Copyfutures

A Report from the Front Lines

Mary Bridges has an interesting report from one of the RIAA actions against individual uploaders. Here is a taste:

Yesterday’s hearing offered a view into what might happen if these cases did not end in settlement negotiations and instead proceeded to trial. Inside the courtroom, the attorneys for the recording industry outnumbered defendants by a two-to-one margin, and the disparity of resources and expertise between the sides only continued to widen. At one point, Judge Gertner dismissed a motion from a defense attorney because, she explained, the “legal argument doesn’t make any sense.”

The Court had previously expressed concern about this resource gap and about defendants who had “no access to counsel.” In order to help raise some legal issues at the core of the case, several parties – including the Motion Picture Association of America, a group of musicians and songwriter societies, and representatives of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society – filed amicus briefs with the court.

Clearplay

David Pogue has a story on Clearplay in Today's New York Times. Here is a taste:

RCA's new DRC232N, a DVD player that automatically skips cinematic violence, sex, swearing and drug use.

Its scene-cutting technology, called ClearPlay, comes from a Utah company of the same name. Its executives maintain that by sanitizing movies, they're actually doing Hollywood a favor by building a broader audience.

Hollywood begs to differ. Actually, it sues to differ; eight movie studios and the Directors Guild of America have taken ClearPlay and a group of similar companies to court. "ClearPlay software edits movies to conform to ClearPlay's vision of a movie instead of letting audiences see, and judge for themselves, what writers wrote, what actors said and what directors envisioned," the Directors Guild says.

Conference Announcement: Layer One

LayerOne
June 12th and 13th, 2004
Westin Los Angeles Airport Hotel

LayerOne is a technology conference and social event being held over the days of Saturday June 12th and Sunday June 13th at the Los Angeles International Airport Westin. We will be covering everything from information security and cryptography to the sociological impact of technology.

Here is the schedule.

Pirate Act & Copynorms

CNET has a story entitled 'Pirate Act' raises civil rights concerns. Here is a taste:

File swappers concerned about getting in trouble with record labels over illegal downloads may soon have a major new worry: the U.S. Department of Justice.

A proposal that the Senate may vote on as early as next week would let federal prosecutors file civil lawsuits against suspected copyright infringers, with fines reaching tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The so-called Pirate Act is raising alarms among copyright lawyers and lobbyists for peer-to-peer firms, who have been eyeing the recording industry's lawsuits against thousands of peer-to-peer users with trepidation. The Justice Department, they say, could be far more ambitious.

What is behind the new statute? The story continues:

not one peer-to-peer criminal prosecution has taken place in the United States. The Justice Department has indicated that it won't target peer-to-peer networks for two reasons: Imprisoning file-swapping teens on felony charges isn't the department's top priority, and it's always difficult to make criminal charges stick.

The priorities explanation may be part of the reason, but there is obvisouly another. Criminal prosecutions for P2P would cause a storm of outrage, because use of P2P simply does not violate the copynorms--the informal social attitudes that determine the social acceptability of copying behavior.

More RIAA P2P Lawsuits

Wired has a story entitled RIAA Bags 493 More Swappers. Here is a taste:

WASHINGTON -- A U.S. music industry group says it has sued 493 more people for copyright infringement as part of its campaign to stop consumers from copying music over the Internet.

The Recording Industry Association of America has now sued nearly 3,000 individuals since last September in an attempt to discourage people from copying songs through peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa and LimeWire.

Felten on Wu & Lemley

Ed Felten has a nice post on recent articles by Tim Wu and Ed Felten. Here is a taste:

Recently I read two great articles on copyright: Tim Wu's Copyright's Communications Policy and Mark Lemley's Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Justifications for Intellectual Property.