The Constable on September 11th, 2008
A dozen special-interest groups urged lawmakers Wednesday to squelch proposed legislation that for the first time would allow the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute civil cases of copyright infringement. The bill, a nearly identical version the House passed last year, is strongly backed by the music and movie industries.
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.
The Constable on September 8th, 2008
According to both the wippit.com homepage, and a story on Distorted-Loop, one of the first legitimate p2p media networks has shut down due to being unable to compete in the current marketplace. Visitors to wippit.com are greeted with the following message:
Wippit has closed.
After 8 years of pushing the digital boundaries, Wippit can no longer compete in the current market climate.
Thank you to everyone that has supported us over the years and apologies to those that will miss us. “
In related news, Pandora also looks like it may be shutting down as well, after failing to reach an agreement with U.S. music publishers.
… and in sure to be upcoming news, music publishers continue to try to shut down services and refuse to license new business models, while the rest of the Internet walks away with their business. (my opinion).
The Constable on September 2nd, 2008
In a recent post here at IPThieves, we discussed the problems with issuing take-down notices as a sole method for copyright holders to try to stave off so-called “illegal” sites from giving away copyright-protected material for free. Since then, we’ve spent some time really looking at more effective methods of the copyright holders could use to stop piracy or theft of their intellectual property.
Of course, one of the most popular methods from the RIAA has been to try to scare individuals into not downloading music illegally in the first place by suing or threatening to sue people who do so. Whether this has worked or not is highly questionable, although it is definitely the case that they have created quite a bit of ill-will by directly going after their potential customers.
When it comes to pirate and illegal download sites, networks and software, there are generally three different types:
One is the group of people who want to trade or allow for free downloads of the material because they genuinely believe that information should be free, and they consider intellectual property to be a form of information - therefore to enforce their philosophy, it is almost a moral obligation for them to build systems to allow this trading and sharing.
The second group of people share and trade for a bit more selfish reason, which is that they do it so they can also receive content, information, etc. for free. This is the main concept behind most p2p networks - people share their content and they in turn can gain access to content from other people.
The third group, however, look at this as a business model. These are the sites that offer large quantities of unlicensed, copyright-protected content to their users (usually for free, although Grooveshark is a whole different story) and financially leverage the traffic generated through ads and other promotions paid for by third parties.
One area that has specifically focused on this third type is the phenomenon of guitar tablature web sites (or other “print” content sites). Ultimate-Guitar.com, for example, continually ranks among the top five music websites - and the vast majority of its traffic has been from the unlicensed displays of tablature for copyright-protected songs. Although it has not officially announced any numbers, the site is expected to generate several million dollars of ad revenue each year - all of which goes directly to the site owners and operators.
So, for this third “advertising-supported-business” group, one question that no one seems to ask is why are advertisers continuing to support them? The answer, of course, is because this is where their potential customers are. It’s why you’ll see ads for cell-phone companies, credit cards and other products aimed at a younger late-teen to early thirties audience plastered all over ultimate-guitar.
Then again, most of these types of sites are using ad networks to get their advertising - the most popular of which is Google Adsense. But one quick look at the Google AdSense Program Policies makes it completely clear that these types of sites are not allowed to display Google Ads:
Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.”
If Google is really telling the truth here about their policies, then shouldn’t these sites be taken off the adsense network? If publishers and copyright holders are smart about this, wouldn’t it make sense to cut off the money source, at least for this third group of advertising-supported businesses that are relying on someone else’s property to make their money?
Sure, the sites could switch to other networks, but the majority of networks have the same policies. And for those that don’t, one could argue that the ad networks themselves (including Google) are directly profiting from the theft of intellectual property, since the networks also take a share of all the advertising revenue generated by their partner sites (before giving the site itself their share).
Wouldn’t that mean Google is directly profiting from the theft of intellectual property? Of course it would - but then again this seems to be the basis for most of Google’s business model (take YouTube for example). And who’s willing to take on Google?
The Constable on September 2nd, 2008
“Following on from the IFPI-inspired Italian blockade of The Pirate Bay, the MPAA’s President has been in Italy offering ideas on how to deal with the ‘problem’ of unauthorized file-sharing. Not wanting to flirt too much with originality, Robert Pisano is backing a 3 strikes-and-you’re-out policy.”
I’m not quite sure how something like this would work - at least unless ISPs have some wording about what is considered “acceptable use” of their network. Even if that’s the case, I’m not even sure if it’s legal for ISPs to determine which sites people can and cannot access and what files they can and cannot transfer online. Then again, since this is generally considered to be illegal activity, they may be able to.
Regardless, this was inevitable. It’s obvious that legal alternatives are not switching people from illegal options, and the only way pirates and others who trade and share intellectual property illegally is to find a way to cut them off. Speaking of which, check back soon for more thoughts on this issue.
The Constable on August 21st, 2008
An article at torrentfreak today indicates that popular “search system,” The Pirate Bay, is appealing the recent ISP block imposed by the Italian government who has accused them of copyright violation.
Since The Pirate Bay itself does not host any copyright-protected content, they perhaps have an argument. Then again, the argument is the same as that used by Kazaa, Morpheus, etc. - and what it comes down to is the sole purpose of The Pirate Bay is to enable people to download copyrighted material illegally.
So our question is this: can their intent be proven? If so, is it illegal to intend to do something? In the U.S. I would think it could be, since you can be charged with things such as “intentional homicide.” But then again, the Pirate Bay doesn’t intend to download anything, the intend to give you direction as to how to do it. To use the homicide analogy, this intent isn’t even the same as being part of a conspiracy to kill someone. It’s more akin to showing someone how to shoot or gun, or where they can get one.
