Techdirt. Stories about "playboy"

Techdirt. Stories about "playboy" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories about "playboy"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Thu, 21 Feb 2013 15:03:29 PST No Nudity: Playboy's iPhone App To Test Men's 'For The Articles' Excuse Timothy Geigner http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130221/06521322054/no-nudity-playboys-iphone-app-to-test-mens-articles-excuse.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130221/06521322054/no-nudity-playboys-iphone-app-to-test-mens-articles-excuse.shtml all the porn at everyone's fingertips and President Bush's name still made us giggle (it kind of still does, actually). That said, amongst older generations, you would occasionally hear the laughable excuse from men that they wanted their Playboy magazines so they could read the articles, I suppose because Time Magazine, The New Yorker and Newsweek didn't exist (psst! They did!).

Well, now it appears we'll get something of a test for that excuse, with Playboy releasing a mobile app for Apple's app store, which of course had to nix all the nipples and vaginas to get it past the tech company's Quaker-like regulators.

This winter, the company, long barred from Apple's digital storefronts because of its pornographic associations, will package a nudity-free version of its content together for the launch of its first iPhone app, featuring lifestyle tips, articles from the magazine and, of course, photos of beautiful women.

Those beautiful women will be clad in lingerie, under Apple's strict no boobies policy. Now, here's why this probably won't work. Nobody is going to download this app to see women in lingerie. There's a couple of reasons for this. First, we've long been able to get that elsewhere. Victoria Secret has an iOS app, after all. Also, there's that handy browser option for viewing all the images one could want on the internet. As for the articles, we have a couple of problems. Jumping into the news content business this late in the game and having success in it would require really compelling articles. The good news is that Playboy still has this. The bad news is that all those people who claim their allegiance to Playboy for their articles are full of crap. As the article summarizes:

So, mobile readers will have to actually read Playboy for the articles, with a little lingerie on the side. This could totally work. What could go wrong?

The answer, of course, is everything.

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]]> seriously?--no-boobies? http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130221/06521322054 Fri, 14 Sep 2012 07:59:00 PDT Dutch Court Says Linking Can Be A Form of Copyright Infringement Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120914/05442020382/dutch-court-says-linking-can-be-form-copyright-infringement.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120914/05442020382/dutch-court-says-linking-can-be-form-copyright-infringement.shtml linking to infringing content could be infringing itself, if certain conditions are met (which they were in this case). The key part here was that the site that was sued was linking to material first, and thus revealing it to the world... even though it does not appear that the site in question uploaded or hosted the content. This is troubling for a variety of reasons which we'll get to, but first the background of the case.

A Dutch television presenter, Britt Dekker, did a nude photoshoot for Playboy, and a bunch of the images leaked ahead of the December, 2011 release of the magazine. A website called GeenStijl.nl had a story about it, and included a link to a zip file that contained all the images that had been uploaded to the cyberlocker FileFactory.com. Playboy had the file taken down from FileFactory, and GeenStijl linked again to the same images on Imageshack. And from there a game of whac-a-mole followed with Playboy having the images taken down, but the images quickly spread all over the place. For what it's worth, at the time, there was a lot of speculation that Playboy itself had leaked the images to build up buzz.

Either way, GeenStijl got sued for copyright infringement -- and they responded by pointing out that they just linked to the content. The court put forth a three pronged test, and found that GeenStijl, even with just links, met the criteria for infringement. As explained on the FutureOfCopyright site (linked above):

The court considered if the publishing of the hyperlinks by GeenStijl.nl constituted a publication (Dutch: ‘openbaarmaking’) as defined in article 12 of the Dutch Copyright Act. In principle, placing a hyperlink on a website is not a publication, unless three criteria are met: there must be an intervention, a new audience and profit.

Intervention: The leaked pictures of Britt Dekker were stored on FileFactory.com, a cloud service to store files and share them with others. However, these files can’t be found through search engines, only users with the exact URL have access to the files. The URL to the file with the leaked pictures was publicly unknown, until GeenStijl.nl made it available to its large audience by publishing an article about it, the court says. Therefore, the actions of GeenStijl.nl are an intervention, according to the court. Without this intervention, the public wouldn’t have had access to the pictures before their official publication in Playboy.
New audience: According to the court, there wasn’t an audience for the pictures before GeenStijl.nl published its article.
Profit: By publishing the URL to the pictures, GeenStijl.nl had the unmistakable intention to attract more visitors, the court states. With success: in 2011, the article about Dekker was the best viewed topic on GeenStijl.nl, according to the statistics.

By my reading, all three of the prongs of the test, as presented here, are somewhat problematic. The reasoning on the first prong -- intervention -- just doesn't seem right. The claim that "the public wouldn't have had access" but for the link on GeenStijl isn't true. They did have access since the files were already on the cyberlocker. GeenStijl perhaps made it a lot more widely known, but at this point you're arguing about whether or not it's legal to make a factual statement. Did the photos exist on a cyberlocker? Yes. Saying so shouldn't be infringing.

The second prong really just seems like a repeat of the first prong. The entire argument that seems to have convinced the court is that GeenStijl was the first to link to the content. Under US law you face much more liability for leaking "pre-release" material, so you could argue that this is a similar situation in the Netherlands, but again, it's not GeenStijl "leaking" the material. They're acting as a journalist, telling people such content exists.

The final prong is completely useless. Basically it seems to say that because the article was popular, that's evidence for infringement. I can't see how that makes any sense at all. If GeenStijl was, for example, selling access to the images, then there's a much stronger argument of "profit." But just saying that because the site got a lot of traffic, they profited seems like a dangerous precedent.

The Future of Copyright article mentions the cases against FTD as being similar, but I'm not sure that's true. While a lower court had found FTD guilty for linking, on appeal it was said that links weren't the problem, it was the promoting of uploads that got FTD in trouble.

Either way, it's of little surprise that Tim Kuik, the head of the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, is cheering on this ruling, suggesting that this case will be useful in other efforts to go after sites that link to infringing content. Of course, given the specific nature of the ruling, including how much of it seemed to rely on the fact that GeenStijl was the first to somehow create an audience for these images, I do wonder if it really has that much value for BREIN in those types of cases. Similarly, it may be a bit exaggerated to claim -- as GeenStijl did in response to the ruling -- that the ruling outlaws Google. Again, the ruling does appear to be highly fact-specific.

It is a troubling ruling for a number of reasons. Merely setting up the precedent that a link itself is infringement has all sorts of problematic implications. But the highly specific details associated with the ruling, especially the reliance on being the first to publish the link, at least suggests that this has limited value as a wider precedent.

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]]> seems-a-bit-extreme http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120914/05442020382 Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:39:46 PDT Model Wins Lawsuit Against French Playboy For Publishing 'Unauthorized' Naked Photos Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101027/04560211605/model-wins-lawsuit-against-french-playboy-for-publishing-unauthorized-naked-photos.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101027/04560211605/model-wins-lawsuit-against-french-playboy-for-publishing-unauthorized-naked-photos.shtml won damages against French Playboy for publishing what were referred to as "unauthorized" photos of her in their June issue. Tragically, much of the reporting on this doesn't explain what kind of photos we're talking about (from the description, it almost sounded like photos taken while she was unaware). However, in the interest of understanding the legal implications only (of course), I (ahem) found the photos in question (oh so very NSFW). The photos all appear to be professional studio shots, most likely from a single photoshoot. Stone claims that her main complaint was just that "no woman wants photos of them to be published in Playboy without permission." However, I'm wondering how French Playboy got the photos in the first place, and if it wouldn't have a claim against the photographer, if he had claimed the rights to the photos (and produced a signed model release form). Obviously, the photos themselves were initially taken with permission, since it's clearly a professional photoshoot. So, where in the process did the photos become "unauthorized"?

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]]> publicity-rights? http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20101027/04560211605 Wed, 7 Oct 2009 09:40:00 PDT Eolas Is Baaaaaaaaack; And It's Suing Everyone Over Embeddable Web Widgets Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091006/1718536434.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091006/1718536434.shtml 5,838,906) on browser plugins. The company sued Microsoft, and a long drawn-out battle ensued. Even though web inventor Tim Berners-Lee presented prior art and asked the USPTO to invalidate Eolas' ridiculously broad and obvious patent, the USPTO eventually upheld the patent (after initially rejecting claims). Even as Microsoft began presenting evidence that it actually had made use of the technology in question before Eolas applied for its patent, losses in the courts and the Supreme Court's refusal to hear the case eventually resulted in Microsoft agreeing to settle rather than continue to fight.

Since then (two years ago), plenty of people have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, concerning Eolas' plans to sue others. Now we know why it waited. It's now received a new patent -- a continuation patent, which is often used to abuse the patent system by putting forth a broad patent, then filing for continuations to make changes that let an earlier "invention" cover technologies that later become popular. In this case, the new patent (7,599,985), which basically just extends the earlier patent on browser plugins, and extends it to javascript widgets. Yes, those embeddable widgets used all over the web? It appears that Eolas thinks that those are infringing and everyone should pay up.

The new lawsuit has been filed against Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, Go Daddy, Google, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises, Staples, Sun, Texas Instruments, Yahoo, and YouTube. Apparently, starting small isn't part of the plan. Not surprisingly, Eolas filed in Eastern Texas using McKool Smith -- one of the most popular law firms representing patent holding firms in East Texas.

I am honestly curious how patent system defenders, who are also programmers, can defend this. I'm sure non-programmers will claim that the patent is valid, but I can't imagine how anyone who has any knowledge of basic programming principles can claim that such a patent is valid. In the meantime, tons of companies doing an incredibly basic thing on the web will now have to waste millions of dollars fighting a ridiculous patent lawsuit. How is this promoting innovation in any way shape or form?

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