Piracy Archives

John Degen “weapons down, please”

Check out John Degen’s post yesterday. In it he laments the “inflammatory and inaccurate rhetoric that seems to sprout up and spread like dandelions whenever anybody in power utters the words ‘copyright protection'”. His observations about the rhetoric around DRMs are also insightful. Asking people to tone down the dialog for a while, he asks “can we please put away the revolvers, handcuffs, chains, scary-looking safes, and weird dystopias?”

John also reminds us that a central purpose of copyright is to enable individuals to decide for themselves how and when they want the product of their creativity to be presented and disseminated to the public.…

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What do LimeWire, Napster, Kazaa, and Isohunt all have in common?

LimeWire now joins the ignoble club of sites and services around the workd that have been found liable for inducing, contributing to, or authorizing massive online copyright infringement. Other well known sites and services found liable on these and other secondary liability or criminal theories include Napster, Aimster, Grokster, Kazaa, Pirate Bay, Mininova, Usenet.com, Newzbin, and Isohunt.

Courts around the world have not tolerated or been willing to countenance online businesses whose core business model involves profiting from facilitating online copyright infringement.…

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Canada again named to USTR’s Priority Watch List for weak IP laws

The USTR just released its 2010 Special 301 Report. Canada has again been placed on the Priority Watch List along with Algeria, Argentina, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand, and Venezuela.

In placing Canada on this list, the USTR stated the following:

Canada will remain on the Priority Watch List in 2010. The United States looks forward to the government of Canada’s implementation of its previous commitments, recently reaffirmed in 2010, to improve IPR protection, and is encouraged by the high level of cooperation between the Canadian and United States governments on IPR matters.

…

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Canada called out for weak copyright laws by IFPI and at the Heritage Committee

Digital piracy remains one of the biggest obstacles for the recording industry. It is an especially significant problem here in Canada. A major contributor is weak copyright protection which limits the development of new business models for music in Canada. These are the conclusions of the IFPI which just published a report setting out a comprehensive picture of the key trends in today’s music business including key trends in Canada. It is also the opinion of representatives of the recording industry who appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage last week.…

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Graduated response: a least cost solution to reducing online copyright infringement

A new article, Three strikes law: a least cost solution to rampant online piracy, published by Charn Wing Wan, argues that graduated response systems can be justified on economic grounds as a way of reducing transaction costs associated with enforcing online copyright infringement.

The abstract of the article states the following:

“Legal context: The prohibitively high cost of civil litigation is inefficient against millions of online infringers; it is virtually impossible to stop online infringement. The establishment and maintenance of a social norm which makes people willing to conform to pro-copyright norms independent of any consideration of legal incentives is indispensable in the fight against online infringers.…

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The Owens analysis of the Canadian copyright consultations: what are the implications?

Earlier this week, Richard Owens, the past chair of the board of directors of the University of Toronto Innovations Foundation, a member of the board and former Executive Director of the Centre for Innovation and Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and an adjunct professor of copyright and technology law at the University of Toronto, published a critical analysis of last summer’s copyright consultation. In his paper, Noises Heard: Canada’s Recent Online Copyright Consultation Process: Teachings and Cautions, he concluded that the consultation “was systematically abused by a clandestine group of mod-chip distributors, foreign websites administrators and international BitTorrent users”. …

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Is graduated response necessary to protect human rights from online copyright infringement?

Last week, the Irish High Court released an important decision in the EMI Records & Ors -v- Eircom Ltd , [2010] IEHC 108 case. The court held that a settlement agreement between an Irish ISP, Eircom, and owners of copyright protected sound recordings and videos to implement a voluntary graduated response system was compatible with Irish data protection legislation. The ruling by Justice Charleton delivered on 16th April, 2010, is noteworthy not only because it found that collecting and using IP addresses for the purposes of sending out graduated response notices to subscribers does not violate data protection legislation.…

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Calling out misreporting about ACTA

As I have pointed out before on several occasions, there is a lot of inaccurate reporting about ACTA. In some cases, the misreporting is done by people who are intimately familiar with the actual text of the publically available draft treaty documents. In other cases, the misreporting results from relying on those widely disseminated inaccurate secondary sources.

A case in point is recent article published by the Ottawa Citizen and other Canwest newspapers such as the Montreal Gazette , Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, Windsor Star, and the Vancouver Sun dealing with ACTA.…

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More hype than facts about ACTA from its critics

The internet is lighting up again with opposition to the ACTA as negotiations on the trade agreement resume in New Zealand. Notwithstanding that much about the treaty is now known from well publicized leaks, its critics continue to try and slag it with misinformation and biased criticism.

Consider the following summary by Prof. Geist in yesterday’s Toronto Star article which was re-published in his blog this morning. Prof. Geist says:

“the text confirmed many fears about the substance of ACTA. If adopted in its current form, the treaty would have a significant impact on the Internet, leading some countries to adopt three-strikes-and-you’re-out policies that terminate subscriber access due to infringement allegations, increasing legal protection for digital locks, mandating new injunction powers, implementing statutory damages provisions worldwide, and engaging in widespread data sharing across national borders.”…

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Injunction to issue against IsoHunt in a busy month for the courts

There has been some confusion over whether an injunction has issued yet in the US IsoHunt case. In short, an injunction has not yet issued against IsoHunt. However, US District court Judge Stephen Wilson issued a tentative order on March 23, 2010 ruling that a permanent injunction is going to be made against IsoHunt. A copy of the tentative judgment is available here.

The tentative order contains the judge’s ruling as to why the Court intends to grant a permanent injunction. …

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