Copylaundering: Jay Leno Airs Campaign Video From YouTube, NBC Claims Ownership Of Original

from the what-a-neat-little-trick dept

This is easily one of the best responses to copyfraud I've ever read. Sure, Jay Leno is a pretty easy target for a roast, but musician Brian Kamerer does a brilliant job of taking him to task over a bogus YouTube takedown. I strongly suggest reading the whole thing, but here's the short version of what happened.

A few years ago, Brian helped a friend, who was running for mayor, create an intentionally silly campaign jingle and commercial, which they uploaded to YouTube. Two years later, they heard from another friend that the video had appeared on the Jay Leno Show as part of a segment about local campaign commercials. They just got a kick out of it, and moved on—until now, another three years later. Brian discovered that the YouTube video had been taken down on a copyright claim... by NBC (most likely as the result of a ContentID match as NBC uploaded old episodes into the system). So Leno mines the internet for material to air on his show—without permission or even the courtesy of letting them know—and then, years later, the network claims ownership of that material and accuses the actual creators and copyright holders of infringement. Brian is unimpressed, to say the least—and even supplies a script for how he imagines things went down:

JAY LENO

Hey remember those loser kids, we played their bit once, remember those guys? Let’s get em.

WRITER

What? Who? Why?

JAY LENO

Those guys, we took their video about three years ago and played it, I loved that song, remember?

WRITER

Oh yeah, sure, I remember those guys. So, what is it you want to do to them?

JAY LENO

I want to have the boys at NBC say that we own the video, so that if they try to watch their video on YouTube, they won’t be able to, and it will look like they stole the video, like Carlos Mencia!

WRITER

Or we could just leave those two nice boys alone. After all, you loved that song, remember?

JAY LENO

You’re fired! Secretary! Get me someone who has the balls to frame these two unknown assholes, so that eventually their work will be blocked on YouTube! And I need fifty more classic cars!

He's kidding of course—he knows that's not how it really happened. The real problem is that the system is broken: the law favors the accuser and permits this kind of copyfraud, giving NBC absolutely no incentive to narrowly target its takedown efforts. But Brian, quite reasonably, points out that he's not interested in excuses—everything that happened revolves around the public face of Jay Leno, and he sees no reason that Leno shouldn't bear the blame.

I know you’re reading this going, “Brian, you don’t understand! It’s not me, it’s just some NBC internet robot that scans YouTube videos and then compares the videos to the vast NBC library and just blocks the YouTube videos that match up, because the robot assumes the video has been stolen. Besides, you don’t own anything on YouTube! Don’t be mad at me, funny man Jay Leno! I liked your video! It’s the robot’s fault. The robot fucked up.”

Don’t hide behind NBC on this one, dude. And don’t blame YouTube. And forget about the robots. I’m not talking to the robot now. I’m talking to you, Jay Leno. Where does the buck stop on The Jay Leno Show, if not with Jay Leno himself? The buck stops with you Jay.

As more people fall victim to copyfraud—including this process whereby a TV network launders your copyrights into their own—and tell the story publicly (and entertainingly) as Brian has done, the aggressive entertainment companies are going to have a harder time recruiting stars as mouthpieces for the anti-piracy cause. Increasingly, they are going to see their own artists rebelling against their bogus takedowns and over-enforcement, as some already are. Combine that kind of pressure with transparency efforts like Google's newly available takedown data, and eventually something's got to give—starting with any remaining shred of public respect for copyright law.

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Greece Stares Into the Abyss; Meanwhile, Local Music And Audiovisual Collecting Society Gets Court Order To Block Web Sites

from the question-of-priorities dept

As you may have heard, Greece is having a spot of bother at the moment. Its economy shrank by 6.2% in the last three months alone, and the austerity measures imposed in return for international loans to keep the country running have contributed to a 40% jump in the suicide rate.

But the Greek music and audiovisual collecting society hasn't let a little thing like a national meltdown prevent it from tackling the really serious problems in life -- like stopping people sharing files online (Greek original):

The Court of First Instance Court in Athens accepted the request of the collecting society for music and audiovisual works to order, among other things, that the Greek ISPs should take technical measures to make it impossible for their subscribers to access Web sites through which illegal posting and exchange of works can take place.

Amidst the deepening Greek tragedy, it's good to see someone offering a little comedy.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

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Programmers Needed: Take Part In A Quick Study On Creativity & Innovation

from the please-help-out dept

Researchers from NYU and the University of Virginia are looking for computer programmers to participate in a study of creativity and innovation. The study involves a creativity contest that will take about 5-10 minutes. The winner will receive a $500 prize. The researchers are looking for professional and serious amateur computer programmers to participate. You can access the study here.

DailyDirt: Build It And They Will Come...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Certain kinds of science fiction could almost be considered far-out predictions. Star Trek crew members used tablet computers decades ago, and now the tablet computing market looks like it could take over PCs. Certainly, there's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy for some sci-fi technology, and here are just a few examples.

• Practical fusion is always just 30 years away, but a dilithium-powered Star Trek Enterprise could take just 20 years to build. Okay, we're joking about the dilithium chamber, but there's an engineer who isn't joking about building his own NCC-1701. [url]
• The Make-A-Wish Foundation helped to create a pretty cool Millennium Falcon for a 9-year-old kid. It's obviously not a full-scale model, so no Kessel runs or hyperdrive. [url]
• Browncoats aren't left out of the fun here: a 12-foot long Serenity ship exists in the Universal Archives. Real fans want to know if there's a miniature dead Wash at the helm.... "I am a leaf on the wind - watch how I soar." [url]
• To discover more links on space exploration, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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No, The RIAA Is Not Asking For $72 Trillion From Limewire (Bad Reporters, Bad)

from the stop-that dept

In the last day or so we keep seeing people send over variations on this story claiming that the RIAA claims it is owed $72 trillion dollars from Limewire. Many of the reports appear to originate from the NME post I just linked to, though I don't think that's accurate. The story is bogus in almost every way possible, and it's kinda sad that a ton of websites are repeating it as fact. If the basic statement sounds familiar, it's because the RIAA member labels did make an extreme request on damages last year in the Limewire case, suggesting that every single download should be subject to statutory damages, which could, under some circumstances (basically willful infringement) reach up to $150,000 per download. As we (and many other sites) reported in March of 2011, Judge Kimba Wood rejected that claim, noting that:

"Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877," Wood wrote, citing a Lime Group court filing referring to the inventor Thomas Edison. She called this an "absurd result."

While she did say that such an argument would likely lead to "billions" in damages, she also mentioned that it could possibly reach trillions in damages, but I don't believe she ever mentioned $72 trillion. Someone, however, did a back of the envelope calculation based on downloads and tossed out that $72 trillion number, and it caught on widely... again, way back in March of 2011. The first place I can find (though it may have come from somewhere else) to quote such a massive number was actually a Law.com article that came out right before the ruling was made. And it says $75 trillion.

Anyway, a year ago, in May of 2011, Limewire famously (or so we thought) settled the case for $105 million. That case is basically over.

And yet, for reasons that are beyond me, someone has revived the original story and lots and lots of other sites -- including plenty with real reporters who should know better -- are repeating it as fact, even to the point some are claiming that this shows the RIAA "wasn't satisfied" with the $105 million settlement. Most reports are linking back to NME as originating it, and the NME report links back to one of the many posts from March of 2011, from Computerworld, so you might think that the (nameless) NME reporter misread the date.

However, in looking around, two days before NME did its bogus report, it looks like Stuff.co.nz posted a similar story also linking to that same ComputerWorld story. Amusingly, the very first comment on that Stuff piece points out that link is to a story from 2011. And yet, Stuff has still not updated its story or posted a correction. Meanwhile, it looks like NME's (still nameless) reporter, simply copied the story from Stuff without crediting Stuff in the first place... meaning that many people are blaming NME for reviving the story, when really, NME just sucks at crediting their sources (and fact checking).

Either way, tons of other sites picked up on the story, including CBS News, who has since pulled it down entirely and just has a 404 page where it was before.

Then there are the folks at "Business Insider," who still have the story up but appear to have appended a "note" at the bottom that says "This case was settled last May for the much smaller fee of $105 million." You'd think that this should have led them to (a) change the headline (b) put the note at the top (c) be a little more clear in correcting their error. Even The Onion fell for it, though they've since posted an update. Then there are folks like WebProNews, Spinner and ZeroPaid (who is normally so good on this stuff), all of whom should have known better.

Anyway: basically this story is bogus. Well over a year ago, the RIAA made a ridiculous attempt to seek damages on every download. No specific amount was named, and no matter how you do your math, that $72 trillion number never made any sense at all. It was just a reporter looking for a good headline. Either way, the judge totally rejected that plan 15 months ago, and the entire case settled a year ago.

Nothing to see here folks, other than an internet pile-on. Move along now...

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As Usual, Media Outlets Mindlessly Parrot BSA Press Releases With Zero Scrutiny

from the par-for-the-course dept

When the BSA released its annual report on software piracy, Mike dubbed it "Bogus Stats Again", because as usual it employs plenty of ridiculous methodologies and unfounded assumptions to inflate the supposed economic loss. The BSA doesn't have to worry, though, because most members of the media just obediently parrot their highlighted "findings" without even bothering to read the report, let alone read it critically.

As reader Robert points out, this is certainly the situation in Canada, where multiple different sources of news are running the same Canadian Press wire story about the BSA report. The CP story is completely one-sided, and certainly makes the situation sound dire:

The value of computer software piracy in Canada totalled just more than $1.1 billion last year with 40 per cent of computer users admitting they acquired software illegally, according to a study released Tuesday.

The Business Software Alliance study found that nearly one in three copies of software was unlicensed in Canada in 2011.

"If 40 per cent of consumers admitted they shoplift -- even rarely --authorities would react by increasing police patrols and penalties," said Jacquie Famulak, head of the Business Software Alliance Canada committee.

"Software piracy demands a similar response: concerted public education and vigorous law enforcement," Famulak said in a news release.

That story is based solely on the BSA's press release (pdf), which draws partially from the global study and partially from the Canadian user survey (pdf). If a single reporter or editor had bothered to spend five minutes doing research, they might have realized that the real picture is much different. The news reports sloppily mash together the 40% figure with the "nearly one in three" (specifically 27%) figure. The former is the number of users who admitted to pirating software in a survey, and the latter is the estimated percentage of pirated software as a portion of total software installs. The methodology behind both figures is highly questionable, but even putting that aside, the BSA's own numbers tell another story when examined more closely. For example, the 40% figure is a summary of several different categories. Take a look at the full graph:

Only 14% of people said they pirated software any more than "rarely", and only 6% said more than "occasionally". To say that 40% of people admitted to piracy is not technically inaccurate—it's just highly misleading in tone and tenor. Then there's the 27% piracy rate for software. The press release, and the news reports that copy it, leave out a very important detail: 27% is an all-time low, and the result of a steeper decline than in any other country in the world. Michael Geist points this out, plus the fact that the BSA called Canada a "low-piracy" country in 2009, and rates have steadily declined since:

For the past few years, the BSA report has repeatedly found that piracy is declining in Canada. In 2009, Canada was characterized as a "low piracy country", in 2010 the industry noted that Canada's piracy rate was at an all-time low, and last year it dropped further to another all-time low.

The latest report says the Canadian piracy rate dropped further in 2011. In fact, over the past five years, the Canadian rate has dropped by 18% (from 33% to 27%), the sharpest decline in the world. No other country has seen its piracy rate drop as quickly.

Seems like that would have been worth mentioning in a story that gets distributed to news outlets across the country. But instead, we see the same pattern all over the world: Europe, the UK, South Africa, India, Malaya—anywhere the BSA put out a press release. Thanks to some combination of laziness, incompetence and indifference ingrained in the mass-media news cycle, the BSA can say what it wants and rely on the press to be its own personal PR vehicle.

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Broadband In Crisis: Does The US Need Regulation To Force Meaningful Competition?

from the two-internets dept

Susan Crawford believes telecommunications in America are going through the biggest crisis ever, and this is just as bad as the banking crisis was. Monday, at the Freedom 2 Connect conference, the Internet law scholar and former Special Assistant for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy at the White House, laid out what's wrong with broadband in America, hinting and what needs to be done to fix it. It's not going to be easy.

"The stakes are extraordinarily high, this has been an incremental crisis for a long time but now it's an actual crisis," said Crawford, whose book analyzing these issues, Captive Audience, will be published in November. The central issue is the so-called digital divide and what Crawford refers to as the "looming cable monopoly." Due to deregulation, which was predicated on the premise that the free market and competition would protect consumers, cable companies have found themselves with an inordinate amount of power to control the Internet and broadband access while, at the same time, traditional phone companies like AT&T are struggling to keep up and veering towards wireless services.

To support her thesis, Crawford presented some stunning numbers. In the last two years, Comcast market share has grown from 16.3 million subscribers to 18.5, a 14 percent growth. Time Warner Cable has grown 10 percent, from 9.2 to 10.7 million customers. Meanwhile, DSL subscribers have plummeted: AT&T and Verizon market share is down 22 and 21 percent respectively.

So, while it's good to be Comcast, it's not good to be an American citizen. Without competition, there's no drive to improve the service. The average speed of an Internet connection in the United States is around 5Mbit/s. An astoundingly low number if you look at other western countries. South Korea, for example, has an average of 50Mbit/s. And faster connections are starting to be implemented around the world. One gigabit connections are available in countries like Japan, Portugal or Sweden and at much better prices than in the U.S. – in Hong Kong, connecting at one gigabit per second costs $26 a month while in Chattanooga, TN, it costs $350.

What does this mean to the average citizen? It means the United States are giving up their leadership. Crawrford said this means “the next Google won't come from America.” And, even within U.S. borders, there's a fundamental problem: you either pay premium for a mediocre service or you are left behind.

“We end up with two Internets, two societies in America,” Crawford said to me in an interview.

One America does some tweeting and Facebook on their inferior, slower wireless devices. The other America not only gets to enjoy video online, but they can also apply for jobs, do video-conferencing, get an education online and, ultimately, live in the 21st century. Crawford argues that this digital divide ends up creating inequality between the haves and have-nots in America.

The only solution, Crawford argues, is for the government to intervene and regulate. Internet access, particularly high-speed access, should be treated “as a utility, just as electricity, gas and water.” Doing so would make the Internet a natural monopoly in which the government would provide the pipe and guarantee equal opportunity of access to everybody.

It might not happen immediately, but Crawford hopes that, with her influence and that of other thinkers like her, this will come to the forefront of the public discussion. She believes that, eventually, in every district, there will be elected officials who understand and care about these issues. That will be when we'll be able to look for a solution. "We make this a voting issue, that's how we fight back."

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Apparently The USTR Thinks 'Unprecedented Transparency' Means Hiding TPP Details From 98% Of Congress

from the that's-mighty-opaque-transparency dept

We just wrote about the new bill proposed by Senator Wyden after discovering that the USTR refused to share the TPP with the staff director of the Senate Finance Committee's Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs and Global Competitiveness -- who, officially, is supposed to have oversight on trade negotiations. However, the USTR (apparently with the support of the administration) has gone rogue, and is effectively hiding all the details of what it's negotiating on from Congress. While Ron Kirk likes to continually talk up how many meetings USTR has held (behind closed doors) with Congress, he conveniently ignores the fact that he is still keeping the US's negotiating position away from Congress.

Reading through the specifics of Wyden's speech, you begin to realize that the USTR and the Administration appear to have interpreted the law that creates the Congressional Oversight Group (COG) to mean that the USTR no longer has to share information with anyone in Congress (as it has claimed in the past), but that it only has to share TPP negotiating documents with the members of Congress who are on the Congressional Oversight Group. That's around 12 members. Out of 535 members of Congress between Senators and Representatives (in the House). In other words, despite the fact that Congress has clear oversight concerning international trade negotiations, and despite the fact that the Congressional Oversight Group was set up specifically to increase oversight of the USTR, the administration has decided that it really means it can keep its negotiating position from about 98% of Congress.

This is part of why Wyden seems so reasonably concerned. The USTR is taking the creation of COG, and basically flipping it on its head. The whole purpose of COG was to increase transparency. And yet, the USTR continues to effectively ignore it, while pretending that it only has to share TPP info with a tiny fraction of Congress, leaving the rest in the dark until it's too late. That's insane. How is the Senate supposed to have oversight if the USTR's own interpretation of the law means that it can effectively reject any effort to oversee it? It's incredible that the USTR seems to be claiming significant powers that it simply does not have -- and even more obnoxious and intellectually dishonest for it to then claim that it's offering "unprecedented transparency."

I'm sure that the USTR is holding the meetings with Congress that it claims, but until Ron Kirk learns that transparency means revealing what you're doing, not just listening to what others say, the USTR is not being even the slightest bit "transparent." Instead, it's abusing the process at the expense of the American public.

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Google Lifts The Veil On Copyright Takedowns: Reveals Detailed Data On Who Requests Link Removals

from the data-data-data dept

As part of Google's ongoing Transparency Report efforts, today the company has released a whole new section on copyright takedowns, containing a huge amount of information on the many takedown requests Google receives. It focuses specifically on the takedowns for search links, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them add other areas later. As you may recall, we were among those who were victimized by a bogus takedown, and a key post about SOPA that we had written was missing from Google search for about a month.

The new transparency platform lets you dig in and see quite a few details about exactly who is issuing takedowns and what they're removing from search. It's using data since last July (when Google set up an organized web-form, so the data is consistent). It may be a bit surprising, but at the top of the list? Microsoft, who has apparently taken down over 2.5 million URLs from Google's search results. Most of the the others in the top 10 aren't too surprising. There's NBC Universal at number two. The RIAA at number three (representing all its member companies). BPI at number five. Universal Music at number seven. Sony Music at number eight. Warner Music doesn't clock in until number 12.

There's also data on which sites are most frequently targeted, which (not surprisingly) lists out a bunch of torrent search sites and file lockers and such. Don't be surprised to see some try to claim that this is an accurate list of "rogue sites" that Google should block entirely. However, if you look carefully at the data, Google also highlights the percentage of pages on those sites for which they've received takedowns, and the vast majority of them are well below 1%. In other words, no one has complained about well over 99% of the pages on these sites. It seems pretty drastic to suggest that these sites are obviously nothing but evil, when so many of their pages don't seem to receive any complaints at all.

Perhaps more important, however, is that Google is also revealing the incredible deluge of takedown requests it receives in search, each of which it tries to check to make sure they're legitimate. As it stands now, Google is processing over 250,000 such requests per week -- which is more than they got in the entire year of 2009. For all of 2011, Google receive 3.3 million copyright takedowns for search... and here we are in just May of 2012, and they're already processing over 1.2 million per month. And while we've heard reports from the usual Google haters that Google is slow to respond to takedowns, it says that its average turnaround time last week was 11 hours. Think about that for a second. It's reviewing each one of these takedowns, getting 250,000 per week... and can still process them in less than 12 hours. That's pretty impressive.

It's also interesting to hear that these reviews catch some pretty flagrant bogus takedown requests:

At the same time, we try to catch erroneous or abusive removal requests. For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper’s review of a TV show. The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content. We’ve also seen baseless copyright removal requests being used for anticompetitive purposes, or to remove content unfavorable to a particular person or company from our search results.

It's good to see Google catch these, as plenty of other sites would automatically take such content down, just to avoid any question of liability. Of course, it doesn't catch them all. Some get through -- as we ourselves discovered a few months ago. That led us to wonder if this tool could drill down and find the details about takedowns targeting Techdirt, but unfortunately at the moment there doesn't seem to be any way to actually search the list. Hopefully that will change soon. Update: The search function is not currently advertised anywhere, but you can access it by using a URL: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/yourdomain.com/

Of course, this is also a good reminder -- as they note in the Google blog post -- that if you run a website, you should absolutely sign up to use Google's Webmaster tools, which will quickly inform you when one of your URLs are targeted by such a takedown, allowing you to easily file a counternotice.

Either way, this is really fascinating data and an interesting platform, shedding some significant light on just how often copyright holders are trying to take links out of Google, who's doing it and who they're targeting.

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Olympics Can't Handle An Official Parody Twitter Account, So Twitter Takes It Down

from the the-official-department-of-the-2012-london-olympics dept

We've discussed a number of times how ridiculously over-aggressive the Olympics can be when it comes to anything close to an IP issue -- even to the point where it gets host cities to agree to pass exceptional IP laws that only apply to issues that the Olympics chooses. The Olympics are especially concerned with any non-sponsor brand even being seen. That means that non-sponsor brands, even if they're the brand of a toilet, will get "taped over." So you can guess at just how insanely over aggressive the Olympics can be to anyone who comes near its own marks.

And that results in situations like the one where the London Olympics complained about a parody Twitter account, billed as the "official protesters of the London 2012 Olympic Games." This is obviously a joke. It's a parody on the fact that the Olympics seems to find an "official" sponsor of everything, so why not mock it using parody, which is widely seen as protected speech. But, not here. Apparently after the Games complained to Twitter, Twitter suspended the entire account and said it needs to no longer rely on trademarks, like the Olympics' logo.

Except, that defeats the whole purpose. How can you parody something when you're not even allowed to show what it is that you're parodying? Twitter is good on a bunch of issues, but on this one, it looks like it may have rushed ahead and shut down an account too quickly.

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Facebook IPO Mess Turning Into A Legal & Financial Circus As Morgan Stanley Agrees To Adjust Prices On Trades

from the wow dept

On Friday, after the Facebook IPO, we wrote a response to those who were complaining about the lack of a first day stock "pop." While the press seems to love those first day pop stories, we've argued for well over a decade that such things are merely signs of a stock being underpriced by Wall Street, causing the company to leave money on the table that it should have received in exchange for its shares. As more details come out about the Facebook IPO, however, it looks like there were a bunch of other issues with the offering, and a big and lengthy legal mess is about to ensue. However, one thing I'll stand by is the claim that the lack of a pop is a good sign, not a bad sign. In this case, though, it may actually have been part of the banks' attempts to cover up the fact that they did the opposite of what they normally did: rather than underprice the deal, it sure looks like they overpriced it... and perhaps tried to cover up that information.

There was lots of talk about how the underwriters were propping up the price on Friday, suggesting weak demand for the stock at the IPO price (or above), and without that support this week, the stock has dropped. But there were significant other issues behind that, which came out in the past few days, including the somewhat astounding claim that the underwiters all learned that Facebook's Q2 was looking worse than had been previously communicated, leading the underwriters to all drop their estimates in unison... but supposedly only informed a few large institutional buyers. Yikes. It's somewhat insane that anyone thought they'd get away with that, and, of course, lawsuits have been filed and there are a bunch of government investigations kicking off, including from the Senate Banking Committee, the House Financial Services Committee and the SEC. I'm not at all confident that any of those will do a decent job of any of this... but it's going to be tied up for a long, long time.

Separate from all of this were the technical "glitches" that caused the IPO to happen later than expected... along with claims that either trades weren't being completed or the prices were higher than expected. On that front, Morgan Stanley has now admitted that it is going to comb through pretty much all of the trades and will make pricing adjustments... which is going to be pretty costly.

Felix Salmon's recap suggests that absolutely everyone comes out of this looking bad. It's just that kind of debacle. I do agree (somewhat) with Matthew Yglesias that blaming Mark Zuckerberg for not playing the Wall Street game is a little unfair, since Zuckerberg and Facebook actually made out nicely in the deal, apparently getting more cash for the equity they sold than what the market was valuing the company at. From a corporate standpoint, that seems like a good deal. Sell high, and all that.

You could make the claim that that's a short-term view and in the long term, the fact that the IPO was so botched, and that Facebook may have walked away with quite a deal for the shares it did sell, may come back to haunt the company in other ways -- in particular when it next decides to tap the capital markets. However, Wall Street can be quite forgiving if you can make it lots and lots of money, and while it's certainly going to be a lot more careful in taking Facebook at its word going forward, a little skepticism and extra scrutiny on Wall Street isn't necessarily a bad thing.

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Congress Proposes Giving Another $10 Million To ICE To Censor More Websites For Hollywood

from the not-cool dept

Ever wonder how many of your tax dollars are going to the federal government censoring music blogs based on no real evidence, but just the say so of the RIAA and MPAA? Well, in the newly proposed Homeland Security Appropriations Bill, just introduced in the Senate by Mary Landrieu, the federal government would like to set aside the following for the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) unit that is in charge of being Hollywood's private law enforcement wing:

Provided further, That not less than $10,000,000 shall be available for investigation of intellectual property rights violations, including the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination

Yup. At least $10 million of your hard earned dollars may be going to ICE to help them continue to be Hollywood's private police force, censoring websites without evidence. This is for just one year. You'd think with that kind of money, ICE could actually hire its own actors for the PSAs it's been putting on censored sites, rather than "pirating" a video put together by NBC Universal.

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Which Would You Rather Have: The Planet, Or A Patent?

from the decisions,-decisions dept

One of the more controversial approaches to the already controversial field of climate change is geoengineering, which Wikipedia defines as "deliberate large-scale engineering and manipulation of the planetary environment to combat or counteract anthropogenic changes in atmospheric chemistry."

Some people are concerned that such large-scale interventions might produce large-scale disasters. That makes small-scale experiments exploring the underlying technologies an important first step before taking this route. Unfortunately, it seems that one geoengineering experiment has been called off because of patents:

A field trial for a novel UK geoengineering experiment has been cancelled amid questions about a pre-existing patent application for some of the technology involved.

The Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project is a collaboration among several UK universities and Cambridge-based Marshall Aerospace to investigate the possibility of spraying particles into the stratosphere to mitigate global warming. Such particles could mimic the cooling produced by large volcanic eruptions, by reflecting sunlight before it reaches Earth’s surface.

As the article quoted above goes on to explain, the main issue here is a potential conflict of interests:

a patent application that was submitted by Peter Davidson, who runs the UK consulting firm Davidson Technology on the Isle of Man and was an adviser at the workshop that gave rise to the SPICE project, and Hugh Hunt, an engineer at the University of Cambridge, UK, who is one of the SPICE project investigators. The patent is for an "apparatus for transporting and dispersing solid particles into the Earth’s stratosphere" by "balloon, dirigible or airship" technology related to the SPICE field trial.

UK funding bodies require possible conflicts of interest to be declared when applying for grants, whereas here the patent application apparently only came to light a year into the experiment. Part of the project is continuing -- things like climate modelling and analysis -- but the most innovative element, the field trial, has been cancelled.

This episode shows one of the problems with trying to marry "pure" science with commerce, and the tensions that can arise between sharing knowledge freely and trying to make money by restricting access through licensing. It would be regrettable, to say the least, if the exploration of ideas that might play a role in addressing climate change were blocked because of patents.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

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How Copyright Would Make The 'Singularity' Infringement If It Ever Arrived

from the deleting... dept

The folks at On the Media point us to a truly hilarious imagining by Tom Scott of what would happen after your physical body "died" in an age of both "The Singularity" and excessive copyright laws.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of the singularity, it's a somewhat wacky attempt to suggest that at some point (perhaps soon, according to supporters), computers will become so powerful (along with our understanding of the human mind), we'll be able to "upload" our minds to a computer network and effectively live forever (among other things, but that's all that you really need to understand to get the video).

Of course, as the video eventually notes, there would likely be a bit of a conflict between copyright law and uploading everything in your mind, so either you'd need to work out some sort of license for that... or have large parts of your cultural history erased to avoid infringement.

Now, this is obviously a silly envisioning of the future, and the whole singularity thing has always seemed a bit nutty anyway, but there's actually something important to think about in all of this joking. It is a good demonstration of how ill-prepared copyright law always is for major changes to technology, and how even solving little things (like being able to buy music online) hardly solves the larger issues that begin to show up when more and more of our lives are interconnected online. Already, we're seeing how people are effectively using things like Google and the wider internet as a "backup brain." But when you're actually storing memories in your head -- and then backing them up online -- copyright law may have a problem with the backup.

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Network Analysis Reveals Apparent (And Legally Questionable) Attack On Torrent Networks

from the pirates-still-won't-pay dept

Last week, we talked about a Microsoft-funded operation calling itself "Pirate Pay" and claiming to shut down torrents of pirated films by poisoning the P2P network with false data. At the time, former BitTorrent VP John Pettitt had commented that their system sounds ineffective and potentially illegal. Now, an anonymous reader points us to an analysis by Poland's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT Polska) looking at a recent surge of anomalous data on the uTP torrent protocol, which sounds somewhat similar to the description of Pirate Pay. The bulk of the analysis is highly technical, and they offer a few hypotheses for what might be causing the anomalies, the strongest of which is that it may well be a large-scale attempt at disruption:

Data collected from public trackers support this hypothesis. Without delving into details of torrent client reactions it’s plain to see that trackers register small amount of peers downloading analysed resources. It’s possible that it’s an effect of a process which we are currently unable to understand fully and which produce the anomaly. At least one interest group that would benefit from uTP poisoning is easy to point at: multimedia companies and their subcontractors. Conduction of this kind of campaign by these institutions wouldn’t be precedent. It’s also possible that generated traffic is used for BitTorrent network mapping and data gathering for later use in other projects.

Whether this uTP anomaly is directly related to Pirate Pay or not, CERT Polska reaches a similar conclusion about its legality:

Anomaly through it’s nature (large share in daily network traffic) produces visible disruption in IT systems and large amount of our false-positive high-level alerts is a good proof. In terms of Polish law, European Convention on Cybercrime and U.S. Codes (and probably many other sources of domestic law) legality of process producing the anomaly is questionable.

If it's true that the big anti-piracy players are attempting a full-scale network attack on piracy, it's actually kind of funny. Resorting to potentially illegal tactics to combat illegal behaviour doesn't do anything to make people respect copyright—it just galvanizes the idea that it's a battle for control. More importantly, the people working to preserve the network will always be more skilled and more numerous than those working to disrupt it, so the best this can do is give them a chance to hone their skills and shore up security.

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Court Dumps Patent Lawsuit Against Tons Of Online Retailers

from the one-down,-many-to-go... dept

Back in 2010, we wrote about how some ancient patents from OpenMarket (now held by a company called Soverain) for an "online shopping cart" were suddenly being used against a ton of online retailers, including NewEgg, QVC, HSN, Amway, JC Penny, Victoria's Secret and more. So when we saw the news that a case concerning the use of an ecommerce patent against a bunch of online retailers, including NewEgg, Amazon, eBay, Dell, Office Depot, Costco and Target had been dismissed and the patent declared invalid, at first I thought it must be the same case. Silly me. Of course there are lots of patent lawsuits against ecommerce providers. And this one was different, involving a company called Kelora Systems, who holds a patent (6,275,821) on "executing a guided parametric search."

The judge, however, found that the retailers didn't infringe, that the claims weren't valid and said that the defendants can recover their legal fees. What's incredible about this case is that when it was originally filed it was against 16 defendants and then more were added a few months later, but as you look down the docket, you also see plenty of orders granting stipulations for dismissal, which are really indications that many of the defendants chose not to fight, but rather to pay up. I bet those companies, including 1-800-Flowers, Briggs & Stratton, PC Connection, CircuitCity, Officemax and others are kind of regretting that decision right now. Kelora, of course, has been hyping up the fact that it's also signed other "licensing" deals with companies like K-Swiss, Footlocker and Sur La Table without having to first sue them.

Of course, I wonder how many such companies will be willing to take out a license after seeing this ruling...

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Generics Drive Down Drug Prices In India, TPP Trying To Stop That

from the really-sick dept

Back in March, we wrote about an important development in India, where a compulsory license for Bayer's Nexavar anti-cancer drug was granted. Bayer, of course, is fighting back:

in its 37-page appeal to the Intellectual Property Appellate Board, Bayer has "demanded the withdrawal of the country’s first compulsory license given to Natco Pharma, arguing that a three-fourths reduction in the price of the anti-cancer drug by another Indian firm has made the permit redundant and its patent itself is vulnerable to being revoked," the Economic Times, India’s leading business newspaper, reported on 19 May. Bayer says CIPLA’s new price "will render Natco’s price unreasonable and defeat the purpose of compulsory licensing," according to the newspaper.

As that shows, there's been an interesting twist in this story. Cipla, another Indian manufacturer of generics, has announced that it too is coming out with a version of Nexavar, pricing it at $125 for 120 tablets. That's even cheaper than Natco's price of $163, to say nothing of Bayer's $5,128 for the same course. A key difference is that India's Patent Controller has granted a compulsory licence to Natco, but not to Cipla. In fact, Bayer has said that it is taking Cipla to court over its production of a cheap version of Nexavar.

Bayer is employing some very strange logic here. On the one hand, it is saying that Cipla's cheaper version of Nexavar means that Natco's licence is no longer needed, and should be revoked. On the other, Bayer is suing Cipla because it has produced Nexavar without the compulsory license that Natco has. Clearly, Bayer hopes to get the best of both worlds -- the revocation of Natco's compulsory licence, and a court ruling against Cipla, which would leave Bayer once more as the only supplier of Nexavar.

Bayer seems to be trying to make that outcome more palatable by emphasizing that it has already reduced the price of Nexavar for some people:

Bayer stresses that to facilitate access for patients to innovative treatments, it has had a Patient Access Programme in place since the launch of Nexavar in India in 2008. Bayer says that this programme, last expanded in April 2012, reduces the price for the monthly treatment with Nexavar for qualified persons to about a tenth of the regular pharmacy price (Rs 280,000 or $5,128) for the complete duration of treatment.

But it's not clear how many patients have actually benefited from this program. And in any case, the reduced price of $512 per 120 tablets is still three times higher than Natco's pricing, which would put it out of the reach of many poorer patients. Compulsory licensing, by contrast, has driven down the price to $163, and maybe even to $125 if Cipla is allowed to offer it too. In other words, the availability of indigenous alternatives has caused the price to drop from completely unaffordable levels to ones that are more realistic for the India market -- exactly as generics are supposed to do:

Health advocates and cancer patients are happy that the fight between the big brand-name pharmaceutical producers and local generic drug makers is making cancer drugs cheaper. The vast majority of Indians don’t have any form of health insurance and out of pocket payments continue to be among the highest in the world. Cancer has also become one of the ten leading causes of death in India today. It is estimated that there are nearly 2 – 2.5 million cancer cases at any given point in time in the country.

Against that background, provisions in TPP that will make it much harder for local manufacturers to produce low-cost generics legally are troubling. They represent a clear attempt by the US to prevent the kind of access to vital patented drugs that India's compulsory licensing has permitted. Western pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders may rejoice if that happens, but many of those in emerging economies who are unable to afford life-saving medicines will die as a result.

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DailyDirt: Standing In The Alpha-Beta Parking Lot....

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

City planning in the future might have to take into account some technologies that sound like science fiction from the 1960s. Probably no flying cars, but there could be autonomous vehicles and less sprawl. Owning a car might not even be practical. In any case, parking lots will likely be long gone, and here are just a few links on some interesting parking situations.

• What goes well with a liveried chauffeur? Perhaps a parking spot that costs a million bucks. The first parking spot in NYC listed for $1 million is in a private garage at 66 E. 11th St. [url]
• One of the first automated parking garages opened in NYC in 2002 -- and it dropped a few cars before working out its bugs. But now, car owners don't have to worry about parking attendants (like Richard Edson) taking cars out for joyrides... [url]
• When cars can drive themselves, they'll just drop us off, circle the block and/or park themselves somewhere (hopefully in a good neighborhood). They could also meet up with their other robot-car friends at the automated parking garage and waste time chatting about power converters.... [url]
• To find some more bizarre/crazy stuff, check out some things that other StumbleUpon users have found. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Now Is The Time To Tell Your Senator That Privacy Is Awesome And CISPA Is Not

from the speak-up dept

While we know that at least Senator Ron Wyden understands why CISPA (and related cybersecurity bills) are bad, there are still 99 other Senators who don't seem quite so clear on the matter. And they're about to vote on such bills very, very soon. A bunch of groups have set up a site called Privacy is Awesome to help you contact your Senator today to let them know that you do think that privacy is awesome, and you won't accept them voting to take away your privacy via overly expansive cybersecurity bills like CISPA or the other bills the Senate is considering.

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Wyden To Obama: Hollywood Shouldn't Know More About TPP Than Congress

from the transparency? dept

Senator Wyden has been at the forefront of raising concerns about the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (as with many other issues we follow), specifically over the total lack of transparency from the USTR on the issue. While USTR Ron Kirk has pretended that "listening" to a few people is transparency, it's not. Actually sharing what you're doing is transparency.

Now, it's one thing for the USTR to refuse to share with the public what it's supposedly negotiating on their behalf -- but what if it is refusing to share with the very people in charge of overseeing its actions? As you hopefully know it's Congress, not the Executive branch, that has the authority to regulate foreign commerce. While the USTR is often granted the power to handle negotiations, it is only to be done with oversight from Congress.

So, you would think that the staff director on the Senate Finance Committee's Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs and Global Competitiveness, would be able to "oversee" what the USTR is doing by getting a copy of the USTR's positions. That staffer, who works for Senator Wyden, got all the proper security clearances... and the USTR basically gave him the finger. According to Wyden:

As the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness, my office is responsible for conducting oversight over the USTR and trade negotiations. To do that, I asked that my staff obtain the proper security credentials to view the information that USTR keeps confidential and secret. This is material that fully describes what the USTR is seeking in the TPP talks on behalf of the American people and on behalf of Congress. More than two months after receiving the proper security credentials, my staff is still barred from viewing the details of the proposals that USTR is advancing.

But you know who's not having any trouble seeing the details? The MPAA, Comcast, PHRMA and others. Again, from Senator Wyden:

The majority of Congress is being kept in the dark as to the substance of the TPP negotiations, while representatives of U.S. corporations – like Halliburton, Chevron, PHRMA, Comcast, and the Motion Picture Association of America – are being consulted and made privy to details of the agreement.

Wyden is introducing some new legislation in response to this, called the Congressional Oversight Over Trade Negotiations Act, which is actually just a clarification of legislation passed in 2002 that created the Congressional Oversight Group in an attempt to increase coordination between Congress and USTR on such matters. Again, Senator Wyden:

Congress passed legislation in 2002 to form the Congressional Oversight Group, or COG, to foster more USTR consultation with Congress. I was a senator in 2002. I voted for that law and I can tell you the intention of that law was to ensure that USTR consulted with more Members of Congress not less.

In trying to get to the bottom of why my staff is being denied information, it seems that some in the Executive Branch may be interpreting the law that established the COG to mean that only the few Members of Congress who belong to the COG can be given access to trade negotiation information, while every other Member of Congress, and their staff, must be denied such access. So, this is not just a question of whether or not cleared staff should have access to information about the TPP talks, this is a question of whether or not the administration believes that most Members of Congress can or should have a say in trade negotiations.

Again, having voted for that law, I strongly disagree with such an interpretation and find it offensive that some would suggest that a law meant to foster more consultation with Congress is intended to limit it. But given that the TPP negotiations are currently underway and I – and the vast majority of my colleagues and their staff – continue to be denied a full understanding of what the USTR is seeking in the agreement, we do not have time to waste on a protracted legal battle over this issue. Therefore, I am introducing legislation to clarify the intent of the COG statute.

The legislation, I propose, is straightforward. It gives all Members of Congress and staff with appropriate clearance access to the substance of trade negotiations. Finally, Members of Congress who are responsible for conducting oversight over the enforcement of trade agreements will be provided information by the Executive Branch indicating whether our trading partners are living up to their trade obligations. Put simply, this legislation would ensure that the representatives elected by the American people are afforded the same level of influence over our nation’s policies as the paid representatives of PHRMA, Halliburton and the Motion Picture Association.

How ridiculous is it that a Senator in charge of oversight of the USTR has to introduce special legislation just to find out what's being negotiated by the USTR, supposedly on the public's behalf? The ridiculous levels of secrecy from the USTR are shameful. It's sad that it hasn't received more attention.

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