Jonathan Bailey's List: Episode 60

• The online resource favored by sites from The Huffington Post to PerezHilton.com is being threatened with legal action by Fox, CBS and NBC, according to Silicon Alley Insider.

    

  The media muscle sent the site a firmly worded cease-and-desist letter for recording and distributing TV content without permission. RedLasso has until May 29 to comply or it faces court time.

• 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. 
• It's not uncommon to find illegal movies being hosted on servers outside the US, which is why sites based in the US have not hesitated to merely tell users how to get to them. The increase in lawsuits against sites that point to illegal movies, however, may push more of them to move operations overseas too in order to skirt further litigation.

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• And yet, the Dutch-based site has eluded legal action until now. Partly, it is because of their takedown policy; if a copyright owner asks them to remove a torrent from their database, they will comply.
• This is not enough, according to BREIN, because over 90% of files tracked on Mininova are illegal; Mininova should start filtering their search results, or they’ll face legal action. Sound familiar? Yup, it’s pretty much the same thing media giants have been asking YouTube to do. So, although many associate Mininova with warez and illegal files, this is essentially the same issue; and if Mininova loses this one, it’ll be bad news for YouTube and others, too.

• In 2007 a select handful of the wealthiest countries began a treaty-making process to create a new global standard for intellectual property rights enforcement, which was called, in a piece of brilliant marketing, the "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (the agreement does not cover currency fraud). 

  ACTA is spearheaded by the United States along with the European Commission, Japan, and Switzerland — which have large intellectual property industries. Other countries invited to participate in ACTA’s negotiation process are Canada, Australia, Korea, Mexico and New Zealand. Noticeably absent from ACTA’s negotiations are leaders from developing countries who hold national policy priorities that differ from the international intellectual property industry.

• "What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world--which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords--which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem."
• Piracy has been a hot-button issue in the PC gaming industry for some time now, with renowned PC developers such as Crytek, id, and Epic claiming that the high rate of pirated PC software forced them to put games on other platforms.

• The RIAA and record companies associated with the original Atlantic v. Andersen case filed a 19-page response, while MediaSentry's parent SafeNet filed a nine-page reply. In it, the defendants categorically deny all of Andersen's accusations and ask for the judge to dismiss the lawsuit and award them costs and attorneys' fees. The RIAA also says that Andersen's attempts to turn the case into a class-action are "inappropriate," arguing that the "factual issues" raised are "wholly unique" to the lawsuit.

•  The "rules," in which the spokeswoman is apparently referring to are those proposed by the FCC, which would require software and hardware makers honor "broadcast flags." The flags are code that broadcasters can insert into the data stream of TV shows that typically require restrictions on the recording of the shows. What she didn't say is that the "rules" aren't rules at all. 

   The courts struck down the FCC's proposal in 2005, saying the regulator lacked the authority to tell electronics makers how to interpret the signals they receive. Since then, Microsoft and other manufacturers have retained the option of whether to honor the flags.
• News that the world's largest software maker has voluntarily agreed to help broadcasters control the recording of their shows is bound to outrage enthusiasts of digital video recorders, as it represents the biggest threat to the practice known as time shifting since the FCC's attempt to require flag adherence.

• On Tuesday, Judge Richard Jones of the U.S. District Court in Seattle handed down an opinion in Timothy Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc., handing Vernor victory in an important exposition of the first sale doctrine. (H.T. and congrats to Greg Beck). The case also illustrates why notice and notice is a better system for safe harbor regimes than the U.S. notice and take down approach USTR is trying to force on other countries.
• Under a notice and notice regime, eBay would not have to make judgments it has no ability to make, and Vernor's auctions would have gone forward because Autodesk was not, seemingly going to sue: recall that Vernor brought a declaratory relief action. Notice and take down, however, gave Autodesk the very relief it was denied by the court.

• What the simplistic - dare I say naive - five point plan laid out by the record “think tank” overlooks is that in order to accomplish the equivalent of something like a Google in the music industry, one has to completely rewrite the industry.  While this is not a new idea, it is also not an idea that can be accomplished in today’s copyright structure nor within the current orientation of the music industry.  Hundreds of years of practice have to be completed abolished for the Google model to work in the music industry.

• How will Prentice attempt to sell the Canadian DMCA?  Word is that the six months since the initial bill was shelved has yielded some changes, most notably reforms such as the legalization of time shifting (ie. recording television shows with a VCR/PVR) and possibly device shifting (ie. transfer a song from a store bought CD to an iPod). 
  
  Neither of these provisions come close to meeting the concerns of the many groups that have spoken out on copyright over the past six months.  Moreover, the Prentice Canadian DMCA is still likely to render Canadians infringers where they seek to use these new exceptions in the digital realm.  For example, last week there were reports that NBC inserted copy-controls into some of their television programming that rendered Windows Vista Media Center users unable to record television shows.  Under the Prentice plan, users that seek to circumvent the digital lock to record the television show (as he will claim they can) will still violate the law.  The same is true for copy-controlled CDs - try circumventing the copy-controls to shift the music onto your iPod and you're violating the law even with a device-shifting provision.

• Mattel Inc said on Monday it has settled its lawsuit against ex-employee and Bratz dolls inventor Carter Bryant, but its case against MGA Entertainment, which makes the Bratz collection, will proceed.

      

  The world's largest toy maker said it would not disclose the terms of its settlement with Bryant. Mattel had said he conceived the big-headed, pouty-lipped toys while he worked at the company as a Barbie designer.

• Bosses at Oklahoma-based company Glamour Shots claim the Hannah Montana Glamour Shots Candy, placed on Disney store shelves, misleads buyers into believing the photo agency made the treats.

   

  The candy is packaged in a small picture frame with Cyrus featured inside.

• Los Angeles indie band Lustra [ tickets ] is claiming the Hannah Montana [ tickets ] song "Rockstar" is identical to their song "Scotty Doesn't Know," from their album "Left For Dead," according to a statement issued on the band's behalf.
  
  "Scotty Doesn't Know," which was recorded for the movie "Eurotrip," was released in 2004 while "Rockstar" was released in 2006.

• This week marked an announcement by none other than the Web Sheriff himself, in which he purports to have assembled a list of historied musical acts like the Village People, UB40, the proprietors of the estate of Bob Marley, and Michael Jackson to comprise a sort of loose-knit coalition to contend with The Pirate Bay in court. The Web Sheriff also wants to add ABBA to his client base, since they’re Swedish, and so is TPB, and would in his mind make for an intriguing clash. All told, John Giacobbi (the name behind the badge) intends to pursue The Pirate Bay for the sum of $100 million, according to Ernesto of TorrentFreak.

• Napster is now selling DRM-free music files playable on any device, including iPods , and has streamlined its Web interface with version 4.5.

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  Napster claims to have the largest selection of music among online music services, with 6 million tracks, and is making all them available for purchase in standard MP3 format. The DRM-free tracks cost $0.99 and albums cost $9.95, which is comparable with Apple 's iTunes Plus DRM-free songs; Apple claims to have 2 million such tracks available. The Apple DRM-free tracks are also in the less-compatible AAC format, which Windows Media Player can't handle. Both companies' DRM-free files are encoded at a high-quality, 256Kbps bitrate.

•   Ever wonder how many YouTube videos vanish from alleged copyright violations? A Massachusetts Institute of Technology research project called YouTomb can show you some. 

   

   The site, an effort by the MIT Free Culture group, scans the most popular YouTube videos for the metadata Google inserts after a video has been taken down. YouTomb shows a list of recently removed videos (which you can't actually view), who requested their removal, when they were taken down, and how long they were up beforehand.

• We regret to report the sudden, unexpected death of Digital Rights Management. Details of the tragedy at present remain unclear, but he was rushed to the hospital following a direct collision with an oncoming future last week at 10 PM. He was seven years old.

   

  Zuneral Services
   May 24th (this Saturday)
   6:30 PM
   JFK Park, Memorial Drive
   Cambridge, MA