Publish and Be Dammed?

In September 2006 The Sunday Times giveaway a CD which featured 10 tracks from a live performance by The Jimi Hendrix Experience which were recorded at London's Royal Albert Hall in February 1969 and included classics such as Purple Haze, Sunshine of Your Love and Foxy Lady. Over 1.3m copies of the CD were given away.

Hendrix died aged 27 in London in 1970 but the paper failed to get permissions from his estate and now face damages to be around $250,000 after losing a high court copyright infringement case. The Hendrix estate represented by Experience Hendrix and Last Experience, launched their legal action 3 ago.

The high court was told by lawyers for Times Newspapers that the Times's promotions team said that they where contacted only days before the planned CD giveaway and that it was too late to withdraw the covermount from the newspaper. There only alternative would be withdraw the polybag containing the CD which would obviously create confusion and that it was also to late to cancel planned TV and radio advertising.

A film of the Hendrix's 1969 London concert and the two companies claimed that this had been delayed in part by the Sunday Times's free CD and the negative impact it would have on UK earnings. In his ruling Sir William Blackburne said that the Sunday Times covermount had delayed by a year the receipt of $5.8m in earnings to Experience Hendrix and Last Experience from the Hendrix concert film. He ordered Times Newspapers to pay damages equivalent to one year's interest on that sum.

An intresting case of publish and be dammed.

A further update article on Out-Law.com

Don't Think Twice Its Aright?

Do you know what is legal and what is illegal with respect to copying; films, videos, music, text, illustrations, graphics, photos? It’s still illegal in the UK to rip a CD from your music collection onto your laptop or MP3 player for listening on the move?

A UK consumer watchdog , Consumer Focus have researched consumer attitudes and claim from its findings that copyright law is outdated and that millions are unaware they were breaking laws. Copying a CD or DVD onto a computer or an Ipod for your own use is defined in law as format shifting. An argument against allowing people to shift format was that the artists could claim that these works only had a limited lifespan and so people should pay them again for having the work on a different format. Ofcom claim that some 41% of the UK adult population, 18 million people, own an MP3 digital music player, such as an iPod and 5 million who own mobile phones that have a MP3 music player.

In a poll performed by Consumer Focus , of 2,026 people, some 73% said that they did not know what they could copy or record and almost 38|% confessed of copying music files onto their digital players.

The research has thrown light on the outdated copyright laws in the UK.
Consumer Focus acknowledged that not a single person has been prosecuted for format shifting for their own use but argued that the law had to be changed if the music industry wanted consumers to take its concerns over piracy seriously. A spokesman for the BPI, the record industry trade body, said: “We agree that the format shifting of legitimately purchased CDs should not leave consumers in a legal quandary.

The law may be in need of change here, and education is needed to bring common sense to the table. However, we now face challenges to yesterday's copyright in many areas and there is a clear need for more common sense and education on many fronts.

So will you stop and think twice before you copy that track to your MP3 player or simply do it and say the law is an ass?

Viet Nam Copyright War

It was interesting to read an article today published by the Viet Nam New agency, ‘Most ebook-sharing sites violate copyright’. It clearly shows the problems of a poorer economy which is trying to grapple with increasing demand, high, copyright ignorance, cost and to what to some appears an easy solution – piracy.

Duong Thu Ai, a translator and author of nearly 200 books, says, "About 30-40 websites have published my work. They have never sought my permission." Tre Publishing House director, Pham Sy Sau said most Viet Nam ebook-sharing websites violated copyrights. Due to the scale of the issue, many foreign publishers are hesitant to deal with Vietnamese publishing houses.

Nguyen Vu Phuong, a senior official of the Viet Nam Literary Copyright Centre, says, "If we put ourselves in the authors’ shoes, we will understand how painful and discouraging it must be when their works are easily distributed by a click, while they rarely receive any acknowledgement, let alone monetary compensation. If writers continually receive such treatment, they will not be motivated to create works of great value. Society’s creativity will eventually be degraded.” On the other hand he says, “Viet Nam’s very young population craves knowledge and most is gained from books. Not many young people can afford books from big stores. Because the content is what they want, they try to get it as cheaply as possible, free if possible".

However, help may be coming from a familiar source. Google is reported as suggested a book search settlement with Vietnamese authors. Google would compensate authors, including Vietnamese, whose books were digitised without permission since 2004. It is believed that a deal between Vietnamese authors and Google would put the copyright issue in Viet Nam in the spotlight.

Fighting the Flood of Digital Piracy

The UK Publishers' Association is reported last week in the Bookseller as having recorded around 800 illegally uploaded texts and successfully helped to remove almost 90% of them from the web in February. The PA’s infringement software adopts the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) approach of issuing take down notices and tracking the files removal and offenders.

The one thing that is certain is that relying on take down notices is akin to Hans Brinker sticking his finger in the dyke at Haarlem to plug the hole, but this time it doesn’t work, is too much effort and we only have so many fingers.

The problem we have written about is that this is based on a safe habour approach for the services hosting the files and is reactive and not proactive, so acts after the cat is often out the bag. Service suppliers can only go so far in vetting files being loaded before their safe harbour status can be brought into question.

Sites like Scribd and Wattpad, that potentially offer so much, are caught between a safe harbour and a hard place. However they are only the tip of what is and remains a big iceberg. We have been shown a pirate copy of a highly expensive and prized work which the publisher had not digitised for fear of being pirated. Some may say an open invention to the pirates and one which they have taken. The quality of the pirated work was impressive and amazingly it was being given away by the pirate for free.

So we now have the altruistic pirate who is not even after the money and will spend considerable time to create a near perfect digital rendition of a complex work. This is a digital cover made from the physical book being scanned, OCRed, and then text over image and links being applied to match any digital rendition. This cat is certainly out the bag and having kittens.

So like rabbits you shoot at one and ten more appear all over the place all in different sizes and shapes!

The UK government look set not to follow the French ‘3 strikes law’ and move instead to a half way house where ISP have to slow the pirates down by reducing their access speed. It’s akin to condemning a driver to the slow lane because they broke the speed limit. We can’t see the music industry liking it, nor the ISPs, so it’s a perfect compromise and will leave all unhappy. Importantly it fails to address the cause and merely sticks yet more plasters on the patient.

There doesn’t appear to be an answer or a route that at least mitigates some of the risk? Some would argue that the problem is small, on a similar level to store shrinkage and maybe not worth any extra effort. We would disagree.

Today the book industry is ill prepared for the potential risk. On one hand everyone is jumping up and down heralding the digital dawn and ebooks and ereaders and getting more publicity than previously dreamt of. On the other hand the digital content is for many reasons only slowly materialising, which fuels the appetite of the pirates. We have exclusive device deals which restrict and marginalise the market. We have a lack of clarity on pricing which confuses the consumer and again is a green light to pirates who can make their offer simple and uniform. We have DRM.

Scribd today iTunes Tomorrow?

Last December Social publishing firm Scribd announced that it has raised $9 million and had hired George Consagra, former chief operating officer of Bebo, as its president. Since then the news has been ‘mixed’, it now claims 60 million visitors a month, has got some support from some publishers uploading their content and on the downside a significant amount of bad press over their hosting of copyright infringed materials. Inherently it is a document sharing site – a YouTube for documents, letting anyone upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail. It claims to have amassed 35 billion words in a mix of books, PowerPoint presentations, legal briefs, and other documents.

Today Scribd has moved up a gear announcing it will be an ecommerce site enabling publishers, authors and owners to charge for their materials so moving from YouTube to eBay, or as they hope iTunes. A logical step and one that should result in a deluge of previously self published materials, publisher experiments and without doubt some more questionable pirate works. The new store will enable users to set their own price for their work and keep 80% of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with DRM security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.

Scribd has also announced plans for an application for the iPhone next month and that it is also building a database of copyrighted works in an attempt to help filter out pirate works and negate publisher’s fears and frustrations. Scribd may hope that by enabling publisher to make money it can mollify its critics but may be hard for publishers to back a venture that is at the same time seen to be undermining them.

The interesting aspect will be not the mainstream publishing works which will no doubt be poured in by many eager to see if they can make extra revenue at no cost but with self published works. Will it change the vanity market from print on demand to online? Will it bring more short stories or serialised stories to the market? Will it undermine the position of the publisher who will now clearly site alongside every budding author on what may be a level playing field? Will it provide the market tested slushpile of the future? Will the database of copyright be seen to perform or undermine its adoption?

We now await the market reaction and obvious response from others such as Wattpad.

Can You Copy A DVD?

The big six film studios take RealDVD to court this week in San Fransico. They claim RealDVD violates copyright an if they win will be questioning whether consumers can make copies as they have done with music, video and audio for many years.

RealDVD, made by RealNetworks, allows DVD owners to make digital copies of their discs onto a computer or laptop hard drive for their own personal use. However online dwnloadable versions can now be purchased and some studios let users make a digital copy of a movie onto a computer by paying extra for an "expanded edition" of a DVD.

As RealDVD effectively bypasses DRM controls, the movie studios, represented by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), claim it is illegal under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). The movie studios fear a ‘rent, rip and return’ culture where the end copy can get shared and loose revenues.

RealNetworks, claim that the digital version made using RealDVD can only be played on the computer that made the copy. The National Consumers League, a consumer watchdog group, said a survey it conducted in conjunction with RealNetworks showed consumers want choice.

RealDVD is not alone in what it does, but that is no defence. So is the question more about behaviour and education or about control and restrictions? We all know that the more you restrict and control the more the incentive to break it. The next problem is defining the loss. One side says its huge, crippling and could bring the industry to its knees, the other that it may be a likened to shrinkage in a store – it happens.

It’s somewhat ironic that the case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is being heard by Judge Marilyn Patel. She presided over the Napster case and eventually shut down the original peer-to-peer music file-sharing service.