Category: Copyright

3 Strikes and we’ll download more

Record industry: ignore that French piracy study!.

A recent study of 2,000 residents of a French town found that more admitted to downloading copyrighted music and video than before the 3 strikes law.

I’ve been writing lately (for my diss) about how laws are most often communicated by non-official sources, like the recording industry.  This type of information dissemination often comes with the spin or coloring of whomever is doing the speaking.  This story is a great example of how that process might backfire.

Lessig chat hit with automatic censorship

Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation | Techdirt.

Lessig recently gave a “webside chat” on the usual issues of copyright and fair use that was posted to YouTube.  The video included clips of music that is covered under copyright, but in this context appear to be fair use. The details aren’t immediately clear, but it seems that Google’s automatic copyright filters stripped the audio track from the video (though it is now available again — with a link to purchase the music featured in the video).

This is an incredibly timely coincidence with my last post about the censorship of digital speech. In this case, there wasn’t even a button to push–an automatic filter indiscriminately altered what Lessig had to say.

The democratization of web publishing, I believe, is an inherently good thing. It would be shameful if speech gets quashed because of a business extending its power over any medium it touches.

Techdirt isn’t usually a source I like to cite, but when Lessig tweets a story about himself, you know it must be legit.

ACTA and ISP immunity

World, get ready for the DMCA: ACTA’s Internet chapter leaks (Ars)

Ars offers an interesting interpretation of the leaked ACTA documents. They point out that it would be a globalization of what is already pretty established American law: ISPs are not liable for the infringing content of their subscribers, so long as they take the allegedly offending material offline. This would be a departure of the law of other countries.

Canadian law professor Michael Geist notes that the current draft would mean big changes for Canada. To take one example, Canada currently has no “takedown” law. Rather than “notice-and-takedown,” many ISPs rely on “notice-and-notice”—they pass notices along to the subscriber in question, but take no other action. But even this is not currently required by law.

What’s more, this would make bringing change to American law even more difficult. There have been plenty of cases where “notice and takedown” has not worked that well. Making it the default around the world wouldn’t be a good thing for us or them.