COPYCENSE

“We are willing to purchase media, and have thousands of music and movies; we are the entertainment industries best friend when it comes to spending money on entertainment. But as with all end of an era kind of things, everything we do is somehow proscribed, regulated, or locked. Those heady days of being 14 or 40 and copying something so it can come with us are over, and that is a shame.” — Techwag.

Techwag. The End of An Era Over Copyright. Dec. 12, 2007. We disagree that the days of copying something to come with you are over, but it is a shame that too many citizens feel proscribed from doing this very fundamental networked activity.

(Editor’s Note: Copycense editors originally commented on this article in the Dec. 18, 2007, edition of Copycense Clippings, where it was a Quote of the Week selection.)

Copycense™: Incisive IP.™

Technorati Tags: Copycense

The final Clippings edition of this year features a novel approach to copyright reform; the Canadian citizenry stopping cold the march of restrictive copyright; and using P2P for marketing purposes.

Thank you for continuing to follow Copycense. We will resume Clippings coverage early next year.

This is Copycense.

Article of the Week

Pamela Samuelson. Preliminary Thoughts on Copyright Reform. The UC-Berkeley law professor offers “preliminary thoughts about what a model copyright law might include and how one might go about getting rid of some of the clutter in the existing statute,” using the example provided by the American Law Institute’s model laws. Categories: Legislation & Regulation; Research.

Quotes of the Week

“It is undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies of [] copyrighted sound recordings on his computer. … Virtually all of the sound recordings … are in the ‘.mp3’ format. … Defendant admitted that he converted these sound recordings from their original format to the .mp3 format for his and his wife’s use. The .mp3 format is a ‘compressed format [that] allows for rapid transmission of digital audio files from one computer to another by electronic mail or any other file transfer protocol.’ Napster, 239 F.3d at 1011. Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recording into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by [plaintiff recording companies].” — Recording Industry Assn. of America brief in Atlantic v. Howell.

MacNN. RIAA Claims CD Rips Are Piracy in Lawsuit. Dec. 11, 2007. The MacNN headline is provocative, but not quite accurate. What the music industry lobby argues that ripping copyrighted music from CD (i.e. the “original format”) to another format (e.g. .mp3 files, for example) and posting to a shared folder on a peer-to-peer program (like Kazaa) means the music becomes de facto illegal, and therefore copyright infringement. While most coverage of this brief focuses on the alleged illegality of ripping music from compact disc to another format, to us the real story is about the recording industry’s attempts to extend into judge-made law the “making available” doctrine, which the industry argued strongly in the Jammie Thomas trial. Although the RIAA does, in fact, think that making personal copies of music is illegal, we’d like to think the likelihood of them trying to enforce that principle alone is far fetched. We’ve seen stranger things occur, however. Categories: Bundle of Rights; Cases & Litigation; File Sharing, P2P & Downloads; Music.

“We are willing to purchase media, and have thousands of music and movies; we are the entertainment industries best friend when it comes to spending money on entertainment. But as with all end of an era kind of things, everything we do is somehow proscribed, regulated, or locked. Those heady days of being 14 or 40 and copying something so it can come with us are over, and that is a shame.” — Techwag.

Techwag. The End of An Era Over Copyright. Dec. 12, 2007. We disagree that the days of copying something to come with you are over, but it is a shame that too many citizens feel proscribed from doing this very fundamental networked activity. Categories: Bundle of Rights.

Technorati Tags: Copycense, Copycense Clippings, K. Matthew Dames

Read the rest of this entry »

William Patry, author of The Patry Copyright Blog, has been en fuego the last few days, writing mostly about proposed U.S. copyright legislation, H.R. 4279 in particular. In addition to suffering the dreaded acronym disease that has plagued legislation since the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001, H.R. 4279 (the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act, or “PRO IP Act”) would increase penalties for copyright infringement, among other things.

(In our most recent edition of Clippings, we focused on the legislation’s proposal to create a Cabinet-level intellectual property czar with a starting budget of $25 million.)

Anyone remotely concerned about balanced copyright should be concerned that Congress is considering this bill, especially with a presidential election and the end of a Congressional term approaching. Candidates on both sides of the aisle recognize they need the support of the entertainment industries that support H.R. 4279, and will be willing to accommodate them. (That is why the Copyright Alliance’s open lobbying campaign of presidential candidates last month was significant.) These industries have prior success in getting bills passed (usually within larger omnibus budget bills) as the Congressional term winds down to zero.

(Lest citizens characterize PRO IP as another Republican plot for world takeover, we note for the record that PRO IP support is bipartisan. Also, let us not forget that the legislation that arguably began this streak of progressively tighter copyright laws, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was signed by a Democratic president working with a Democratic Congress.)

But back to Patry, and his points about the legislative process. In the second of two posts, Patry commends the Canadian approach to the legislative process, noting along the way that University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist was able to gather more than 10,000 Canadians to protest the country’s recent foray into DMCA-like legislation. “How Canada deals with the substantive issues is of importance, obviously, but for those of us in the U.S., how the Canadians have dealt with the process of having their voices heard is instructive indeed,” Patry wrote. “There is much we have to learn from Canada. I cannot think of a better place to start than with H.R. 4279.”

Patry’s summarizes his opinion of the PRO IP bill in the final paragraph of his first post:

So this it: a Zero Tolerance approach to a civil, economic tort, copyright infringement. The dangers in the new Zero Tolerance to copyright go far beyond the individuals swept within its net, although that is bad enough: the Zero Tolerance approach threatens respect for law itself. People do not obey laws they abhor, and there is much to abhor in H.R. 4279. Copyright owners have proved themselves incapable of understanding their customers and the public’s outrage over the direction copyright has taken; perhaps they delude themselves into thinking that the opprobrium comes from those who don’t respect law anyway; but it doesn’t: it also comes from those like Sir Hugh and I who love copyright law and who have devoted our professional careers to it. If section 104 and the civil forfeiture provisions of H.R. 4297 pass, there will be many others.

I, too, love copyright. Perhaps unlike Patry, my involvement in copyright from the legal perspective is relatively recent compared to my involvement with copyright as a creator of words, music, and art. I believe in “promot[ing] 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.” (Emphasis mine.)

I create, and I get paid for my creations. I like and expect to be paid for my creations. I expect my creations will be protected by the law. Everything on Copycense is subject to Copyright Act of 1976 — rights and exceptions all — and we will not hesitate to file a DMCA takedown notice against any Web site that dares to scrape and re-post this site’s contents whole or without attribution.

Despite my strident criticisms of the lobbies such as RIAA and MPAA, no one ever has read in these pages that we do not believe in copyright or copyright protection. But, like Patry, I believe U.S. copyright has gone almost irreconcilably askew. There are a variety of reasons for this problem, but I want to focus on one. And I’ll begin with a story.

Technorati Tags: CommuniK., Copycense, William Patry

Read the rest of this entry »