Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
The Constable on October 9th, 2008
Just a year after one of Romania’s most popular BitTorrent sites was raided by the police (and its admins arrested, then released), Torrentbits.ro is now being blocked by one of Romania’s largest ISPs, UPC.
The move mirrors other recent blocks by ISPs, including the now-famous block of The Pirate Bay by Italian ISPs - a block which was later forced to be removed at the behest of the Italian courts.
Kind of makes you rethink Net Neutrality, doesn’t it? While freedom on the net may sound like a great idea at first, perhaps a middle ground can be found where ISPs are at least allowed to block access to sites it deems to be potentially illegal.
Just a thought.
(Thanks to TorrentFreak for the heads-up)
The Constable on October 1st, 2008
A recently discovered flaw in Amazon’s Video on Demand service allows users to rip Flash streams, but it’s not clear that Adobe deserves all the blame on this one. Amazon may have made mistakes of its own, in the name of improving user convenience, and the company’s online content distribution system could be headed for a revamp.
read more | digg story
The Constable on September 25th, 2008
Patents, like copyright, are core pieces of the Intellectual Property puzzle. With the ability to lay exclusive claim to an idea, patents can be extremely dangerous. Still, some sort of system is also necessary in order to encourage people to come up with their own ideas, guaranteeing that as soon as they do so they will not be stolen from them by someone else. The patent system is supposed to encourage the creation of new ideas, but it is now also being abused by some to block new ideas from ever happening through the use of “blocking patents.”
Check out this article from BBC for more information.
Life-saving scientific research is being stifled by a “broken” patent system, according to a new report.
“Blocking patents” are delaying advances in cancer medicine and food crops, says the Canada-based Innovation Partnership, a non-profit consultancy.
read more | digg story
The Constable on September 11th, 2008
AT&T’s just updated its terms of service for broadband customers, and starting next month, if you’re a heavy downloader, get ready to have your connection squeezed to a trickle. While they haven’t implemented usage caps a la Comcast (yet) they are using a similar traffic management technique starting on Oct. 18 that will slow down your whole…
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The Constable on September 11th, 2008
Today, after almost a year, the OiNK investigation came to an end. Earlier today we reported that OiNK administrator Alan Ellis was charged with “conspiracy to defraud”. Now, just hours later the alleged uploaders are charged with copyright infringement for uploading one CD.
read more | digg story
The Constable on September 11th, 2008
Congress returned to work this week, and Senators appear to have copyright on the brain: A broad intellectual property enforcement bill introduced in July is slated for markup by the Senate Judiciary Committee later today, and another aimed at cracking down on piracy overseas was introduced yesterday.
read more | digg story
The Constable on September 9th, 2008
Interesting story on Madison, WI’s newspaper, The Capital Times, website today regarding market share of legal sheet music download service, Musicnotes.com. The main gist of the article is that they are at 80% market share, but what is potentially more interesting is the quote from their CEO discussing the concerns that some of the illegal sheet music sites and networks may start to pose as they continue to proliferate.
While we are proud of the loyal customer base we have built over the years, one of our biggest concerns moving forward is the proliferation of illegal sheet music Web sites and file sharing networks,” Musicnotes CEO Kathleen Marsh said in a statement. “There are several sites that give away complete arrangements of copyrighted music for free as downloadable PDFs or other image scans. Musicnotes continues to work with industry organizations, publishers and songwriters to address this growing problem.”
Also worth mentioning is that Musicnotes is also the same company that brought back popular guitar tab web site MXTabs.net as a free, legal service.
Digg Description:
Madison-based Musicnotes said Tuesday that it currently holds nearly 80 percent of the U.S. market for downloadable sheet music and is about 10 times the size of its nearest competitor, according to HitWise.
read more | digg story
The Constable on September 4th, 2008
FCC Chair Kevin Martin says that even if Comcast is appealing its net neutrality Order, the agency still wants to know what the heck “protocol-agnostic” means.
read more | digg story
The Constable on September 4th, 2008
In the ongoing back-and-forth between Comcast and the FCC, Comcast has now asking for the recent order from the FCC for them to stop throttling to P2P users to be overturned.
read more | digg story
The Constable on August 21st, 2008
Over at Ars Technica there’s an article about “A federal judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Universal for its DMCA takedown notice involving video of a dancing toddler. The judge held that copyright holders must take fair use into account before demanding the removal of online material.”
Now I don’t really want to get into this whole thing, since you can read most of it over at Ars anyway, but what is interesting here is that Universal argued this to be a derivative use of a copyright-protected “thing.” I’m not completely schooled in derivative rights in copyright, but I know quite a bit… and I would think that if anything the only valid argument on this would be that YouTube is publicly displaying (or peforming, etc) copyright-protected material without a license to do so.
As for whether or not this falls under fair use, that’s not for me to judge. Obviously this would be fine for private memories etc, but fair use is another question. The fact that there is a potential for google (youtube) to profit from this video, and since the video itself gains its watch-worthiness due to the fact that it’s FUNNY to see a toddler dancing to Prince (vs. just dancing to nothing), makes me wonder.
It’s kind of if a nightclub didn’t have music.
Why can’t places like YouTube just pay an ASCAP fees for stuff like this? It sure would seem to make sense to me.
read more | digg story
