never would buy Photoshop anyway. But,
    what is forgotten is that file sharing in reality strikes against the
    small developer.

    An example: A small company
    have pu down a lot of time and borrowed money to develop a program that
    resembles Photoshop. It can’t do everything that Photoshop can do, but
    the price is low, say 400 to 700 SEK ($57-100). The market exists –
    everyone thinks that Photoshop is too expensive.

    The
    problem for the user is: why pay 70 bucks when you can have Photoshop
    for free via the Pirate Bay, and Photoshop is much better?

    As
    you can see, piracy strikes against the small developers, not the big
    ones. The small die and the big gets bigger. Have you ever concidered
    that you help big business by evaporating their competition?

    Gottfrid:
    Again, The Pirate Bay as a unit has no opinions in any question. My
    personal opinion is that you’ll have to find other ways to make money
    than selling licenses. I have this background myself, so I am aware of
    the problems. One have to find ways around them instead of calling for
    more police and harder controlling methods.

    Peter: Perhaps that market model doesn’t work anymore? One have to look at other alternatives.

    via New York Times

    Last week, a new contender entered the field with a radically

    different approach to Internet movies: Netflix.


    The company has done away with expiration

    dates, copy protection and multi-megabyte downloads. That’s because

    you don’t actually download any of Netflix’s movies; instead, they

    “stream” in real time from the Internet to your computer.

    Netflix has also done away with per-movie fees — in fact, there are

    no additional fees for watching movies online at all. Instead, the

    Netflix service is free if you’re already a Netflix DVD-by-mail

    subscriber.

    The hours of movie watching you get each month depends on which

    DVD-by-mail plan you have. You get one hour of online movies per

    dollar of your monthly fee. So if you pay $6 a month (for the

    one-DVD-at-a-time plan), you can watch six hours of movies online; if

    you pay $18 (for the three-DVD plan), you can gorge yourself on 18

    hours of online movies. And so on.

    Guardian Unlimited Technology

    The BBC is in advanced negotiations with Google to make programming available via a branded channel on the search giant’s video-sharing site, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.

    It is understood that BBC executives are keen that the deal, which involves BBC Worldwide and the BBC, is eventually expanded to include putting content on Google-owned YouTube.

    BBC Worldwide is understood to be looking at commercial options for the agreement, such as a share on contextual advertising that will run alongside BBC content.

    Several large broadcasters in the US have similar arrangements with
    Google-owned YouTube including CBS, which claimed 200,000 extra viewers
    for The Late Show with David Letterman after clips from the show were
    posted on the video-sharing website.

    p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site

    Chinese Internet search engine Baidu.com and Big 4 Organized Music member EMI say they’re going to run an advertising-supported online music streaming service in China.

    “The agreement will see Chinese repertoire from EMI’s Typhoon Music being made available for streaming, at no charge, to all users of Baidu,” says ChinaTechNews.

    Baidu will feature an ‘EMI Music Zone’ in its music search channel, “which will legally stream all of EMI Music’s Chinese repertoire, including recordings from artists such as Jolin Tsai, Stephanie Sun, David Tao, Sandy Lam and Richie Ren,” says the story, adding:

    “While consumers listen to the music for free they will be exposed to Internet advertising, and EMI and Baidu will share the revenue generated by the advertising, a lackluster approach to monetizing and promoting digital music in China.”

    FT.com / Companies / Media & internet – Online ads ‘shun user-generated video’

    User-generated video sites such as YouTube and MySpace will earn only a fraction of the advertising budgets available for more professional online programming, according to a study.

    Such sites’ advertising revenues stand to grow from $200m last year to $875m by 2010, but this will account for just 15 per cent of the total online video advertising budget, according to Screen Digest, the media analysis company.

    The report echoes News Corp’s admission that its Fox movie studio
    and television content will be more important than home-made clips for
    capturing online video advertising, a market which Screen Digest
    expects to expand from $1.1bn last year to $6.2bn by 2010.

    Peter
    Chernin, News Corp president said at a recent conference: “We do not
    see big advertisers advertising with YouTube or MySpace. They have
    concerns about the content … and there is no scarcity value for the
    content … so there is very little ability to monetise video
    advertising on user-generated video.”

    Digital World Norway Outlaws iTunes

    Norway has […] declare[d] that Apple’s iTunes store is illegal under Norwegian law.

    The map has closed, there is nowhere left to go.

    There is no utopia, not a radical, not even a moderate one. There are no more drugs left to experiment with, no more New Left ideas of egalitarianism,  there are no more untested marxist theories, no undiscovered Eastern religions.

    Our parents have tried it all and they have failed miserably. All utopias, all ideas, all dissenting voices, all the radical otherness, all their best efforts have led us here.

    Where our ideal of uttermost freedom manifests itself in the unrestricted right to share the latest hollywood movies. Where our most courageous secretly mix two songs together.

    and MS is still the biggest company in the world.
    See the network effect in practice.

    BetaNews

    Microsoft disclosed Monday that over one in five Windows installations were deemed non-genuine through the company’s Windows Genuine Advantage program, which requires users to validate their operating system before downloading updates from the company.

    Since WGA launched in July 2005, over 512 million users have attempted to validate their copy of Windows, Microsoft said. Of those, the non-genuine rate was 22.3 percent. 56,000 reports have been made by customers of counterfeit software, which grants that user a free replacement copy of Windows.

    While high, that number is less than the average software piracy rate around the world, according to the Business Software Alliance. The BSA reports that 35 percent of the world’s software is pirated (22 percent in North America specifically), and a Yankee Group study noted that 55 percent of organizations report instances of counterfeit or pirated software.

    Now this is insane and clearly against the interest of the artists.

    The insanely great songs Apple won’t let you hear. – By Paul Collins – Slate Magazine

    JAPAN SALES ONLY

    “Killer Tune” is just that: It sounds like the Killers, and it is killer. It’s one of the most popular iTunes downloads for the band Straightener—but you haven’t heard it.

    You can’t hear it.

    The iTunes Music Store has a secret hiding in plain sight: Log out of your home account in the page’s upper-right corner, switch the country setting at the bottom of the page to Japan, and you’re dropped down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of great Japanese bands that you’ve never even heard of. And they’re nowhere to be found on iTunes U.S. You can listen to 30-second song teasers on the Japanese site, but if you try purchasing “Killer Tune”—or any other tune—from iTunes Japan with your U.S. credit card, you’ll get turned away: Your gaijin money’s no good there.

    And there are 20 more countries where iTunes users can lurk among
    the samples, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, and
    Australia. They won’t let you buy their songs, either. You can find an
    EP of Scottish sensations the Fratellis at iTunes United States, for
    instance, but their hit glam singalong “Chelsea Dagger” is in nearly
    every country except the United States. (Their randy burlesque video for it, naturally, is all over YouTube.)

    Even
    so, window-shopping in the Japan store remains particularly
    instructive. Why? Because variable pricing—a label demand that Apple
    loudly and successfully fought off
    in other countries—has quietly appeared there in the form of 150- and
    200-yen songs. Whether “Killer Tune” gets the success it deserves or
    not, someday we might all be turning Japanese.

    Study: At Least 25 Million Americans Pirate Movies

    Roughly 25 million Americans — or 18 percent of the U.S. online population — have illegally downloaded a full-length movie, a study released Wednesday asserts.

    In a study of 2,600 Americans polled via telephone and online, Digital Life America, a unit of Solutions Research Group, found that 32 million Americans had downloaded a movie at some point in the past.

    Of that number, 80 percent of those users — or 25.6 million Americans
    — exclusively used peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, the vast majority
    of which have typically been used for exchanging copyrighted files. The
    number of regular file-sharing users doubled between 2005 and 2006, the
    study found.

    “It’s all inclusive but as we note a few lines down, 80 percent of
    downloaders use only P2P,” said Kaan Yigit, the director of the study,
    in an email Wednesday night. “CinemaNow!, MovieLink, Amazon Unbox are
    miniscule at this point – iTunes accounts for bulk of whatever legal
    downloads there is.”
    The study’s authors didn’t clarify whether “downloaded” implied illegal
    downloads or participation in legal services such as CinemaNow! Some
    file-sharing sites, such as BitTorrent.org, have also signed deals with
    movie houses for legal distribution of licensed films. The authors of
    the study did not respond to a request for clarification by post time.

    The perspective is that users simply don’t care, or believe, that that
    the studios are being hurt by piracy, the self-funded study found. The
    survey revealed that 78 percent of those surveyed found that physcially
    stealing a DVD from a store was a serious offense, but only 40 percent
    believed copying the movie digital also merited a serious offense. The
    study pointed out that those surveyed described an example of a
    “serious offense” as parking in a fire lane.

    “There is a Robin Hood effect — most people perceive celebrities and
    studios to be rich already and as a result don’t think of movie
    downloading as a big deal,” Yigit said, in a statement. “The current
    crop of ‘download to own’ movie services and the new ones coming into
    the market will need to offer greater flexibility of use, selection and
    low prices to convert the current users to their services — otherwise
    file-sharing will continue to thrive.”

    The study also found:

    • A typical movie downloader is 29 years of age; 63 percent of all downloaders are male, and 37 percent are female.
    • A downloader typically has 16 full-length movies stored on his PC.
    • Of those surveyed, 56 percent watched a DVD on a PC at some
      point, while 29 percent watched a DVD on a PC in the last month. About
      25 percent have watched a streaming TV show on their PC.

    The study’s authors estimated their error rates at plus or minus 2.4 percent.

    An oldie but goodie. I just don’t want t loose it.

    CNN.com – Web sites change prices based on customers’ habits – Jun 24, 2005

    According to a recent study, many consumers are unaware that price discrimination occurs over the Internet. But apparently, it does.

    First it was “Rip! Mix! and Burn!”

    Now it is simply just “Burn!” It is the second time in a few weeks when an artist is caught “red-handed” using, remixing, appropriating another artist’s work. Last December Shepard Fairey aka Obey was blamed for borrowing an image from the public domain, now rapper Timbaland is caught “stealing” from another artist.
    What’s disturbing is not the cases themselves. Anyone with an average visual literacy knows that Fairey works from whatever he finds and places his works back to the urban visual fabric. Also the name Timbaland that plays with the brand Timberland hints a tendency to borrow. These people do what they are supposed to do: low-level cultural recycling. (I don’t mean this as something negative or worthless. On the contrary: without maggots the whole food-chain would collapse. Inspiration works in mysterious ways.)

    What’s disturbing is how the public discussions around these news assess such artistic practices. I do not know those people who participate on these fora. Based on the nicknames and the quality of the arguments it seems many of them are very young and inexperienced. Despite (or rather because?) of this, they seem to be confident using arguments that echo the rhetoric and arguments of RIAA lawyers rather than the arguments of remix culture advocates or artists from Duchamp to George Clinton.
    I am afraid that the digital collage-culture, the read-write culture Lessig talks about is endangered not by the direct actions of the content industries, but by their indirect effect on how the next generation thinks about such issues. IP lawsuits get wide coverage in the mainstream media, and as the YouTube download statistics show in the online networks as well. I can only wonder if the cross-referential, inter-textual nature of culture -when it gets mentioned in art history classes or R&B magazines- is also as strong a signal. In courts aesthetic arguments or artistic tradition have less weight than legal arguments, and even if they do get considered, fair use victories, decisions on the scope of fair quotation (Thx Aniko!) get much less popular attention than piracy cases. What news, what kind of pressures shape the minds and norms of the ne(x)t generation? Is everyone of them, who now cry thief, innocent in downloading copyrighted material from the net, using downloaded pictures in their school papers, using cracked software? And if -as I suspect- they aren’t, what kind of standards are consolidating right before our eyes?

    Skimming through the thousands of posts it seems that the most serious accusation or rap, the most uncool thing to do is to rip-off another artist. The rip-off can be financial, it can mean the lack of giving proper credits or it can mean not asking for permission. It is associated with a lack of creativity and originality on one hand and exploitation on the other. What is originality, what is creativity? What does “standing on the shoulder of giants” really mean? This debate is at least three centuries old and no end of it can be seen. I do not know if either giving credit, asking for permission or sharing revenues could or should be universal norms. But I am sure that these norms should not apply only to those who are financially successful.

    Few arguments from this rich debate enter into the popular discourse, the judgment seem to come more from the gut than from anything else. But gut-reactions are reflexes not reflected upon, imprinted by repeated stimuli (think Pavlov). Bhattacharjee et al. may not have been able to show strong causal connection between legal threats and the level of file-sharing in their article (Bhattacharjee Sudip, Gopal Ram D, Lertwachara Kaveepan, Marsden James R. (2006): Impact Of Legal Threats On Online Music Sharing Activity: An Analysis Of Music Industry Legal Actions, The Journal of Law and Economics, vol. XLIX), but there may be an effect after all, even if a more subtle one and reaching not necessarily the desired aim. Instead of curbing file-sharing it changes how we think about the rules governing creative expression.

    If mix, and remix, appropriation, quotation, hommage, collage and all the rest -call it the individualization of the commonplace- becomes uncool, guess what we are left with. Originality? Guess again. 

    Advertising Age – MediaWorks – How Many? 289 Out at Time Inc.

    Time Inc., the country’s largest magazine publisher, spent the morning telling hundreds of staffers their jobs were being eliminated — in its latest and largest yet round of staff cuts — for the company’s good.

    “As you all know, the past year has been a time of transition at Time Inc.,” said Chairman-CEO Ann S. Moore in a midday memo to staff. “While we continue to invest in our core magazines, we are also focused on transforming our work force and broadening our digital capabilities in order to become a truly multiplatform publisher.

    New World Notes: FIGHTING THE FRONT

    The first night I arrived at the protest against the Second Life headquarters of Front National, the far right French political party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, it was ringed on all sides by protesters with signs to wave and statements to distribute. By the second night I came (this was late last week), the conflict had become more literal, for many Residents had armed themselves. Multi-colored explosions and constant gunfire shredded the air of Porcupine, a shopping island which FN had inexplicably picked for the site of their virtual world HQ, in December.

    The server lag from so many people throwing up so much gunfire slows the battle to a slow motion firefight, but I manage to wade up to TonTonCarton Yue, who is strafing the FN building with a chaingun usually associated with an AC-130 gunship, than a political protest.

    “Can I ask,” I begin, “why are you shooting?”
    “Because I hate Front National,” Yue tells me simply.
    “If you use violence, doesn’t that reduce you to their level?”
    “I don’t know,” Yue answers, after awhile. “I don’t care. FN equals violence.”

    And having offered that axiom, he returns his aim to the enemy, and unleashes another barrage.

    MP3.com: DJ Drama arrested in RIAA piracy sting

    A police SWAT team and antipiracy agents from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) raided the Atlanta-based Aphilliates Music Group office and Gangsta Grillz studio, arresting mix tape specialist Drama and his partner DJ Don Cannon. Authorities told Atlanta’s Fox 5 News that they confiscated more than 81,000 mix tape CDs, several computers, recording equipment, and four cars, among other items. Drama, real name Tyree Simmons, and DJ Don Cannon, spent the night in Fulton County Jail. The raid occurred under the Rackeetering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, and Drama and Cannon could face felony charges.

    I doubt that SWAT team is needed against djs. They are either not only DJs ora something is really fucked up.

    Yahoo! News

    Global digital music sales almost doubled in 2006 to around $2 billion, or 10 percent of all sales, but have not yet reached the industry’s “holy grail” of offsetting the fall in CD sales, a trade organization said.

    Independent Online Edition > Business News

    The music industry opened up a new front in the war on online music piracy yesterday, threatening to sue internet service providers that allow customers to illegally share copyrighted tracks over their networks.

    The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, said it would take action against internet companies that carry vast amounts of illegally shared files over their networks. It stressed that it would prefer not to pursue such a strategy and is keen to work in partnership with internet providers.

    John Kennedy, the chairman of the IFPI, said he had been frustrated by internet companies that have not acted against customers involved in illegal activity. He warned that litigation against ISPs would be instigated “in weeks rather than months”. Barney Wragg, the head of EMI’s digital music division, said the industry had been left “with no other option” but to pursue ISPs in the courts.

    The Splintered Mind: Still More Data on the Theft of Ethics Books

    Last month, I noted that ethics books are more likely to be stolen than non-ethics books in philosophy (looking at a large sample of recent ethics and non-ethics books from leading academic libraries). Missing books as a percentage of those off shelf were 8.7% for ethics, 6.9% for non-ethics, for an odds ratio of 1.25 to 1. However, I noted three concerns about these data that required further analysis. I’ve now done the further analysis.

    I am preparing for a meeting with Howard Rheingold, and on his site I have found this article. It is relaitvely old (hahaha: it was written in 2004), but it is new in the sense that it frames the question of piracy not as a legal or economic problem but a cultural one.

    Ian Condry:Cultures of Music Piracy: An Ethnographic Comparison of the US and Japan

    I am buffled not by the simplicity of such an idea, but the lack of it in current discourse. Condry compares US and Japanese attitudes towards copying and notes:

    “What is striking is that the contrast is less one of ‘Japanese culture’ being different

    from ‘American culture’ but that American and Japanese fans share many

    attitudes, while the responses of the Japanese business community differs

    markedly from those in the US.”

    “Taruishi and others in the music business place at least some of blame for
    consumer copying on the recording industry for styles of promotion that
    encourage thinking of music primarily as a commercial item. In 1990s Japan, he
    explained, record companies relied heavily on promoting songs through tie-ups
    with television commercials and prime time dramas. They focused on hit songs,
    rather than developing fan relationships with artists and groups. Taruishi argues
    that such practices taught fans that music is simply a commodity, not a piece of
    the soul of an artist or group, and so fans had little compunction against simply
    copying music CDs, whether from friends or rental shops.
    In situations where the connection between artists and fans is viewed as
    more direct, people will buy.”

    “So Japan offers several lessons. Eliminate p2p and you still won’t
    eliminate unauthorized copying. Marketing practices may be partly to blame for
    fans’ willingness to copy music. Hits can be generated many ways, even without
    major label promotion. Businesses have other options besides fierce copyright
    enforcement. Manga and anime have flourished in the context of lax legal
    responses. Japan, with its rental CD shops, karaoke boxes, and a soon-to-bebooming
    market in ‘ring tunes’ (CD quality songs for ringing cell phones), shows
    that possible futures for media businesses are various. US record companies
    may be fighting the wrong battles.”

    “In the fall 2003, I started asking students a new question: Is there some music you would always
    pay for? Most students said yes. They mentioned indie artists, or artists from
    their hometown, whom they know ‘need the money.’ Some students identified
    major groups ‘with a solid track record of good albums.’ Other students
    mentioned entire genres of music, notably, jazz and classical music, because ‘they
    stand the test of time,’ and because they are not adequately supported by major
    record companies.”

    See my writing on the substitutability of cultural goods for similar arguments. 

    foxtrot.jpg

    Senators aim to restrict Net, satellite radio recording | CNET News.com

    “New radio services are allowing users to do more than simply listen to music,” Feinstein said in a statement. “What was once a passive listening experience has turned into a forum where users can record, manipulate, collect and create personalized music libraries.”

    So


    Satellite and Internet radio services would be required to restrict
    listeners’ ability to record and play back individual songs, under new
    legislation introduced this week in the U.S. Senate.

    this is what the Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act, or
    Perform Act, propses, reintroduced Thursday by Sens. Dianne Feinstein
    (D-Calif.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and Lamar
    Alexander (R-Tenn.).

    this is insane.

    Index – Tech – Nem adja fel a ProArt

    Szinger András ügyvéd, az Artisjus (a ProArt egyik tagszervezete) jogásza szerint is a precedens értékű ítélet hiánya a legfőbb problémájuk per pillanat a fájlcserélők elleni harcban. Ők mindent megtettek, hogy “mondja már ki végre a magyar bíróság, hogy a fájlcsere illegális”, a büntetőügyek azonban eddig nem jutottak el bírói szakba, bár még van folyamatban lévő eljárás, melyben ez várható. Az eredménytelenséget részben annak tulajdonítja, hogy a Diablo hub elleni nyomozást megszüntető ügyészség álláspontja – a szabad felhasználásra történő hivatkozás – “totálisan téves”, másrészt elismeri, hogy “a jogalkalmazók szerint talán nem a büntetőjog a legmegfelelőbb eszköz a probléma kezelésére”.

    Büntetőjogilag ugyanis jövedelemszerzést, vagy vagyoni hátrányt (elmaradt hasznot) is kellett volna bizonyítani, ez azonban annak ellenére sem sikerült, hogy az Artisjus által felkért szakértő jogvédett műveket megosztó felhasználókat azonosított (IP-cím alapján) a Diablo hub nevű fájlcsereközponton. Az ügyészség azonban eljárásjogi hiba miatt nem vette figyelembe a feljelentő által benyújtott szakvéleményt, így a vagyoni hátrány bizonyítása egyelőre elmaradt, de a pótmagánvádat az Artisjus ki fogja egészíteni a szükséges adatokkal.

    The New York Times has an excellent article on the different views on mash-up culture:

    Did you miss Eminem’s hit movie “8 Mile”? You’re in luck: Many of its rap battles and other major scenes are available for viewing on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google. Indeed, until recently, the entire film was there, broken up into 12 nine-minute chunks to get around YouTube’s ban on longer clips.

    An 18-year-old YouTube user calling himself Yosickoyo posted the movie six months ago. He declined to give his real name, but said in an e-mail message that he had made the film available as a favor to others who had shared movies. “I just want to thank them by uploading a movie that I have,” he wrote.

    NBC Universal, whose Universal Pictures distributed “8 Mile” in 2002,
    did not appreciate the gesture. The company asked YouTube to take down
    the clips after it learned of them from a reporter.

    “I think studios will sue if they don’t get a licensing deal they like,” said Jessica Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan
    Law School. “My guess is if I were a movie studio, getting a cut of the
    money is more profitable than shutting it down. But it’s complicated,
    very complicated, and it’s only going to get worse.”

    No one knows exactly how much Hollywood-derived content is uploaded to
    the site without the studios’ consent, but academics and media
    executives estimate it could be anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent.

    The studios are happy to have some of their content on YouTube. Marc
    Shmuger, chairman of Universal Pictures, said that for each new
    release, Universal’s marketing team sends out a digital “tool kit” to
    sites like YouTube with studio-approved graphics, clips, sound effects
    and music videos that can be shared.

    Mr. Shmuger said the studios need to embrace sites like YouTube because
    they are the future of movie marketing. “If you want to be involved in
    the cultural debate, you have to allow consumers to be more actively
    involved,” he said. “That’s a different world order which we are not
    used to.”

    Already, several major music companies, including Universal Music
    Group, once a corporate sibling to Universal Pictures but now owned by Vivendi,
    have forged agreements with YouTube, which makes its money from
    advertising, that allows music to be played in videos for a fee.

    “We don’t want to kill this,” said Larry Kenswil, a Universal Music executive. “We see this as a new source of revenue for us.”

    “I don’t consider any of this stuff piracy,” said Professor Litman of
    the University of Michigan. “Folks are taking snippets and making them
    their own.”

    Ron Wheeler, a senior vice president of content protection at Fox
    Entertainment Group, said that even though Fox was not being paid for
    the right to use the “Napoleon Dynamite” clips, the company had not
    asked that the video be taken down.

    “We are not in the business of just saying no, but we do consider it unauthorized use,” Mr. Wheeler said.

    Brian Grazer,
    a producer of “8 Mile,” said some of the mashups he had seen were
    “pretty hip.” But he said he, too, viewed them as a form of piracy: “It
    bothers me artistically. Here’s this thing where you have no control;
    they are chopping it up and putting your memories in a blender.”

    The Directors Guild of America is already taking a hard line. The guild’s president, Michael Apted,
    said in a statement that he and his fellow directors would challenge
    the unauthorized use of any work. “We will aggressively protect our
    members’ creative and economic rights,” he said.

    Mr. Cotton, the NBC Universal lawyer, said that the YouTube
    removal-request game could continue for only so long. “Sand is running
    out of the hourglass,” he said. “Companies aren’t prepared to sit by
    and not let this be addressed.”

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    eMarketer.com – Illegal Video Downloads Outpace Legal Downloads Four to One

    According to the NPD Group, among US households with members who regularly use the Internet, 8% (six million households) downloaded at least one digital video file from a P2P service for free in the third quarter of 2006, compared with 2% of households that downloaded a paid video file.

    Free, and often illegal, video downloads are outpacing paid video downloads by four to one.

    Nearly 60% of the video files downloaded from P2P sites were adult film content, while 20% were TV show content and 5% were mainstream movie content.

    Technorati Tags: ,

    FCC proposal could end payola probe

    WASHINGTON — FCC commissioners are mulling a staff proposal that could resolve the agency’s investigation into payola allegations between the record labels and major radio broadcasters, according to industry and government sources. While details of the Enforcement Bureau’s proposal were sketchy, sources said that radio station groups would be required to set aside a certain amount of airtime for music produced independently. The radio groups also would agree to a code of conduct and an education program, the sources said. As part of the deal, the radio broadcasters would not admit to any wrongdoing.

    The interesting thing is that when payola first emerged it was used by independents to promote a genre not carried by the majors then: rock’n’roll. Payola was a tool to crack the majors’ grip on the distribution channels. I wonder if p2p and CC distribution is the new way to crack the majors’ (who how own all the then independents) grip on the marketing and distribution channels.

    Technorati Tags: ,

    Buy Sealand? Is it possible?


    ACFI is a group of people working for the peoples right to it’s Internets. We have made progress in
    Ladonia and are now working on the Micronation of Sealand.

    Recently it was made clear that this country is for sale. To make sure the owners will be kopimistic and that the country won’t be governed by people that do not care about it’s future, we have come up with a plan.

    This is what http://buysealand.com/ sais about the plans buying Sealand, a sovereign piece of land in the North Sea.

    But there are no more white spots on the map. Autonomy in the sense Hakim Bey describes is not a geographical notion. Pirate utopias are not designed to maintain themselves in the long run: there is no such thing as radical and uncompromising independence, separation from the rest of the world.

    There is though guerrilla warfare, temporary autonomy, hit and run independence. But you need more than a bunch of 12 years old, who have not read The Lord of the Flies to achieve that…

    p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site

    “The new site will offer all of Universal’s classical and jazz releases, including classic imprints such as Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Verve and Impulse, running to 125,000 tracks taken from nearly 8,000 CDs,”

    “Clare Nash, who heads the classics and jazz unit’s new media business,
    said the company decided to enter the market after industry research
    showed digital stores were not providing high enough quality download
    files and suitable search engines,” says Reuters.

    “So they’re getting there and have the right idea. They just need to
    drop the price, get rid of the DRM, offer alternate encodings and
    digitise their whole back catalogue.”

    Technorati Tags: , , , ,

    powered by performancing firefox

    Buy Sealand? Is it possible?

    ACFI is a group of people working for the peoples right to it’s Internets. We have made progress in Ladonia and are now working on the Micronation of Sealand.

    Recently it was made clear that this country is for sale. To make sure the owners will be kopimistic and that the country won’t be governed by people that do not care about it’s future, we have come up with a plan.

    This is what http://buysealand.com/sais about the plans buying Sealand, a sovereign piece of land in the North Sea.

    But there are no more white spots on the map. Autonomy in the sense Hakim Bey describes  is not a geographical notion. Pirate utopias are not designed to maintain themselves in the long run: there is no such thing as radical and uncompromising independence, separation from the rest of the world.

    There is though guerrilla warfare, temporary autonomy, hit and run independence. But you need more than a bunch of 12 years old, who have not read The Lord of the Flies to achieve that…

    via tech.blorge.com

    The news that the British BBC plans to make hundreds of episodes of
    its popular British television programs available on a file-sharing
    network has three separate stories behind it.

    The first is the BBC has done a deal between the commercial arm of
    the company, BBC Worldwide, and the Java-based BitTorrent client
    technological firm, Azureus. The file sharing means that users of
    Azureus` Zudeo software in the United States can legally download
    titles, such as ‘Little Britain.’

    This coincides with the second pieve of news which is that the BBC,
    which is paid for by compulsory subscription, is not getting a rise
    next year. Indeed, it is getting a slightly less money if you allow for
    inflation.

    Many critics – Richard Ingrams in The Independent leading the charge – have asked why ANY money should be given to the BBC.

    Good point.

    p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site

    1. Torrentspy.com (Alexa rank: 176)

    2. Mininova.org (Alexa rank: 207)

    3. ThePirateBay.org (Alexa rank: 291)

    2006: Year in Music: It Was Free Cuz I Stole It (Seattle Weekly)

    Now is a bad time to be a giant music corporation, but ethically challenged music fans couldn’t ask for better days. Bootlegging has always been about catering directly to the fans, and the Internet breeds the best bootleggers yet: bigger and stronger and faster than ever before, the better to handle the demands of 10 million file sharers trading a billion and a half songs daily.

    It’s clear now that the CD-R bent the CD over and the MP3 player finished it off, and although the industry is still in shock, smaller and more agile labels are already accepting the inevitable and locking in a vinyl/digital-only production schedule, then using merch like T-shirts—low production cost, high sale price, lots of options to ratchet up collectibility—to plug their revenue gaps.

    Since file sharing is permanent enough now that you can buy $19-per-year lawsuit insurance, it’s time to acknowledge the bright side. Out-of-print doesn’t mean anything anymore. If you can learn about it, you can listen to it, and if the record company doesn’t want to reissue it, you can probably find it without even having to stand up. The romance is gone but the music is cheap, accessible, and instant—that’s the music industry of the future, brought to you now by Russian MP3 pirates, obsessive genre bloggers, and criminals selling albums off a blanket on the street. Highlights of a year of unfair shares:

    Philadelphia Inquirer | 12/22/2006 | Music dies at Tower on Broad St.

    Amid the holiday rush, Tower Records’ Center City store went out of business yesterday, two months after the once-revered chain was acquired for liquidation.

    Not all record stores are suffering equally. Many local emporiums, like
    hip-hop- and R&B-heavy Armand’s Records in Center City, and
    WXPN-centric Main Street Music in Manayunk, are struggling to get by.
    Others, like wide-ranging a.k.a. music in Old City and Repo’s South
    Street store, which specializes in indie rock, are thriving.

    Though downloading is inexorably eating into CD sales, “it still
    only makes up about 5 or 6 percent of the business,” said Billboard
    magazine’s Geoff Mayfield. He blames Tower’s demise equally on “lowball
    pricing from mass merchants,” meaning stores like Best Buy, Target and
    Wal-Mart. Those stores often sell new releases for as little as $9.99
    to lure Jay-Z or U2 fans who might also pick up a digital camera or a
    washing machine.

    [see the same problem on the video rental and retail market from a few days ago.]

    “It’s a struggle,” said Ben-Moyal, whose second-floor Chestnut
    Street store was all but empty one afternoon this week. Business is
    down 70 percent over the last few years, he says, partly due to a new
    computer program, the Serato Scratch Live, that lets DJs use MP3 files
    instead of the vinyl LPs that were the backbone of his business.

    Store owners face a laundry list of obstacles. There’s a music-sharing culture in which 2.8 billion
    ready-to-burn blank CDs were sold in 2006, according to the Consumer
    Electronics Association, compared with about 588 million CDs of
    recorded music. There’s competition from the likes of Amazon.com for
    baby boomers who are too busy or intimidated to venture into stores.

    Another approach that works at independent record stores, Donio said, is “the High Fidelity model, where it’s more about the music culture in the store.”

    That’s the strategy of Amoeba Records, the three-store mini-chain on
    the West Coast, whose stores offer such a vast selection of new and
    used CDs that they are regarded as a Mecca to music-lovers. Co-owner
    Marc Weinstein calls his customers “culture hounds” – as good a term as
    any for the customers at a.k.a. on Second Street, where business this
    week was buzzing.

    “We really try to carry a vast array of different types of music,
    and try to be as completist as possible,” said a.k.a.’s Mike Hoffman, a
    former Third Street Jazz employee who carries 35,000 titles in his Old
    City store. He said business is up three percent this year. “We really
    cater to music heads.”

    Studios OK technology for movie downloads – Yahoo! News

    Hollywood studios have approved a new technology and licensing arrangement that should remove a major obstacle consumers now face with burning movies they buy digitally over the Internet onto a DVD that will play everywhere.

    The lock, known as “content scrambling system,” or CSS, is backed by
    the studios, TV networks and other content creators and comes standard
    on prerecorded DVDs today. All DVD players come equipped with a key
    that fits the lock and allows for playback.

    With Qflix — and its studio-backed copy-protection system — consumers should have more options. But they’ll need new blank DVDs and compatible DVD burners to use it.

    The system can also be used in retail kiosks, which could hold hundreds of thousands of older films and TV shows for which studios don’t see a huge market. Customers could pick a film, TV episode or an entire season’s worth of shows and have them transferred to DVD on the spot.

    Isn’t this the same CSS system that was broken by DVD Jon?
    I don’t quite get it. The studios are happy to announce to support a DRM known to be failed and agree to use it widely? Isn’t this a hidden admission of defeat? Or this is a last attempt to milk a dying format, the DVD?

    Marketplace: The end of musicals?

    Lloyd Webber has three hit shows running in London, including his version of the Sound of Music.

    But he warns the sound in the seven West End theatres he owns could become inaudible. The wireless mics his productions rely on could get too expensive to run.

    Britain’s telecom regulator is to blame, he says. The regulator is planning to auction off to the highest bidder the airwaves used by theatres and concert venues.

    A cell phone company with deep pockets is likely to win. The fees could then soar and the theatres could be priced out.

    The regulator refuses to listen to the growing chorus of disapproval. Lloyd Webber warns the West End could fall silent, .that the end of Musical Theatre in Britain is nigh.

    I am being mean now, but this is interesting.

    This is a great talk, much different from anything i have heard from him so far. as he gets more and more pissed off, so he gets more radical. 🙂

    AT&T Plans Push in Wireless, Ads – WSJ.com

    AT&T Inc., which became the world’s largest telecom company by closing the $86 billion acquisition of BellSouth Corp., will aggressively push new wireless services to corporate customers and consumers, and make advertising a key revenue stream, according to Chairman and Chief Executive Edward E. Whitacre Jr.

    With full control of cellphone operator Cingular Wireless, formerly a joint-venture with BellSouth, the San Antonio-based phone company will begin selling AT&T-branded wireless services to its large pool of corporate phone and Internet customers, allowing it to offer discounts for bundles that were impossible when Cingular was a separate entity. AT&T corporate users will be able to access their files and desktops remotely, whether they are plugged into a land-line Internet connection or connected to the Web wirelessly.
    [Edward Whitacre Jr]

    Consumers will have a choice of signing up for a new package of cellphone and Internet service rather than just the traditional bundle of land-line phone and Internet service, the company says. Until now AT&T had worried about cannibalizing its land-line phone business. AT&T has also been testing cellphones that can run on Wi-Fi networks when at home, letting consumers save money on their cellphone bills and potentially get better reception indoors.

    “The biggest asset we bought here was Cingular,” said Mr. Whitacre. “We’re about to become a company with wireless at its heart.”

    AT&T also will begin selling advertising on cellphones, television and its Internet-access service this year, allowing advertisers to reach consumers across multiple platforms with a single operator. Advertisers will be able to buy spots for TV and broadband beginning early this year, with wireless ads following suit later this year. The advertising business could generate several billion dollars in revenue per year in the next five years, the company says.

    Movie Group Claims Win in Chinese Piracy – Breaking – Technology – smh.com.au

    A Beijing court has ordered the popular Chinese Web portal
    Sohu.com to pay $140,000 in damages for distributing Hollywood
    movies online without permission, the movie industry’s trade group
    said Friday.

    China is regarded as the world’s leading source of illegally copied movies, software and other goods, despite repeated government promises to stamp out the underground industry. The MPA blames piracy in China for costing U.S. studios $244 million in lost box office revenues last year.

    The group says Chinese regulators are encouraging a market for pirated movies by allowing only a few dozen foreign titles per year for theatrical release. It said five of the 10 movies cited in its lawsuit against Sohu were not released theatrically in China.

    Battle of Britain: Piracy, pricing key DVD issues

    LONDON — Price and piracy once again dominated the U.K. home entertainment scene this year, with both issues raising hackles throughout the industry as 2006 draws to a close.

    For instance, the major supermarkets here are using DVDs as loss leaders — offering such hot new releases as “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” for less than £10 ($19.60).

    Gennaro Castaldo, head of communications at leading U.K. specialist entertainment retailer HMV described the supermarkets’ actions as being “like a cuckoo in the nest that works against the best interests of the industry and other retailers. I can’t think of a thing the supermarkets do in a positive way to develop and sustain the industry.”

    He adds that specialists such as HMV have “almost written off the blockbuster releases as revenue earners” because of supermarket pricing and have been forced to concentrate even more on deep catalogs.

    [poor, poor retailers being forced to concentrate on deep catalogs. i can’t feel enough sorry for them. and even there they have to compete with bastards like amazon and other e-tailers. maybe they should be forced out of business as well, not just the supermarkets.]

    “Giving it away below cost also damages the aspiration to collect DVDs because consumers perceive it as an almost throwaway product,” Castaldo said.

    Advertisement

    Castaldo argues that, far from benefiting the consumer, the cumulative effect of this sort of price-cutting is putting specialist retailers at risk and “damaging the diversity of the retail landscape in towns.”

    [this is bullshit. supermarkets take the blockbusters, and the rest needs to find its own niche, with its special supply. specialist retailers should be flourishing, shouldn’t they?]

    While supermarket pricing on new releases has drawn gasps of pain from specialist home entertainment retailers and distributors alike, some industry leaders, like Universal Pictures International Entertainment president Eddie Cunningham, believe there isn’t much more room for prices to fall — on catalog titles at least.

    “But to be honest, I’ve been saying that for 4-5 years,” he explains. “I take a little bit of consolation in the fact that most people must be looking at the £5 catalog price point and saying if they move to £4 they will need a third more volume just to stand still.”

    Unofficial estimates suggest that if December retail sales match those of 2005, the U.K. business will see a sell-through volume of about 222 million units. The problem is that the overall value of those sales has fallen roughly 7% thanks to the proliferation of cheap chart releases.

    Most distributors and specialist retailers seem at a loss as to what to do to counter the plummeting prices. Some point to the proliferation of giveaway DVDs attached to newspapers as a contributing factor,

    [so the studios and other copyright owners selling stuff to magazines cheap enough so they can give it free to consumers. so what we have here? it is called competition my friends, competition. retailers have to compete. finally. thanks god.]

    saying that it sends consumers the message that DVDs are virtually free.

    Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, which will release “Casino Royale” next year on DVD, is rumored to be contemplating a particularly high dealer price for the hugely successful Bond movie in a bid to combat price-cutting.

    But, for many in the industry, the major issue facing the business is still piracy. Seasoned observers note that the issue has become much worse with the virtual elimination of the independent rental dealer, who provided the eyes and ears at local level in the fight against intellectual property theft.

    “We feel abandoned,” said John Worthington, owner of a rental store in Deal, Kent. “On the real frontline, the next person through your door could be someone telling us we are unemployed.”

    [John, try to compete. not only with pirates but with other retailers as well. Others can do it, You can do it. see how independent bookstores are doing it:http://www.warsystems.hu/?p=174 ]

    Creative Industries minister Shaun Woodward told the British Video Assn. recently that more enforcement officers was not the answer and that the movie business had to tackle the problem on a global scale. “If you only look at it in the context of the U.K., you won’t achieve the solution you want,” he told the association’s recent general meeting.

    Responded BVA director general Lavinia Carey: “Enforcement is the key for us and if we could see a lead coming from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in trying to reinvigorate the creative industries’ Intellectual Property Rights focus group or forum as it was then I think that would be extremely welcome.”

    The studios are moving to help themselves, however, with sources suggesting that Warner is leading a group of distributors who wish to significantly increase the financial commitment to fighting piracy. They argue that the losses justify the investment.

    [Everyone is whining when the status quo is upset by competing distribution channels. Get used to it and be competitive.]

    Agenzia Giornalistica Italia – News In English

    (AGI) – Rome, Dec. 30 – Computers, CD burners, cases, covers and labels ready to be printed, plus a very up-to-date archive, both on the computer and in paper version, from which customers could choose the DVDs, CDs or the PC program preferred from among thousands just put on the market. It was a bona fide “pirate” recording centre discovered by the financial police of the provincial command in an apartment on via Prenestina, not far from Porta Maggiore. Six have been arrested (3 Italians and 3 Senegalese), 20 reported, 20,000 DVDs and over 10,000 CDs sequestered. All of this was part of the operation “Roma Plus”, which was participated in by civil servants of the IFPI anti-piracy enforcement (International federation of phonographic industry) who came down for the purpose form Great Britain. The “mastermind” behind the organization was an 39-yr-old Italo-American, S.G., who owned the illegal workshop, and who daily supplied the illegal sellers with goods by using his scooter. Most of the sellers were non-Europeans who with the Christmas season coming up had to deal with a high-than-average demand. The favourite selling spots were the roads around the university and the main shopping streets. The offer was very wide-ranging (“and the quality excellent” admitted the police): among the material sequestered were, among others, 6,000 copies of the film “Commediasexy” ready to be sold, with 1,000 others to be assembled, hundreds of copies of “Natale a New York” and “Ole'”, thousands of disks which are already in the top places of the hit parade but also multimedia encyclopaedias, design and architecture software, antivirus and videogames which are very popular among those in university. (AGI) .

    Copyright vow going down the YouTube | FT business | The Australian

    YOUTUBE’S failure to complete a key piece of anti-piracy software as promised could represent a serious obstacle to efforts by Google, its new owner, to forge closer relations with the media and entertainment industry.

    The video website, the internet sensation of 2006, promised in September the software would be ready by the end of the year. Known as a content identification system, the technology is meant to make it possible to track down copyrighted music or video on YouTube, making it the first line of defence against piracy on the wildly popular website.

    YouTube’s offices were closed for the New Year holidays. While providing no further details about when the system would be made formally available, it said tests of the system had been under way with some media companies since October 2005 and the system remained on track.

    Mike McGuire, a digital media analyst at Gartner, said there was likely to be little patience for missed deadlines.

    “The technology industry really has to start living up to the media industry’s expectations,” Mr McGuire said.

    Scrooge and intellectual property rights

    Joseph E Stiglitz

    A medical prize fund could improve the financing of drug innovations

    At Christmas, we traditionally retell Dickens’s story of Scrooge, who cared more for money than for his fellow human beings. What would we think of a Scrooge who could cure diseases that blighted thousands of people’s lives but did not do so? Clearly, we would be horrified. But this has increasingly been happening in the name of economics, under the innocent sounding guise of “intellectual property rights.”

    Intellectual property differs from other property—restricting its use is inefficient as it costs nothing for another person to use it. Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, put it more poetically than modern economists (who refer to “zero marginal costs” and “non-rivalrous consumption”) when he said that knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish from the light of the first. Using knowledge to help someone does not prevent that knowledge from helping others. Intellectual property rights, however, enable one person or company to have exclusive control of the use of a particular piece of knowledge, thereby creating monopoly power. Monopolies distort the economy. Restricting the use of medical knowledge not only affects economic efficiency, but also life itself.

    We tolerate such restrictions in the belief that they might spur innovation, balancing costs against benefits. But the costs of restrictions can outweigh the benefits. It is hard to see how the patent issued by the US government for the healing properties of turmeric, which had been known for hundreds of years, stimulated research. Had the patent been enforced in India, poor people who wanted to use this compound would have had to pay royalties to the United States.

    In 1995 the Uruguay round trade negotiations concluded in the establishment of the World Trade Organization, which imposed US style intellectual property rights around the world. These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded. As generic medicines cost a fraction of their brand name counterparts, billions could no longer afford the drugs they needed. For example, a year’s treatment with a generic cocktail of AIDS drugs might cost $130 (£65; {euro}170) compared with $10 000 for the brand name version.1 Billions of people living on $2-3 a day cannot afford $10 000, though they might be able to scrape together enough for the generic drugs. And matters are getting worse. New drug regimens recommended by the World Health Organization and second line defences that need to be used as resistance to standard treatments develops can cost much more.

    Developing countries paid a high price for this agreement. But what have they received in return? Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns. The chief executive of Novartis, a drug company with a history of social responsibility, said “We have no model which would [meet] the need for new drugs in a sustainable way … You can’t expect for-profit organizations to do this on a large scale.”2

    Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way. For instance, the human genome project decoded the human genome within the target timeframe, but a few scientists managed to beat the project so they could patent genes related to breast cancer. The social value of gaining this knowledge slightly earlier was small, but the cost was enormous. Consequently the cost of testing for breast cancer vulnerability genes is high. In countries with no national health service many women with these genes will fail to be tested. In counties where governments will pay for these tests less money will be available for other public health needs.

    A medical prize fund provides an alternative. Such a fund would give large rewards for cures or vaccines for diseases like malaria that affect millions, and smaller rewards for drugs that are similar to existing ones, with perhaps slightly different side effects. The intellectual property would be available to generic drug companies. The power of competitive markets would ensure a wide distribution at the lowest possible price, unlike the current system, which uses monopoly power, with its high prices and limited usage.

    The prizes could be funded by governments in advanced industrial countries. For diseases that affect the developed world, governments are already paying as part of the health care they provide for their citizens. For diseases that affect developing countries, the funding could be part of development assistance. Money spent in this way might do as much to improve the wellbeing of people in the developing world—and even their productivity—as any other that they are given.

    The medical prize fund could be one of several ways to promote innovation in crucial diseases. The most important ideas that emerge from basic science have never been protected by patents and never should be. Most researchers are motivated by the desire to enhance understanding and help humankind. Of course money is needed, and governments must continue to provide money through research grants along with support for government research laboratories and research universities. The patent system would continue to play a part for applications for which no one offers a prize . The prize fund should complement these other methods of funding; it at least holds the promise that in the future more money will be spent on research than on advertising and marketing of drugs, and that research concentrates on diseases that matter. Importantly, the medical prize fund would ensure that we make the best possible use of whatever knowledge we acquire, rather than hoarding it and limiting usage to those who can afford it, as Scrooge might have done. It is a thought we should keep in mind this Christmas.3 4 5 6

    Joseph E Stiglitz, professor


    1 Columbia University, New York, NY 10025, USA

    jb2632@columbia.edu<!–
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    Competing interests: JES was chief economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000 and a member and then chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1997. He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001.

    References

    1. Médecins
      Sans Frontières. People not getting the treatment they need to stay
      alive. Newer AIDS drugs unaffordable and unavailable. Geneva: MSF, 29
      November 2006.
    2. Andrew J. Novartis chief in warning on cheap drugs. Financial Times 29 September 2006.
    3. Stiglitz JE. Making globalization work. New York: WW Norton, 2006.
    4. Hollis
      A. Optional rewards for new drugs for developing countries. Geneva:
      World Health Organization, 5 April 2005.
      www.who.int/entity/intellectualproperty/submissions/Submissions.AidanHollis.pdf.
    5. Pogge T. Human rights and global health: a research program. Metaphilosophy 2005;1/2(36).
    6. Love J. Submission of CPTech to IGWG. 15 November 2006. www.who.int/entity/public_hearing_phi/summary/15Nov06JamesLoveCPTech.pdf

    (Disclaimer: the article is reprinted here in full, as the BMJ archives are for subscribers only. Should the article remain in the free section, we will remove the article from this page.)

    The NPD Group: Peer-to-Peer Digital Video Downloading Outpacing Legal Alternatives Five to One

    According to The NPD Group, a leading consumer and retail information company, among U.S. households with members who regularly use the Internet, 8 percent (six million households) downloaded at least one digital video file (10MB or larger) from a P2P service for free in the third quarter of 2006. Nearly 60 percent of video files downloaded from P2P sites were adult-film content, while 20 percent was TV show content and 5 percent was mainstream movie content.

    Slyck News – The Pirate Party Ramps up for 2008

    “We gather to change laws, not break them

    We strive to use Copyright law to promote Progress

    We strive for more privacy and less invasion of it by government and private business

    We aim for a Patent system that rewards Innovation

    We work against people losing control of the devices and software they own

    Not every action conducted by each local chapter necessarily reflects the positions of the national Pirate Party.”

    The Pirate Party of the United States, based upon Sweden’s Piratpatiet,
    is seeking grass roots leadership as well as potential candidates for
    the 2008 elections.

    p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site

    p2pnet.net news interview:- Last weekend, the Swedish Pirate Party founded its youth organisation, “Young Pirates”.

    The Young Pirates have over 1000 members, and are therefore eligible to receive funding from the Swedish government. We had a chance to interview its chairman Hugi Ásgeirsson who’s 18 and lives in the northern Swedish city of Kiruna, where he’s currently on his last high-school year studying Space Science.

    Independent Online Edition > Americas

    A group of rock ‘n’ roll’s elder statesmen have launched a legal battle against the owners of a website that sells music memorabilia and rare recordings – claiming they never gave permission for the items to be sold.

    “Sagan simply doesn’t have the legal rights to exploit and profit from the extraordinary success of these musicians,” said Jeff Reeves, one of their lawyers. “This memorabilia was created in the first place for the purposes of promoting concerts and as gifts for fans and concert crew. Graham himself did not have the right to sell, reproduce or otherwise exploit these materials as a promoter, and neither does Sagan, who was not authorised to purchase these materials and who has absolutely no connection to the artists or their music.”

    I don’t see the problem creating a secondary market for memorabilia. What is going to be next? Trying to control the second hand bookstores and used CD stores?

    Yahoo! Canada News

    Several major record labels sued the operator of the Russian music website AllofMP3.com, claiming the company has been profiting by selling copies of music without their permission. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in federal court in New York against Moscow-based Mediaservices, which owns AllofMP3 and another music site, allTunes.com.

    What kind of authority a US federal court has over a Russian company?

    BBC NEWS | Technology

    Hundreds of episodes of BBC programmes will be made available on a file-sharing network for the first time, the corporation has announced.

    The move follows a deal between the commercial arm of the organisation, BBC Worldwide, and technology firm Azureus.

    The agreement means that users of Azureus’ Zudeo software in the US can download titles such as Little Britain.

    Until now, most BBC programmes found on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks have been illegal copies.

    The titles will be protected by digital rights
    management software to prevent the programmes being traded illegally on
    the internet.

    Users will also be able to link to programmes from blogs, social networks and fansites.

    No pricing structure for the BBC content on Zudeo has been revealed.

    Reuters.com:

    Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” tallied first-week sales of 10.5 million units, according to the studio, making it the biggest home video debut of any new release this year.

    The sequel, also the top box office earner of 2006, shot to No. 1 on the Nielsen VideoScan First Alert sales chart for the week ending December 10, and its draft pulled the original “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” back up to No. 9 a full three years after it was released.

    It is despite of or because of file-sharing? POTC was number 1 on p2p networks as well.

    Interfax China:

    Shanghai. December 19. INTERFAX-CHINA – Shanghai Push Sound Music & Entertainment Co. Ltd. won a case against Kuro, a mainland operator of peer-to-peer software, setting a legal precedent in China, Shanghai Push’s lawyer said.

    “This is a milestone in the online copyright field,” Rong Chao, who represented Shanghai Push, said. “The judge’s ruling didn’t solely rely on the central servers the company keeps, rather the judge made full consideration of the intentions of the company. The key point is that the copyright infringement was organized – the company charged money and its activity could be defined as active inducement.”

    However, Rong didn’t think any cases against individual users would be filed. “Individual users conducted direct copyright infringement, but due to state policy and other reasons, I don’t think it’s smart to file lawsuits against individuals.”

    Index – Tech:

    A szervert lefoglalták, az üzemeltetőt feljelentették, házkutatást tartottak nála és kihallgatták, majd amikor az eljárás bűncselekmény hiányában megszűnt, pótmagánvádat is beterjesztettek ellene. De a ProArt teljes jogi arzenálja sem volt elég a Diablo Hub nevű fájlcsereközpont kiiktatására, az ügy a hangzatos nyilatkozatok ellenére a vádemelésig sem jutott el. Az ország egyik legnagyobb fájlcserélője most rágalmazás és hamis tanúzás miatt ellenperelné a szerzői jogvédő ernyőszervezetet.

     Computer Business Review:

    According to the UK research, nearly one third of eight to 13 year olds are sharing songs on their mobiles via the Bluetooth wireless feature, but without the consent of copyright holders.

    Out of the 1,500 children surveyed, 45% said that while they didn’t currently share music, they would like to in the future.

    The Register:

    The leading DRM digital download service, Apple’s iTunes, has experienced a collapse in sales revenues this year according to analyst company Forrester Research.

    While the iTunes service saw healthy growth for much of the period, since January the monthly revenue has fallen by 65 per cent, with the average transaction size falling 17 per cent. The previous spring’s rebound wasn’t repeated this year.

    Forrester revealed some fascinating details about iTunes purchasing habits. Some 3.2 per cent of online households (around 60 per cent of the wider population) bought at least one download, and these dabblers made on average 5.6 transactions, with the median household making just three a year. The median transaction was slightly under $3.

    “iTunes sales are not cutting into CD sales,” he elaborated to us, “they’re an incremental purchase at best.

    “There’s a problem here. CD sales have fallen 20 per cent over five years. The message here is not that CD sales are coming back, the ability to obtain pirated music is now so widespread the DRM looks to consumers more like a problem than a benefit.”

    Forrester and Nielsen’s figures merely confirm that what the industry is losing in falling CD sales, it isn’t gaining in DRM downloads.

    LinuxWorld:

    Wikia Inc. plans to offer a free online application hosting service in the near future, but has no idea how it will make money from it.

    Set up by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in 2004, Wikia’s goal is to encourage the sharing of information. It hosts Web sites for free, using wiki software to let its customers and their readers edit the sites freely. Wikia asks its customers to share their content under a variety of Creative Commons or GNU licenses.

    “Open source was the beginning. Free culture is what’s happening next,” Wikia CEO Gil Penchina said Monday, announcing the company’s plans at the Le Web 3 conference in Paris on the future of social media.

    cherry picking

    Clipboard011.jpg

    Mozart’s entire musical score now free on Internet | Entertainment | Entertainment News | Reuters.com:

    The International Mozart Foundation in Salzburg, Austria has put a scholarly edition of the bound volumes of Mozart’s more than 600 works on a Web site.

    The site allows visitors to find specific symphonies, arias or even single lines of text from some 24,000 pages of music.

    “We had 45,000 hits in the first two hours…we would not have expected that,” program director Ulrich Leisinger told Reuters in a telephone interview.

    The version appearing on the Internet is a digitized copy of the “New Mozart Edition” published by Barenreiter, of Kassel, Germany.

    It is considered the “gold standard” of Mozart editions and Leisinger said Barenreiter was paid $400,000 for the digital publication rights.

    Musicians Oppose Media Consolidation: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance:

    Radio consolidation is shrinking playlists and creating a homogenized musical landscape, several singers and songwriters told the Federal Communication Commission on Monday. “Big radio is bad radio,” Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America, told FCC commissioners in the second of six public meetings nationwide. “You can drive I-40 from Knoxville to Barstow, California, and hear the same 20 songs on every country radio station.”

    IGN: RIAA Petitions Judges to Lower Artist Royalties:

    “Mechanical royalties currently are out of whack with historical and international rates,” RIAA executive VP and General Counsel Steven Marks said. “We hope the judges will restore the proper balance by reducing the rate and moving to a more flexible percentage rate structure so that record companies can continue to create the sound recordings that drive revenues for music publishers.”

    Now this sounds very much like RIAA wants to keep the artists on leash. Not only they have lost their grip on the production and distribution segment, they are now in heavy competition with other sources of revenues, that endanger their ability to control artists. Strange tactics, that is for sure.
    The story was /.-ted, there the comments were heavily in favor of the artists and against RIAA. This is a signal that those, who do not condemn p2p networks (i guess the slashdot crowd is more on the p2p side) are not automatically against the artists, they are against the music industry.

    FT.com / World / International economy – Universal, MySpace set for landmark battle:

    The legal battle brewing between Universal Music and MySpace could shape the broader commercial relationship between traditional media companies and a new generation of internet start-ups that rely on them for content.

    Mr Zittrain said that the DMCA probably favoured the user-generated sites but that their case was hardly airtight.

    “If I had to place a bet, I think they would probably pull it off. But there is plenty of room for a judge to rule on the equities,” he said.

    Content companies could also be bolstered by the Supreme Court’s ruling last year against Grokster, an online file-sharing service.

    Az Internet Archívum főhadiszállása SF Presido kerületében, egy volt katonai területből átalakított üdülő-övezetben, a volt postamester házikójában  található. Péntekenként déltől nyitott ebédet tartanak, azaz bárki odamehet és haverkodhat az archívumi dolgozókkal. Ezen a héten a nyugati part egyik legnagyobb kábítószer témájú magánkönyvtár tulajdonosa is megjelent, hogy ha lehet, szívesen digitalizáltatná, és közzétenni a negyven évnyi drog-aktivista múlt minden közzétehető (értsd: szerzői joggal már nem védett) hordalékát. Néhány gyöngyszem, ami a táskájában rejlett: Mordechai Cooke drogügyi klasszikusának, a The Seven Sisters of Sleep-nek első, dedikált kiadása, egy szintén első kiadás Harper, Olive ponyvaregényéből, a The opium smugglers of ‘Frisco, or, The crimes of a beautiful opium fiend, és néhány hasonló fajsúlyú ritkaság.

    Az Internet Archívum masszív erőforrásokat fordít arra, hogy digitalizálni tudjon speciális gyűjteményeket, magánkönyvtárakat. Mind a Google mind a Microsoft nekilátott a nagy, egyetemi könyvtárak szkennelésének, úgyhogy a digitalizálási nyomás Brewster Kahle non-profit alapítványán némileg kisebb, de a helyzet nem feltétlenül vált egyszerűbbé. A számtalan szakgyűjtemény és magánkönyvtár digitalizálása mellett nem tettek le arról, hogy olyan könyveket is digitalizáljanak, amikkel a két nagy is foglalkozik. Az ok egyszerű: a nyílt, ingyenes, szabad hozzáférést biztosító IA nem bízik a két nagyban. Nem tudni mi lesz, ha bármelyikük megszűnik, nem tudni, hogy mikor, milyen megfontolások mentén teszik fizetőssé, vagy technikailag nehezen hozzáférhetővé a public domainban levő könyveket a jövőben, és így tovább.

    Ezért aztán két helyszínen ( az UC Berkeley egyetemi könyvtárának raktárában és San Francisco belvárosában) kétszer 8 órás műszakokban kétszer két tucat ember foglalkozik a folyamatosan érkező könyvek digitalizálásával. Egy-egy műszakban a saját maguk által fejlesztett, két, tükörreflexes Canon fényképezőgépet használó rendszeren kb. 800 könyvvel végeznek.

    A következő lépés az lesz, hogy ezeket a digitalizáló állomásokat kiteszik közterekbe: múzeumokba, könyvtárakba, hogy bárki, akár egy-egy könyvet is bedigitalizálhasson, megkaphasson dvd-n.

    Germany slaps cap on fines for illegal music downloads:

    Berlin – Music company lawyers who impose huge fines for illegal music downloads are to face a cap of 50 euros (64 dollars) per case in Germany, the government in Berlin announced Friday. ‘The limitation for the first warning letter from a lawyer ensures that we don’t exaggerate in punishing copyright breaches,’ said Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries. The maximum applies to those who download music without intending to resell it. German teenagers have been keen users of online sites offering MP3 music files, many of them illegally copied. To fine the downloaders, the music industry has been using a provision of German law that allows lawyers to force wrongdoers to write apologies, and then to pay the law firm’s entire bill. In future, the law firms would only be able to charge members of the public 50 euros per incident for this service. Announcing draft legislation, Zypries said it would also increase powers to prevent product piracy, enabling German customs agents to rapidly destroy counterfeit goods that imitate famous brands.

    Russia agrees to shut down Allofmp3.com | CNET News.com:

    Russia has agreed to shut down Allofmp3.com and other music sites based in that country that the U.S. government says are offering downloads illegally.

    The nation has struck the agreement with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative as it seeks entry to the World Trade Organization. The U.S. has suggested that it would hold up Russia’s acceptance in the WTO unless leaders there took action against digital piracy.

    “Russia will take enforcement actions against the operation of Russia-based websites,” according to a press release issued November 19 by the U.S. Trade Representative. “(Russia will) investigate and prosecute companies that illegally distribute copyright works on the Internet.”

    On Wednesday, Allofmp3.com was still operating. Gretchen Hamel, a spokeswoman for Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, said that she didn’t know when the deal requires the Russian government to begin taking action.

    Allofmp3.com has denied charges of piracy by pointing out that the company is compliant with Russian copyright law. It says it is careful to pay royalties to artists via the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, which claims to represent copyright holders.

    Ongoing crisis in academic-journal pricing is the focus of recent colloquium:

    From 1986 to 2003, the unit cost of serials purchased by academic research libraries rose by 215 percent compared with a 68 percent rise in the consumer price index over the same time period, said Doug Brutlag, professor of biochemistry and current chairman of the Academic Council’s Committee on Libraries.

    There is a big discrepancy between the prices charged by for-profit and nonprofit journals, reported Ted Bergstrom, professor of economics at the University of California-Santa Barbara, in a talk titled “The Changing Economics of Scholarly Journals.” Bergstrom presented data comparing journal costs in 2004 that showed that the price-per-page of for-profit journals was about three times the average price-per-page of nonprofit journals.

    I wonder who pays who…

    Google Reaches Copyright Deal With Belgians – New York Times:

    Google, the world’s most-used Internet search engine, reached a settlement with Belgian photographers and journalists yesterday in a copyright dispute over how Google’s news service links to newspaper content.

    “We reached an agreement with Sofam and Scam that will help us make extensive use of their content,” Jessica Powell, a spokeswoman for Google, said in a phone interview yesterday. She declined to give details of the agreement or say whether it involved paying the groups for the content, and declined to say whether Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., was considering similar accords with the newspapers.

    AGORAVOX – The Citizen Media:

    Sony’s Grouper application gives users a way to share music videos with each other and, in entertainment and software cartel parlance, that’s a criminal offence not even second to murder and rape.

    The people who run Sony are “criminals” and “thieves,” says Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, to all intents and purposes.

    “In a filing with the U.S District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Grouper denied the copyright-infringement allegations and said Universal was using the lawsuit to boost a rival video-sharing site in which it has a stake,” says Reuters, going on:

    “Universal, owned by French media group Vivendi and the world’s largest music company, has been leading an aggressive drive to get paid for all uses of its works on new digital services over the Internet.”

    Newswire / Press Release: GetByMail Releases New Remote Access and File Sharing Version GetByMail 1.5 – Software | NewswireToday:

    Using GetByMail you can stay at home and have access to your office computer and vice versa simply through your e-mail account. You can get remote directory listings and tree view, download/upload files and directories, perform change dir, make dir, rename and delete operations, capture remote computer desktop screens, run remote applications, shutdown, reboot and logoff remote computer. During download/upload operations files and directories are automatically compressed and split into small pieces to assure reliable transmission. GetByMail gives you a unique ability to share files on your computer with other people simply through e-mail. It is an excellent solution if you want to share files with people who do not have access to FTP, P2P or are behind firewalls. With a help of GetByMail you can get through the firewall without any hassle. GetByMail only requires a unique e-mail address for every PC where the program is installed. No complex network configuration, no dedicated IP and no additional FTP software are required. Most popular Internet E-mail (POP3/IMAP/SMTP) and Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail configurations are supported.

    Nokia Launches a Solution to Fight the “Bit Pipe” Challenge: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance:

    To help mobile operators better manage their data traffic, Nokia  is introducing a network solution that lets operators control the use of network resources by bandwidth hungry applications such as file sharing and Voice over IP telephony — giving operators the tools to maintain better control over their networks.

    The Nokia Peer-to-peer Traffic Control is the industry’s first integrated solution to allow mobile operators to profitably manage the bandwidth available for peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, and thus balance the allocation of network resources. The centralized solution is implemented as a software upgrade to the Nokia Flexi Intelligent Service Node (ISN) and will be commercially available during the first half of 2007.

    Lost Remote TV Blog:

    It’s been a month since CBS began its partnership with YouTube, and the network has uploaded 300 videos. Since that time, the clips have racked up a total of 29.2 million views for an average of 857,000 views a day. Many of the clips are from CBS’ Late Show with David Letterman and The Late Late Show, and the network says ratings have risen 5 and 7 percent respectively since the YouTube deal began. “Although the success of these shows on YouTube is not the sole cause of the rise in television ratings, both companies believe that YouTube has brought a significant new audience of viewers to each broadcast,” reads the press release, which follows below along with a list of the top 15 clips so far…

    Google Book Search is a plagiarist’s nightmare. – By Paul Collins – Slate Magazine:

    But wait, you might ask, don’t people accidentally repeat each other’s sentences all the time? It seems to me that this should not be unusual. Yet try plugging that last sentence word by word into Google Book Search, and watch what happens.
    It: Rejected—too many hits to count
    It seems: 11,160,000 matches
    It seems to: 3,050,000
    It seems to me: 1,580,000
    It seems to me that: 844,000
    It seems to me that this: 29,700
    It seems to me that this should: 237
    It seems to me that this should not: 20
    It seems to me that this should not be: 9
    It seems to me that this should not be unusual: 0

    It seems to me that this should not be unusual is itself … unusual.

    AMAZON NOIR ~ The Big Book Crime:

    Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime – Out of court settlement UBERMORGEN.COM, PAOLO CIRIO, ALESSANDRO LUDOVICO The Bad Guys (The Amazon Noir Crew: Cirio, Lizvlx, Ludovico, Bernhard) stole copyrighted books from Amazon by using sophisticated robot-perversion technology coded by supervillain Paolo Cirio. A subliminal media fight and a covert legal dispute escalated into an online showdown withthe heist of over 3000 books at the center of the story. Lizvlx from UBERMORGEN.COM had daily shoot outs with the global mass- media,Cirio continuousely pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Ludovico and Bernhard resisted kickback- bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. The good guys (Amazon.com) won the showdown and drove off into the blistering sun with the beautiful femme fatale, the seductive and erotic massmedia.

    Professors get ‘F’ in copyright protection knowledge:

    Professors are making material available free rather than requiring students to buy $100 textbooks. While faculty members from Harvard University to the University of Pennsylvania complain of a restricted flow of ideas, publishers say they must protect $3.35 billion in annual U.S. college textbook sales. “We can’t compete with free,” says Allan Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs with the Washington-based publishers group, whose members include McGraw-Hill Cos. and Pearson Plc.

    Legal Music Services Compared:

    Music Services Compared

    MPAA sues over DVD-to-iPod service:

    After the iPod gained the ability to play videos, services sprung up that would rip your DVDs and reencode them for viewing on your iPod. Useful, but illegal in the US. The Motion Picture Association of America has decided to sue one of those DVD ripping and reeconding services. Earlier this month, Load ‘N Go Video was sued by Paramount Pictures in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit accuses Load ‘N Go Video of copyright infringement and violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Based in Boston, Load N’ Go was founded in 2005 to help consumers get video content on to their portable media players. Load N’ Go also sells iPods and DVDs, and will rip DVDs for its customers and load them on to their iPods. The customer then gets the iPod with the movies loaded on it and a copy of the DVD that she legally purchased. The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection, even for fair use purposes, so Load N’ Go’s prospects do not look good. The implications of this case are even more troubling. Not only could the MPAA sue any other companies performing similar services, but they clearly believe that they can sue you for ripping DVDs and moving the content to your iPod or other digital media player.

    File-sharing defendant says Kazaa has him covered:

    As the RIAA-shepherded file-sharing lawsuits wend their way through the courts, we have seen defendants utilizing a handful of different strategies as they fight back. A novel defense comes courtesy of Arista v. Greubel, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas. David Greubel argues that even if is found liable for copyright infringement, Arista and the other record labels are barred from recovering any damages because the of the Kazaa settlement. In his first affirmative defense to Arista’s complaint, Greubel says that the RIAA has been “fully satisfied for any liability and damages” due to his alleged conduct because of its settlement with Sharman Networks. Since the RIAA held Kazaa’s parent company liable for the infringement of Kazaa users, Greubel argues, the cartel has been fully compensated for whatever harm Greubel may have done.

    As far as I can understand from the accounts (not being sucked into the SL world myself), piracy just has been introduced to Second Life via a script or bot, that is able to copy SL assets.

    Now the economy of SL is based on users paying rent to the Linden Labs company and trying to recoup their living costs by developing and selling digital stuff that enhances  avatars: textures, digital flik-flaks, sword, whatever.

    Now this whole ecosystem is in danger because there is no more scarcity in SL life. The reactions of users are staggering: shops selling these assets closing down, protests staged. It is interesting how these people will cope with the idea of piracy in SL. Well, actually “piracy” was there before as these users were beaming rented videos to flocks of other users, and i am quite sure that many of them have not only the SL client but bittorrent on their machines, but still, when it comes to someone stealing their stuff, it gets ruff.

    Here is the reuters story.
    Here are some comments from the SL blog:

    “Has anyone been inworld lately? It’s intensely creepy:stores closing right and left, noobs freakin’ out, IMs flying fast and furious. I’ll stay offworld tonight and read a good book.”

    “I have removed my items from SLBoutique, SLExchange, and on my shop.”

    “The CopyBot is a violation. The people who take their time to create stuff for their good and other peoples good should be able to see it at their own risk. We as SL citizens should not go out to buy the CopyBot. We should work together to get rid of this CopyBot so we can keep our Businesses up and running.We will not let a CopyBot stand in our way of creating what is right for us. SO BOYCOTT THE COPYBOT!!!!!!!”

    “My favourite venue to play has closed in protest. Not only do I lose this amazing place to play for amazing people, but I am also out a good chunk of change every month.”

    “I see alot of people on here talking about piracy when it comes to movies on sl.. before you go off about that, know that those of us that have had to put hours into learning how to work sl to get products that sell so we can help maybe try and pay the rent really need to know that our products arnt being copied and sold off. Agreed, pirating movies is wrong, the people that make them need it to help pay the bills, and some of us on here need our products to help pay our bills as well. Thats the reason were in a huff about this, its because some of us cant afford to hear “It got out of our hands, OOPS””

    I’m actually not against libSL. It sounds like they do what is needed here; developing things that show weaknesses in SLs functionality, and revealing them. What I AM against is the idea that they do it by showing every noob, greifer, hacker and moron on SL how to exploit those problems and weaknesses, yet aren’t being truly held accountable for them.

    Way up at the top of this thread, someone suggested internalizing the entire project, and it sounds like a good idea. Let them do what they’re doing… just make sure they report their findings before anything gets leaked, and that someone else then gets on that exploit to remove it.

    As for the idea of opensource in a world that has so many people all at once doing different things in it? Foolishness. Opensouring should be kept to test servers at best because, due to their very nature, programmers like to innovate, and doing so always comes up with something that is uncontainable and bad in general for the place they’re playing around in, as well as the good things.

    Also, Copybot was leaving people like myself, who aren’t programmers or scripters or builders, just people who come into the game to meet friends and socialize, with the problem of paying for things that are unique, then having them copied and spread all over, which defeats the point of having them made in the first place.””This is a virtual world, coping someones product is theft/stealing. It’s not copyright infringement in the metaverse. If I go into a shop and run off with some clothes its theft. Its the real world concept in virtual terms.”

    Hello, I took great passion in creating my content spending more time in this game then I have anything in my entire life. I had created a very very profitable business. People loved my creations. I was down to nothing in my real life untill I found secondlife. Ever since then life has been getting better, slowly but surely. I even had people are blogs about me! Now the same company I stood behind through thick and thin just killed my only hope in life. Linden labs, you made my dream a reality, and you just destroyed it.

    Reporting someone who stole your content is pointless. Once 1 person gets a hold of your creation full permission, anyone and everyone now has it full permissions.

    I never expected my business to go out like this.”

    Finding the analogy with RL piracy
    “As I tell others, it is a huge overreaction on the part of content creators, to the same tune as the RIAA/MPAA make about “music/movie piracy!! ZOMG!”.

    Copyright infringement has always been against the ToS. Anyone caught doing it will be banned, and can be subject to civil and criminal penalties for doing so.

    What has changed?

    Nothing, except a bunch of folks getting their panties up around their armpits, artificially causing more of a problem than the offending application ever could represent by itself.

    Now, let’s all take a collective deep breath, and move on to more pressing concerns.

    In the meantime, if you catch people copying your stuff without your consent, REPORT THEM! If you catch people selling unauthorized copies of your stuff, REPORT THEM, and then go to http://secondlife.com/corporate/dmca.php and do your duty! The only way people get the message is when it is sent LOUD and CLEAR. Don’t equivocate, hesitate, or otherwise dilly-dally/pussyfoot around. PROTECT YOUR RIGHTS! Hell, offer a bounty for anyone reporting copyright infringement of your works which results in a banning or a successful DMCA takedown or a winning court case. Make the bounties tiered if you like!

    Complaining about the POTENTIAL of your rights being violated is ABSOLUTELY pointless. They will be, I GUARANTEE it. YOU should be prepared to fight for them, when and where it happens.”

    “I have to say… I think it is dumb how all of you people are blinded.. and all… It’s really sad, Yes it is sad that things like this exist. But how come you people all decide to use the movies here in SL and stuff like that. I am sorry but a lot of you people that are against copy bot are kind of biggots. I don’t mean all of you because I am sure not all of you watch pirated movies here in SL. But look at that, You don’t complain about that but when it comes to your own creations your right on top of it. That is kind of sad really. ”

    “And this is the 100% perfect exmaple of the bigots, one who cares about their own works being used, but not of others.”

    Arguing for proprietary technology instead of open source:

    “I would yet strongly suggest to stop all activities connected to libsecondlife. Your ownership of protocol is an enormous asset, if you can not communicate running an environment that allows business if you do not have transaction security in your protocol. If you support activity that can weaken this hard point of every system that desires an own economy, then you will appear unprofessional.

    This is not the first hassle connected to libsl, as prokofy pointed out griefers that LL permbanned seem to have used the project to even educate themselves.

    So you run Sl as a platform we users and businesses can use. We users and business people rely on the security of the platform, it’s stability and availability. If you intend to continue the libsl project and head for a client/server open source in the end, i think this now is the right point to tell us, the community that this is indeed the case.

    But if you do so, you also need to make a statement how asset and transaction security will be handled in an open source development environment. Will we see clients designed to “click and copy” every asset then? Or will this be efficiently prevented. You as company need planing security, we do so too.

    You speak of incentives that libsl gave certain sub communities of Sl users. Many of us yet had hassles like with the god mode tool, which enabled highly efficient stalking and other things. Whats a valuable feature for some is a dangerous weapon for others. Checks and balances here, if you have implemented indeed much of the security in the client, then you have to move it to the server level asap and ensure that knowledge of the protocl can not cause harm to ownership of assets.

    I really and sincerely hope, that SL moving to open source does not mean the abandonment of in system asset security. I know very well that this would be the end for the in system content creators, the small vibrant community that built sl with so much creativity. The ones who do not need that security of assets are the newcomers, the rl businesses who do not care if a milk box texture is copied and reused, who only care for a click and the rl revenue generated by using SL as sales platform for rl goods. In RL, they have somethign we cant rely on Sl now. Propper protection of property.”

    And here is the official response:

    Today I met with a large group of Residents, members of the Sellers Guild, to talk about the implications of a recently-developed LibSL product called CopyBot. CopyBot allows the user to create a replication of an object, including textures, that is fully permissive. Needless to say this product has caused tremendous worry among content creators who want to understand how its use may possibly affect their business. In particular, they are concerned about theft of their creations, and the potential for unscrupulous people to undercut their prices and essentially take away their business.

    First a caveat. Copying does not always mean theft. There can be legitimate uses for copying, just as there are on the web. As Cory has written previously, copying is not necessarily theft, and in fact nowhere in the copyright laws does the word “theft” appear. Instead, the language focuses on the idea of violating a copyright — i.e. I have an idea which I own a copyright on, and you have profited from presenting that idea as your own. You have violated my copyright.

    Merely copying something doesn’t mean that a copyright violation has occurred. The law discusses ‘fair use’, for example, as one type of copying that is not a violation. If you DO think someone has copied something you made and is violating your copyright by profiting from the copying then you do have the option of using the DMCA process to file a complaint. It’s a difficult process, but it is one that we’re willing to help enable because we agree that copying is a disincentive to creation.

    Ideally we’ll build ways that you can better identify your work as your own so that copying it is not profitable. For example, here are some ideas that we’re pursuing to help you prove your ownership of an idea or object:

    * You may have heard us talk about “first use metadata”, that is a time stamp that is attached to your creations, including uploaded textures, that shows first use. First use is an important part of being able to claim copyright ownership. This work is started, and we are committed to completing it quickly.

    * We could work to reduce how much avatar/clothing data is downloaded, so that a copy can be made of the baked texture and shape but not the pieces. We’re interested in your thoughts on that option.

    * We can reduce incentives to copying content within the system, by preserving the creator attribution such as with creative commons licensing.

    * We could create hover text which would act like a garment label does, exposing both the first use metadata and also a brand name, reducing the incentive to copy by making it obvious that copying is occurring. If your work is “signed”, and clearly you developed it first, then the person who purchases the copy is not unlike the person who buys the fake Rolex off the back of a truck. Plus the signature becomes a recognizable asset and could be coupled with a landmark as a form of advertising.

    These options allow you to prove that your creation is in fact yours, but ultimately it’s the DMCA process that provides you with the channel to protect your investment. It’s to your benefit to review the government’s rules for filing a copyright and protecting it, posted at http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html. More government-provided information on copyrights can be found here: http://www.copyright.gov.

    Copyright law is very complex, and for those of you building businesses protecting your investment will be an on-going challenge. We recognize the importance of helping you to manage your copyrights, and will make every effort to build features into the system to mitigate the negative impact of copying. Beyond that we will help you initiate the DMCA takedown process when appropriate.

    I know you will have ideas and suggestions, so please feel free to post them here. While we can’t answer every post, we will be reading your comments and taking them into account in our ongoing development efforts.”

    BBC NEWS | Entertainment 

    The past year has also seen the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace, seen by some as a great way to reach potential fans and, with unsigned acts, talent-spotters who can offer record deals. But it is easy for material to be placed online illegally – and singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, now in his 30th year in the business, has particular concerns.

    “The majority of people posting songs on to social-networking sites don’t have a record deal,” he says.

    “They’re using the site as a way of getting attention to get a deal, so often the first legal contract they’re entering into regarding their work will be through the terms and conditions of that site.

    “If we’re in a situation where sites are harvesting intellectual property rights, it almost becomes impossible to use these sites without consulting a lawyer.”


    “I reckon if they’d been around 25 years ago, it would have saved me two years of playing in dingy pubs in south London,” he says.

    “Undoubtedly Rupert Murdoch is making a lot of money selling advertising on MySpace and he’s not paying a penny for content.”

    “The supply to Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda is going to lead to the collapse of HMV as a record business,” he predicts.

    Jenner believes that the record industry has been wrong to license tracks which appear on CDs given away by magazines and newspapers.

    This signalled discs “did not have a great value – that they were incredibly cheap to make”, he says.

    “I suspect that making them cheaper is the record companies’ latest own-goal. They’re cheapening their premium product.”

    He also fears the internet is misunderstood by labels.

    “They weren’t really able to come to grips with the essential truth of the internet, which is that it’s all about sharing of files.”

    RED HERRING

    Online advertising revenues reached a new record of $4.2 billion for the third quarter of 2006, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers said Tuesday.

    The latest figure marks a 33 percent increase over online advertising sales of $3.1 billion during the same period a year earlier, and a 2 percent jump over the previous quarter.

    The increase comes, in part, thanks to the astonishing growth numbers turned in by Google. Online advertising revenues almost exclusively drive the search giant’s financial results, and the Mountain View, California company reported sales jumped 70 percent to $2.69 billion for the quarter ending

    September 30, 2006, compared with the same period a year earlier. “Online marketers have far more confidence in online advertising and they’re starting to experience the effectiveness themselves,” said Sheryl Draizen, senior vice president and general manager of the IAB.

    RED HERRING

    Lawsuits against P2P applications are old news in the peer file sharing market. So the story goes, a company gets sued, makes a few compromises to please the record industry and stays alive if it has the financial means to do so. But another application or service pops up to fill its place.

    Now some analysts think the record industry should stop suing and instead look for ways to benefit from the technology. “The major label recording business is in heaps of trouble… they’ve [spent time] building a strategy to knock down P2P that might have been better spent on some other initiatives. But they’re certainly showing no signs of moving off it,” said Joe Fleischer, CEO of media research firm Big Champagne.

    Despite being in the middle of a legal battle with the record industry, P2P service LimeWire is in talks with record labels and working on a “conversion plans for users,” said LimeWire consultant Laura Tunberg with consulting firm We Get It. She explains that LimeWire wants to give users legal purchasing options.

    “A lot of users want a legitimate product,” said Ms. Tunberg. “We believe a certain percentage of our user base will be converted, and that this is a viable business model.”

    “If you take away the free, a lot of the appeal of peer-to-peer clearly goes away,” said Mr. Mitchell. “It’s going to take some innovative and clever software development to drive the legitimate marketplace.”

    The Pine Log Online:

    In a recent nationwide survey conducted by the Business Week Research Services, 86 percent of the managers and supervisors involved considered job applicants’ downloading and file-sharing activity when making hiring decisions. In fact, just over 60 percent of hiring managers and supervisors say the employee would be fired (18 percent). 14 percent of hiring managers and 16 of supervisors report the person would be put on probation.

    The Register:

    Twenty-two people were convicted of internet piracy in Finland last week.
    A judge in Turku ordered them to pay fines and more than €420,000 in damages for copyright offences – about €19,000 each.
    All 22, some of whom are still under the age of 18, were operators or administrators of Finnish BitTorrent tracker Finreactor.
    In its ruling, the court said the administrators had intentionally created the service to violate copyright law. The court rejected the defendants’ claim that as operators of the service they were not responsible for the infringement since the content was transferred directly between the users and no infringing content was either stored or transferred through the tracker.

    The court argued that the service should be seen as a whole and the convicted defendants “were directly and essentially involved in the infringing activities”.

    Mark Mulligan – Straightening the Record:

    MP3 player owners of all types (iPods included) don’t regularly buy much digital music.

    iPod owners are actually more likely to buy digital music than other MP3 player owners

    Free online music consumption significantly outweighs paid, significantly more so for owners of non-iPod MP3 players

    Device owners are much more likely to buy CD albums online than digital albums

    via Torrentfreak:

    Back in 2004, Suprnova managed to settle itself among the 1000 most visited websites on the internet. So when the site was taken offline december 19, 2004, there was a huge gap to fill.

    Today, 6 bittorrent sites entered this top 1000 list, generating more traffic than Suprnova ever did. Sites in Alexa’s Top 1000 (rank September 26, 2006)

    # 205 Mininova
    # 218 Torrentspy
    # 387 The Piratebay
    # 439 Isohunt
    # 573 Torrentz
    # 593 Demonoid

    It doesn’t stop here. There are more sites waiting in line to enter the top 500. Currently Torrentz and Demonoid both entered the 1000 most visited sites on the internet. Both sites are rapidly growing as you can see in the graph below. They climbed from a spot somewhere around the 5000 to the top 1000 in only 6 months.

     | The Register:

    A judge in the northern city of Santander in Spain dismissed a case against an anonymous 48-year-old man who downloaded digital music from the net.

    Judge Paz Aldecoa of No. 3 Penal Court ruled that under Spanish law a person who downloads music for personal use can not be punished or branded a criminal.

    He called it “a practised behaviour where the aim is not to gain wealth but to obtain private copies”.

    The state prosecutor’s office and two music distribution associations had sought a two year sentence against the man, who downloaded songs and then allegedly offered them on a CD through email and chat rooms.
    However, there was no direct proof he made money from selling the CDs.

    Justice Minister Juan Fernando Lopéz Aguilar says Spain is drafting a new law to abolish the existing right to private copies of material.

    Fox to sell films in China to help reduce piracy – Los Angeles Times:

    News Corp.’s 20th Century Fox film group will sell movies in China through an agreement with Zoke Culture Group, the largest video distributor there, to help cut down on DVD piracy.

    Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will start selling videos including “Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties” and films such as “X-Men: The Last Stand” this month with Zoke, the News Corp. unit said Monday.

    Moviemakers such as Fox are trying to recoup some of the $1.2 billion that the Motion Picture Assn. of America estimates its members, the world’s six largest studios, lost in Asian sales last year because of piracy. Time Warner Inc. in September said it might sell movies on DVDs in China when they were released in U.S. theaters to discourage illegal copying.

    via Business Standard

    By 2009, software piracy rates will fall to 64 per cent. This implies a 10 per cent drop from the figure of 74 per cent in 2004, notes the Business Software Alliance (BSA) India committee – an industry enforcement body. Are the figures good enough?
    Globally, software piracy is a $34 billion industry with 35 per cent of the software being pirated. In the Asia-Pacific region, the figure totals $8,050 million while it amounts to $566 million in India alone, according to Microsoft. In 2006, BSA conducted over 40 raids and issued over 1,200 letters to corporates who were using pirated software.
     
    However, raids and the subsequent shutdowns of corporates can backfire. Raghu Raman, CEO, Mahindra Special Services Group notes that open source adoption is increasing in the country and such action would only further such a move.
     
    Software vendors also need to reduce the cost per deployment or look at packaging their software along with services to reduce piracy. For instance, SAP’s business model of software packaged with services or commonly known as Software As A Service (SaaS) leaves little scope for piracy. Anti-virus solution providers like Symantec and Trend Micro earlier this year made a strategic move towards adopting SaaS at all levels from enterprise to home users. IDC predicts SaaS will make up 30 per cent of the software market by 2007.
     
    Brian Campbell, Director, Genuine Software Initiative, Microsoft India, says: “The key to customer satisfaction is making the right product available at the right price.”

    Review – Technology – New York Times:

    Envisional, a company based in Britain that tracks Internet piracy, estimates that 25,000 to 30,000 pirated titles are available on the Web. The vast majority are English-language titles, although pirated German, Spanish and French books are also plentiful.

    CONTEXT – This Week in Arts and Ideas from The Moscow Times:

    For the past decade, Maxim Moshkov’s online archive Lib.ru has been the main literary resource for Russian Internet users. Free of charge and furnished mostly by readers’ contributions, its contents act as a gauge of literary popularity. According to Lib.ru’s honor system, authors maintain the right to protest against online publication and have their books withdrawn.

    http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/04/01/moshkowlost.shtml

    A Moscow court has found Maxim Moshkov, owner of the biggest and most popular Russian on-line library, lib.ru, guilty of breaching copyright law.

    The court ordered Moshkov to pay a 3,000-ruble ($107.7) fine to the plaintiff, writer Eduard Gevorkyan. The writer had initially wanted 1.5 million rubles (about $54,000) from the library owner. The court significantly decreased the fine after Moshkov explained he gains no profit from his library.

    It was the only lawsuit brought against Moshkov that has ended in success for the plaintiff. Other writers have been unable to even start their cases. However, Gevorkyan had earlier won cases against two other libraries, edu-all.ru and aldebaran.ru, that were obliged to pay 50,000 rubles each. The writer’s interests were presented by the company KM-online.

    Moshkov told the court that all the texts in his library were taken from the Internet or sent by readers. If the author disagrees with the release of his texts, Moshkov removes them. However, over 120 writers have agreed to publish their work on lib.ru. The library owner said he wrote letters to Gevorkyan asking if he would permit the publication of his texts but did not receive permission.

    Moshkov’s lawyers intend to appeal the court decision.

    Moshkov created his library in 1994. Every day over 20,000 people visit lib.ru.

    http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=4053

    How often do you receive new texts?

    On average, 10-20 texts per day.

    How much traffic does your site get per day?

    40,000 readers a day

    Do you know where people are visiting your site from?

    The audience is proportional to the diaspora of Russian-speaking internet users worldwide:
    Moscow- 20%
    Petersburg- 5%
    All of Russia together- 40%
    Former republics of the USSR- 20%
    USA + Israel + Germany- 15%

    Do you know anything about the people who send you texts?

    A few thousand people have sent me books. They live all over the world, almost from every country. Most are Russians, but there’s been Americans, Bulgarians, Polish, Portuguese, Arabs, etc.

    http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=4005

    Maksim Moshkow’s Library (also known as lib.ru), which contains approximately 40,000 e-books, both public domain and copyrighted.

    On the site it says that the library has the support of the Federal Agency of Printing and Mass Communication. What sort of support did they provide, and how did you get it?

    In the 10th year of the library [2004] the Federal Agency of Printing and Mass Communication decided to offer me help and set aside a $35,000 grant for the development of the library. In September 2005, I received that money, and now I’m spending it on modernizing the technical equipment for the site. I’m upgrading the servers, and getting OCR done on electronic texts I’d like to have in the library.

    http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=4039

    What about copyright? Do Russian writers mind that their books are on your site?

    Book circulation in Russia is steadily declining every year, and only two or three hundred authors are making money off publications. For a lot of other authors, the Internet is becoming the only way to reach readers and, for that matter, to advertise their books and attract the interest of publishers. So the majority of Russian authors have neutral or positive feelings about Internet publishing, and many of them put their books on-line themselves.

    With the growth of Internet usage, more and more authors have started to send their books to me for the library, and I had to organize a special service that would automatically put up those books. Now I have servers for the library where authors register, create their section of the library, put up their work, and communicate with readers.

    There’s already about 300 of these self-directed sections in the library. I had to make a separate server for beginning, still-unpublished authors — there’s about 19,000 of those sections and around 200,000 works.

    Has an author ever asked you to remove their books? What did you do?

    It’s happened. Since the library was created, around 20 people have gotten in touch, telling me to delete their books from the library. I deleted them, naturally. After all, this is something the author should decide — whether or not he wants to be read on the Internet or not.

    Techcrunch » Blog Archive » YouTube Going Mobile… in 14 Months?:

    Crunchgear caught an AdAge story today about YouTube founder Chad Hurley telling attendees at the OgivlyOne Digital Media Summit in New York that YouTube hopes to be able to deliver user generated short video clips to mobile devices by the end of 2007.

    Wired 13.09: Reinventing Television:

    Ben, I read something in which you talked about how network television and cable were going to become one and the same.



    Karlin: Only in the sense of perception. From a creative standpoint, there used to be this idea that network was the holy grail and that cable was where people went who couldn’t work on network. That’s the old model. And now that there’s just as many quality shows coming out of cable – on FX there’s good shows, Comedy Central has good shows, HBO … I think the audience is going to cease noticing, “Oh, that’s got the NBC logo on it.”



    Stewart: It’s the idea that the content is no longer valued by where it stands, in what neighborhood it lives. What matters is what you put out there, not its location. I think that’s what people have come to learn from the Internet – it doesn’t matter where it comes from. If it’s good, it’s good. Just because our channel is after HGTV and right before Spanish people playing soccer doesn’t make it any less valuable than something that exists in the single digits on your television set.



    Karlin: The bottom line is network television is going to have to figure out a way to produce its shows less expensively in order to survive and compete. And cable shows are going to have to figure out a way to pay people a little more, probably, as they start getting the same kind of revenue out of their shows that the networks get.

    p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site:

    The “Tape it off the Internet” project is currently in the final stages of the closed Beta program. TIOTI might very well be a realistic representation of what the future of TV will look like. The TIOTI project approach to socialize and optimize your TV Download experience. TIOTI combines great design, TV-torrent tracking, favorites, recommendations, RSS feeds, tagging, groups, wiki’s, and a lot more ‘Web 2.0? stuff.

    Hollywood Says Piracy Has Ripple Effect – washingtonpost.com:

    Given those facts, the study says, movie piracy causes a total lost output for U.S. industries of $20.5 billion per year, thwarts the creation of about 140,000 jobs and accounts for more than $800 million in lost tax revenue.

    It’s important to remember, however, that even though piracy prevents money from reaching the movie industry, those dollars probably stay in the economy, one intellectual property expert said.

    “In other words, let’s say people are forgoing paying for $6 billion in movies by downloading or consuming illegal goods but end up spending that $6 billion on iPods, computers and HDTV sets on which to watch the movies, which leads to $25 billion in job creation in the computer/software/consumer electronics field,” Jason Shultz, staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in an e-mail.

    According to the L.E.K. study, 38 percent of all movie piracy occurs on the Internet, with counterfeit DVDs accounting for the rest.

    Time Warner’s Quarterly Profit Nearly Triples – washingtonpost.com:

    In a conference call with investors today, Time Warner chief executive Richard D. Parsons and others said their strategy of changing AOL into a free service, supported by advertising, had produced a 46 percent jump in ad revenue and the successful “migration” of millions of AOL users to free accounts. They said the company was close to beginning to increase the amount of overall traffic to its Web sites — critical if its ad revenue is to continue growing.



    While overall revenue at AOL declined 3 percent, to $2 billion, for the three months that ended in September, advertising revenue increased by $151 million, to $479 million.

    via reuters



    SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 5 (Reuters) – Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) is set to begin helping customers buy advertisements in 50 U.S. newspapers in a test of how the Web search leader can extend its business into offline media, the company said on Sunday.

    Google said it has invited more than 100 advertisers already buying ads through its Web marketing system to join a three-month test of a Print Ads service that places ads in daily papers including the New York Times and Washington Post.

    If the trial is successful, Google could extend the program to hundreds of thousands of its online advertising customers, offering newspapers a broad new sales channel that could help offset an ongoing decline in classified print advertising.

    “For advertisers, it gives them access to a network of newspapers through an online interface and the ability to potentially reach a new customer base,” Google spokesman Michael Mayzel said in response to questions via e-mail.

    A year ago, Google, of Mountain View, California, began an earlier test in which it started selling print advertising in a handful of magazines, including PC Magazine. However, demand for the service was slow to take off, executives said in May.

    Mayzel contrasted the earlier magazine program to the current newspaper test by saying that, “This test is not an auction and we are not buying and reselling ad space.”

    In effect, Google is giving greater control over how ad sales are made. Advertisers log into the Google AdWords system and select newspapers and available ad space, then upload the advertising artwork. But newspaper publishers retain creative and financial control over whether to approve or reject bids.

    The advertisements will appear in 50 metropolitan newspapers, including the Boston Globe, Seattle Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Chicago Tribune, along with papers in the Gannett Co. Inc. (GCI.N: Quote, Profile, Research) newspaper chain, the Google spokesman said.

    Print advertising joins efforts by Google to expand into radio and video ads, allowing it to move beyond its Web-search marketing business that delivers pay-per-click text ads on its own site and others and accounts for the bulk of its revenue.

    Google already offers click-to-play video ads through Web sites in its ad affiliate network. It has said it plans to start a public test of its Google Audio Ads that brokers ads on radio stations by the end of this year, Mayzel said.

    During the test program, Google’s services will be free, but it plans on taking a sales commission eventually. “In the future, we will set up a revenue share model where the majority of the ad revenue will go to the publisher,” he said.

    © Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.

    Favorite old flicks online / Startup inDplay to link archives with digital world:

    Along with Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, Hearst is giving angel funding to the Redwood City startup inDplay Inc., which hopes to solve this problem. “There are libraries and libraries of these films just sitting around lying fallow,” Hearst said. “With inDplay, we hope to … (create) a place where the library owners can broker deals with customers who want to license them.”

    Interview with  Peter Jenner on The Register:



    So how long can the big labels keep up this charade?

    Earlier I was talking about the ground moving underneath the industry. At In The City people are beginning to realise they have to do something. So I think in two or three years blanket licenses will be with us in most countries.


    So it’s a fear of losing the distribution channels?

    They won’t have any control over distribution. A blanket license is a blanket non-license, really – it’s simply saying “we won’t sue you”. But if you have commercial services exploiting music, we will want to pay you more. You’re licensing the anarchy.

    It’s interesting where we’ll end up drawing the line between commercial and non-commercial, but in the end the numbers will be so huge it’ll iron itself out. Someone from England might pull in a lot of hits from Spain – but again, it doesn’t matter. I don’t then worry how they’ll pass the money to each other, but it’ll all come out in the wash.

    via cnn:

    Clipboard01.jpg

    FT.com / Technology – Microsoft in digital book deal:

    Microsoft on Tuesday took another step into Google’s terrain by announcing a deal with a digital scanning company to produce digital books.

    Kirtas Technologies, which makes high-speed scanners and the software to edit and organise books, will scan works for Microsoft’s Live Book Search Web-based application. The books will become available early next year.

    Microsoft on Tuesday announced a new partnership to scan books from Cornell University’s library. Microsoft has already agreed partnerships with the British Library and libraries at the University of California and the University of Toronto.

    via  Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com:

    Speaking last week at the Digital Home Developers Conference, Brad Hunt, the executive vice president and chief technology officer for the MPAA, conceded that many people are frustrated at having to buy multiple copies of the same content to use on different devices and that this is driving them to piracy.

    “I understand that if we frustrate the consumer, they will simply pirate the content,” he said. “The issue we face today is that consumers are buying content that uses specific DRM and that, in turn, is gradually creating a world of separate DRM systems.”

    Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | 

    “Under UK copyright law,” says Ben White, copyright and compliance manager at the British Library, “we are unable to copy for preservation purposes film or sound material that sits in our permanent collection.” A further complication is the fact that about 10% of the archive, which includes more than a million discs and 185,000 tapes, is unpublished. Much of that is known as orphan works – pieces whose owners are unknown. We know who owns When I’m 64, but who owns the archive’s recording of Nelson Mandela’s speech at the Rivonia trial?

    “We think the extra 45 years is very important,” Richard Mollet, director of public affairs for the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the industry’s trade association says, calling the 1950s a “big bang moment” for the world impact of British music. “Copyrights are the asset bases of British record companies. If we enhance the asset base, we can go on to make other, more exciting entrepreneurial investment decisions. If we increase the length of the term, we increase the value of these assets. We think they should remain in British ownership, because that’s where they came from.”

    Industry people often use the phrase “the Beatles extension” because the first Beatles recordings, owned by EMI – which has called for term extension in evidence submitted to the EU and the UK – will come out of copyright in 2012. When I’m 64 is 39 years old.

    Much of the Beatles’ catalogue was sold to Michael Jackson, who outbid McCartney for the publishing rights in 1985 and has since sold them to Sony Records. McCartney has to pay royalties to sing many of his own songs. There are plenty of other, less famous musicians whose recordings are out of print yet locked in the ownership of someone who refuses to release them.

    “Locked” is, however, a fighting word to Mollet: “We falsely hear it said that copyright equals locked up.” Not so, he insists: “It’s allowing companies to make available their back catalogues.”

    Nonetheless, even without term extension, Glenn Gould’s 1955 performance – now out of copyright -of Bach’s Goldberg Variations is still available; it was recently reissued by Sony. And there are no industry figures for what proportion of revenue comes from old material.

    “The cultural institutions are quite correctly identifying that they have film or recording stock that’s rotting away because of cost and, in some cases, ambiguity around whether it would be within the law to make preservation copies of that work,” says Paula le Dieu, managing director of the new media company Magic Lantern and former head of the BBC’s Creative Archive. “But they need to continuously be thinking about what the next problem is that they face: having made those digital copies, what access are they going to provide for the public?”

    After all, she says, “a vast, vast collection of British cultural heritage is locked away on dusty shelves, of no apparent value or not enough value that people have been prepared to make even the most basic preservation efforts with that material, and why can’t the public access that material? Preservation is not enough.”

    via MarketWatch:

    On May 24, lawyers for Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures convinced a federal judge in San Francisco to issue a subpoena requiring YouTube to turn over details about a user who uploaded dialog from the movie studio’s “Twin Towers,” according to a copy of the document.

    YouTube promptly handed over the data to Paramount, which on June 16 sued the creator of the 12-minute clip, New York City-based filmmaker Chris Moukarbel, for copyright infringement, in federal court in Washington.

    That YouTube chose to turn over the data, rather than simply remove the offending video from its site — as it did Friday when it agreed to take down 30,000 videos at the request of a group of Japanese media companies — came as a surprise to copyright experts.

    What Comes After YouTube:

    Not so long ago, such a collaboration would have been unthinkable; even today, most files downloaded using BitTorrent are illegal.

    But Warner hopes that by competing side by side it can convert at least 10% of those users to buyers. “The industry has to be willing to take chances,” says Darcy Antonellis, executive vice-president for distribution and technology operations at Warner.

    TVU networks corporation | About:

    TVU networks is a new global live TV service that enables TV Broadcasters and private individuals to broadcast TV channels to a global audiences over the Internet. TVU uses a new application-level multicasting technology (similar to peer-to-peer file sharing) that allows broadcast costs to be exponentially lower than those of today’s streaming technology.

    TVU offers a consumer service which aggregates these high-quality TV channels into a format similar to a cable service for the PC. This new service will premiere later this year. Consumers will be able to watch free live channels from around the globe as well as subscribe to pay channels and pay-per-view events. TVU networks is founded and led by a team of leading industry veterans coming from backgrounds in digital TV, Internet, software and TV programming.

    BBC NEWS | Technology | iPod fans ‘shunning iTunes store’:

    They estimate that during 2006 Europeans will spend more than 385m euros (£260m) on digital music – the majority of this spending will be on tracks from Apple’s iTunes store. However, the report into the habits of iPod users reveals that 83% of iPod owners do not buy digital music regularly. The minority, 17%, buy and download music, usually single tracks, at least once per month. On average, the study reports, only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores. The rest will be from CDs the owner of an MP3 player already has or tracks they have downloaded from file-sharing sites.

    Slyck News – iPod Sales help Apple Soar:

    Today Apple is a premier technology firm. But don’t thank the Mac, at least not entirely. According to Apple’s financial report from last quarter, the company sold over 8.7 million iPods in the last quarter. Mac sales were also impressive, with a record 1.6 million units sold. Total revenue generated by the iPod equaled $1.6 billion, while the Macs made up the difference with over $2.2 billion in sales. What about the left over billion?

    iTunes continued to played a small role in Apple’s revenue with about $452 million in sales. This represents a substantial increase of 70% from the same quarter in 2005, but is actually a drop of 1% from the 3rd quarter of this year. It’s clear from Apple’s financial report that the iTunes music store is no where near the money maker that the iPod or Mac represent. Although $452 million is hardly a number to dismiss, iPod’s dominance in the market is powered by factors other than Tunes.

    Slyck News – AllofMP3 Threatens Legal Action Against Visa and MasterCard:

    “AllofMP3 will pursue every course of action, including legal options, to reverse Visa’s and MasterCard’s decision.”

    What’s next? AllofMP3.com is not taking this situation lightly. It threatens the existence of their business model, as the reported DRM/adware option would surely spell the end of AllofMP3.com. Its likely AllofMP3.com will first attempt to settle its banishment from Visa and MasterCard through appeal. If they fail, then a legal battle is certain to erupt.

    “AllofMP3 will pursue every course of action, including legal options, to reverse Visa’s and MasterCard’s decision.”

    In Era of Blockbuster Books, One Publisher Rolls the Dice – WSJ.com:

    Mr. Sterling says he agrees that book publishing, for all its planning, remains a roll of the dice. “I still marvel that despite everything we do, we just don’t know,” he says. “It’s the wonderful thing and the agonizing thing about the business.” On Sept. 20, when the bad news about Mr. Rubenfeld’s book was coming over the transom, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave a speech to the United Nations. He held up a copy of Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance” and praised the book, which shot up the Amazon best-seller list, prompting the printing of an additional 50,000 copies to meet demand. Mr. Chomsky’s publisher: Henry Holt & Co.

    and some replies to the article
    http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008112.html

    I’ve been hearing the “publishing is becoming a winner-take-all sweepstakes” riff since I started working in the industry. It’s not true, and it’s not becoming true. I suspect it’s generated by lazy news departments that can’t be bothered to take notice of books that aren’t blockbusters, and from this conclude that blockbusters are all that matters in publishing.

    Bestsellers aren’t the whole of publishing. Every year, we publish a great many okaysellers. You guys buy them because they look interesting, or because a friend has recommended them, or because you liked another book by that author. Marketing push only goes so far.

    Free-for-all over Russian music site – Print Version – International Herald Tribune:

    Free-for-all over Russian music site By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2006 PARIS A Moscow-based Web site that the U.S. Commerce Department has branded as the world’s highest- volume online seller of pirated music announced plans Tuesday to release hundreds of thousands of albums free. Low prices and ease of use have made AllofMP3 a consumer favorite among music download sites, but the site – which claims to operate legally under Russian copyright law – faces continuing legal battles with the music industry and harsh criticism from the U.S. government. On Tuesday, the credit card company Visa International said it had suspended card service to the site, citing concerns over copyright issues. The U.S. trade representative, Susan Schwab, has warned that continued operation of the site signals a lack of respect for intellectual property law that could jeopardize Russia’s long-sought entry into the World Trade Organization. The company, which lists no telephone number on its Web site and normally declines all comment, undertook a rare public relations offensive Tuesday. Vadim Mamotin, director general of the site’s parent company, Mediaservices, spoke through a translator during an interview by telephone with the International Herald Tribune and then participated in an online chat with 59 journalists. Defiant, Mamotin maintained that the company operated legally under Russian law. “In six years of operation we have never been convicted by a Russian court or declared illegal,” Mamotin said, speaking through the translator. “Under Russian law we are 100 percent legal.” The site, which claims five million subscribers and a growth rate of 5,000 a day, remunerates artists by paying 15 percent of its revenue to a collecting agency, the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, or ROMS by its initials in Russian, Mamotin said.

    Wallflower at the Web Party – New York Times:

    JONATHAN ABRAMS was in a spot. He could take the safe bet and accept the $30 million that Google was offering him for Friendster, the social networking Web start-up he began only a year earlier, in 2002. Saying yes to Google would provide a quick and stunning payout for relatively little work and instantly place the Friendster Web site in front of hundreds of millions of users across the globe.

    Rolling Stone : Wal-Mart Wants $10 CDs:

    Getting Wal-Mart excited about carrying a record is at the top of every label’s to-do list, but it’s harder than it sounds. There is an immense cultural chasm between slick industry executives and Severson’s team of three music buyers at Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Only one of the three had ever worked in music retailing — until that person moved to a new division in August and was replaced by someone who previously bought Wal-Mart’s salty snacks.

    p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site:

    While Wal-Mart represents nearly twenty percent of major-label music sales, music represents only about two percent of Wal-Mart’s total sales.

    “If they got out of selling music, it would mean nothing to them,” the story has a label executive saying. “This keeps me awake at night.”

    That’s end of the Ars Technical excerpt, but there’s more – a lot more – in the Rolling Stone story, and the conclusion is especially interesting.

    “Major labels insist that the low prices mass retailers such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy demand are impossible for them to achieve,” it says, talking about whether or not the Big Four will ever drop their CD prices. But it has Best Buy senior vice president Gary Arnold saying,

    “The record industry needs to refine their business models, because the consumer is the ultimate arbitrator. And the consumer feels music isn’t properly priced.”

    So? So maybe WalMart can get CD prices lowered across the board, says Hannibal

    Time to cash in on the network externaly in Africa?

    via p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site:

    The Microsoft reality configuration team is getting plenty of mileage out of a shock-horror claim that 81% of computer software now in use in Africa is illegal or, put another way, it wasn’t bought from Microsoft. And this is costing governments and the high-tech industry [read Bill and the Boyz], “billions of dollars in revenue and choking growth,” say “experts” quoted by Agence France-Presse. What to do if Africa wants information technology to “help jumpstart development and reduce poverty”? Enhance and enforce intellectual property laws. And this time the BSA (Business Software Alliance), whose imaginative stats have been called into question, and of which Microsoft is a member, wasn’t pumping out the numbers. Instead, “Meeting at a recent workshop in the Kenyan capital, representatives of software companies, including United States giant Microsoft, government and media companies heard stunning piracy figures and the costs to local economies,” says AFP. The “stunning figures” of course came from Microsoft in the shape of Abed Hlatshwayo, the company’s anti-piracy manager for Eastern and Southern Africa who, says the story, claims the region is, “awash in illegal copies and downloads worth more than $12,4-billion”. Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Botswana and Kenya are named as the principal culprits and, “As a result of piracy in Africa, Microsoft lost $31 million between 2004 and 2006,” says the Angola Press, also quoting Hlatshwayo.

    Digital rights in question as business model | Tech&Sci | Technology | Reuters.com:

    “There’s been no growth this year at all,” he says. “The market has stalled.” On a month-to-month basis for this year, average monthly downloads are flat, just as they were last year, averaging around 10 million a week. Of late, average weekly downloads have slightly slipped, from 11.5 million in January to 10.7 million at the end of September. That’s after an all-time high of almost 20 million downloads the week after Christmas. According to the most recent SoundScan year-to-year figures, digital album sales through October 1 have grown 115 percent over the same period last year, while downloaded individual tracks have grown 72 percent.

    TheStar.com – Why YouTube won’t be Napster redux:

    Given these changes, what is the likelihood that a new licensed P2P model will come to the fore in the near future? Better than you might think.

    There are several such initiatives currently underway, the most advanced of which appears to be Noank. The brainchild of Terry Fisher, a Harvard law professor, the system is billed as a “digital media exchange” and is expected to launch in China sometime next year. Once operational, it will enable ten million Chinese university students to freely download music and movies with no technological restrictions. The service will be funded by a mandatory student fee (similar to a student activity fee), with 85 per cent of the proceeds distributed to participating artists and content owners. Fisher estimatesc that the service will generate $200 million (U.S.) per year from these fees alone, with additional advertising revenue possibly doubling that figure.

    via techcrunch:

    Video piracy rampant in Canada: experts:

    In fact, an astounding 20 per cent of the world’s pirated Hollywood films made by illicit recording in movie theatres come from Canada, Corriveau says. The industry is sure of that, he adds, because each print of a film is individually watermarked before being sent to a theatre, thus allowing investigators to tell precisely where a film was illegally copied.

    iTWire

    The Jobs interview, which marked the fifth anniversary of iPod, revealed that the Apple co-founder claims that if you charge the market a price it will accept for music, users will forgo illegal downloads and pay iTunes to download tracks.

    What Jobs didn’t say, however, is that the strategy only works up to a point. Of the hundreds and sometimes thousands of tracks that each iPod owner has on his or her player, on average only 20 to 25 were bought through iTunes.

    via Slyck News 

    “Despite the growth of legal online music services over the past year, free downloads outpaced online sales of music files by a wide margin among all age groups. Among respondents with Internet access, 30% said they downloaded free music tracks, compared with 11% who bought tracks online. Teenagers are the top downloaders, with 68% of those aged 15 to 20 saying they downloaded tracks for free last year and 23% making at least one online purchase.” This might be an indication that ‘try before you buy’ is something practiced by Canadians.

    Canadians are also said be be attending concerts: “Live Music Performances Two thirds of Canadians saw live music performances last year, with 46% attending one to five concerts, 11% attending six to 10, and 11% attending more than 10 concerts. Performances by Canadian artists made up approximately three quarters of all concerts attended. “Around 29% of concert attendees bought CDs or DVDs at the shows and 19% bought other concertrelated merchandise.”

    The Future of Music: New Artist Model at Work:

    Barenaked Ladies grossed $978,127.99 in revenue from intellectual property in its first week music sales from their new album, Barenaked Ladies Are Free (Desperation Records/Nettwerk Music Group). Understanding this sales figure requires looking beyond the numbers on the charts, according to Terry McBride, band manager and CEO of the Nettwerk Music. McBride notes BNL released their album on their own artist-run label, Desperation Records, in multiple formats, from physical CDs to digital albums, deluxe editions, USB flash drives, ring tones, multi-tracks for remixing, streams, etc.

    via paidContent.org:

    There’s plenty to iron out, not least the complex rights issues of movies. While new media rights are becoming a staple for new content deals, archive content is fraught with complications. “It’s the library that’s difficult because the stakeholders are many, and in some cases there’s no single owner. There might be contingent stakeholders, a guild, foreign distributors with a stake in foreign markets – it’s very difficult to get a library cleared for a new distribution model. That’s something the studios are working on now that we can’t influence.”
    Ashwin Navin Of BitTorrent

    via paidContent.org:

    “We understand now that piracy is a business model,” said Sweeney. “It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do – through quality, price and availability. We don’t like the model but we realize it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward.” That’s an incentive for Disney to make its content available easily and legally,

    Disney Co-Chair Anne Sweeney

    The changing art of measuring TV viewership – Network World:

    Nielsen Media Research cannot collect data about what people watch on handheld video-viewing gadgets or from PCs streaming network TV shows. While Nielsen estimates around 90% of TV viewing still happens in homes, it’s this burgeoning 10% that TV networks and advertisers are desperate to delve into.

     “The industry is just dehydrated for this data,” says Bob Luff, Nielsen’s CTO, who oversees the design of the technology used to collect and measure TV viewing habits in more than 40,000 Nielsen homes. “But how do you measure what’s on a video iPod at 38,000 feet on an airplane’s fold-down tray?”

    Wired News: Indie Bookstores Tackle Internet:

    Adam Brent knew his 11-year-run selling bestsellers and new releases was over when mail carriers started walking into his building to deliver books from Amazon to the tenants upstairs.

    Gary Kleiman, who owns BookBeat in the northern California community of Fairfax, decided the way to do it was to get rid of the clutter and make his store a gathering place.

    “We had 10,000 or 13,000 books in the store,” said Kleiman. “Now we have maybe 1,500.” Last fall, Kleiman gave all but a handful of his used books to charity. Then he tore down shelves and in their place put tables and chairs and a small stage for live performances. He started offering free wireless internet access. And to help convince people to take advantage of it all he got a beer and wine license.

    As for the books, most of the ones left are new and they’re confined to the perimeter walls. While he’s selling about the same number of books as he used to, new books are selling better. And his store has a lot more customers — eating, drinking and listening to music — than he did before. About 60 percent of the store’s profits come from the cafe.

    Jim Huang, who opened The Mystery Company in Carmel, Indiana, said a key to the store’s success since it opened about 3 1/2 years ago was recognizing that when it comes to mystery books, customers don’t just want a place to buy them, they want a place to talk about them.

    “We do everything we can think of to get readers to talk,” said Huang, whose store has discussion groups, readings by authors and other events.

    In Menlo Park, California, community members also came forward with funding when Kepler’s Books closed in August of 2005. Kepler’s reopened that October, thanks to more than $500,000 from 24 investors, and soon created a membership program.

    About 2,000 people joined, pumping another $196,000 into the business, said Clark Kepler, whose father founded the store in 1955.

    Encouraged as they are by some success stories around the country, bookstore owners note that the brutal business has claimed some of the nation’s most famous independent book stores, including Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California, and WordsWorth Books on Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most recently, Coliseum Books, a famed New York bookstore, announced it was closing for the second time in its 30-year history — this time for good.

    FT.com

    The time European consumers spend online has, for the first time, overtaken the hours they devote to newspapers and magazines, a study revealed.
    But the growth of new media is expanding total media consumption rather than simply cannibalising print and television. Print consumption has re-mained static at three hours a week in the past two years, as time spent online has doubled from two to four hours. Viewers are also spending more time watching television, up from 10 hours to 12 a week.

    Inside Google Book Search:

    So without further ado, here’s our list of most-viewed English language books supplied by our publisher partners for the week of September 17th through 23rd:

  • Diversity and Evolutionary Biology of Tropical Flowers
  • Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms
  • Measuring and Controlling Interest Rate and Credit Risk
  • Ultimate Healing: The Power of Compassion
  • The Holy Qur’an
  • Peterson’s Study Abroad 2006
  • Hegemony Or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance
  • Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage
  • Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense
  • Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot
  • As books go online, publishers run for cover – Technology – International Herald Tribune:

    “We are facing all the same risks as the music industry,” said Olaf Ernst, worldwide director of e-books for Springer, a German scientific publisher. “But if our reaction is like theirs was, we will have problems.”

    De Kemp said that in time, new techniques for restricting access to copyrighted books – like dicing a single work into many PDF files and using digital watermarks – could solve this problem.

    while from its competitors google:

     has asked for a list of all the books available through their rivals’ online book projects now, and what books will be added to their digital stacks through 2010.

    It also wants to see a showing of a legal right to scan each book, and the digital rights management process used to secure the book from copyright abuses.
    Google also wants to see documents about any disputes the companies have had with The Authors Guild with respect to their book projects.

    From Amazon.com, Google also wants to know the effect its book project has on Amazon’s book sales. (MarketWatch)

    the whole lawsuuit of authors against googloe seems irrelevant:

    “Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers,” said Colleen Scollans, the director of online sales for Oxford University Press.

    She declined to provide specific figures, but said that sales growth has been “significant”. Scollans estimated that 1 million customers have viewed 12,000 Oxford titles using the Google program.

    Specialty publisher Springer Science + Business reported sales growth of its backlist catalog using Google Book Search, with 99 percent of the 30,000 titles it has in the program getting viewed, including many published before 1992.

    “We suspect that Google really helps us sell more books,” said Kim Zwollo, Springer’s global director of special licensing, declining to provide specific figures because the company is privately owned.

    “Our experience has been that the revenue generated from Google has been pretty modest, whereas the Amazon program has generated more book sales,” Penguin Chief Executive John Makinson told Reuters at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week.

    Amazon.com’s search tool also allows users to scan the contents of books and browse sample pages. For Penguin’s books included in the U.S. “Search Inside” program, sales have increased by 7 percent.

    Historical warfare publisher Osprey is reaping the benefits of using both Google and Amazon to boost sales.

    “When we looked at the first six months of stats, we saw that 30 percent of Google Book Search clicks went directly to our site, while roughly 40 percent went to Amazon,” said William Shepherd, Osprey’s managing director.

    “Our sales through the Web are steadily increasing in proportion to our total sales, and we’re confident that Google Book Search will accelerate this growth.”

    Walter de Gruyter/Mouton-De Gruyter, a German publisher, said its encyclopaedia of fairy tales has been viewed 471 times since appearing in the program, with 44 percent of them clicking on the “buy this book” Google link.

    One of its many scientific titles, “Principles of Visual Anthropology”, has seen about one-quarter of the 1,206 views click on “buy this book”.

    Arty coffee-table book publisher teNeues said its online sales have doubled over the past year, attributable primarily to a fresh marketing campaign and inclusion in Google’s book search, Chief Executive Hendrik teNeues said.  (reuters)

    This goes back to my samling argument, that by providing pre-purchase sampling possibility to customers you can lower the entry barrier for buying as you lower risks associated with buying. But still, the data are pretty impressing…

    Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Amie Street Takes Innovative Music Model Into Beta:

    DRM-free music marketplace Amie Street is announcing its beta launch this morning. (Note: it looks like it’s having traffic issues today, but it is coming up if you’re patient.) We wrote about the company’s alpha launch and interesting demand-driven pricing model here in July. Songs uploaded by artists fluctuate in price according to demand over time. Users get recommendation tokens for each dollar they put into the system and get free credits if the songs they recommend rise in price. Artists receive 70% of sales proceeds. The company is angel funded, with one of the most notable angels being Robin Richards of MP3.com fame.

    NewsFactor Network:

    Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest record company, recently accused YouTube of being a serial copyright infringer. Universal CEO Doug Morris said as much during a Merrill Lynch investors’ conference speech last month. “The poster child for [user-generated media] sites are MySpace and YouTube,” said Morris, according to publicly released transcripts of the closed-door meeting. “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars.”

    Congress looks at P2P in academia:

    College students: while they excel at both binge drinking and mumps-spreading, they’re also voracious media consumers. Like the python which can distend itself to eat an entire deer, college students show an almost unlimited appetite for music and movies, so much so that they are Public Enemy no. 1 on the entertainment industry’s Most Wanted poster.

    Skype’s Venice Project Revealed:

    Skype’s Venice Project Revealed The company is combining professionally produced TV and videos with the Internet, and BusinessWeek.com got the first look

    The existence of the project was first reported on by BusinessWeek.com in July (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/24/06, “Kazaa, Skype, and now ‘The Venice Project'”). BusinessWeek.com has since received an exclusive demonstration of how the system works.

    To get started, users need to download a piece of software from the Web and install it on their PCs. When they boot up, the software will connect to the Web and open a full-screen window displaying “near high-definition” quality video images.

    While the software turns your PC screen into something that looks a lot like your TV, the capabilities go far beyond anything you’ll experience in your den. Jiggle your computer mouse, and a variety of tools appear along the edges of the screen, even as the video continues to play. At the bottom of the screen, there are controls like those on a DVD player, including stop, pause, and fast-forward, as well as a search window to find new videos. An image on the left includes a menu of preset channels. And on the right, there’s a set of interactive tools that let you share video playlists with friends or family. An image at the top of the screen identifies the channel and the name of the clip you’re watching. All of the images can be expanded by clicking on them with a mouse.

    Peer-to-Peer Executives Reflect on the Relevancy of Their Industry | Digital Media Wire:

    Peer-to-Peer Executives Reflect on the Relevancy of Their Industry

    Amanda Marks, EVP of Universal Music’s eLabs, set off an alarm among the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) executives in attendance this morning with her suggestion that P2P has become irrelevant. Not surprisingly, they disagreed.

    “What that really means,” said Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, “is, ‘We’re going to take P2P off the agenda. We’ve knocked out a lot of household names (in legal battles), and now we’ve got to focus on creating a lot of growth, because we’re probably not going to thwart people’s desire to pass stuff around on the Internet.’”

    The sense that the labels are hiding their anxiety by dismissing P2P companies as a threat was shared by others. All of the panelists agreed the playing field has changed, perhaps unfavorably, if you’re one of the major labels. Joey Patuleia, VP of Artist Relations with INTENT MediaWorks, said, “Very quickly, new artists are figuring out they don’t need labels.” One of the ideas behind social networking and P2P, as it relates to the artists who use it as a professional vehicle, is that anyone is empowered to promote themselves and their brand, to meet new people, and to spread their music on their own. The label is less necessary as a path to success.

    CJR September/October 2006 – Copyright Jungle:

    COPYRIGHT JUNGLE By Siva Vaidhyanathan

    in recent years — thanks to the ferocious mania to protect everything and the astounding political power of media companies — the basic, democratic checks and balances that ensured that copyright would not operate as an instrument of private censorship have been seriously eroded. The most endangered principle is fair use: the right to use others’ copyrighted works in a reasonable way to promote important public functions such as criticism or education. And if fair use is in danger then good journalism is also threatened. Every journalist relies on fair use every day. So journalists have a self-interest in the copyright story. And so does our society. Copyright was designed, as the Constitution declares, to “promote the progress” of knowledge and creativity. In the last thirty years we have seen this brilliant system corrupted and captured by the very industries that the old laws fostered. Yet the complexity and nuanced nature of copyright battles make it hard for nonexperts to grasp what’s at stake.

    So it’s up to journalists to push deeper into stories in which copyright plays a part. Then the real challenge begins: explaining this messy system in clear language to a curious but confused audience.

    “The Politics of Intellectual Properties”
    A Special Issue of Cultural Studies
    Edited by Ted Striphas & Kembrew McLeod

    Download entire issue in one zipped file or download individual essays below:

    (1) Ted Striphas & Kembrew McLeod, “Introduction—Strategic Improprieties: Cultural Studies, the Everyday, and the Politics of Intellectual Properties
    (2) Adrian Johns, “Intellectual Property and the Nature of Science
    (3) McKenzie Wark, “Information Wants to be Free (But is Everywhere in Chains)
    (4) Andrew Herman, Rosemary J. Coombe, & Lewis Kaye, “Your Second Life? Goodwill and the Performativity of Intellectual Properties in On-Line Games
    (5) Steve Jones, “Reality© and Virtual Reality©: When Virtual and Real Worlds Collide
    (6) Jane Gaines, “Early Cinema, Heyday of Copying: The Too Many Copies of L’arroseur arose
    (7) Gilbert B. Rodman & Cheyanne Vanderdonckt, “Music for Nothing or, I Want My MP3: The Regulation and Recirculation of Affect
    (8) David Sanjek, “Ridiculing the ‘White Bread Original’: The Politics of Parody and Preservation of Greatness in Luther Campbell a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker et al. v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.
    (9) Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, “Out of Sight and Out of Mind: On the Cultural Hegemony of Intellectual Property (Critique)
    (10) Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Afterword—Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manifesto
    (11) Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Just Say No: Negativland’s No Business

    These PDFs are reproduced with the permission of the Publisher. It has been published as a special thematic issue of Cultural Studies (Volume 20 Issues 2 and 3). Further details about Cultural Studies can be found at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09502386.asp.

    By Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel International Herald Tribune

    SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2005

    What then, do we think, can replace copyright? In the first place, a work will have to take its chances on the market on its own, without the luxurious protection offered by copyrights. After all, the first to market has a time and attention advantage.

     

    What is interesting about this approach is that this proposal strikes a fatal blow to a few cultural monopolists who, aided by copyright, use their stars, blockbusters and bestsellers to monopolize the market and siphon off attention from every other artistic work produced by artists. That is problematic in our society in which we have a great need for that pluriformity of artistic expression.

     

    How do we think this fatal blow could work? If the protective layer that copyright has to offer no longer exists, we can freely exploit all existing artistic expressions and adapt them according to our own insights. This creates an unpleasant situation for cultural monopolists, as it deprives them of the incentive to pursue their outrageous investments in movies, books, T-shirts and any other merchandise associated with a single cultural product. Why would they continue making these investments if they can no longer control the products stemming from them and exploit them unhindered?

     

    The domination of the cultural market would then be taken from the hands of the cultural monopolists, and cultural and economic competition between many artists would once again be allowed to take its course.

     

    This would offer new perspectives for many artists. They would no longer be driven from the public eye and many of them would, for the first time, be able to make a living off their work. After all, they would no longer have to challenge – and bow down to – the market dominance of cultural giants. The market would be normalized.

    via: FromGeneva: WIPO General Assembly-Impressions from Day One:

    “We are living a historical moment when, more than ever, intellectual property deserves to be the object of a debate that corresponds to the breadth and complexity that this subject has acquired. We have seen that a number of sectors of the international community has become increasingly aware of the importance of discussing intellectual property in all its aspects, particularly its effects on social and economic development, as illustrated by the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health. It is clear to us that development will only be ensured if there is a balance between intellectual property rights and obligations and the public interest, as had been highlighted by the Ambassador of Argentina, on behalf of the Group of Friends of Development. If such balance is lost we will violate the nature of knowledge itself: we should never forget Thomas Jefferson’s words, according to which there would not be any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property than ideas, whose sharing does not necessarily harm anyone….”

    orphans.jpg

    O’Reilly Radar > Oops – Only 4% of Titles Are Being Commercially Exploited:

    on November 04, 2005 In a recent post, I made the assertion that 10-20% of titles published were still in print and being commercially exploited, with another 20% clearly in the public domain, leaving approximately 60% in what I called “the twilight zone” — with no clear rights. Farhad Manjoo of Salon, who is writing a followup story, emailed me for confirmation of those numbers, and in so doing, made me realize an error in my calculations. I had taken the number supplied by the OCLC, of 10.5 million unique titles in the five libraries cooperating with the Google Print Library Project, and applied to that the recent report by Nielsen Bookscan that 1.2 million unique titles sold at least one copy in 2004, and came up with the estimate of 12% I used in that prior post, which I generously expanded to 10-20% by assuming that books that didn’t sell even one copy might still be considered “active” by some publishers.

    WSJ.com – TV Downloads May Undercut ABC Stations:

    Last Thursday morning, Apple Computer Inc. started selling an episode of the hit television series “Lost” through its iTunes Music Store for $1.99 after the show aired the night before on ABC. It marked the first time a popular show was made available for legal downloading over the Internet so quickly after its original airing. With that, Apple may have helped open a Pandora’s box for the media business. The Cupertino, Calif., company and its first TV partner — Walt Disney Co., the parent of ABC — have taken a potentially significant step in the dismantling of a decades-old system for distributing TV programming to viewers, a move that could have profound long-term consequences for broadcasters, cable systems and satellite companies if more users download shows instead of watching them the old-fashioned way.

    Apple’s deal with Disney, which also includes past and current episodes of “Desperate Housewives,” “Night Stalker” and “That’s So Raven,” is already causing waves in the TV business. On Friday, Leon Long, the president of the association representing ABC’s affiliate stations, expressed misgivings about the partnership, which was announced publicly by Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs and Disney CEO Robert Iger at an event last Wednesday. In a letter Mr. Long sent to the president of the ABC network, Alex Wallau, Mr. Long said ABC affiliates are concerned that they weren’t given an opportunity for financial participation in a new form of distributing shows that derives value through the promotion and broadcasting of affiliates.

    The letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, says: “It is both disappointing and unsettling that ABC would embark on a new — and competitive — network program distribution partnership without the fundamental courtesy of consultation” with its affiliates.

    Mr. Long, who runs the ABC affiliate WXON in Biloxi, Miss., didn’t return calls seeking comment. Mr. Wallau said he would respond to the affiliates this week but declined to comment further.

    For TV affiliates, Apple’s new offering “is really bad,” says Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. “You don’t get anything. You just get a smaller audience,” he says.

    Also concerned about the Apple-Disney partnership are the unions that represent TV-show writers, producers, directors and actors. Soon after Disney and Apple’s announcement, those unions issued a joint statement saying, “We look forward to a dialogue that ensures our members are properly compensated for this exploitation of their work.”

    Patric Verrone, president of the Writers Guild of America West, says the Apple-Disney pact would fall under current guidelines that cover video-on-demand and other forms of pay TV, which is 1.2% of the licensing fee that a production entity receives for retransmitting a TV show or movie. Apple and Disney haven’t said how they’re splitting the revenue from the $1.99 sale of TV episodes.

    It’s unlikely Apple will cause a meaningful diversion of viewers from traditional TV in the near term. For now, it offers less than a half-dozen TV series from Disney through iTunes. Shows can take more than an hour to download if users don’t have the speediest Internet connection. And the video quality is inferior if displayed on a large television, though the picture looks better on a computer or one of Apple’s new video-capable iPod portable players.

    But the partnership with Disney may be merely a first step for Apple, which said it expects to offer more TV shows. If downloading episodes over the Internet proves popular, analysts believe Apple will get permission to offer shows with better-fidelity pictures. Any success Apple has won’t go unnoticed by other online media powerhouses with expanding video initiatives like Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which could all help extend TV downloading to more viewers.

    FURTHER READING

     

     Page One: Comcast Builds a Mini Internet1
    10/13/05
     
     Video Comes to the iPod2
    10/13/05
     

    The Disney deal with Apple is part of a whirl of efforts at all major media companies to explore new means of distributing TV shows. Live broadcasts of news channels like MSNBC are now available on cellular phones. Programmers typically make hit shows available on DVD within a year after the episodes have aired on a network.

    On cable networks, there’s a growing selection of TV shows available through video-on-demand, though hit shows aren’t typically available for on-demand viewing as quickly as iTunes is putting Disney programming on the Internet. Cable giant Comcast Corp., for instance, has been trying for some time to strike a similar deal with Disney to offer “Desperate Housewives” on video-on-demand soon after it airs on the network. These talks haven’t advanced to a serious level because Comcast generally prefers to get content for video-on-demand free of charge, which it typically offers at no additional charge to subscribers beyond their regular monthly cable bills.

    The technologies are all part of the slow death of “appointment viewing,” the mantra networks lived by for decades as they sought to habituate viewers to watching shows at one time on one outlet. The growth of TiVo and other personal video recorders that make it easy for viewers to record shows and watch them when they like, while skipping through commercials, helped undermine the networks’ control over viewing habits.

    If Apple is able to assemble enough top-notch TV programming for iTunes, it could prove vexing to cable operators like Comcast. In the past, cable operators have faced pressure by politicians and consumer groups to offer individual channels “a la carte,” rather than forcing all subscribers to pay for large packages of programming that most don’t watch in their entirety.

    Apple is, in effect, giving consumers the opportunity to cherry-pick programs for $1.99 each, though analysts expect it will be years before Internet companies represent a viable alternative to cable TV. On the other hand, the iTunes video offerings could help boost demand for the high-speed cable Internet connections supplied by Comcast and others.

    TV advertisers, too, could someday be forced to adapt if Internet downloading of shows takes off, since the programs Apple is selling are commercial-free. Advertisers typically pay fees based on the size of TV audiences; if audiences shrink, they pay less. The Apple deal “is part of the changed world that we are living in,” says Peter Gardiner, a media executive at Interpublic Group’s Deutsch ad agency. “This is about finding news ways to distribute content and it’s up to us to find new ways to advertise.”

    BBC NEWS | Entertainment | File-sharing ‘not cut by courts’:

    Global court action against music file-sharers has not reduced illegal downloading, an industry report says. The level of file-sharing has remained the same for two years despite 20,000 legal cases in 17 countries. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) said it was “containing” the problem and more people were connecting to broadband. The global music industry trade body said sales of legal downloads were worth more than $1bn (£570m) in 2005. That is up from $380m (£215m) in 2004, with “significant further growth” predicted this year. DIGITAL MUSIC: STATE OF THE INDUSTRY Legal download sales pass $1bn a year A library of two million songs legally available 420 million singles downloaded in 2005 19,400 people sued for illegal song-swapping to date 335 legal online music services available 35% of illegal file-sharers have cut back* 14% of illegal file sharers have increased activity* One in three illegal file-sharers buy less music* *Jupiter survey of 3,000 people in UK, Germany and Spain Download stores now offer two million songs – double the number available a year ago – and the total number of legal downloads shot up to 420 million in 2005. IFPI chairman John Kennedy said the industry was “winning the war but we haven’t won the war” against piracy.

    Oct 20th 2005 From The Economist print edition:

     Intellectual-property protection can be good for the technology industry as well as for its customers, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here). But it requires careful handling “The granting [of] patents ‘inflames cupidity’, excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits…The principle of the law from which such consequences flow cannot be just.” The Economist may have put it rather strongly in 1851, but its disapproval of patents represented conventional wisdom at the time. A century earlier, Adam Smith had described them as necessary evils, to be handed out sparingly, and many other economists have since echoed his reservations. Patents amount to temporary monopolies on useful new inventions. In recent years intellectual property has received a lot more attention because ideas and innovations have become the most important resource, replacing land, energy and raw materials. As much as three-quarters of the value of publicly traded companies in America comes from intangible assets, up from around 40% in the early 1980s. “The economic product of the United States”, says Alan Greenspan, the chairman of America’s Federal Reserve, has become “predominantly conceptual”. Intellectual property forms part of those conceptual assets. In information technology and telecoms in particular, the role of intellectual property has changed radically. What used to be the preserve of corporate lawyers and engineers in R&D labs has been speedily embraced by the boardroom. “Intellectual-asset management” now figures as a strategic business issue. In America alone, technology licensing revenue accounts for an estimated $45 billion annually; worldwide, the figure is around $100 billion and growing fast. Technology firms are seeking more patents, expanding their scope, licensing more, litigating more and overhauling their business models around intellectual property. Yet paradoxically, as some companies batten down the hatches, other firms have found ways of making money by opening up their treasure-chest of innovation and sharing it with others. The rise of open-source software is just one example. And a new breed of companies has appeared on the periphery of today’s tech firms, acting as intellectual-property intermediaries and creating a market for ideas. Mind the keep-out signs At the same time, however, the legitimacy of many patents granted is in question as patent offices struggle with the huge increase in demand. Over the past decade the number of patent applications has nearly doubled and continues to climb. Much of that growth has been in the IT and telecoms field: in America alone, that sector’s overall share of patents has increased from around 30% in 1990 to almost 40% today. Also climbing, alas, is the number of lawsuits over patent infringement, the cost of litigation, and the amount of money plaintiffs are winning. Meanwhile, emerging technology powerhouses such as China and India are competing to move up from lower-end work such as hardware manufacturing and software coding to more sophisticated projects requiring their own innovation. This could pose serious challenges to today’s incumbents. The number of patents granted at China’s patent office has trebled in the past four years alone. “Intellectual property has become more central to the industry,” says Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems. “I don’t know if that is a function of a mature industry, or simply a confused one.” Licensed to make money The facts and figures speak for themselves. IBM alone now earns over $1 billion annually from its intellectual-property portfolio. HP’s revenue from licensing has quadrupled in less than three years, to over $200m this year. Microsoft is on course to file 3,000 patents this year, when in 1990 it received a mere five. Earlier this year it set up an entirely new corporate division to exchange its technology for cash or equity in start-up firms. Nokia has recently started licensing its technology to other firms and plans to do more. And some companies, such as ARM, a British firm that designs the blueprints for microchips used in wireless devices, do little other than create and sell intellectual property. According to a survey of business executives last year by McKinsey, a consultancy, 54% of companies saw growth in licensing of 10-50% between 2000 and 2002. Almost 75% of executives say they expect to buy as well as sell more licences over the next two to five years, and 43% expect a dramatic increase in their licensing revenue. And they think the market is still embryonic. “Many companies generate a lot of intellectual property and do not capture the value from it,” says Jay Jubas of McKinsey. The new predominance of intellectual property in technology industries is fed by a number of broader industry trends. First, IT and telecoms have become so complex that there is a greater willingness to accept the innovations of others. Gone are the days when vertically integrated firms handled every step of a product, from initial design to final sale. Now, a small army of specialist firms focus on narrow portions of technology, using intellectual-property rights to protect their inventions when they are licensed out. Second, as many new technologies quickly turn into commodities, firms increasingly rely on innovation to remain competitive. Yet the return on investment in R&D is short-lived because more people innovate at a far faster pace than before. That means margins have shrivelled, explains Ragu Gurumurthy of Adventis, an IT and telecoms consultancy. “How to recoup the cost of innovation? By licensing the technology,” he says. Third, customers are demanding “interoperability” and common standards rather than proprietary systems, which means different firms’ technologies must work together smoothly. This often requires pooling patents or cross-licensing agreements. Fourth, generating intellectual property is less capital-intensive than other aspects of the IT businesses because it relies mainly on people rather than bricks, mortar and machinery. That makes it attractive to many start-up firms. Venture capitalists often demand that firms patent technology, both to block rivals and to have assets to sell in case the firm flounders. This was particularly apparent during the internet boom in 2000. “In addition to the dotcom bubble, we had a patent bubble,” says Mark Webbink of Red Hat, a firm that sells Linux, an open-source operating system. Companies cannot simply turn their back on what is happening in intellectual property. Even if they refuse to play the game, they may be unwittingly infringing someone else’s patents because there are so many more of them around. Unless firms have patents of their own to assert so they can reach a cross-licensing agreement (often with money changing hands too), they will be in trouble. Thus many companies are acquiring large numbers of patents for purely defensive reasons, for use only to keep others’ patent threats at bay. Legally, the intellectual-property system covers four areas: copyrights (used to protect artistic, musical or literary works); trademarks (for things like brands); patents (for inventions); and an ill-defined category of “trade secrets”, for practices that are kept confidential. The system provides legal protection against counterfeiters and copiers and is vital to many fields, such as biotechnology and nanotechnology. And it matters not only to companies: universities, too, have recently become big patent holders and licensers. In IT and telecoms, the area of intellectual property that is creating particular upheaval is patents (see article). This is because patents confer a “negative right” to exclude others from using the same technique; yet information technology and telecommunications rely on “network effects”, meaning that as more people use a system, it becomes that much more useful. To make the most of such network effects, interoperability between different technologies is essential. This can be achieved either by a single standard set by a dominant firm (which tends to generate resistance from customers and competitors), or by using a mixture of different technologies, with the patent system providing legal protection for inventions. The more the merrier As the system of intellectual property evolves, the ethos seems to be that if a little is good, then more is better. That is to say, if some property rights on inventions are beneficial, then increasing those rights—in scope, strength or duration—will increase the benefits. But that is a large assumption. There is even a body of evidence to suggest it is flatly wrong. The technology industry faces the question of whether today’s abundance of patents, rather than lubricating the gears of innovation, may be clogging them up. Already, businesses are having to negotiate with other firms in order to do basic things such as reading files from different proprietary formats; and the design of new technology products now involves lawyers as well as engineers. The proliferation of patents might prove a serious encumbrance to businesses, just as travellers along the Rhine in medieval Europe were slowed down by having to pay a toll at every castle. James Boyle, a legal scholar at Duke Law School in North Carolina, claims that the current increase in intellectual-property rights represents nothing less than a second “enclosure movement”. In the first enclosures, in 18th- and 19th-century Britain, the commons—open fields used by many, belonging to all, owned by none—were fenced in, and nearly all land became private property. By analogy, the granting of property rights on ideas, to the extent it is happening today, is plundering the intellectual commons of our public domain. Others see the expansion of intellectual-property rights as hugely beneficial, leading not only to more innovation but to more openness. The standard justification for the patent system is that it provides an incentive for innovation, allowing the inventor to reap rewards by protecting the work from imitators who would otherwise hitch a free ride on the investment. But that is a simplification. The initial intention was in fact to make inventions available to the public as well. Before the 18th century, innovations were mainly kept secret through trade guilds. Sometimes monarchs capriciously granted indefinite exclusive rights to someone they favoured. Intellectual-property law was meant to remedy this by requiring the invention to be vetted by experts, limiting the right to a set period and making knowledge more widely accessible through public disclosure. Its development was part of the drive towards democracy and capitalism and the abolition of royal privileges and monopolies. In principle, patents open up innovations in two ways. First, they confer only temporary rights; once patents expire or are abandoned, the intellectual property they are designed to protect passes into the public domain. Second, they require the details of the invention to be disclosed so they can be replicated. This permits follow-on innovation, which is essential for industrial progress. More recently, as the patent system has evolved, it has been seen to provide other benefits. It leads to a degree of economic specialisation that makes business more efficient. Patents are transferable assets, and by the early 20th century they had made it possible to separate the person who makes an invention from the one who commercialises it. This recognised the fact that someone who is good at coming up with ideas is not necessarily the best person to bring those ideas to market. Such specialisation is now so common that it is taken for granted. Semiconductors, the silicon chips that power digital devices, are typically designed by specialist firms that are good at engineering, but physically produced by other firms whose expertise lies in manufacturing. As the patent system has matured and licensing has become much more widespread, these transfers are turning business relationships on their head. Some economists argue that the growth of patent transactions is establishing a proper “market for technology”. The creation of any market takes time and trouble. When such an institution develops, those outside the system feel threatened by it and condemn it. Yet just as the banking system created a market for capital and the insurance industry created a market for risk, the growth of the patent system may be creating a market for innovation. This provides a sort of “liquidity” to knowledge that did not previously exist, argue Ashish Arora, Andrea Fosfuri and Alfonso Gambardella in their 2001 book, “Markets for Technology, the Economics of Innovation and Corporate Strategy”. Seen that way, the evolution of the patent system in IT and telecoms is simply part of a broader movement to create an institutional mechanism for the transfer of ideas to fuel economic progress. Mutually assured destruction That is the context in which commercial battles are taking place in the technology industry today. The convergence of IT and telecoms is forcing companies to work together in new ways in order both to protect and exchange their technology. “How do you create a marketplace for ideas in that converged marketplace?” asks David Kaefer, director of intellectual-property licensing at Microsoft. “That is really the big question. In the past, two parties would haggle over a pound of wheat. Today, they haggle over the patent of the week.” These markets for technology are expanding. For instance, 60% of technology and telecoms firms report an increase in licensing compared with the previous decade, and 70% report fewer obstacles to reaching such agreements, according to a survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2004. “Intellectual property is the next asset class. Companies are creating a market,” says Eric Gillespie, the co-founder of ipIQ, one of the new crop of firms that are fuelling patent transactions. But when talking to executives in the technology firms themselves, the language you hear most often is that of “the arms race” and “mutually assured destruction”. Companies amass patents as much to defend themselves against attacks by their competitors as to protect their inventions. Many technology companies have recently championed reform of the patent system to deal with spuriously awarded patents, licensing extortion and massive lawsuits. “There is a broad recognition in the US that the patent system, if not reformed, will…begin to impede American competitiveness around the world,” says Bruce Sewell, general counsel of Intel, the world’s biggest chipmaker. This survey will argue that, despite such adjustment problems, the huge changes in intellectual property currently taking place in the IT sector will in time produce more efficient markets. But what do the IT firms themselves make of it all?

    In this series i collect various market data and researches that deal with the effect of file-sharing on the markets. Our first is a research from 2000:

    Wired News: Napster’s Good? Bad? Er, What…?:

    The study, compiled by the Yankelovich Partners, surveyed 16,000 Americans between the ages of 13 and 39 who say they listen to more than 10 hours of music a week and have spent at least $25 on music in the past six months. Among the findings: 59 percent of those who said they heard a certain piece of music for the first time while online ended up purchasing that music as a CD.

    BBC NEWS:

    In the midst of an explosion in digital music sales, and a flourishing new music scene, industry executives are lobbying the UK government to extend protection for sound recordings from 50 years to 95.

    This, they say, would protect existing revenue streams that bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones provide.

    The argument for the extension of copyright is often presented as win-win situation for all. If we do not extend copyright, then the Beatles’ sound recordings could be packaged and released by anybody, and the recording artists would not receive any money from future sales of the songs they recorded and made popular.

    The debate surrounding whether it is right or wrong to increase copyright term is often presented as a choice between all or nothing: either continue to protect the Beatles’ songs or give them away for nothing, and allow artists to be ripped off and the music industry to suffer.

    But this false polarisation is not very helpful. The majority of works produced in the 50s and 60s are no longer of any commercial value. Many are out of circulation and unavailable to would be listeners.

    Opportunities offered by the internet and digital distribution could allow niche providers to re-package and re-distribute old recordings, bringing previously ‘lost’ creative content to contemporary ears.

    If you walk into a bookshop you can buy a copy of Dickens’ Bleak House, or Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for about £1.50. The copyright in these works has long expired so different publishers can compete to offer them at lower prices. Consumers have benefited from the works being out of protection.

    So perhaps the expiration of copyright in sound recordings for the Beatles should not be seen as the end of music. Instead it could be the end of an era, perhaps.

    It arrives at the start of new careers for new artists producing new and exciting music.

    p2pnet.net – sais:

    In an, “unmitigated victory for the music and movie studios,” a US federal judge has ruled StreamCast Networks, “contributed to massive copyright infringement because the company developed a business model that relied on users who violated the law and it did not attempt to block the trading of copyrighted materials,” says the Los Angles Times.

    p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site:

    A Swarm of Angels is a project that aims to create the first community driven film. The Film will be written, funded and distributed over the Internet. The plan is to gather a group of 50,000 people who each contribute £25 ($47.5) to join the project. The initiator, Matt Hanson, is an award-winning filmmaker and accomplished writer who wants to break free from the traditional movie business model. Hanson was inspired by the power of social networks on the Internet. Together with his innovative ideas about the future of filmmaking taken from his book “The End of Celluloid“, this resulted in a unique project. The film will be released under a Creative Commons license, and people are free to share, remix, and, distribute the film anyway they like.

    From the BL website:

    “The current stand-off on IP threatens innovation, research and our digital heritage” – Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive, British Library

    As the Library prepares for legal deposit of digital items we are discovering that DRMs can pose a real, technical threat to our ability to conserve and give access to the nation’s creative output now and in the future. Contracts can also prevent users’ legitimate access to databases. In fact, twenty eight out of thirty licences offered to the British Library and selected randomly were found to be more restrictive than rights that currently exist within copyright law. It is of concern that, unchecked, this trend will drastically undermine public access, thus significantly undermining the strength and vitality of our creative and education sectors.

    1 Digital is not different – Fair dealing access and library privilege should apply to the digital world as is the case in the analogue one.

    2 Contracts and DRM – New, potentially restricting technologies (such as DRMs /TPMs) and contracts issued with digital works should not exceed the statutory exceptions for fair dealing access allowed for in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act.

    3 Archiving – Libraries should be allowed to make copies of sound (and film) recordings to ensure they can be preserved for posterity in the future.

    4 Term of copyright – The copyright term for sound recording rights should not be extended without empirical evidence and the needs of society as a whole being borne in mind.

    5 Orphan works – The US model of dealing with orphan works should be considered for the UK.

    6 Unpublished works – The length of copyright term for unpublished works should be retrospectively brought in line with other terms – life plus 70 years.

    p2pnet.net reports:

    A San Francisco-based company figures it’s found a way for film fans to edit copyrighted movies —– without being sued.

    How does it work?

    Cutlists are “virtual edits separated from the content itself” and with them, “users can share their creations over the Internet,” says Cuts. “The cutlists then act like a virtual remote control, automatically skipping, stopping, muting or playing comments created by the ‘Cut-Maker.’

    “Cutlists work with DVDs and multiple download video formats including Protected WMV files and even video purchased from iTunes.”

    Recording Industry vs The People sais:

    In Arista v. Lime Wire, in Manhattan federal court, Lime Wire has filed its answer and interposed counterclaims against the RIAA for antitrust violations, consumer fraud, and other misconduct. Lime Wire alleged that the RIAA’s

    goal was simple: to destroy any online music distribution service they did not own or control, or force such services to do business with them on exclusive and/or other anticompetitive terms so as to limit and ultimately control the distribution and pricing of digital music, all to the detriment of consumers. (Counterclaim, paragraph 26, page 18).

    Publishers aim for some control of search results | Tech&Sci | Internet | Reuters.com:

    Global publishers, fearing that Web search engines such as Google Inc. are encroaching on their ability to generate revenue, plan to launch an automated system for granting permission on how to use their content. Buoyed by a Belgian court ruling this week that Google was infringing on the copyright of French and German language newspapers by reproducing article snippets in search results, the publishers said on Friday they plan to start testing the service before the end of the year. “This industry-wide initiative positively answers the growing frustration of publishers, who continue to invest heavily in generating content for online dissemination and use,” said Gavin O’Reilly, chairman of the World Association of Newspapers, which is spearheading the initiative.

    Wired News: Voters Keelhaul Pirate Party:

    The Pirate Party not only failed to score the 4 percent required for a seat in Sweden’s Parliament, but appears to have missed the 1 percent that would have afforded the party state assistance with printing ballots and funding staff in the next election. Final numbers won’t be in until Wednesday the 20th, but the Pirate Party appears to be pulling .62 percent of the vote, or about 33,000 votes, according to party leader Rick Falkvinge. “This percentage may change somewhat as more districts are counted … but I don’t expect it to change to a significantly different number.”

    Variety.com – Yahoo tests ‘Right’ to MP3 downloads:

    In a first for mainstream pop music, Yahoo! will sell Jesse McCartney’s new album “Right Where You Want Me,” from Disney-owned Hollywood Records, in the unprotected MP3 format.

    “We’re trying to be realistic,” said Ken Bunt, senior VP of marketing at Hollywood Records. “Jesse’s single is already online and we haven’t put it out. Piracy happens regardless of what we do. So we’re going to see how Jesse’s album goes (as an MP3) and then decide on others going forward.”

    “We think this is a really good experiment, because copy protection is not doing anything to stop people from stealing when you can just get unprotected tracks off of a CD or get music illegally online,” said Yahoo! Music topper Dave Goldberg. “We think it’s good to make it easy for consumers to get digital music on whatever device they want and for companies like us to not be reliant on one particular technology company for how our consumers can access music.”

    Because Apple doesn’t license the copy-protection technology behind iTunes, musicstores like Yahoo!, Napster and Rhapsody that want to sell major-label music have to use Microsoft’s alternative.

    EMusic is currently the only online musicstore that sells songs in MP3 format, but it specializes in indie music and doesn’t have any major-label tracks.

    FT.com / Companies / Media & internet – Disney’s iTunes sales hit 125,000:

    Disney has sold 125,000 online film downloads less than a week after agreeing to make its titles available on Apple’s iTunes store. The sales have added about $1m in incremental revenue to the media company, according to chief executive Bob Iger, who expressed confidence that revenues from the new film venture could reach $50m in its first year. “Clearly, customers are saying to us that they want content available in multiple ways,” Mr Iger said at an investor conference sponsored by Goldman Sachs. Disney broke with other Hollywood studios when it agreed last week to make 75 titles available on iTunes at prices ranging from $9.99 to $14.99.

    p2pnet.net reports:

    Swedish media artist and film-maker Anders Weberg has a new project he’s tagged, ‘P2P Art – The aesthetics of ephemerality.’ It’s, “Art made for – and only available on – the peer to peer networks,” he says. “The original artwork is first shared by the artist until one other user has downloaded it. After that, the artwork will be available for as long as other users share it. The original file and all the material used to create it are deleted by the artist.” Weberg’s first P2P Art release is Filter, a 699MB film based on emotions he experienced when, at the beginning of the year, he woke up in the night to find his son 13-year-old son, André, unconscious on the floor.”

    Boing Boing: Amazon Unbox to customers: Eat shit and die:

    Amazon’s new video-on-demand store may sound like a good idea, but once you take a look at the “agreement” you enter into by giving them your money, that changes. The Amazon terms-of-service are among the worst I’ve ever seen, a document through which you surrender your rights to privacy, integrity of your personal data, and control over your computer, in exchange for a chance to pay near-retail cost to watch Police Academy n-1. As Ben Franklin might have said: They that can give up general purpose computers for the sake of a little eye candy deserve neither computers nor eye candy.

    Slashdot 

    Answers From Lawyers Who Defend Against RIAA Suits Posted by Roblimo on Thursday September 14, @12:39PM

    You had some excellent questions for attorneys Ty Rogers and Ray Beckerman, who maintain the Recording Industry vs The People blog. Here are their answers, verbatim, as they were sent to us by Mr. Beckerman.

    Christian Newswire:

    Scott R. McCausland, 24, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and one count of criminal copyright infringement in violation of the Family Entertainment Copyright Act. His guilty plea stems from his involvement in the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) network previously known as Elite Torrents. The plea was entered before U.S. District Court Judge Sean J. McLaughlin for the Western District of Pennsylvania. McCausland, who is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec.12, 2006, faces up to five years in prison, a fine of $250,000, and three years of supervised release.

    Piratenpartei: Partei:

    Die Piratenpartei Deutschland wurde gerade erst – am 10.09.2006 – in Berlin gegründet. Sie ist basisdemokratisch organisiert: die Gründung, Parteiprogramm und Satzung wurden für jedermann öffentlich in unserem Forum und Wiki erarbeitet. Dabei konnte jeder Inhalte hinzufügen, ändern und kritisieren. Der Werdegang der Partei ist dort archiviert. Wir laden sie ein dort zu stöbern, Gemeinsamkeiten zu entdecken und sich an der regen Diskussion zu beteiligen. Denn unseren Wurzeln bleiben wir treu, die Mitarbeit an den Inhalten soll auch weiter niemandem verwehrt bleiben. Das Engagement eines Jeden ermöglicht erst die Kettenreaktion des Erfolges der Piraten – darum: verbreiten Sie ihre Entrüstung über den Status Quo, verbreiten Sie das Wort.

    p2pnet.net:

    ONLINE PIRACY AND THE EMERGENCE OF NEW BUSINESS MODELS

     by David Choi and Arturo Perez

    This explorative paper examines the impact of online piracy on innovation and new business creation. While often dismissed by academics and professionals alike, online piracy has shown to be a valuable source of innovation to both industry incumbents and entrepreneurs for the following four reasons: First, the online pirates have pioneered the use of new technologies. For example, they have made a significant impact in the evolution of file-transferring technology, which has created breakthroughs in information distribution for both illegal and legal uses. Second, the piracy communities have been the source of invaluable market insight to the business world. Third, online pirates have contributed to new market creation. For example, many of former Napster users have migrated to the legal version of Napster and Apple’s iTunes. Finally, online piracy has often spurred the creation of legal and innovative business models. We observe that this pattern of piracy pioneering new market insight, market communities and business models is repeated with each generation of new pirate technology. We point out that companies that understand the pattern and take advantage of the innovation offered by piracy communities can build businesses of significant value. Our paper is one of the very first and rare attempts on the subject of online piracy in management or entrepreneurship literature. It is also one of the first writings to describe the transition of online piracy to legitimate businesses. We believe that this is a practical paper that can be of use to academics as well as entrepreneurs.

    Index – Tech – Fájlcserélők célkeresztben:

    A honlapján közölt információk szerint a ProArt az internetet folyamatosan figyeli, és ha jogvédett anyagokra bukkan, megkeresi a szerverüzemeltetőket, megjelöli a kérdéses illegális fájlokat, majd kéri, hogy töröljék azokat vagy tegyék lehetetlenné a hozzáférésüket. “E kérésnek az üzemeltetők jelentős hányada eleget is tesz, ellenkező esetben az üzemeltetővel szemben is jogi eljárás kezdődhet.” – áll a ProArt honlapján.

    A gyakorlatban azonban ez a fajta “jogvédelem” egészen máshogy működik – állítja dr. Dallos Zsolt ügyvéd, az Elite DC Hub nevű népszerű magyar fájlcserélő rendszer üzemeltetőinek jogi képviselője. A ProArt meg sem próbálta megkeresni a szerver üzemeltetőit, a jogvédők feljelentéséről akkor értesültek, amikor 2006. február 10-én reggel 6 órakor rendőrök dörömböltek az Elite üzemeltetőjének (akit a fájlcserélő közösség Dentro néven ismer) ajtaján. Négy órával később a szerverparkban lefoglalták az Elite szerverét, és még aznap házkutatást tartottak két rendszergazdánál is, lefoglalva számítógépeiket és adathordozóikat – mint később kiderült, az akcióra a ProArt 2005. novemberi büntetőfeljelentése nyomán, ugyanakkor határozat nélkül, sürgősségi alapon került sor.

    www.jeremydebeer.ca – Sony BMG Settles Canadian Class Actions:

    Sony BMG has agreed to settle Canadian class action lawsuits relating to its use of restrictive contractual terms and DRM technologies on music CDs. If approved by the courts following hearings in late September, the Canadian settlement will resolve disputes in Québec, British Columbia and Ontario.

    The structure of the agreement mirrors the one reached in the United States earlier this year, and the terms are generally similar. People who purchased CDs containing certain digital rights management systems will be entitled to various forms of compensation, depending on the type of software on the CD. Purchasers of “XCP” CDs will receive a DRM-free replacement disc and MP3 versions of the tracks, as well as a choice between either a cheque for C$8.40 (American purchasers got US$7.50) and a free album download, or 3 free album downloads. “MediaMax 3.0” purchasers get only a free MP3 version of the album they had bought, while “MediaMax 5.0” purchasers get the MP3s plus another free album download.

    Films That Come Over the Net Don’t Come Easy – New York Times:

    In addition to the lethargic download times, the playback restrictions imposed by studios are reminiscent of the fine print on a car lease. CinemaNow’s typical rental fees for the store’s 1,000-plus library of movies range from $2.99 for older titles to $3.99 for new releases. Offerings include most of the latest major releases, matching those you would find in a video store. You have 30 days from the date of rental to watch a movie, but once you hit the start button you have just 24 hours to watch before the rental self-destructs. If you want to download a title permanently to your hard drive, prices at CinemaNow are $9.95 to $19.95. The catch is that to adhere to Hollywood’s copyright restrictions these movies can be viewed on only three devices, all compatible with Windows Media Player, that you register with the service. You can make a backup copy of a purchase to a DVD, but that DVD will play only on the computer that was originally used to download the movie. Furthermore, not all rental movies are available for purchase — and not all movies available for purchase are available for rental.

    the rest are as pathetic as this one. combat p2p with this….

    WSJ.com – Portals:

    Will All of Us Get Our 15 Minutes On a YouTube Video? August 30, 2006; Page B1 If the data from YouTube are to believed, the world has a lot of explaining to do. The video-sharing site doesn’t make public much of the information it has about itself, such as a breakdown of the nationalities of its registered users. But it’s possible to piece together that sort of information by “scraping” the site, a popular and entirely legal practice of using a computer to gather methodically all the tiny bits of public information scattered around a Web site, and then piecing them together. I did a scrape of YouTube a month ago and found there were 5.1 million videos. By Sunday, the end of another scrape, that number had grown by about 20% to 6.1 million. Because we know how many videos have been uploaded to the site, the length of each, and how many times it has been watched (total views were 1.73 billion as of Sunday) we can do a little multiplication to find out how much time has collectively been spent watching them. We will get to the result in due time. First, some other bits of YouTube fun — data-crunching style. For example, the words “dance,” “love,” “music” and “girl” are all exceedingly popular in titles of YouTube videos. Also, nearly 2,000 videos have “Zidane” in the title. Who at a desk anywhere on the planet didn’t watch at least one head-butt video in the days after French soccer star Zinedine Zidane’s meltdown in the World Cup final? For all the talk of the Internet fragmenting tastes and interests, YouTube is an example of the Web homogenizing experiences. YouTube videos take up an estimated 45 terabytes of storage — about 5,000 home computers’ worth — and require several million dollars’ worth of bandwidth a month to transmit. Those costs are one reason that some predict YouTube will collapse under the sheer weight of providing a haven for every teenager with a cellphone camera eager to be famous for 15 minutes of video. An even more enterprising YouTube scraper is Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, which, equipped with a supercomputer with 400 nodes and a 10 gigabit Ethernet connection, was able to learn about all of the 500,000 or so people who bothered to create profiles for themselves at the site. While YouTube’s messaging software is rudimentary, and often doesn’t work, many users nonetheless rely on it to stay in touch with each other. That gives YouTube — and other Web locales — some of the “social network” characteristics usually associated with the likes of MySpace. And it’s another reason that established players like Yahoo and Google are ramping up their video-sharing competitors. Johan Pouwelse, a Delft professor who helped develop a peer-to-peer, video-sharing technology at Delft called Tribler (one that he says could help YouTube cut down on bandwidth costs), reports that 70% of YouTube’s registered users are American and roughly half are under 20 years of age. The oldest active viewer apparently is geriatric1927, a 79-year old U.K. resident who sits at his PC in his study with headphones on and narrates memories of World War II. Ernie Rogers, a 23-year old from Colton, Calif., whose handle is “lamo1234,” has watched more YouTube videos than anyone. Mr. Rogers claims he is on the site 24/7. And as “the YouTube rockstar,” he has shared his original songs, including one called “Waste of Time.” The most devoted uploader is Christy Leigh Stewart, a 21-year-old college student who lives near Modesto, Calif., and who has so far uploaded nearly 2,000 videos. Nearly all involve Korean pop music, a passion of Ms. Stewart. Indeed, she says the main reason she spends too much time with YouTube is to drive traffic to hwaiting.net, a Korean-oriented Web site she runs with her friend Megan Hansen. The notion of using the enormous YouTube audience for marketing other products has occurred to many people, including YouTube itself. It recently struck a deal with Paris Hilton, whose “channel,” reports Prof. Pouwelse, instantly became the most popular. Another is Marc Pearson, 24, who, as pearson101, records backyard wrestling matches: enthusiastic but low-budget versions of the fake-real matches you see on cable. Because his hometown of Stoke-on-Trent, England, is short on wrestlers, Mr. Pearson uses YouTube to attract opponents. “We used to have a lot of wrestlers around here, but not anymore, on account of all the injuries,” he explains. The YouTube juggernaut has attracted the interest of many others, including academics. Anita Elberse, a Harvard Business School professor with an interest in the digital-entertainment marketplace, said the site is a good laboratory for studying how some forms of content become popular. Andrew M. Odlyzko, a mathematician who heads the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, has examined YouTube data, such as lists of most-viewed videos, to see whether the numbers follow a pattern familiar to statisticians, where a few of the most popular items get an especially large percentage of the traffic. They do. Oh yes, I owe you a statistic: The total time the people of the world spent watching YouTube since it started last year. The figure is — drum roll, please — 9,305 years!

    The Korea Times : Online Music Sharing Flourishes:

    Soribada, the largest peer-to-peer music sharing service in South Korea, said yesterday the number of its paying subscribers exceeded 500,000 as of Saturday. The number of users who pay 3,000 won (3.12 USD, 671 HUF) per month for unlimited music downloads has steadily increased since the charging system was first adopted on July 10, it said. In August alone, over 300,000 have registered as new subscribers.

    Slyck News – Snakes on a Torrent:

    In order to share work with friends, family, or whoever, simply drop and drag the files you wish to share into a folder. Snakebit does the rest. No need to create .torrent files, upload .torrents or seed files.

    via Torrentfreak:

    On August 28, the Pirate Party of Sweden made their election program official. An introduction stating the ideas and ideology behind their program, the party stated their program for the election in a number of concrete points.

    In a situation where they can gain position of forming a government by striking a deal with us in an issue that they, themselves, believe to be less important, there is every reason to believe that they will be eager to find a solution.

    But in either case, there are three possible scenarios:

    1) One of the factions agree to our demands, and the other does not. Then we will choose the faction that agree with us. Whether this is the red faction of the blue faction is of no concern for us. As long as we see that they are doing their best to seriously run our issues, we will support the government in all other issues as well, without questioning.

    2) Both the factions agree to our demands. If there are differences of nuances making one faction looking slightly better than the other, we will choose this faction. If both are exactly as good, we will support the faction with the more votes. This way we won’t influence the balance between the factions in Swedish politics. As long as the government is running our issues, we will support them in all decicions, just as in the first scenario.

    3) Both the factions refuse to meet our demands. This is the more complicated case, but we can handle this one too. Initially we will support one faction, and make a government possible. Most likely this will be the ones with the less votes, so that the others, the ‘victors’, will feel that they have lost power they were entitled to. They can, however, not do much about it, since we will support the government without questioning in anything that does not involve our principles.

    When the “victors” are safely placed in the penalty box of opposition, we start our businesslike, low-voiced conversations with them, until they realize that our proposals are not, in fact, that dangerous, and that they can only win from working with us. When they have seen our arguments in the glow of the miraging governmental position for a while, there are good reasons to believe they will agree with us. This is when we will call for a vote of non-confidence and change the government. After that, the Pirate Party with support the new government without questioning, in all issues, as long as the government runs our issues forcefully, just as in scenario 1 and 2.

    This is our entire strategy. This way we can guarantee that our policies will have a break-through.

    There is some discussion going on in the economic literature whether copyright creates a monopoly for the author or there are many substitutes to any work protected copyright (see the reading list for relevant literature).

    The monopoly argument is important because economists do not like monopolies and look at them as strong reasons for regulatory intervention. The fair use provisions are part of any copyright legislation just because of this: they serve as escape routes from the monopolistic power of creators.

    So far I have not seen any convincing argument for or against the monopoly case. Maybe because there is none. So here is a solution, that defines monopoly (a very economic term) with the help of culture.

    Anyone, who wishes to read the the book for which author Imre Kertesz won the Nobel price will be in difficult position to find a substitute. Other Nobel price winners or other works from Mr. Kertesz simply wont do the job. So whoever owns the rights for that work has indeed monopoly power ower the work.

    This is also the case when we think about fan communities. For a die-hard Star Wars fan a film about Superman wont be a good substitute, morover it wont be a substitute at all.

    On the other hand, for someone like me, who dislikes most of the movies from hollywood, it makes no difference if -having nothing else to do-, my local cinema does not play You Me and Dupree, only Superman Returns. I am not loyal, I am not fan, I am not member of that culture that values that specific piece of culture as his own. These two movies compete for me, and they are perfect substitutes for that night.
    The bottom line is: intellectual property legislation creates monopoly for those whom a piace of cultural good really matters, and is an imperfect monopoly for those who do not care.

    Mass produced, low shelf-life entertainment products tend to fall into the non-monopoly category, as few of them have loyal fanbase. Other cultural items, classics, cult pieces, things part of ‘high culture’ (meaning that they have a consumer base that values them on very sophisticated terms) tend to be monopolies.

    But either way. If we can talk about a cultural monopoly in cases where there are consumers who really care, than it is a monopoly, even if there are consumer segments where it behaves like a competing product.

    motto.jpg

    James Boyle: Cruel, Mean or Lavish? Economic Analisys, Price Discrimination and Digital Intellectual property.

    Now this is important because there is no sign of people going out from business because of piracy. Or is there? Please leave a comment if you know about artists, producers who had to look for another job because of piracy!

    EFF: DeepLinks:

    Macrovision’s “Analog Copy Protection” (ACP) technology is intended to degrade the quality of video copies made on analog VCRs. It does this by intentionally adding noise to the vertical blanking interval of analog video signals. This noise confuses the automatic gain control (AGC) circuit used by analog VCRs. In short, Macrovision’s ACP is an exploit against a weakness in analog VCRs. Thanks to Section 1201(k) of the DMCA, VCR makers are now forbidden by law from fixing the weakness, which means that analog VCRs have remained vulnerable to ACP. In other words, Macrovision’s ACP is an antiquated DRM technology that owes its effectiveness in the analog world to a government mandate.

    GigaOM reports: Get Ready For Online Video Price Wars:

    In-Stat, a market research company predicts that the global market for “online content services is expected to expand by a factor of 10, growing from about 13 million households during 2005 to more than 131 million households by 2010.”

    Technology Review has a nice article on video sharing services and piracy:

    Pirated video makes up about one-fifth of the moving-image content uploaded to video-sharing sites, according to Tom McInerney, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Guba. And while the sharing sites benefit indirectly from pirated videos, which generate Web traffic and advertising impressions, hosting this material is often more trouble than it’s worth.

    Considering that only “YouTube visitors upload 65,000 videos every day and download 100 million of them”, it is not that bad, isn’t it?

    Slyck News reports:

    The content database has been online since around new years 2004. This means that any content free of copyright or content allowed by the author to be distributed freely are more than welcome in the content database.

    http://content.emule-project.net/

    Canadian Peer-to-Peer (P2P) legal theories:

    Canadian Peer-to-peer (P2P) legal theories, proposals and questions Conversations in the Digital-copyright.ca discussion forum in the last few weeks have suggested there is more than one theory about how peer-to-peer “file-sharing” (P2P) works, what it does, and what the meanings of terms like “upload” and “download” are when used in the context of P2P.

    New York Times reports:

    In the last few months, trade groups representing music publishers have used the threat of copyright lawsuits to shut down guitar tablature sites, where users exchange tips on how to play songs like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Highway to Hell” and thousands of others. The battle shares many similarities with the war between Napster and the music recording industry, but this time it involves free sites like Olga.net, GuitarTabs.com and MyGuitarTabs.com and even discussion boards on the Google Groups service like alt.guitar.tab and rec.music.makers.guitar.tablature, where amateur musicians trade “tabs” — music notation especially for guitar — for songs they have figured out or have copied from music books. On the other side are music publishers like Sony/ATV, which holds the rights to the songs of John Mayer, and EMI, which publishes Christina Aguilera’s music. “People can get it for free on the Internet, and it’s hurting the songwriters,” said Lauren Keiser, who is president of the Music Publishers’ Association and chief executive of Carl Fischer, a music publisher in New York.

    heise online reports:

    “These are good signs, but the overall market is still not developing according to expectations,” explained Michael Haentjes, chairman of IFPI. He claims that the “ongoing common use of illegal sources on the Internet” such as peer-to-peer networks and “the unresolved problems due to excessive private copies” are “slowing down market growth for music downloads. The Association said it plans to redouble its efforts to combat illegal downloading.

    A quick note on the differences of who pays the price of copyright infringements in the US and in Europe.

    In the US RIAA and other organizations as well as the copyright owners pay the lawyers and people to track down infringers and they use the money they win from settlements to initiate more actions. So finally those who have (or in many cases those who have not) committed unlawful acts pay the price of enforcement.

    In Europe copyright crime is pursued by the police and the prosecutors. Thus taxpayers pay the price of unlawful behaviour of some members of society. They pay for the extra resources necessary to pursue illegal activities and where resources are limited and resources are diverted from pursuing other crimes to pursue copyright infringers they pay the price in the form of rising crime-rate in other fields. In this latter case the cost of strict copyright laws might be the rise in other crimes. Well, well…

    LA Weekly has a nice article on the difficulties of clearing rights for documentaries.

    “There’s actually a discussion within the BBC between people like me and some quite senior executives who are keen to say, ‘If we are a public broadcasting corporation, then we should make everything we have ever made completely free and downloadable at an MPEG-2 level, and people can do whatever they want with it. I think there is a feeling that if we could do that, we would be able to do something that those who are constrained by commercial considerations cannot. And then where will Rupert Murdoch be?

    Wired News: A Nation Divided Over Piracy:

    n Fleischer’s world, the Motion Picture Association of America and rights holders are attacking digital technology itself, trying to hang on to an outdated model. “It’s an inevitability that digital data will be copied…. The alternative to peer-to-peer piracy is person-to-person piracy,” he says. While some online pirates take pains to distinguish themselves from those who sell counterfeit DVDs and CDs, he sees such physical bootlegging as just “a symptom of underdeveloped computer networks.”

    Wired News runs an uber-interesting story on the  Secrets of the Pirate Bay:

    “The general perception is that they are doing something good … they’ve always had this image, very ideological,” says Tobias Brandel, the reporter who broke the story. If the Pirate Bay turns out to be a collection of businessmen profiting off of piracy via porn ads and online poker, it would lose popular support in the moralistic Swedish society. And if the Pirate Bay’s crew is eventually convicted of copyright crimes “they will have a much harder punishment,”

    So, the dilemma, according to Wired and the swedish journalist representing the “swedish moral (minimum) consent” is that stealing a la Robin Hood is okay, but keeping a share of the bounty is bad.

    Apart from the fact that pirating is not by definition an altruistic activity, lets think for a moment about the economics of this case.
    Providing access to “pirated” material comes with a cost. The two images show the difference:

    The first 3 servers of pirate bay

    The current configuration of 12 Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL140 servers.

    And these are only the hw costs. The costs of litigation, police raids, and eventually the inevitable conviction are much-much higher. These guys are willing to pay that price for

    The Pirate Bay’s jaunty image was blemished when a July 5 article in the Swedish daily paper Svenska Dagbladet revealed the site’s hidden financial life for the first time. Posing as an internet firm seeking advertising on the Bay, the paper phoned Eastpoint Media, which sells banner ads for the Pirate Bay in Scandinavia. Eastpoint revealed to the reporter that they place 600,000 Kr of ads per month — about $84,000 U.S.

    for an indefinite amount of (but possible not very long) time. So this is the wage of fear (Le salaire de la peur) for providing links to 3.513.240 torrent files on the net. Good to know.

    Here I collect the texts I have written as part of the research:

    The Club model of cultural consumption and distribution

    When it comes to the market of digital goods, clubs –buyers teaming up to buy a single item and share it among themselves– seem to have little or no economic significance. Digital files are either perfectly controlled, thus the producer can appropriate all of the consumer surplus that could have arose by forming a club, or there is no way to control unauthorized copying thus there is no price at which it would be reasonable to sell a good on the market.
    But if we include other, noneconomic aspects of clubs, notably their ability to negotiate and
    enforce norms on how a given good is accessed and used, clubs can have a significant effect
    on markets. So far we have seen that technological protection measures and copyright laws cannot effectively curb unauthorized uses of digital content. User communities around jambands can be an exception from this general trend as together with the artists they have created a normative environment that is able to police and enforce undesirable actions.

    Is there a way to propagate the emergence of such communities through adequate
    technologies designed to connect artists and fans? What can we do to help fans and artists to negotiate rules they are both are happy with?

    Bodó Balázs- Gyenge Anikó: A könyvtári kölcsönzések után fizetendő jogdíj közgazdasági
    szempontú elemzése

    A nyilvános könyvtári kölcsönzések után a jogosultaknak fizetendő jogdíj (Public Lending
    Right – a továbbiakban PLR) ötlete több sebből is vérzik.
    Ha a PLR-re mint a nemzeti kulturális politikától független eszközre tekintünk, mely e jogot természetjogi érveléssel a tulajdonhoz való jogból vezeti le, minden esetben oda jutunk, hogy a jogosultak monopoljogát kiterjesztjük és az ezzel járó járadékot növeljük. Ennek következménye jelentős fogyasztói csoportok kulturális fogyasztásból való kiszorulása lehet, melyre eddig a legolcsóbb és hatékonyabb megoldás a könyvtári kölcsönzés szabadsága volt.

    Ha a PLR nemzeti kultúrpolitikai eszköz, akkor viszont azt a megállapítást tehetjük, hogy a PLR a meglévő kultúratámogatási rendszerek mellett való üzemeltetése indokolatlanul
    bonyolult, és költséges, és ha az állami döntéshozók úgy találják, hogy van a költségvetésben kultúratámogatásra fordítható tartalék, akkor azt érdemes a meglévő intézményrendszeren keresztül szétosztani.

    Végül pedig a jogosultak, szerzők szemszögéből megvizsgálva a kérdést: nincs olyan szerző a földön, aki visszavonná egy megjelent művét a könyvtárakból csak azért mert azt vélelmezi, hogy a kölcsönzések miatt eladásoktól esik el. Ennek az egyetlen oka az, hogy a szerzők számára a könyvtárban való jelenlét haszna nagyobb, mint a könyvtári olvasók által okozott kiesett kereslet. Már csak emiatt sem érdemes a PLR bevezetése.

    The Pirates of The Pirates of the Caribbean

    This is the PowerPoint presentation of the talk I gave on the Chicago Kent Law School this March.

    Robin Hood Digital – english

    “File-sharing communities are also remembering communities. They direct attention and thus demand, they discuss and thus keep alive cultural goods. When something is posted as available for download, not only those fetch it have requested a particular item, but also those who were standing nearby. These individuals are reciting work long forgotten like those who in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 memorize books to be able to share them with others.”

    Sobri Joska Digital – in hungarian

    Megjelent a Café Babel 2006 decemberi, Hiány c. számában.

    A Csendes Könyvtár és az összes többi hasonló szolgáltatás az úgynevezett közjavakra épülő internetes kooperációs hálózatokra (commons based peer production networks) példa. A piac által (kényszerűségből) szabadon hagyott résekben, marginális igények, érdekek körül a semmiből jönnek létre olyan közösségek, melyek a hálózat tagjai között elosztott különböző képességeket, erőforrásokat (időt, szkennert, karakterfelismerő programot, korrektúrázó képességet) képesek hatékonyan összehangolni egy olyan feladat érdekében, melynek gyümölcseit aztán mindenki szabadon és ingyenesen élvezheti.”

    A szerzői jog gazdaságtana az online világban

    Frissen elkészült könyvfejezet.

    “A szerzői jog közgazdasági elemzése során a szerzőknek biztosított monopoljog különös figyelmet vívott ki magának. Ennek az az oka, hogy a monopol helyzetben levő termelők maguk határozzák meg a piaci árat, és ez az ár jellemzően nagyobb, mint amennyi versenyhelyzetben lenne. Tökéletes verseny esetén a piaci ár megegyezik a termék határköltségével, azaz azzal az összeggel, amennyibe a legutolsó példány elkészítése kerül. A monopóliumok határköltségnél magasabb ára azzal jár, hogy a piaci kereslet egy
    része nem tudja megfizetni a monopolista szabta árat.”

    A szőnyeg alá söpört archívum
    Megjelent a Manager Magazin 2006. Decemberi számában Tartalomraktárak címen.

    “Ma Magyarországon az a kérdés, hogy a piacra várnunk-e, hogy ezeket az archívumokat kiépítsék, a nehézkesen működő és alulfinanszírozott közintézményekre lőcsöljük-e ezt a feladatot, vagy megteremtjük annak lehetőségét, hogy a magyar kulturális közösség fenntartsa önmagát. A Neumann-ház megrendelésére elkészített Nemzeti Digitális Adattár 2.0 vitaanyag a közösségi archiválás lehetőségének kiterjesztését tartalmazza, az első lépés tehát ezügyben megtörtént. Még egy lépés azonban hátra van. Dekriminalizálni kellene kirillt, scan_dalt, helpert és társaik. Hogy ne fordulhasson elő az, hogy ennek az örökségnek piaci, személyes érdekeket sértő részei esetleg nem maradnak fenn. Hogy ne legyen bűnöző az a soktízezres közösség, amelyik a magyar audiovizuális örökség archiválásán dolgozik – társadalmi munkában.”

    A retardált archívum

    Megjelent az Élet és Irodalom 2007. január 5-i számában.

    “A közpénzből finanszírozott, közszolgálati archívum kapuit minél szélesebbre kell tárni. A hat havi elérhetőséget nem szűkíteni kell, hanem az archívum digitalizálásával bővíteni. Az archívumi anyagok lementését, felhasználását, adott esetben átalakítását nem megakadályozni kell hanem a megfelelő jogi konstrukció kidolgozásával megengedni , támogatni, bátorítani. Ezt követeli a finanszírozás módja. Ezt követeli a közszolgálatiság jelentése. Ezt követeli a piaci értékesítés igénye. Ezt követeli a józan ész.”
    PhD 2-page research proposal in english

    A short description of my research.

    Régebbi cikkek/ older writings

    A „mély link”
    Internetes tartalomszolgáltatók vs. internet

    Megjelent a Beszélő 2003 szeptemberi számában.

    “Mély link valójában nincs. Link van, mely mutathat bárhová: egy portál címoldalára, a legutolsó, senki által nem olvasott cikkére, képre, linkgyűjteményre, bárhova. A mély linkelést nem lehet megtiltani, csupán azt lehet technológiai eszközökkel elérni, hogy egy adott gyűjteménybe csak egy, a hivatalos kapun keresztül lehessen bejutni. Ott pedig, ahol korábban szabad volt az átjárás, jogi vagy technológiai falak kezdenek épülni, melyek az internet mindent mindennel összekötő hipertextuális szövetéből kiragadnak, elérhetetlenné tesznek tartalmakat. Az intertextualitásból kiemelt, a többi szöveggel való kapcsolatától megfosztott valami pedig megszűnik szövegnek lenni.”

    Bolyongás egy áldás nélküli térben
    Graffiti és street art mint a társadalmi diskurzus eszköze

    Megjelent a Café Babelben 2004-ben.

    “Az egyre lezáródó fizikai, média- és kulturális terekben az autonómia megteremtése egyre költségesebb: magas a lebukás veszélye és nagy a várható büntetés, megfizethetetlenek a kártérítési és nem utolsó sorban jogi költségek. Nehéz felbecsülni, hogy az egyre szigorodó ellenőrzési technikák milyen mértékben gátolják üzenetek megjelenését, hiszen a leginkább kockázatvállalókat kivéve az alkotóknak nem áll érdekükben láthatóvá válni, nem szeretnék magukra felhívni a figyelmet. Ha mégis, akkor a szólás szabadságát keresők szükségszerűen mozognak a gyengébb ellenállás, tehát olyan médiumok felé, melyek könnyebben támadhatók, azaz ellenőrzésük architekturális okokból nehezebben megoldható”

    Deathmatch!

    The following statement was issued today by Consumer Electronics Association (CEA®) President and CEO Gary Shapiro regarding a letter sent last week from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to U.S. Congressman Rick Boucher (D-VA) concerning the RIAA’s refusal to participate in the Copy Protection Technical Working Group (CPTWG) to discuss efforts to prevent the mass, indiscriminate redistribution of copyrighted works over the Internet:

    “We are pleased to see the RIAA letter finally confirmed, as we have long suspected, that no technical specification for an audio flag, or in fact anything else, exists and that the RIAA has stayed away from the Copy Protection Technical Working Group in part because it has nothing to propose. The letter also confirms that the RIAA’s interest lies solely in preserving its existing ways of business, with the hope that it can maximize profits by limiting innovation and undermining long-standing consumer rights. – CEA

    Wrong. It is Nokia.

    Nokia said it had sold more than 15 million music-enabled phones in April to June, roughly double the amount Apple’s iPod’s and making it the world’s largest manufacturer of digital music players, and it aims to sell more than 80 million music devices this year, adds The Washington Post. – p2pnet.net

    Ed Felten writes on p2pnet:

    Instead, advocates of DRM-bolstering laws have switched to two new arguments. First, they argue that DRM enables price discrimination — business models that charge different customers different prices for a product — and that price discrimination benefits society, at least sometimes. Second, they argue that DRM helps platform developers lock in their customers, as Apple has done with its iPod/iTunes products, and that lock-in increases the incentive to develop platforms. I won’t address the merits or limitations of these arguments here — I’m just observing that they’re replacing the P2P piracy bogeyman in the rhetoric of DMCA boosters.

    The ASUS WL-700gE Wi-Fi Router:

    • has a 160-gig hard-drive.
    • it comes with a BitTorrent client!
    • has three USB 2.0 ports for connection of additional external hard drives

    via p2pnet.net

    It was also clearly explained that the only products we sold on the website were historical recordings that Universal Music Sweden had refused for years – despite countless requests from fans – to release. It was also explained that the money raised from these sales was used to promote ABBA and Universal Music’s products via the ABBAMAIL website, mailing list, forum, newsletters etc. The MIPI representative said they didn’t care about that at all.

    We found out in the early days that ABBA’s record company didn’t mind ABBAMAIL’s activities because they knew that it didn’t conflict with their products and that ultimately it benefitted them. They realised that ABBA fans needed to be kept interested in ABBA so they would be more willing to buy the next incarnation of GOLD or MORE GOLD or FOREVER GOLD or LOVE SONGS or THE DEFINITIVE COLLECTION etc. Their primary concern was that we didn’t make a “big deal” out of it – as long was we kept it low key and just sold to the hard-core fans, they were fine with it.

    What has changed?

    Well apparently the Managing Director of Universal Music in Sweden has made it his personal mission to close us down – he won’t stop until he achieves this.

    via p2pnet.net

    MarketWatch reports:

    Google Inc. later this month will begin distributing free, commercially-supported video clips from Viacom Inc.’s MTV Networks to about 200 Web sites catering to young adults and teen-agers, in effect syndicating the programming to the Internet.

    As we knw there are three different ways to charge for a content: sell it by the piece (view), sell it for a flat rate (subscripition based) and package it with advertising. As for now video content was not really available for advertising, at least the majors were reluctant to engage in such a business model. Now it seems the time has come. Will it be strong enough to catch on with other cultural goods like  movies or music as well?

    CARFAC – the coalition of canadian artists with the question “if artists are not paid for what they create, why would anyone make art?” on their banner and Appropriation Art- a coalition of appropriation artists seem to have some issues among each other. From the letter of the latter in reply to the former:

    The practice of appropriation is internationally recognized as a long standing, historic art practice. It includes works of collage, found footage and conceptual art. Works that use appropriation are collected and exhibited by major galleries and museums internationally, are written about in virtually every art history book and taught in universities and colleges throughout the world. Works that use appropriation are legitimate works of art. Period. Contemporary sources of appropriation are found in film, radio, television, advertising, text, character, situation, cast off material, found material, quoted material, borrowed material, …and on and on. Artists use this rich vein of source material because it is meaningful; because it holds and reflects popular, cultural or civic memory, because it conjures personal associations or connects us together in a profound way. These works question, push boundaries, advance technologies; they encourage experimentation and invention. They tell new stories. Contemporary culture should not be immune to critical commentary. Without this new work our cultural environment would be much the poorer. It is surprising that an organization that claims to speak for Canadian artists can be so out of touch with contemporary art practice.

    What is on stake? Moral rights in the new canadian copyright law.

    … high tech proprietary networks rise. Slyck News reports on the All-New Warez P2P – Version 3.0:

    Warez are entering a tough market. Due to the stability of file sharing there simply is not a necessity to switch clients or try something new. It will take more than just the promise of BitTorrent speeds to switch people away from BitTorrent, which also has the advantage of being open source.

    However, by bringing together the two phenomena of file sharing and social networking, this client may tap into great success. Add anonymity in the future and this will be a network to watch closely.

    If the promise of networks being able to grant speed, variety and anonimity as protection for the everyday user whom will RIAA sue? All those poor souls who are not smart enough to choose a software offering the protection? Not the most “dangerous” but the lamest? We’ll see.

    After so many companies failing in court to RIAA I am wonderning what they were hoping for? That noone will notice the several million users? Do they have a good defence?

    Slyck News’ Thomas Mennecke speculates that:

    Many believed, as did LimeWire, that their open source nature would preserve their existence – at least for some time to come.

    I do not see that commercially exploting an open source software would mean an excuse from being sued. But anyway, whom will RIAA sue after they take LimeWire out? All the contributors who have developed the code?

    LimeWire’s open source nature may not save the company from the RIAA’s onslaught, but it may save the Gnutella network. LimeWire’s newest features and talent comes from the open source world; even if Lime Group vanishes tomorrow, development won’t.

    Well said.

    Well, i know it is a very bad title for anything but it was the shortest way to describe the content of Ken Fischer’s article on “The RIAA, IP addresses, and evidence” in which he explains the recent RIAA backdowns on some alleged pirates. The bottom line is: when it proves to be difficult to link illegal downloads to a specific person that might be behind an IP addresss RIAA chooses to walk away rather then trying to make the link. At least that was the case so far in the US.

    IPcentral drew my attention to Chris Castle’ article on net neutrality and copyright in which he argues, no, rants about net neutrality supporters who are defending illegal downloading by opposing people peeping into IP packet contents. As for myself, this is certainly a reason supporting net neutrality. Another one is that I dont want people like Chris policing my communications.

    GUse this tool to find downloadable mp3s on Google.

    This is just great. The right search term for google is:
    intitle:index.of “mp3″ +”Artis Name” -htm -html -php -asp “Last Modified”

    SiliconBeat reports:”Skyrider, a Mountain View start-up, is developing technology that will be able to search peer-to-peer traffic, in order to help media and other companies become more profitable. The two-year old company has raised $8 million from Silicon Valley’s top VC firm Sequoia Capital, along with Charles River Ventures. The company’s product will be announced in fall, the company told us last night. (Here is their release.) The company aims to “monetize” popular peer-to-peer networks, which have emerged to help circulate large files such as video. Since that’s where the information is, that’s where to do the best mining. And the company is working on a search platform that spans across P2P platforms.”

    From experience goods to search goods

    There has been several measurements on how illegal downloading affects markets of cultural goods. Although the results sometimes contradict each other, there is a consensus that in fact there is a conversion of illegal downloaders into purchasers. There are several explanations offered: downloaders pay for items they were not exposed to before (the publicity value argument), downloaders are not evil, and they are willing to pay to artists they like (community support argument), downloaders are buying because there is a market they are happy to use or they are threatened to use by lawsuits (industry argument) or illegal downloads are not (good enough) substitutes for a DVD or a CD.

    In this essay I would like to offer a different approach that explains the coexistence of illegal downloading and legal purchases by a shift that affects the status of cultural goods. A shift that made culture to act like a search good instead of an experience good, a shift that at the end completely rewrites the rules of cultural markets.

    In the economic literature cultural goods are described as experience goods the value of which can only become apparent to its consumer after it has been consumed. Unlike drinking just another bottle of coke, one cannot tell if she liked a concert, a movie or the new album of an artist until she has experienced it. This attribute of cultural goods defines a very special economic context to these goods as this uncertainty on the experience creates a factor of risk on the consumer side, a risk which heavily affects prices and demand for the goods, thus creating a risk for the supply side as well.

    There are several methods by which both the consumers and the suppliers try to lower the level of uncertainty on the demand side. On the consumer side listening to word of mouth and peer reviews and the general avoidance of things unheard of and unknown are the tools to reduce the risk of paying for something that might turn up as a bad experience. Suppliers give away free previews in form of trailers, teasers; a whole media system of commercial radio airs these goods in exchange for commercials; professional or paid reviewers are writing about these goods; charts and top-lists are complied; massive multi-million dollar marketing campaigns are launched; stars with known reputation are bred and employed. These techniques are designed to provide the potential consumers with extra information and thus lower their uncertainty.

    Today the efforts and resources of cultural industries are equally divided between the production of cultural goods and their marketing. Production costs are in the same range as marketing budgets and the marketing has spawn a distinct culture of celebrities and parasite media dealing with celebrities, reinforced by the cross-ownership of media conglomerates in every media type.

    Despite all these efforts consumers might end up not being satisfied. There are several signs of this ‘post-coital sadness’: bad reviews on blogs, quickly dying films after the opening weekend, weak DVD rentals and sales and falling reputation of stars. This signals the distance between the actual and the promised experience, the size of the information asymmetry between the consumer and the supplier.

    With the advent of file-sharing technologies this situation has changed. The risk of consuming a cultural good is not a financial risk anymore if one can download a song freely before purchasing it. Of course there are costs still associated with consumption: the cost of acquiring information about a good, the cost of searching, the cost of downloading, the cost of possible lawsuits, etc., but one does not have to pay at the counter only to realize that all the other songs on that album are not at all that good as the one played all the time on the radio, or that the trailer actually contains every enjoyable second of a feature film. Consuming a cultural good for free is the cheapest way to get to know the actual value of it. As the risks of consuming something unknown decrease, cultural goods shift to be search goods in economic terms, as no transaction is takes place before the actual experience.

    But that does not mean that market transactions cannot and will not happen afterwards. But in this case a purchase will happen only if the consumer had a positive experience, when she actually had full information on the goods that she was about to purchase.

    Will this shift result is a loss in sales? Well, the supplier will lose only the sales that were happening only because the information asymmetry – in other words sales that at the end resulted in an unhappy customer. Will new sales occur? Certainly, from consumers for whom the risk of paying for something unknown was too high of an entry barrier to make the actual purchase in the first place. Illegal downloading is lowering the entry barrier of consumers to markets.

    Many still argue that illegal downloading is actually replacing or rather killing markets. I would argue that the efforts trying to keep cultural goods as experience goods are killing markets. Trailers, paid-for radio broadcasts, 30 second online listening-in services do not lower the uncertainty barrier enough to draw significant amount of new customers to markets outside of the mainstream. And for those consumers who are free-riding on this system will eventually face a serious problem: the end of supply of the goods they actually liked but never paid for.

    I will soon post my theory on how the fact that cultural goods’ shift from being experience goods to search goods actually changes the market. Till then read p2pnet.net’s stroy on how it is happening in practice:
    “The p2p networks are invaluable. My young daughter, Emma, and I use them to sort out the garbage, meaning most Hollywood product. Does that mean we don’t go to the movies any more? Nope. We (I should say I) downloaded The Incredibles, Over the Hedge, March of the Penguins and Corpse Bride and we not only went to see them at our local cinema (a half-hour’s drove away, BTW), we also bought DVDs of the last two. That’s not huge. But we saw, and bought, what we, not Hollywood, wanted. On top of that, we home-school Emma and she enjoyed the extras that come with the DVDs. And since we’re not loaded, think of the money we’ve saved! Trying-before-buying? As a dad without a vast income, I like it. Thank you, p2p networks ………”

    JavaScriptSearch News reports:”exaroom, inc. unveiled its new product beta for a file-sharing service, www.exaroom.com. The new exaroom service enables members to access files on their own computer and their friends’ shared files from their browser.”

    Inside Bay Area reports: “Digital albums sales are up 126 percent in comparison to the first six months of last year. Thus far, some 14.7 million digital albums have been sold, which is a staggering figure, given that only 16.2 million were purchased in all of 2005.”

    Darn! I was working on a very sophisticated argument based on the assumption that people prefer single tract to whole albums.

    icLiverpool reports: “TECHNOLOGY allowing bands to sell their music direct to fans on the internet and protect against piracy will give more power to musicians. That’s the claim of Liverpool firm Safesell which is behind the system that plays on any Windows-compatible pc or mobile.

    It can be sent to friends by email or peer-to-peer file sharing. At the end of a promotional period anyone wishing to play the track again is invited to buy a license online.

    Co-founder Brian Pond said: “Safesell is the first product in the world to offer everything you need to sell music or video direct to customers. “It provides downloading in a format which cannot be pirated; it allows the artist to control pricing of tracks and album and the quality of download, the territories and currencies they want to deal with; and it manages the payments.””

    Now that is really interesting, a real alternative to the traditional middlemen like record companies and marketplaces. I hope it will work out at the end, and it will charge reasonable transaction fees.

    “There’s no good answer to designing a “good DRM.” Or rather, no DRM is good DRM. iTunes is instructive again in this regard: Apple sold a billion tracks in three years in spite of its DRM, not because of it. No Apple customer bought an iTune because of the DRM. What’s more, every track in the iTunes music store can be downloaded for free from P2P networks. Apple proves that you can sell music without DRM all day long — all adding DRM to Apple’s music does is give Apple the ability to abuse its customers and its partners from the labels.” – InformationWeek

    On WSJ.com

    Lee Gomes has posted a critique on Chris Andresons The Long tail by the title: “It May Be a Long Time Before the Long Tail Is Wagging the Web”. His crucial point is whether data supports Anderson’s claim that with availability the aggregate demand for less popular goods is comparable to those of the hits.
    “Ecast told me that now, with a much bigger inventory than when Mr. Anderson spoke to them two years ago, the quarterly no-play rate has risen from 2% to 12%. March data for the 1.1 million songs of Rhapsody, another streamer, shows a 22% no-play rate; another 19% got just one or two plays.”

    “By Mr. Anderson’s calculation, 25% of Amazon’s sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can’t find at a traditional retailer. But using another analysis of those numbers — an analysis that Mr. Anderson argues isn’t meaningful — you can show that 2.7% of Amazon’s titles produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite as impressive.

    Another theme of the book is that “hits are starting to rule less.” But when I looked online, I was surprised to see what seemed like the opposite. Ecast says 10% of its songs account for roughly 90% of its streams; monthly data from Rhapsody showed the top 10% songs getting 86% of streams.”

    In his reply Anderson is not very convincing.

    “Let’s say you have 1,000 items and the top 100 (10%) account for 50% of the sales. Then you add another 99,000 items to the catalog, and the sales of that top 100 fall to just 25% of the total, while it takes another 900 items to make up the next 25%. I would say that demand has shifted down the tail, because those top 100 items have dropped from half the market to just a quarter of it and the rest of the demand is spread over more items.

    But by Gomes’ math, we’ve gone from a market where 10% of products make 50% of the revenues to one where 1% of the products make 50% of the revenues–in other words, it’s become more hit-centric. I think this is simply a misunderstanding of basic statistics, and I’m disappointed that Gomes, despite many emails from me and at least one economist to him on this point, chose to simply say that I don’t agree with that approach (but not why).”

    Battle of giants.

    Anderson: “I think this is simply a misunderstanding of basic statistics! And I have an economist to support this!”

    Gomes: “I don’t agree with that approach!”

    You know, the joke about the rabbi who listens to the complaints of two feuding congregants. One explains why the other guy is wrong, and the rabbi answers, “You are right!” Then the other guy states his case and the rabbi says, “You’re right.” Then a third man who was listening asks, “Rabbi, they are at odds, how can they both be right?” The rabbi then turns to the third man and says, “You’re right, too.”

    Because this is not the real question. Erik Brynjolfsson, Michael D. Smith, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu has an article titled “Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers” (MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper 4305-03 June 2003) in which they estimate that the increased product variety of online booksellers has resulted in $1 billion consumer surplus. Battling over the market concentration is a dead end. Measuring the consumer benefit is the real issue here i guess.

    This is the question everyone wants the answer to. Well we have data on the Pirates of the Caribbean II. And they are anything but easy to interpret.

    Variety reports on 26/07 that “The smooth sailing continues for Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Pic dominated four new entries and easily won the weekend box office with $35 million at 4,133 playdates.”

    This film is all about breaking new records:

    Disney’s swashbuckling sequel grossed $18.1 million Monday, shattering the previous nonholiday Monday benchmark of $14.4 million set by “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith” last year.” etc, etc.

    Well, PotC is not only #1 in the box office but also on p2p networks:It was downloded (as of 22/26) 1,485,734 times worldwide and 887,392 times in the US.
    Now the question arises: what has happened to that nearly 900.000 downloads? Did they go and see it on the big screen? Or they have tuned out because they thought the movie sucked?

    Well, one effect of watching the movie illegally before going to the cinema might be that people who would have been discontent with the movie eventually end up not paying for it. Is that so bad? I dont think so.

    There is always a huge uncertainty associated with the consumption of cultural goods. Will I like it? Are all the movie reviews telling the truth? This uncertainty means extra cost on the buyer side and lost income on the seller side. So the seller (and the buyers) would do anything to lower that lack of information. How? The tools are apperent:

    – large marketing campaign (including publishing good reviews and word of mouth)

    – saturation of the market (try to avoid the wide release)

    – using as many stars as you can pay for

    – and use references to stuff the buyers already know (do a sequel, recycle a comics character).

    With free downloads cultural goods stop being “experience goods” – or something that reveals its true value after the consuption. They become “search goods” – something that has a known value from the first moment.

    So my bet would be that with this shift content producers will loose those customers, who were trying to lower their uncertainty using the proxies mentioned above, but they were cheated, misinformed or simply let down. They loose only those revenues that they do not deserve.And the fact that PotC II does well in theatres and on p2p might mean that it is actually a movie people are willing to see, because they already know it is good…

    Chris Ovenden has a proposal on p2pnet.net
    for an alternative for flat rate fees on every broadband connection:”Instead of an ISP tax, I propose a voluntary filesharing license. In other words, you pay for the right to trade files however you like.”

    So far so good. But then he continues:
    “The license would be administered by a body independent of both ISPs and the music industry, whose mandate would include collecting and distributing the money as well as catching license fee evaders.”

    Catching fee evaders?

    “On the enforcement side, ISPs would be required by law to make available to the licensing agency certain limited information about the internet usage of unlicensed customers (rather as TV sales have to be registered with TV licensing.) In the first instance only very general information – such as the type of packets most commonly sent and received, and the overall usage pattern – would be revealed. If there was cause for suspicion, further investigation would require dialogue with the user.”

    Bad, Chris, Bad. I dont want anyone to monitor my packets. You can sit down now.

    The Register reports”A Dutch appeals court has thwarted attempts by the Dutch anti-piracy organisation BREIN to get the identities of file-sharers from five ISPs, including Wanadoo and Tiscali. The court found that the manner in which IP addresses were collected and processed by US company MediaSentry had no lawful basis under European privacy laws. A lower court in Utrecht had reached a similar conclusion last year.”

    I will discuss that with lawyers specialized in EU legislation, and will get back to You with more details.

    p2pnet.net reports that for £17 ($31.50) “BT’s download service will include two digital copies – one for a PC and one for a portable device – plus a DVD sent through the mail. The movies will be available as soon as the DVDs hit stores, several months before they air on pay-TV.”

    Amazon also plans to launch a movie download service, where prices like $20 for newer movies and $10 for older ones are expected.

    IDG News Service reports”About 1.8 million people in Japan are active users of file-sharing software, a sharp increase from a year ago, according to a survey by the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), TV broadcasters, and other industry groups.

    The figure is equal to about 3.5 percent of all Internet users and represents a big jump from last year’s survey, which put the number at about 1.3 million, or about 2.7 percent of Internet users.

    The survey was conducted online in mid-June and gathered 18,596 responses. The average number of downloads per user per year was 194 files, of which about 87 were music, 79 were movies, 11 were images, nine were software applications, and eight were documents.”

    Bob McChesney and John Podesta has a nice article in the Washington Monthly on the need to have an universal broadband access as it is a public infrastructure: “Without real competition or innovation, broadband deployment in the United States has stagnated. […] Simply empowering local governments and community groups, in coordination with private entrepreneurs, to provide universal affordable, broadband may be the single best thing we can do to make America the pre-eminent economy—and democracy—of the 21st century.” – Let There Be Wi-Fi

    The New York Times has a nice piece on the self publishing market:”The print-on-demand business is gradually moving toward the center of the marketplace. What began as a way for publishers to reduce their inventory and stop wasting paper is becoming a tool for anyone who needs a bound document. Short-run presses can turn out books economically in small quantities or singly, and new software simplifies the process of designing a book.”

    Who was Pavlik Morozov? A 13-year old soviet boy, who reported his father to the KGB. He served as a role model for generations of soviet youth as someone who, when he had to choose between the values of the soviet state and his family, he has choosen the former.

    Well, history will repeat itself. New York Times reports: “Starting this summer the Hong Kong government plans to have 200,000 youths search Internet discussion sites for illegal copies of copyrighted songs and movies, and report them to the authorities.

    The campaign has delighted the entertainment industry, but prompted misgivings among some civil liberties advocates. The so-called Youth Ambassadors campaign will start on Wednesday with 1,600 youths pledging their participation at a stadium in front of leading Hong Kong film and singing stars and several Hong Kong government ministers.”

    And it is not the mainland, communist China, this is Hong Kong.

    Ever wondered what is the point in piracy (besides providing free access to things that are too expensive/late/unavailable on the market?) They teach corporations the new rules. Reuters reports: “Hollywood studio Warner Bros. is taking on the pirates in China’s film market, using lightning-fast home video release and low prices to beat DVD counterfeiters at their own game.

    Warner’s China film-making joint venture released its first picture, a low-budget film called “Crazy Stone”, in cinemas on June 30, then followed with a DVD version selling for as little as 10 yuan ($1.25) just 12 days later.”

    This is what it means not to be in a monopol position and exposed to competition. But at least it has turned out, that $1.25 is still a price worth going after. Talking about a nearly pure information good this should be natural, shouldn’t it.

    ZDNet UK News reports” The [British] Home Office wants to give the police and the courts sweeping new powers which could see suspected hackers and spammers receiving the cyber equivalent of an anti-social behaviour order (Asbo).

    The proposed Serious Crime Prevention Order is intended to combat organised crime where the police do not have enough evidence to bring a criminal prosecution. It would enable civil courts to impose the orders on individuals, even if they had not been convicted of a crime.”

    Sounds more and more like Orwell’s thought police. Great!

    I have found this browsing through Michael Geist’ s site. In his Rethinking the Public in Public Broadcasting article he mentiones” The Danish Broadcasting Corporation, which already features hundreds of hours of archival material on its website, recently announced plans to provide content to the wikipedia project, thereby enabling users to build on its materials. Later this month officials in the Netherlands intend to unveil plans to digitize 700,000 hours of feature films, documentaries, television shows, and radio programs. This remarkable project, which will take several years to complete, will transfer an incredible array of historical materials into the hands of the public.”

    Well, in Hungary, the fate of the archives of the public television MTV are -how to say- interesting. In 2005 nearly 11 thousand hours of archive material was sold for 4.2 billion HUF (20 million USD, 1800 USD /hour) to the National Audiovisual Archives responsible for digitally archiving contemporary and historic audiovisual material. MTV could choose what material she handed over. The transaction will repeat itself this year.

    MTV is notoriously underfinanced (or to put it in another way notoriously mismanaged), and this 4 billion per year is a hidden support from the government to the station. The price for this? They loose their archives, or that part that was not stolen in the last two decades. The National Audiovisual Archive makes these materials available at dedicated terminals set up in libraries. Wow. Talk about open access to materials the taxpayers had payed for at least twice: at the production and at the sale.

    Michael Geist has an excellent piece on the alternative business models the online ditribution allows for individual creators:
    Video and the Internet an Explosive Mix: ” Released for free on the Internet in early June, Globe and Voltz are featured combining 101 two-litre bottles of Diet Coke with 523 mentos. Less than two months after it was first posted, the video has attracted an audience of millions and has become a commercial success story.

    Filmed with a US$300 budget, it has already generated nearly US$30,000 in advertising revenue for the two creators. Globe and Voltz posted their video on Revver, a new video site that places a short advertisement at the conclusion of user-generated videos (Revver shares the resulting revenue with the creator).”

    Sometimes I feel ashamed (dont forget to scroll down on the target page to see why) for spending my time with copyright issues while in the world outside the wars in the middle east, escalating conflicts over energy supplies, the global ecological catastrophy we are heading to is happening, and instead of doing something for those issues I am in a comfortable, air conditioned room thinking about the rights of artists and users. Seems like entertaintment compared to what is happening out there right now.
    But I am more worried when it comes to the assessment of the results of the G8 summit: pump more oil , ignore the ecologic consequences, turn a blind eye to the middle east and the developing nations and strenghten the IP protection – this is how the result of the meeting of the world’s strongest people can be summed up.
    Anyway. The world leaders have issued the document”Combating IPR Piracy and Counterfeiting‘ in which they say: “We consider it necessary to give priority to promoting and upholding laws, regulations and/or procedures to strengthen intellectual property enforcement, raising awareness in civil society and in the business community of the legal ways to protect and enforce intellectual property rights and of the threats of piracy and counterfeiting, and also to providing technical assistance in that area to developing countries. Close cooperation between law enforcement agencies, including customs authorities, is also of great importance.” This means more FBI raids in Hungarian university campuses, and i guess more publicly financed police squads patrolling the interests of the entertainment industry (A police unit dedicated to combating movie piracy and those responsible for the manufacture and distribution of pirated films has launched in London. – BBC) Thank You, just what we need.
    One of the first victims of this can be the russian AllOfMP3.com, which is a legal service selling music and paying royalties under russian copyright laws. So that is the problem with allofmp3?  “The labels demand, and get, between 60 and 85 cents wholesale for each music file. This means iTunes, for example, wants £9.79 (almost $18.20) for an album where an AllofMP3.comn typically pays only about £0.75 (about $1.40) for a download. ” (P2Pnet)
    We are talking about information products here. The marginal cost of any song in mp3 format is very-very close to zero. So what is the reason behind charging 1 dollar/song, and puuting this on the agenda of G8? I tell you: GREED.

    Today the Center for American Progress hosted an event where Vint Cerf (Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google) and David Farber (Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at the Carnegie Mellon University) clashed on the issue whether the US government should pass laws granting neutrality to the net, or just let service providers set up the rules and fees by which they would allow application and content providers use their broadband network.

    For those who are into scoring things, the final result would have been Cerf winning the celebrity deathmatch if Farber would have not massacred himself with some pretty uncautious remarks well before the end of the show.

    At first it seemed this need not happen. Vint Cerf was in a very delicate position in this debate being not only the one responsible for creating the end-to-end, application neutral architecture of the net, but also being on Google’s payroll, a company with heavy financial interest in this issue.

    But he managed to balance his arguments. On one hand he argued against broadband providers to tax application and content providers because they were not able to come up with a viable business model based on charging the users of that network. He mentioned several examples from Europe and Asia where ISP’s were able to build high coverage broadband networks using revenues from the users, and proposed to help american ISP’s to think about similar models in the US. He also cited statistcics according to which only half of broadband subscribers have a choice from where they buy the broadband access.
    On the other hand he argued vehemently for net neutrality as the only way to secure continuous innovation on the network.

    Farber have not had any real counterarguments except for voicing the immanent fear of government intervention. For me, someone from Europe, or to be more exact from post-communist Central Europe it was not easy to understand the real weight and depth of this fear. Farber said that if we allow government to make rules on net neutrality, it will be a foot in the door, and other laws interfering with more and more online issues were down on that road.

    He had three main points against the regulation: (1) existing control mechanisms are adequate to provide net neutrality, (2) the network was never a fair playground anyway, and (3) there is no sign of carriers behaving badly. Well, soon after that he had to admit that (1) even though the FCC, the FTC and the Dept. of Justice do provide adequate tools to curb unvanted ISP behaviour, the are anything but fast to do justice. (2) and (3) say nothing about possible future dangers of a non-neutral internet.

    At the end the conclusion (at least for me) was that turning the internet into something like the cable business is plain wrong. Broandband providers defining which applications (VoIP, IPTV) and content from which countries, sources, providers can reach their customers gives power to carriers that are much more dangerous than a government move to reinstate a piace of regulation – that of the status of common carrier- that was there before, but it is not anymore because in “2005, the FCC reclassified DSL services as Information Services rather than Telecommunications Services, and replaced common carrier requirements with a set of four less-restrictive net neutrality principles”. (Wikipedia)
    You can listen to the event here.

    More to read on net neutrality:

    Wikipedia has an excellent article on Network neutrality.

    Kevin Kelly has a piece called Scan This Book, in which he envisions an electronic library which has all the books ever printed, scanned, digitized, cross referenced: “So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things: First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. Far out in the “long tail” of the distribution curve — that extended place of low-to-no sales where most of the books in the world live — digital interlinking will lift the readership of almost any title, no matter how esoteric. Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don’t know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.”

    This vision might be closer than we think even though I have concerns whether this might be turn out just nice like that. One fact in the article has stunned me:

    “Corporations and libraries around the world are now scanning about a million books per year. Amazon has digitized several hundred thousand contemporary books.[…] Superstar, an entrepreneurial company based in Beijing, has scanned every book from 900 university libraries in China. It has already digitized 1.3 million unique titles in Chinese, which it estimates is about half of all the books published in the Chinese language since 1949. It costs $30 to scan a book at Stanford but only $10 in China.”

    Just to put that in perspective. The state funded Hungarian book-scanning project scanned 700 hundred book in 7 years. yes that is one book in three days, for around a hunder dollars each. can we call that a digital divide?

    And events like this:The Internet and the Future of Consumer Protection

    For the first time since 1996, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this fall will hold major hearings on consumer protection, the Internet, and globalization. On July 24, the Center for American Progress will host the principal event that will frame and inform those hearings. The event will feature senior leadership from the FTC itself, as well as academic, consumer, and industry leaders. Presenters include: FTC Commissioners Jon Leibowitz and J. Thomas Rosch Former FTC Chairman Robert Pitofsky Former FTC Directors of Consumer Protection Howard Beales & Jodi Bernstein.

    🙂

    The great thing in being in DC is that I can attend meeting like this:

    The Great Debate: What Is Net Neutrality?
    Featured Speakers: Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google Dave Farber, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University
    Moderated by: Carl Malamud, Senior Fellow and Chief Technology Officer, Center for American Progress

    Net Neutrality has become a hot issue this summer in Washington, with ominous cries of impeding doom if we don’t do something. Discussions in the House and Senate have become more heated, and coalitions are forming through the internet. What are the real issues? The Center for American Progress is pleased to present a debate on this important issue featuring two Internet experts, both known for their pioneering work on creating the Internet and for their ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences.

    More here. Report will follow.

    Siliconvalley.com reports about a trial in Japan where Paramount wanted to stop a Japanese company to re-release classic movies originally released before 1953. Now the trick is that the 50-year patents of Paramount to these tiles (like Casablanca or Citizen Kane) expired in 2003, putting them into the public domain. “A 2004 law extended copyright protection for films by 20 years. Judge Makiko Takabe rejected Paramount’s claims that its products that had entered the public domain are retroactively subject to patent protection for 20 more years under the new law.”

    Nice try.

    PC Pro reports that “P2P downloads made up 18 per cent of the digital tunes, with a further 11 per cent copied from friends’ CDs’; 65 per cent were ripped from purchased CDs with the remaining six per cent from paid-for download” in the UK. The study was done by British Music Rights (BMR), “an umbrella organisation representing a number of composers’, songwriters’ and music publishers’ bodies.”

    These numbers seem to be a bit low for me, but this is not the point now. BMR wishes to use these numbers to push for a licence fee collected from hardware manufacturers and ISPs. I quess I can understand that, this is where cash is abundant, fight for a stake where there is a bounty.

    But, the name they have coined:Value Recognition Right, is a telling us about an intent of making telcos and ISP’ part of the content value chain. This not only is damaging of Net Neutrality, but serious intrusion of the privacy of the users. Someone watching my packages, peeping into whether they are part of an illegal mp3, and metering these packages? Lobbying for rent seeking, instead of trying to create economic/legal/cultural models to gain revenue on the right of their own? Come on, this is plain wrong.

    Ars Technika writes: “An Oklahoma mother, Debbie Foster, was accused by the RIAA of copyright infringement back in November 2004, and her daughter Amanda was added to the complaint in July 2005. According to the RIAA, the Internet account paid for by Debbie Foster was used for file sharing, with an unspecified number of songs downloaded.

    The music group offered to settle the case for US$5,000, but Foster decided to take her chances in court. She requested that the RIAA provide specifics such as the dates of the alleged downloading and the files involved. The RIAA failed to provide the requested information and Foster filed a motion for summary judgment. In turn, the RIAA decided to cut its losses and asked the court to withdraw its case. The court approved the RIAA’s request, but named Foster the winner and awarded her attorneys fees over the RIAA’s objections.”

    I wonder how many of RIAA’s lawsuits lack any actual evindence?

    Coming home from a salsa event last night i have bought the book at Dupont Circle, and I am reading it now. so stay tuned for a more detailed review.

    For accessibility reasons mentioned in my previous post for those of You, whose local library doesn’t carry WSJ, or you dont have a credit card or the necessary means to pay for that article, here is a reprint of a copyrighted WSJ article. The rest of you, go and buy it, so they can write such articles in the future.

    “Picks Rare Art Films Surface Online By IAN MOUNT July 8, 2006; Page P2

    A groundbreaking experimental Man Ray film, made in 1923, is now available for anyone to watch free online. It isn’t on the Web sites of the Library of Congress or the Internet Moving Image Archive. But you’ll find it at both YouTube and Google Video, two amateur-video-sharing sites. Increasingly, rare and avant-garde films are showing up on sites like these, best known for hosting homemade video spoofs. On YouTube, there are 1969 art videos by Nam June Paik, a 1967 student movie by George Lucas and an iconic 1930 film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, as well as a clip of Dalí in a chocolate commercial (pictured).

    It’s the latest reflection of an online culture where fans can function as curators of digital entertainment, bypassing libraries and museums with their own collections of music or movies. In many cases, these rare film clips are posted by amateur film buffs who’ve scooped up film reels or rare VHS tapes from eBay or local sales, and then digitized them for online viewing. A handful of Web sites and blogs, such as the Greylodge Podcasting Company (www.greylodge.org/gpc), link to the clips, many of which aren’t available on DVD.

    The posting of these rare films can raise legal issues, however. Some of the films are still under copyright, and will be taken down if a copyright holder objects. Two short films by director David Lynch, for instance, were recently removed from YouTube when Mr. Lynch’s production company complained. People who post these films say they’re only trying to increase awareness of overlooked cinematic gems, and say they receive few complaints. Because the posters generally aren’t profiting from the film clips, and aren’t cutting into anyone’s profits in cases where the films aren’t sold commercially, lawsuits over these film clips are rare. “Is George Lucas going to spend money chasing down his grad-school films? Probably not,” says attorney Daniel Harris, who heads the intellectual-property group at the law firm of Clifford Chance in Menlo Park, Calif. HOW TO FIND IT: For an index of rare films on YouTube, go to http://www.greylodge.org/gpc and choose “link dump” under “categories.” — Ian Mount”

    (Note: CC licence does not apply to the WSJ article).

    Well, this is very much like the point i am trying to make here. A Nam June Paik video piece might be interesting for 1620 people worldwide, and that might be enough to make a business model on. But aggregating this demand on the physical infrastructure is impossible. The question whether all of these 1620 people would be willing to pay for watching the film is yet to be answered. But the risk of the answer being no, might be a pretty high entry barrier for copyright owners when it comes to digitizing the archives in large quantities.

    But what is costly and risky for one entity is cheap, easy, (but not quite) risk-free for the users.
    Distributing the costs of digitization among the network members is a wise choice, even if it means you have to think about copyright in different terms.

    Hollywood started experimenting with sellinbg movies online and offline using very different prices. In the UK “Universal Pictures and Wippit, the music file-sharing site [offer] Universal films on the day of DVD release. As for pricing, new releases are going to cost £19.99 with older films costing £4.99. Whilst this might look incredibly expensive on the outset, Universal notes that buyers will get three versions of the film. One for a computer download, one for a portable device and a hard copy through the post.” (source: bit-tech news).
    Meanwhile according to p2pnet in a galaxy far-far away “Warner Bros is selling “selected” movies for a mere $2.75 in major Chinese cities.” They aim to gain some market in a country where illegal copies costing less than a buck are ubiquitous.

    So let me start listing the factors of cultural accessibility:
    – affordability
    – availability on time – no more release strategies set by the producers?
    – physical accessibility – download online, or buy it in a store, or rent it or go to a library?

    and most probably:

    – cultural capital – now simply substituted by marketing.

    “The reason why piracy’s come along is that there weren’t enough products at the right price soon enough,”– Tony Vaughan, managing director of CAV Warner Home Entertainment Co, Warner Bros’ joint venture distribution company in China.

    Write that down.

    According to the story of International Herald Tribune Virgin, the british consumer retailer giant has been caught red-handed in stealing and then reselling a Madonna song. “The store’s online portal was ordered by the Paris Tribunal of Commerce to pay €600,000, or $754,000, in damages for downloading the Madonna song “Hung Up” from a France Télécom Web site. The Web site had exclusive rights to distribute the song for one week.”

    Virgin downloaded the song, cracked the DRM and started selling the song herself.

    Not exactly like Robin Hood. Well, at least they define the standards for stealing for our sake.

    P2Pnet adds, rightly:

    “Pirates like Virgin steal and profit from their criminal activities.

    Filesharers don’t steal a thing and make no profit whatsoever.

    That’s a big difference.”

    Derek Slater was lucky enough to receive a copy of Andersons book the “The Long Tail“. In his review he mentiones one statement:

    “Hollywood economics is not the same as Web video economics, and Madonna’s financial expectations are not the same as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s. But when Congress extends copyright terms for anothe decade at the request of the Disney lobby, they’re playing just to the top of the curve. What’s good for Disney is not necessarily what’s good for America. Likewise for legislation restricting technologies that allow digital file copying or video transmissions. The problem is that the Long Tail doesn’t have a lobby, so all too often only the Short Head is heard.”

    I am happy to read this. I would continue this line of thought: What’s good for America is not necessarily good for other big cultural entities (like for example the French, see their effort on “Cultural Exception“), and what is good for the French is not necessarily good for small languages and cultures, like Hungarian.

    Different country sizes, different number of native speakers, GDP per capita, different scope of cultural markets, different systems of cultural production and distribution.

    To what extent does the uniform global IP legislation leave space for local specifities? Can they, shold they be regulated in a single policy space? I hope to have answers in a few months.

    Torrentfreak has collected the pro-piracy political parties forming an international coalition. Wow.
    I was wondering lately how something which by its very nature should be and is hiding from public eye because it is illegal would affect policy-making and public discourse. People active in illegal file-sharing want to avoid publicity. They have no interest in being part of the public annales. Or at least that was the theory of James C. Scott in his Domination and the Arts of Resistance : Hidden Transcripts: „The goal of […] subordinate groups, as they conduct their ideological and material resistance, is precisely to escape detection; to the extent that they achieve their goal, such activities do dot appear in the archives.”

    But it seems that we are witnessing a coming out of filesharers and that is very-very important. I see them as the only group that propose a serious alternative to current IP legislation, the rest is softie blabla respecting the rules of the global IP playground. Revolutions do not start like this. Revolutions start by announcing the discontinuity.

    When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. ” (declaration of independence)

    Now, what is only left is to lay out the causes, isn’t it, 😉

    The UK’s independent music labels want a change in the law so internet service providers (ISPs) become liable for illegal file-sharing by their users.” – says the headline of BBC News.
    It is the second attack this week on intermediaries like ISPs to bear responsibility for the behaviour of their users, but the bottom line might be to create a legal construction where ISPs are in a similar position as other more traditional intermediaries are like radio stations and other broadcasters, who pay a licence fee for the use of copyrighted material to rightsholders in exchange for letting their users listen to copyrighted material.
    People behind the swedish pirate bay have heavily argued against this kind of flat-rate copyright fee. (via nettime) Well worth a read.
    http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0407/msg00020.html
    http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0407/msg00032.html
    Well, i guess the big war about what ISPs
    are: phone companies (not responsible for the content they convey) or media companies is just about to start. Yummy.

    many sources in the blogosphere report the standoff between the isp tiscali and the british phonographic industry. bpi wants tiscali to stop its ip-identified users from file-sharing, tiscali says slow down to them.

    they want tiscali to

    1.  suspend the relevant customers until such time as they enter
    into an undertaking with the BPI in the form required by bpi
    2.  disclos the personal details of the relevant customers to the
    BPI; and
    
    3.  itself enter into a legal agreement with the BPI obliging it
    to do the above.

    none of the above will happen. details here and here and here.