Canipre, as a company, offers to track down people who are illegally downloading copyrighted material from record companies and film studios. According to their website, they have issued more than 3,500,000 takedown notices, and their work has led to multimillion dollar damages awards, injunctions, seizure of assets, and even incarceration.

In a recent interview, Canipre's managing director Barry Logan explained that it's about much more than just money—he's hoping to teach the Canadian public a moral lesson:

"[We want to] change social attitudes toward downloading. Many people know it is illegal but they continue to do it... Our collective goal is not to sue everybody… but to change the sense of entitlement that people have, regarding Internet-based theft of property.”

So, just to be clear: Canipre has written "they all know it's wrong and they're still doing it." Referring to copyright theft. On top of an image that they are using without the permission of the copyright holder. On their official website.

Logan claimed that the company used a 3rd party vendor to develop their website and that the vendor had purchased the image from an image bank.

I pointed out to Logan that if that was true, he had basically paid his vendor to rip off other people's creative work. Logan told me that he would contact his web provider and have the image removed. He also told me that he would provide me with the name of the website developer and the name of the image bank where they obtained my photo.

Based on customer feedback we have changed the Office 2013 retail license agreement to allow customers to transfer the software from one computer to another. This means customers can transfer Office 2013 to a different computer if their device fails or they get a new one. Previously, customers could only transfer their Office 2013 software to a new device if their PC failed under warranty.

By the way, if all this seems familiar, it’s not your imagination. Microsoft tried a similar tactic with Windows Vista in October 2006. The original license agreement imposed a new limit of one transfer on retail copies of Windows. At the time, I called it “a sneaky change in Windows licensing terms.” After a similar outcry from Microsoft customers (a Microsoft executive acknowledged having received "lots of e-mail and other feedback" on this issue), Microsoft rolled back the changes and restored the original license terms less than a month later.

Open source licenses are often described as the "constitutions" for the communities that form around the software they govern. That would seem to imply that in their absence, alongside other unwanted consequences, the communities would collapse. A provocative paper by Clark Asay, Assistant Professor at Penn State University Dickinson School of Law, suggests that this isn't the case, and that software could be released into the public domain and yet still thrive as a collaborative project.

He points out that despite its undeniable success -- free software now dominates many of the most important sectors in computing -- there are transaction costs associated with it. For companies, these arise from ensuring full compliance with licenses, no mean task if corporate lawyers are unfamiliar with the subtleties of this world. For programmers who are choosing a free software license for their code, not only is there a bewildering choice, but some of them are mutually incompatible. This means that code from one project can't always be dropped into another using a different licence, which makes building on open source harder than it should be.

Asay suggests that placing software into the public domain would avoid all these issues, and allow the code to be re-used more widely, with resulting benefits for coders, companies and users alike. However, he recognizes that there are some important concerns that need addressing.

For example, one of the strengths of licenses like the GNU GPL is that it prevents free riding: if a company takes GPL'd software and uses it in a product that it distributes, it must adopt the GNU GPL and contribute its code back to the original code's community. If the code were in the public domain, that wouldn't be the case -- it could simply be taken and used without further ado. But Asay notes that there are good reasons why companies are likely to make their code available anyway:

if a firm were to take and close a project, they almost certainly would not obtain the free labor that contributors around the world are willing to provide to open-licensed projects. Without that free labor, firms would lose the most significant advantages of an open model of innovation, and the free labor would likely remain loyal to the open version of the project. Firms thus already have incentives to open and contribute as much of their materials as possible, since doing so will attract free labor and trigger innovation in directions that better suit the firm and its strategic direction.

That also explains why coding communities will still function, even in the absence of "constitutions". Anyone who refuses to accept consensus decisions simply becomes isolated if they try to ignore them. Alternatively, if the community leadership starts to go astray, forks of the code may occur that gain sufficient supporters to become the main line of development. In other words, the natural collaborative development dynamics produce many of the same results as formal licenses that lay down what norms and behavior are expected.

Asay also tackles the important issue of attribution in a world of public domain software. Many programmers contribute to free software not for direct economic benefit, but to enhance their reputations, which may translate into financial benefits in the form of a higher salary or job offers. Asay points out that the current system of providing recognition is unsatisfactory -- often attribution is buried deep in licensing documents that no one ever looks at. That may explain in part why developer profiles on the popular GitHub code hosting service are becoming more common: it's a way of displaying programming prowess in a form that is easy for peers -- or potential employers -- to access. As the site itself explains:

Every developer gets their own profile page that is automatically updated with a stream of the important things they are doing on GitHub and a list of the Open Source projects they are hosting at GitHub. Many developers have started referring to GitHub Profiles as the new résumé.

One problem with Asay's idea is that the state of the public domain today is unsatisfactory. For example, it is very hard to place works in the public domain -- the Creative Commons CC0 is perhaps the most thoroughly worked-out tool for doing so. As Asay notes, we need legislation to formalize and facilitate this move, and to address issues such as liability.

This difficulty emphasizes how much the public domain has been neglected as copyright maximalists have sought to portray it as an anomalous wasteland that needs to be made "productive" by reclaiming it through copyright enclosure. But the public domain is the natural condition of all knowledge -- that which can be shared freely -- while it is copyright and its monopoly that is the deviation from that state. If nothing else, Asay's proposal may help to bring some much-needed attention to this important but neglected area.

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Those heated discussions are one reason why it's rare for an open source project to change its license -- usually it's just easier to stick with what you've got rather than provoke another argument over which new license should be adopted. But there's another major impediment to changing the licensing: the need to get absolutely everyone who has contributed code to agree formally.

That's not a problem when the code has been assigned by contributors to a single entity, often a software foundation, as happens with components of Richard Stallman's GNU (GNU's Not Unix) project. But the individual copyrights of perhaps the best-known open source code, that of the Linux kernel, have not been assigned in this way. That makes the prospect of contacting the thousands of people who have contributed code, and getting them to agree to a license change, not just hard, but probably impossible, not least because some of them may be dead. For this reason (and because Linus Torvalds doesn't want to change it anyway), Linux is likely to remain licensed under the GNU GPLv2 for the foreseeable future.

Another project where the copyright on code contributions has not been assigned to some central body is the popular multimedia player VLC. Since this is a major project with many hundreds of contributors, you might think it would be similarly impossible to get all of them to agree to a license change. And yet, against the odds, VLC has done just that, thanks to the tireless efforts of Jean-Baptiste Kempf. A fascinating post explains how he achieved this:

The initial license change for libVLC [VLC's main engine] was completed a few months later in December 2011. This involved about 150 developers and 80,000 lines of code. If a developer did not respond to the re-licensing request, that developer's code was rewritten.

The VLC experience confirms that changing a license is not something to be undertaken lightly. But it also shows that with perseverance it can be done -- once the flamewars have subsided, of course.

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"They were right. I did get exposure, but it didn't come from anything they did. It was sympathetic outrage on Twitter, and bloggers and journalists talking about how crazy it was."

[....] "Sometimes I forget that Twitter is something beyond just being snarky at the Oscars. All of a sudden something happens and you remember that this is an amazing, powerful tool." Coulton says. "My fans have a keen sense of justice, and this idea that we should be attributed for our work. People who are of the Internet realize that attribution is what we trade on."

A compulsory license includes the privilege of making a musical arrangement of the work to the extent necessary to conform it to the style or manner of interpretation of the performance involved, but the arrangement shall not change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work, and shall not be subject to protection as a derivative work under this title, except with the express consent of the copyright owner.

Internet sleuths immediately went to work on the question, creating side-by-side comparisons of the audio (which are very convincing) and even unearthing an official Fox version of the as-yet-unreleased single in the Swedish iTunes store. While the track is not currently available in the American store, gaming blog Kotaku claims that it “was available earlier and was pulled by Fox.” Despite calls from Twitter and multiple media organizations, the network has yet to make a statement as of this afternoon, but, all things considered, it’s looking pretty bad for Glee.

How is it that copyright lasts 70 years after death, but licenses expire at death?

Of that $5.3 million, $5 million is reserved for artists who sold at least 28,500 total downloads on iTunes between the inception of iTunes on January 9, 2001 and December 31, 2010 including current class members Youngbloods and Shropshire. Qualifying members would split that $5.3 million pro rata to the number of downloads of their records. However, these two artists may ultimately receive a lot less than splitting the $5 million between themselves because any artist who was signed to Epic, Columbia or Arista Records who sold more than 28,500 is eligible to join the class if they entered into agreements dated between January 1, 1976 and December 31, 2001.

According to a trusted source there may well be over 100 artists would qualify for membership. The balance of the money, only $300,000, is reserved for all Sony artists with fewer than 28,500 total downloads on iTunes.

The proposed settlement also provides for a prospective 3 percent bump in artists' royalty rates with respect to permanent digital downloads and ringtones sold in the US after January 1, 2011. The 3 percent is against Sony Music Entertainment's gross receipts. This amounts to 3 percent of 70 cents (the amount Sony received for 99 cent downloads) and that is only 2.1 cents.

The saga of unusual collections of the Central Office of Collection and Distribution (ECAD) has added another chapter last week. The boys from the blog Caligraffiti received last Tuesday in an email warning that the collecting society would have to pay royalties for videos from YouTube and Vimeo that appeared on the site.

The saga of unusual collections from the Central Office of Collection and Distribution (ECAD) gained another chapter last week. The boys from the blog Caligraffiti received last Tuesday an email from the collecting society warning that they would have to pay royalties for videos from YouTube and Vimeo embedded on the site.

YouTube Brasil will have to pay 2.5% of its gross revenue per exhibition of songs protected by Ecad (Bureau of Revenue Distribution) in the country. If the amount of the stipulated percentage does not reach BRL 258,000 (US $146,250) in a year, the site must pay the value as "minimum annual fee".

The right of public performance in digital mode is through the concept of transmission exists in law and in this art. 5 of section II of Law 9.610/98, which issue is the transmission or dissemination of sounds or sounds and images through of radio waves, satellite signals, wire, cable or other conductor, optical or other electromagnetic process, so this includes the Internet.

The rights of public performance in digital media happen through the concept of transmission found in the article 5, section II of the law 9.610/98, in wich transmission or emission are the diffusion of sounds or images through radio waves, satellite signals, wire, cable or other conductor, optical or other electromagnetic process, so this includes the Internet.

To blog [as] a nonprofit, the amount charged by Ecad is nothing lightweight: R $ 352.59 (US $204) monthly.

 

Eduardo has also confirmed that ECAD has gone after weddings with DJs for performance royalties (as Ninja pointed out in the comments) and pointed out that the BRL $359 amounts to roughly half a month's wages at minimum wage.

Example 1, the case of the kettle. As summarized by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, “Readers who’ve been to law school may remember the chestnut known as the ‘Case of the Kettle’. A man is charged with borrowing a kettle and breaking it. His reply is that, first, he never borrowed it; second, it was already broken when he borrowed it; third, it was intact when he returned it.”

Example 2, the case of the dog. Paraphrasing from a 1978 Wall Street Journal article about well-known Texas defense attorney Richard “Racehorse” Haynes: You say my dog bit you, but I don’t own a dog, and he doesn’t bite, and you kicked him first.

Example 3, digital downloads. Two recent court cases hinge on how the sale of an MP3 download compares to the sale of a conventional physical recording, known as a “phonorecord” in Copyright-speak. In one case, the singer Eminem demanded that Universal Music Group calculate his royalties for downloads based on the higher rate for licensed material instead of the lower rate for phonorecord sales. UMG refused, arguing that the sale of an MP3 download was the same as a phonorecord sale. In the second case, EMI filed suit against ReDigi, a company that allows purchasers of MP3 downloads to resell those files under Copyright law’s “first sale” doctrine. EMI argued that the MP3 files were not phonorecords and thus not subject to first sale.

Putting these two arguments together, we see the music industry imagining transactions where what’s sold is a phonorecord but what’s purchased isn’t.

Value in the music business though is an odd thing: the more value added to the music by the fan directly, the less influence the rights holders have over it, and the more influence the creators of representational systems (i.e., turntable.fm) and rights creators have (i.e., artists going directly on turntable.fm with stuff that their labels don’t own). And rights holders do not like being taken out of the value equation.

Call it Kaplan’s Law: the more value a non-music company adds to the fan/artist relationship, the bigger the threat to those who’s business depends on being between the two.

To artists: own your experiential rights. Participate in technology and hold your representatives (lawyers, labels and management companies) to the standards you want your content held to once you lose control of it.

What measures do you propose be put in place to prevent the uploading of major label owned content? I can't speak to the mechanism to determine what an annual fee would be (presumably it would be by percentage of catalogue * number of lockers that the content resides in), but asking that controls be put in place to prevent the service from becoming another illegal sharing vehicle is *very* reasonable.

To combat this they [Universal Music] want only songs with digital receipts to be able to added to lockers. For some time UMG has been demanding that online music retailers embed personal information in every song they sell. They call it UITS. iTunes has been inserting email addresses into every song while other retailers like Napster are using a unique receipt number....

All songs without a proof of purchase would be assumed to be unauthorized and not accepted into the system. Songs ripped from CDs would not have unique identifiers and wouldn't be loaded. Any song purchased prior to retailers inserting personal identifiers or from retailers who have yet to personalize every song would also be excluded. (To date, Amazon's MP3 store does not put any unique identifiers in songs despite UMG's demand that they do so.) Promotional songs download online would also not work.

Sony believes users will share lockers by visiting each others houses and syncing in each others music. To combat this Sony wants loading to happen from only one computer. Each locker owner would have to designate a single location from which they could upload songs. Users could load music from either their laptop or desktop or office computer but not all three. Their belief is that this will prevent friend to friend file sharing.

Most worrisome to Warner Music Group is that users may setup multiple lockers and the distribute the extra lockers to friends. Imagine if a locker owner setup a locker at Apple and Amazon and then gave their less used locker away or maybe even sold it. What WMG would like to see happen is that a central locker authority would administer all locker assignments. For awhile they were pushing Catch Media as the solution. More recently they may have relaxed their demands in this area and insisted that locker identities be uniquely tied to a valid credit card or some other such verified identity.

Cloud Drive is a general online storage service for all digital files, not unlike Google Docs, Microsoft SkyDrive and any number of other internet file back-up services. It’s your external hard-drive in the cloud. It requires a license from content owners no more than those other internet file back-up services do and no more than makers of external hard drives for PCs do.

Cloud Player is a media management and play-back application not unlike Windows Media Player and any number of other media management applications that let customers manage and play their music. It requires a license from content owners no more than those applications do.

It really is that simple.