COPYCENSE

“Wayne Chang hopes to return to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst this year to finish up a business degree. But he might not be altogether welcome on campus, since dozens of his fellow students are threatening to sue him for $157,500.

“That’s what it will cost the students to settle lawsuits from music recording companies, which say the students illegally distributed copyrighted tunes over the Internet using a file-swapping service founded by Chang and called i2hub. Chang said he had no idea students would use his system for illegal activity. But the UMass-Amherst students say i2hub’s advertising misled them into believing that the file swapping was legal. They want Chang’s defunct service to pay the damages.”

Hiawatha Bray. UMass Users Ask File-Swap Service Founder to Pay Up. Boston.com. Jan. 19, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“The EMI Group is reviewing a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to allow reverse engineering of its digital rights management software, EMI said on Friday.

“The EFF, a digital rights group, sent an open letter to EMI earlier this month asking the company to publicly declare that it would not take any legal action against independent computer security researchers who investigate copy-restriction technologies used on EMI CDs.

“A spokesman for EMI told ZDNet UK that the company had received the letter and was reviewing the matter.”

Tom Espiner. EMI Considers Opening Its DRM to Inspection. News.com. Jan. 20, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

Draft legislation making the rounds in the U.S. Senate gives us a preview of the MPAA and RIAA’s next target: your television and radio.

You say you want the power to time-shift and space-shift TV and radio? You say you want tomorrow’s innovators to invent new TV and radio gizmos you haven’t thought of yet, the same way the pioneers behind the VCR, TiVo, and the iPod did?

Well, that’s not what the entertainment industry has in mind. According to them, here’s all tomorrow’s innovators should be allowed to offer you:

customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law.

Had that been the law in 1970, there would never have been a VCR. Had it been the law in 1990, no TiVo. In 2000, no iPod.

EFF Deep Links. New Senate Broadcast Flag Bill Would Freeze Fair Use. Jan. 20, 2006.

See also:

Electronic Frontier Foundation. Draft Legislation: Digital Content Protection Act of 2006. (.pdf, 63 KB) No date.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“In the decades since Woodstock, many a concert film has gotten mired in its own clichés. But as the Beastie Boys set out to commemorate a concert at Madison Square Garden, the hip-hop group had a different idea. Why not smash the model?

“They decided to lend hand-held video cameras to 50 fans, told them to shoot at will, and then presented the end result in movie theaters in all its primitive, kaleidoscopic glory.

“The result of this brainstorm is “Awesome … ,” which will be shown Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, before being released by ThinkFilm in late March.”

Lorne Manly. This Is Not Spinal Tap: A Concert Film by Fans. The New York Times. Jan. 19, 2006.

(Editor’s Note: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper’s fee-based Archive.)

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“U.S. adult film maker Digital Playground on Thursday said it will throw its support behind Sony Corp.’s high definition Blu-ray format, adding spice to the multibillion-dollar standards war raging in Hollywood.

“Sony’s Blu-ray competes with the HD DVD format championed by Toshiba Corp. and appears to have amassed more allies in the next-generation DVD format war — including Apple Computer Inc., Panasonic and the majority of movie studios.

“Digital Playground is the company behind the movie “Pirates,” which has won honors from the porn industry that calls Southern California’s San Fernando Valley home and is estimated to have had 2005 sales of $12.6 billion, according to Adult Video News.”

Lisa Baertlein. Adult Film Maker Digital Playground Picks Blu-ray. Yahoo! News. Jan. 19, 2006.

Update:

Mike Musgrove. Technology’s Seamier Side. WashingtonPost.com. Jan. 21, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“The fight led by former U.S. Rep. Pat Schroeder and the American Association of Publishers to stop Google from digitizing the library collections of several leading universities — and making the results searchable — is, unsurprisingly, about money.

“Google has a technological knack for making a fortune out of almost everything it does, and who can blame the publishers for wanting a cut of that? But this fight is also about a bigger issue that affects the rest of us as well — namely, the pace at which new ideas can change people’s lives.

“Setting aside the fact that owners normally accept some responsibility for safeguarding their own property, this argument seems to have it all backward. In the Google library project, what prevents potential copyright infringements is not a publisher’s decision to “opt out” or not, but whether Google provides more than a snippet without a publisher’s permission.”

Robert J. Shapiro. Google vs. The Publishers. Statesman.com. Jan. 20, 2006.

See also:

John C. Dvorak. Much Ado Over Google Book Search. PCMagazine.com. Jan. 18, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.