Viacom Admits Error

Viacom recently sent out DMCA notices to users posting copyrighted material on Google's YouTube. One such instance involved a parody of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report", entitled "Stop the Falsiness." This video uses clips from the actual show, but it uses them properly as a commentary about the show.

Last week Viacom dropped the case against the creators of this video, and now the video is back up.

It is good that they dropped the case though they should have never filed a DMCA complaint in the first place.

European Parliament passes controversial copyright directive

The Second Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive or IPRED2, was recently passed by the European Parliament. This Directive states that copyright infringement at a commercial level as well as inciting those infringements is punishable buy up to 300,000 euros and up to 4 years in jail.

The directive is ostensibly designed to crack down on commercial piracy and counterfeiting operations, but critics warned that, thanks to the vague terminology of the directive, it could apply much more widely. They note that no definitions are offered for the terms "incitement" or "commercial scale," opening the possibility that the courts could interpret them to include innovators building new media products. Those terms could be interpreted, for example, to hold ISPs liable for the infringing activities of their users.

- Timothy B. Lee

Due to the vague wording in this legislation, it causes concern. What is "commercial scale"?

Either way this directive is losing support with each step it goes through. For now the directive will go to the Council of the European Union, and hopefully they will reject it and send it back to the European Parliament.

The Best and Worst Internet Laws

Eric Goldman, a Law Professor writes about the best and the mainly the worst internet laws.

Saddle River Flooding.

This has nothing to do with the subject matter of my blog, but my town is flooded and I went to go investigate. Many streets in the section of Rochelle Park near the Saddle River are flooded, including the police station (great city planning RP) and people are being rescued by boat. As I was leaving the flooded scene on passaic street I saw the Carlstat fire department bringing another boat. I am not sure if they are just searching or if there are people that are actually being rescued.

I had a digital camera on me but of course the battery was dead, I took a few pictures with my phone which (most) are terrible quality. I may go out later and take a few more with a real camera.

Decent Quality pictures:

Car stuck in the water
Debris

Crappy quality:

1 2 3

Methods of collecting evidence revealed.

This article explains how a German company has been collecting user information in peer-to-peer networks such as Gnutella and eDonkey as well as bittorrent. Other companies in the United States are likely to use this sort of technology as well, but the question is whether this is enough to reasonably prove that a file has been shared by the defendant. The main argument here is how can you tell who is responsible for sharing a file? Many people have unsecured wireless networks still, and in the legal documents contained here [pdf] (thanks to torrent freak), it is left to the individual to make sure that no one else uses their network for illegal purposes.

New Bill Before Congress, To Help Colleges Fight Piracy.

A bill was introduced before the House Committee on Education and Labor by Rep. Ric Keller [R-FL], that will amend the Higher Education Act,

...[which] supplies federal money to universities, allowing that money to be used for programs that reduce illegal downloading of copyrighted content.

It is unclear right now what this bill fully entails, because the full text has not yet been released to the public.

It seems though that the lobbyists for the big entertainment companies are making a push for this. The bill was introduced the same week that the RIAA sent out pre-litigation letters to students of colleges nation-wide, and now this week the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has named the top 25 movie piracy schools. The Higher Education Act is due to expire this summer, and there is sure to be a push to extend the life of the HEA. The big companies may be trying to bury this into the renewal so that they have another way of trying to control college students.

iTunes to sell DRM-free music.

iTunes, and EMI went public today annoucing that they would be selling all music produced by EMI on Apple's iTunes with no copyright protection beginning in May. Also the songs will be higher quality, now coming at 256kbps, instead of 128kbps.

DRM, or Digital Rights Management Software, in reference to iTunes music files, is used to limit the number of times that the file can be copied. The intent of DRM is to prevent piracy (even though no one would pirate AAC audio files anyway, but thats another story..). There are plenty of legitimate reasons to want to copy a song file more then a few times. For example you may want to make backups just incase your computer crashes, or you may get new devices that you would like to place your song on.

It is a good step for EMI (which is part of the Big Four record companies that run the RIAA), but I do not think it will improve their sales much. In addition to raising quality and removing DRM technology they also jacked up the price to $1.29 per song. It works out to be around the same cost as a CD, yet you have no physically produced copy. It would be nice to see more and more companies selling DRM free audio files, although a drop in price is realistically the best approach.

Link to Arstechnica story by Eric Bangeman

The music companies, facing a long-term decline in sales, had resisted freeing up their digital songs from restrictions because they were afraid consumers would make numerous copies that would deprive the companies and their recording artists of revenue.

But peer-to-peer Internet sites that freely trade music files have flourished anyway, with five billion downloads last year, compared with 509 million songs downloaded from official digital music services, according to the NPD Group.

New York Times

Entertainment Companies need to realize that they cannot run their business the same now in the Digital Age, as before. Their loss of sales is from their inability to adapt to new technology soon enough. They resist change compulsively, however with DRM-free music they may be moving in the right direction.