Jonathan Bailey's List: Episode 104

• Reached Wednesday morning, Claudia Jones, an AT&T spokeswoman, said the company's letters do include a mention that company retains the right to terminate service. She wanted to make it clear that AT&T has no intention of doing so, however. Jones also said the ISP never shares customers' names or any other personal information. What the company does do is send a "cover letter" to the accused customer along with the letter the ISP received from the RIAA stating that the person's IP address was flagged.

• "Our efforts are focused on educating consumers who receive infringement notifications for illegal downloading about where to find high-quality, legitimate content on the internet and on effective ways to deal with repeat infringers," the Motion Picture Association of America said in a statement. The association, which is the lobbying agency for the Hollywood studios, declined to elaborate.

• The European Parliament adopted the report with 481 votes in favor, 25 against and 21 abstentions. French proposals that would allow a ‘graduated response’ aka ‘3 strikes’ regime to deal with alleged copyright infringers were rejected.
• “Governments or private companies should not see the denial of such access as a means of imposing sanctions, as proposed in some countries in the union.”

• What's the CMI that Fairey is accused of "stripping" from the original photo? Well, the AP complaint is not entirely clear on this question. In one part of the complaint, AP alleges that all of its digital photos include digital metadata that Fairey allegedly "stripped" from the image. In another part of the complaint, AP seems to rely on Fairey failing to preserve the "copyright notice line" at the edge of the photo.
• The answer to Prof. Boyden's second question is that a file edited and re-saved in Photoshop generally will retain its metadata. As for the first question, it appears to be be answered by this video from Time magazine, in which Fairey demonstrates his process — clearly not a digital transformation of a digital file.

• The DoJ filing even offers a justification for why this is the right way to think about apportioning fines. "The harms caused by copyright  infringement are not negated merely because an infringer does not seek commercial gain," it says. "In the context of online media distribution systems, infringement without commercial gain limits a  copyright owner’s ability to distribute legal copies of copyrighted works. The public in turn suffers from lost jobs and wages, lost tax revenue, and higher prices for honest purchasers of  copyrighted works."

• RealNetworks made its surprising claim Monday because, under rules of evidence, companies must retain records if they believe they are going to be sued. The MPAA claims RealNetworks destroyed a host of documents relating to RealDVD's production -- well before the MPAA sued it in September.

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  "This was not some theoretically possibility," Williams said. He also said, "They knew there would be a lawsuit."
• A central dispute in the case concerns whether it is an circumvention violation for RealDVD to copy the DVD encryption into a computer hard drive that allows playback of the movie at any time absent the original disc. The MPAA says the content-scramble license requires that the keys to the encryption code must be read from the DVD while the DVD is inside the computer.

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• This is clearly something of a trial run for Fox, as Redlasso won’t be able to offer any of the content from its national cable news networks. But it’s still a big win for Redlasso, indicating that the content owners haven’t forsaken the site completely.
• Redlasso CEO Al McGowan says that the company has settled all pending lawsuits with the television networks, and is also looking to expand its content offerings to include both regional and national content from the other networks.

• In August 2007 disaster struck when a database of MediaDefender’s internal emails leaked to the public. Every juicy detail of their anti-piracy campaigns were out in the open, including the tools they used. The hacker said that he initially didn’t plan to make the info public, but when he found out what MediaDefender were up to he was determined to “destroy them” - and so he did.

• So if you download a leaked version of a game, or even have a boxed copy that was sold prematurely, you won't be able to play until the game is unlocked online.
• The second part of this protection is making sure there is a license attached to each account, via server-side authentication. You can sign in and play your game on as many systems as possible, but you have to have a license attached to your account. Of course, this only works for online games, and is relatively useless for offline titles. "You can install on as many systems as you want... whereever you want to," Johnston says. The game simply authenticates whenever you log into the online servers. "This is really IP protection," he says, admitting that DRM is a dirty word.