Redigi to Land in Europe and Sell Music and Books!

Are we about to see the demise of the lack of a first sale doctrine on digital files? Although ReDigi is still locked in a US court case with Capitol records accused of copyright infringement they now plan to bring  their service to Europe. Amazon is releasing its AutoRip service which gives buyers of the physical they can resell and a digital copy for life in the cloud. Others a queued up watching as many start to push the boundaries on digital media, the right to resell and the whole question of the licence you get when you buy digital media.

ReDigi move to Europe is within the next quarter and is not just about music files but also ebooks and potentially video, games and software. This means that publishers who may have been watching the music industry from the sidelines are now potential in the arena alongside them on this one in Europe.

Last year in a EU court ruling the door was opened for the resale o media file to be fully tested. In a case between UsedSoft and Oracle, the EU court stated that the UsedSoft service could enable the resell of Oracle software and that the copyright owner’s rights could not prohibit the resale by its customers. Many ignored the ruling thinking it only was about software, but it wasn’t and its now threatening to come home in the shape of Redigi. If the services takes hold in Europe it could itself impact the US and there would appear to be no reason why consumers would not embrace the service.

Redigi in effect broker the resale of digital files for a reduced price and so create a second hand, or used media market. ReDigi only allows people to sell music files they have legally purchased and scans users’ computers and devices for illicit files and requests them to be deleted. Redigi recognise that a digital file can be copied and have built their service on moving the digital file to their servers and removing it from the seller’s system. The buyer retrieves the file from Redigi.

ReDigi also has enabled artists to register with its site and receive 20% royalty on sales through its platform.

The objections from the industry are based around the lack of ‘first sale doctrine’ on digital product and that the file is always ‘mint’. The fear of piracy drives copyright owners to the barricades whilst the service itself drives consumers to challenge them. This Mexican stand-off often overrules the need to find a solution that works for all. Some would suggest that the visibility of the dual standards being adopted between physical and digital rights themselves will generate more piracy than the service itself!

Related blogs:

First Sale Doctrine: Digital Threat or Opportunity  Jan 2012

Digital Files Aren’t Just For Christmas But For Life July 2012

51 Million Take Down Notices and Counting

2012 appears to be the year when the surge in copyright take-down notices may have tipped search engine sites into considering proactive downgrading the results of repeat offenders or self policing by de-listing them. This action if taken will be significant step, but the sheer rise in number of take-down requests may now necessitate it being taken.

Google and other hosting services, have an obligation to remove infringing content upon receiving a valid DMCA request from copyright holders. Google publish weekly stats on the number of take-down notices they receive and process. In 2012, copyright holders requested Google to remove a staggering 51.3 million links, which is a significant increase compared to previous years. Google is currently processing half a million take-down requests per day and the number is not stable, but increasing week by week. The last week saw a record 3.5 million requests, which itself is 15 times greater than that receive in the whole of last January.

As expected the RIAA is the most active sender of requests with 7.8 million over the year. Surprisingly, the Pirate Bay were only cited in around half a million requests this year, whereas the file sharing site FilesTube topped the rankings with 2.2 million requests.

The increasing trend in requests and take-downs highlights the problem of their management and the challenges of dealing with and resolving take-down notices against legitimate content. It is therefore more likely that companies such as Google will increasingly downgrade the search results of repeat offenders and maybe even take the ultimate step and de-list them.

The current system is more of a case of ‘sticky tape and plaster’ than a resolution and as bodies such as the RIAA continue to automate their detection and servicing of notices, we appear to be climbing onto a treadmill that is just getter faster and bigger. The ideal solution for much of the copyright infringement is a open copyright register, but we have seen that the associations appear to be devoid of funds and the commitment to take that bold step and instead are happy to continue to add more sticky tape to the issue and pass the blame down the chain to the likes of Google who ironically offered one to the book industry, albeit with many unacceptable strings..

An EU 'iTax' Is Not The Answer

The UK government have announced that they are to finally acknowledge the right of individuals to copy material for the own use. We have all done it. We have all copied a file from one format to another , or from one device to another in order that we can play it as we want to , on the device we want to, or store it logically with other files. Today that is illegal in the UK, but tomorrow it will be finally addressed.

However, in addressing it we face many further interpretations and fine detail. It will not allow encrypted files to be unlocked so in fact could be said to be further promoting some to remain in the restrictive world of DRM. Defining what librarians, teachers and academic researchers, can and can’t copy is today also open to much debate. It will get clarified as the law is amended, but how much compromise has to be accommodated and how open it will be in reality, is widely open to debate and much lobbying by strong vested interested groups.

It is right that the law reflects the consumer perspective and decimalises what is accepted social practice, but it also must protect the licensed owner’s and originator’s too. In doing so it must strive to obviate creating new loopholes that can be exploited by some at the detriment of others. Interestingly it should also recognise that what is acceptable today will need to be revisited and reviewed regularly as the digital environment evolves and cloud based services develop. We still are to revisit the long overdue review of the first sale doctrine on digital and some would argue that this alone is the biggest timebomb and is primed to explode

The latest taxation challenge and EU battle looks to be over what has been dubbed the ‘iTax’. This battle is clearly going to pit the UK against other member states and also some other states against each other.

Today in France if you buy a 64gig iPad you will pay a 15 Euro iTax on the transaction. If you buy it over the border in a neighbouring country you may pay zero iTax. France raises a levy on digital device sales to offset the lost revenues from digital copying but could be said by some to be just driving sales elsewhere with little deterrent and even less real revenue. In Holland cassettes carry a 2 Euro levy and a 2 gig memory stick a 0.50 Euro one. In Poland even blank sheets of paper are taxed  as they can be used to facilitate copying. It begs questions as to how the tax is distributed, the logic of the charges and whether they make any difference today, let alone tomorrow, or whether they are just like some ‘green taxes’- a means of raising tax revenues?

The UK have rightly said no to the iTax and now appear to be on a collision course with the EU who wish to introduce a standard cross community iTax with some £15 tax in iPads  and other gadgets and also iTax on blank media, all to cover the cost of illegal copying. Some would suggest this is just tax for tax sake.

Copying and piracy is promoted by scarcity of content and the inability to access, play or store at one’s convenience. Loopholes and inconsistency of pricing, taxes and approach to copyright, in a cross border commercial environment such as the EU, is the bigger cause of abuse. Taxing devices and blank material is not the answer and just drives more people underground. Inconsistent VAT rates, between digital and physical media, and also between free trading nations are at best indefensible and at worst an open invitation for global companies to exploit for their own pockets at the expense of all. Introducing more tax, for tax sake, is not the answer.

The EU is once again demonstrating its ineptitude to deal with the digital issues head on and instead play to their political audience. The digital strategy that we wrote about earlier this week, clearly shows vision but also is so predictable and fails to address today’s issues.

The fact is that global business is pulling the fabric on which individual and local societies can grow. The commercial environment today is imbalanced in favour of the accountants, lobbyist and loophole managers and Taxing the illogical to reward the state is not the answer.

A Tsunami Hits A DMCA Safe Harbour?

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, service providers are allowed ‘safe harbour’ on content posted, but must act on any infringement notice that is served on them. Pretty straight forward and it is a process that happens everyday.

However, it can break down and go wrong and in the case one notice appears to have closed down not one piece of content infringement but 1.5 million teacher and student blog articles.

Pearson raised a takedown notice on ServerBeach who host Edublogs' websites. Edublog claims to be the oldest and second largest WordPress Multisite setup on the web. The infringement cited was aimed at a teacher's blog, which in 2007, had shared a copy of a 1974  Beck’s Hopelessness Scale's questionaire with his class.

Pearson requested $120 for the 38 year questionnaire, which was posted in 2007 and ServerBeach contacted Edublogs. The notice sent to Edublogs had apparently already been actioned and the offending post removed and not being displayed. However as many of us know, deleting something doesn’t remove it from the search engines’ cache so it is still effectively there and in this case ServerBeach spotted a copy of the disputed blog entry stored in the working memory of Edublogs. When Edublogs did not respond within 24 hours to emails alerting it to the allegedly infringing content, ServerBeach shut down the entire site and some 1.5 million innocent blogs. The action over one DMCA notice impacted a whole community. Was this in fact compliance or over zealous compliance? 

There then followed a open internet spat between ServerBeach and Edublogs.  

A whole innocent community of teachers and students have been effected by something that they should not have been exposed to. Who was right, wrong and whether it could have been handled better is subjective today. What is clear is that it is a bad day’s PR for DMCA, Pearson, ServerBeach and Edublogs and a worse day for a significant education community.

Digitise Your Books For Chump Change

Sometimes we all miss the launch of something and its only when someone discovers it do some of the ramifications come home and the service become ‘news’. We were alerted to a piece in Publishers Weekly ‘1DollarScan Takes Service to Cloud, Authors Guild Worried’

So who and what is 1DollarScan?

The company is based in San Jose and operates under a Japanese company Bookscan. The object of its service is to offer consumers the ability to digitise their books for a 'cent a page' making a 200 page book digital for just 2 dollars, or less than the cost of the postage to 1DollarScan. The book is destroyed in the process, which first cuts the spine, then using high-speed Canon scanners, with optical-character recognition, scans and OCRs the content turning it into a PDF file, which can be read on literally a host of devices.

So what’s the difference with scanning your own books using standard off the shelf equipment and software and creating digital copies using1DollarScan? What’s the difference between copying a CD to create a MP3 file or taping a TV programme to create a digital copy? The reality is that the day is fast approaching when everyone will be able to do it themselves effectively at home and this service is just offering the economies of scale and scope. If the consumer only uses the files for their own use it is ‘fair use.’

The service may be taken up by many people wanting to clear their shelves, or it may fail just as other smart ideas, which no one really wanted. However, the challenge is how we would regulate such a service? 1DollarScan claim that they will ensure consumer self validate their usage and that they will also provide an opt in/out service for the owner of the copyright. From the outside and without the detail it is hard to say how this will work, but given that they will know nothing about the copyright against the titles they are scanning, it would appear half baked and some would suggest 'aiding and abetting' potential infringement.

Do 1DollarScan retain an archive of the files and if so, are these fair use or an infringement?

If 100 requests for the same title are scanned, they will distributed the 100 PDF files to 100 people with little or no control over their future use. They will be effectively 'open files' which would be relatively easy to covert to other formats and trade. The files will once again fall under DMCA Safe habour protection for any trading services that  unwittingly got involved and the owner of the copyright will have to search, and issue take down notices.

When Google scanned books the process was restricted to one body. With this service there could be literally hundreds of the same files in circulation and onus is on the owner to ensure that they are not being traded and infringing copyright.

The challenge is that 1DollarScan will not be the first nor will they be the last service offer and the digitisation cost is going only one way. Without a rights registry we remain a rights industry that some would say is walking backwards into a digital world.

Related :

Publishers Weekly ‘1DollarScan Takes Service to Cloud, Authors Guild Worried’

That Was The Week That Was: Apple, Kodak and a Blackout

So what was the biggest news story this week? The filing for Bankruptcy of that previously leading technology giant Kodak, the Presidential launch and hype of Apple’s grab for textbooks and to create an exclusive iWorld or the darkness created by the likes of Wikipedia and others and resultant climb-down of US legislators to their ill conceived SOPA and PIPA bills?

Kodak clearly teaches us that no one is immune to disruptive change and the emergence of digital technology and integrated video and photography in every smartphone simple by passed them. It is a very real lesson and one we should rank alongside many others who failed to adapt. In any value chain we all have to add value to survive.

The Apple launch will have significant repercussions far wider than the intended textbook market. Apple has not thrown a people into the pond but a whacking great bolder, that forces us to question much of what we do between author and reader. The one thing that is certain is that it will change not only what we do but how we do it and what we trade moving forward. Apple is not the winner merely the one to throw the first stone.

So what about the lights that went out over the Internet and the ensuing recreation of what, would have been bad law. This was a relatively quiet but significant revolution. Backed largely by big media and content producers such as the movie studios, record labels it is seen by them as their way to control and fight piracy and by many others as going too far the bills would have gone too far and with the capacity to created a nightmare.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was going to be bad law and along with its Senate cousin, the Protect IP Act,(PIPA) have galvanised protests across a very wide spectrum of companies and have been controversial from the beginning. Site such as Wikipedia and Reddit switched themselves of in protest. The object was to demonstrate what could easily happen under these ill conceived laws.

Under SOPA, a rights holder can take steps to shut that site off from search engines, ad networks, even Internet service providers and basically starve the offending site out of existence.

But critics see as being to easy to close down a supposedly offending site by just writing a strongly worded letter and would give legitimate sites a huge new set of legal obligations. Like a 21st century McCarthy witch hunt on the Internet.

On Wednesday U.S. lawmakers' websites were inundated with messages and Google delivered a 4-million-name petition against SOPA and even before the switch off, President Obama declared that he didn’t support SOPA. The silent majority stood up.

Is it the end, or will those experienced political wranglers and lobbyist divert their money to try and make some minor changes and push this bad law through?

This certainly was the week that was!

Cybercrime, SOPA and Copyright

Cybercrime takes many different forms and always happens to someone else. We can take precautions against it but when it happens its impact can be significant.

Some recent news items demonstrate the size and impact of cybercrime activity.

• The UK’s Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) have closed down over 2,000 fraudulent e-commerce websites ahead of this year’s Christmas shopping season. These were websites that were marketing products from well-known brands such as Nike, GHD, Tiffany and Ugg. Consumers received shoddy bogus items, nothing or could have their identities stolen or bank details used. It is estimated the banking fraud alone was in the region of £2.9 million.
• The US FBI have charged six Estonia individuals with conducting a sophisticated click-fraud scheme that infected about four million computers in 100 countries with malware and stole over $14 million Six people were arrested in on 8 November. The seventh member of the gang, a Russian, remains at large.
• US and Romania authorities have arrested over 100 people in connection with Internet fraud schemes that are claimed to have netted over $100 million.
• Four British men have been charged with conspiracy hacking to carry out an unauthorised act in relation to a computer as part of the infamous LulzSec and Anonymous group activities.
• Hackers are even alleged to have destroyed a pump used to pipe water to thousands of homes in a US city in Illinois.

These are some of the cybercrimess that have made the news in the last few days and we have to accept that there are many that don’t and that go undetected, or are merely kept quiet. Cybercrime is not going away nor is any consumer, organisation or even state totally safe. Cybercrime also is global but is often policed locally. It's not only about financial gain, but affects all property, intellectual property, utilities, commerce, and even personal identities. What makes cybercrime so difficult is that the motives behind it vary widely. We may hear about the large financial fraud and theft cases and those relating to large scale privacy issues, as above, but everyday what we all regard as criminal activity is taking place and intellectual property theft and infringement is happening at an alarming and increasing rate.

As states attempt to clamp down on cybercrime they do so often with a lack of inter state consistency and some would suggest that they go too far in encroaching on the rights to privacy. The laws have to deal with many complex issues and it makes us wonder whether police forces will be judged in the future, not by the number of ‘bobbies on the beat’ (police on the street but on the number of ‘bobbies on the net’.

It is often difficult to separate copyright infringement from financial cyber fraud and many hold different opinions about these. Protection and management of owned rights is critical in today's intellectual property sectors. It is often one thing to own rights and a completely different thing to be able to police and manage them.

SOPA

The US legislators are currently grappling with how far to clamp down on copyright infringement. The House of Representatives has tabled a Stop Online Piracy Act, (SOPA) copyright bill which is designed to make it much harder for rogue offshore sites to sell counterfeit U.S. goods, including fake prescription drugs and copyrighted movies and music. Such sites are believed to be causing tens of billions of dollars in losses annually to U.S. companies.

The bill however is attracting as much negative as positive attention. Objectors are raising issues regarding the bill potential to require Internet providers to monitor customers' traffic and block the addresses of Web sites suspected of copyright infringement. A network provider can be ordered to "prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States" to specific Web sites defined by their unique DNS number. ‘Deep packet inspection’ to block data from specific Web pages, or URLs and potentially intercepting a customers' browsing for analysis is at the core of many objections. As well as free speech and rights advocates groups, some of the largest web companies, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, have spoken out against the bill.

What is also interesting, is how SOPA and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which grant immunity to website owners for content posted by users will interact could be in conflict. The DMCA offers website owners a Safe Harbour for content posted on their site by users. So a sites such as Wattpad or YouTube cannot be held responsible if a user posts copyright infringing material on its site. DMCA allows content owners to ask the YouTubes of the world to take down infringing material but the site can claim safe habour and is immune to being sued unless it refuses.

The Recording Industry Association of America, along with the Motion Picture Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, strongly supports the SOPA legislation. However, the question remains as to in whose interest should the bill be crafted.

European Union Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes is widely reported saying that the millions of dollars being spent copyright infringement it is not addressing the issue. She also believes that consumers can see copyright as a restrictive tool and that artists are still not being adequately rewarded.

Kroes said, "We need to go back to basics and put the artist at the centre, not only of copyright law, but of our whole policy on culture and growth. In times of change, we need creativity, out-of-the-box thinking: creative art to overcome this difficult period and creative business models to monetise the art."

We support the sentiment given by Kroes but also accept that legislative action is required to deter, and police the internet. When we see the legal patent battles that are going on today between the technology giants we have to ask what realistic chance has the small owner of intellectual property got in the depths of the internet and in dealing with international infringement and crime?

Japanese publishers accuse Apple of copyright infringement

Apple stand accused by a consortium of Japanese book publishers of copyright infringement in that they a selling pirate titles through their App Store. The group claiming the infringement are the Japan Book Publishers Association, the Japan Magazine Publishers Association, the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan and the Digital Comic Association. The claimants state that some of the titles have been deleted in response to requests from authors and publishers but a majority of them remain and are open to abuse. Although Apple support the need to act promptly on complaints about copyright violation the consortium have asked Apple to set up a section to handle deletion requests and piracy.


Read more: http://www.ipodnn.com/articles/10/12/14/company.not.policing.app.store.groups.say/#ixzz189vx84rL

A Rights Business With No Rights Registry

Many see digital as opening up new opportunities one of which is to identify those old best sellers that have gone out of print and get then back on the shelf. Obviously it would be good to get them on the digital shelf as ebooks and with a relatively low investment they can be up and available competing with everyone else again. Once out there, there is little need to do anything except collect whatever sales revenues occur. The other option is to make them available once again in a physical POD (print on demand) rendition. Again once set up, POD is just a case of collecting the money from the sales, on a book that may never go out of print, needs no marketing spend and may never get its rights reverted.

In somewhat a roundabout way this is where Google came in and is what the, still unsettled, book settlement is about. The problem was never those new works under new contracts that allowed them to go digital, nor those that had slipped into public domain and no longer were tethered to anyone. It was always about orphans and many of this were not completely parentless, but just lying dormant and ‘out of print’. To all those wishing to adopt orphans, ‘out of print’ now offers relatively cheap digital pickings.

Many dispute the orphan numbers and debate numbers and not ethics. Some will assume rights and adopt a ‘publish and be dammed‘ approach always willing to admit an error when found out, but too lazy to do the diligence to establish the facts first.
We write this not as a piece of theory, but as a result of establishing books that were sucked into a trade publishing programme improperly. Some will basically trawl their best sellers that are out of print and readopt them without the appropriate diligence.

So again we ask how publishing is to manage rights in a digital world when it has no registry? How do authors and estates protect themselves from digital tethering and how can authors effectively monitor the situation?

EMI versus MP3tunes: A Question of Safe Habour

We have often raised a question of whether the “safe harbour” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) work. Our point is that it is a reactive process and depends on the party whose copyright has been infringed raising the appropriate notice and by the time the material is taken down the cat is probably out the bag and had many kittens. However, the recent Viacom versus YouTube found that the site was not liable for illegal content uploads, because it didn’t encourage them and quickly removed them.

Now we have a New York federal court deciding on another case between EMI and cloud based music service MP3tunes. MP3tunes enables users to store their music and access it from computers and mobile devices and also operates Sideload, a music search engine which allows users to discover music tracks and then copy them to their own space. They claim that their service only enables users to store their music online so they can listen to it anywhere and that it can’t held responsible for copyright infringement and are shielded from liability by the “safe harbour” provisions of the DMCA.

EMI claim that MP3tunes and Sideload represent a two-step mechanism for the discovery and acquisition of copyright music. EMI claim that MP3Tunes ‘does not own the music it exploits; nor does MP3tunes have any legal right or authority to use or exploit that music.’

The legal debate is also about whether someone who bought an EMI CD, ripped it to their computer and uploaded it to MP3Tunes for their own use and so they can listen to it anywhere, is in breach of copyright. It is further clouded by EMI initially claiming they did not place free downloads on the internet and that MP3tunes should have know that any their music on the internet was copyrighted. This was exposed when it was accepted that EMI had given away free copies of songs to the likes of Walmart, Amazon.com, MySpace, Facebook, Google, hoping the songs would go viral. The problem was that they went viral in a way the had not bargained for and made their somewhat righteous stance appear somewhat hypocritical when they had no way of distinguishing many of the music tracks they had leaked online with the tracks they accused MP3tunes of infringing.

Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), filed an amicus brief along with others asking the court to protect the “safe harbour” provisions of the DMCA. DMCA defendants fear that the case could go beyond online music storage and impact e-mail, photo and video storage applications.

We don’t like DMCA and safe habour but until we can find a better way its what we have today. Closing down DMCA through this action could have serious implications on social network services and digital restictions on both legitimate as well as infringing material. Many say we should learn from music industry and yet again they are in showing us what not to do.

UK Copyright Review Must Listen To All Sides

Nearly a decade ago, I received an invitation to a big BBC lunch to look at the digital world. I turned up to join a group of teenagers and geekie characters in sneakers and hoods, feeling somewhat over aged and out of place. We were all allocated to sit at tables with top executives and over lunch discussed the digital world known then only to my fellow guests. I walked away realising how little I knew and wondering if the BEEB could absorb the wealth of information and advice. To their credit the BBC learnt and applied a lot in some of their subsequent ventures.

Now David Cameron has announced that the UK’s intellectual property laws are to be reviewed over the next six months and this could lead to them being relaxed to allow greater use of copyright material without the owner's permission. He appears influenced by Google’s founders who had apparently told the UK government they could not have started their company in the UK. He certainly is impressed by the US fair use laws and ‘to encourage the sort of creative innovation that exists in America.’

The previous government’s review produced The Digital Economy Bill which was welcomed by some but raised many objections and clearly was a rushed job with many dots not being joined up.

Larry Lessig gave a really interesting and thought provoking TED presentation on copyright. The most salient statement was when he said that the older generation watch TV and listen to music but the that the younger generation now make TV and make music. However, the law often views the sampling and representation of material as wrong and makes criminals out of people for the wrong reasons. We have to find ways to change how we view and respect copyright material. Yesterday’s laws and rules that work in the physical world fail in the digital one.

The challenges for the review are significant with copyright owners on one side wanting to maintain tight control and revenue streams and the public on the other wanting more freedom to share, express themselves and exploit digital opportunities. The interesting question now is, who the review will consult and whether it is brave enough to accomadate those that the BBC learnt so much from? It must listen not just to industry bodies, publishers and technology corporations but also to authors and consumers and those who we may regard as 'pirates' today.

This is a Rights Business

This weekend saw an interesting letter published in The Daily Telegraph ‘Books on Demand’. The letter focused on print on demand and claimed that, ‘Publishers appear to be selling material that is freely available online to extract money from unsuspecting book buyers.’

The complaint was against ‘publishers’ and was in danger of tarnishing all with the same brush. Ruth Allen was rightly annoyed to discover that a $15 Print on demand book in the US which she claims was a copy of four of her articles, which were largely her work and made freely available over Wikipedia under their Creative Commons licensing copyright agreement. She objects to her altruism being used by others for profit but as we were unable to find the material under her name on Wikipedia, it is almost impossible for us to validate her claims.

We fully support Creative Commons licensing and its fair use, but respect that its unfair usage may be difficult to control in this digital age where exploitation is merely a click, or a short ‘low risk’ print run away.

We recently discovered a more traditional book work that had been republished as a print on demand rendition by its publisher, even though the contract did not permit that, reversal conditions had been met and the request for a reversal had been ignored. We only discovered the infringement by accident and the situation has been now resolved. The question is, how much infringement is now creeping back under the print on demand long tail.
We wonder if we will all be spending more and more time monitoring and searching for infringements in the future, with more and more take down notices being issued retrospectively. The Scribd and Wattpad platforms have demonstrated how easy it is for some to infringe and also how difficult it is for all to proactively manage content. In addition to the online threat we also now have a growing print on demand environment which itself is creating ‘low risk’ opportunities to publish first at little risk and be dammed.

We now talk about term licensing of digital rights but who will know when the term has expired? We openly dispute to volume of orphan works out there with the numbers often varying according to the position taken on their adoption. It is becoming easier to scan and copy books and torrent sharing is here today. There has always been serious book piracy, it is not new but just getting easier.

Some would suggest that a rights business without a rights registry in a digital world is an open door for those who wish to exploit it and a nightmare for those who want to protect their property and rights. We are no experts on copyright but would suggest that there must be a better way than expecting the owner to spend their time ensuring that the rights have not been infringed

Spanish Court Rules in Favour of YouTube

A court in Madrid has ruled that YouTube is not liable for copyright infringement for video material users have uploaded from Spanish television station Telecino. YouTube is not obliged to monitor all content and determine infringement and in ruling the court overrules a provisional ruling two years ago, which ordered YouTube to stop hosting any Telecino videos.

However, YouTube must respond quickly to claims from copyright holders about infringement and cooperate with the holders of the rights to immediately withdraw the content once the infraction is identified.

The ruling was welcomed by YouTube, which said that it was a vindication of EU laws which protect online service providers from liability for material that third parties publish. Some say that the ruling now protects copyright owners’ interests but also enables the likes of YouTube to operate and not get bogged down checking every clip.

This ruling also aligns with an earlier US District Court one that ruled similarly in their favour against Viacom. YouTube also now qualifies for similar protection in the US and in the EU. The court said that YouTube only becomes liable for infringement once it has been told of specific videos that infringe specific copyrights and that it should act to remove these from its site.

Europe however is not united on this issue, a court in Hamburg allowed a collecting society's suit to go to trial on the issue earlier this year and claimed that there "are some good reasons to think that YouTube indeed has some duty to take care of detecting illegal uploads". Also a Belgium court in 2007 ruled that ISP Scarlet should use technology to filter out of its traffic files which infringe copyright.

Safe Harbour may appear to be the easiest way to manage copyright today, but it is reactive not proactive and in effect tries to put the cat back in the bag after the event. The reality is that once the cat is out, it is out. Today’s technology there should enable ways in which we can certify authorisation, licence and track infringement and merely depending on owners to track everything, everywhere, appears to be a legal cop out.

YouTube is a Safe Harbour

Safe harbour is one of those relatively new concepts which syas that in principle a Internet service can’t be held responsible for what others do on their service. Some would word it differently but in essence it’s a reactive approach to copyright infringement as opposed to a proactive one that attempts to check first.

In 2007 Viacom filed a lawsuit claiming that Google’s YouTube was based on copyright infringement and that it profited from knowing that the site was full of unauthorised copyrighted material. The US District Court for the Southern District of New York has ruled that YouTube is only liable for infringement once it has been told of specific videos that infringe specific copyrights and fails to act to remove them from its site.
The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) allows online service providers to avoid liability for their users' law-breaking actions and absolves them of any burden to monitor their service for infringements of the law. It gives them a safe habour in which to operate Under DNCA companies who are informed of law-breaking, must act quickly to disable, remove or block the content or become they become liable.

The Court said that Viacom can have no quibble with how YouTube's current system operates and that when Viacom sent a mass take-down notice on February 2, 2007, by the next business day YouTube had removed virtually all of them by the next working day. The Court also said that previous cases made it clear that the responsibility to find and identity infringing material was the copyright holder's, not the online service provider's.

What does this mean to other safe habour operators? It clearly differentiates those who file share knowing that material is violating copyright from those who provide a platform and are ignorant of any abuse until notified. It also clearly enforces the owners responsibility to catch the offence and offender. So maybe we do now need an industry police force or maybe everyone should follow Macmillan’s lead and have a Digital Piracy Director.

Google Faces a New Rights Battle

Some say that it never rains just pours. It must feel like it is certainly pouring down on Google’s legal department as it prepares to face yet another copyright law suit. We have had to issues on YouTube, the French court finding them guilty and then before their appeal is even heard more French publishers starting another case. We all await the decision on the Great Book Bank Robbery and their most audacious heist on orphans works. Now The American Society of Media Photographers, the Graphic Artists Guild, the North American Nature Photography Association and the Professional Photographers of America, as well as individual photographers and illustrators have grouped together to fire another shot across the corporate pirate’s bows. The planned class-action lawsuit against Google asserts that in digitizing millions of books from libraries and also with their “partner program,” they infringed on the rights of photographers and other creators of graphic works. The original case action on the book scanning largely excluded photographs and other visual works. In doing so it was almost inevitable this would happen.

Graphics, illustrations and photographs are often used under strict licence in books and may be restricted to renditions or even editions. They are often fee based, may be purely complimentary or integral to the text content. Imagine an art book with no art, a childrens book with no illustrations. We have seen many books digitised with an illustration boxed out because the rights did not extend to digital. We have publishers who have some titles not digitised due to the issue of illustrative rights alone.

It brings home once again the point that a rights business needs a rights clearing house and registry for all, that not only covers the basics, but is capable of dealing with permission and associated rights in a digital world.

To read the filed compliant

Copyright Infringement: Who knows best?

As we are about to get the UK Digital Bill pushed through parliament by use a government ‘wash up’, we looked across to France to see how they have faired with their ‘three strikes law’.

France's recent disconnection law has still to cut off it first P2P pirate, but according to a team of French researchers who affiliated with the University of Rennes, online copyright infringement is down on P2P networks. However, they also claim that copyright infringement is up in other areas such as online streaming and one-click download services like Rapidshare. A report on the research by Ars Technica , claims that since the law was passed, the total people infringing has actually increased by 3%.

The research was based on 2,000 phone surveys in Brittany and claims that 15% of P2P users have already stopped using the networks, but found that over 60% of those former P2P users had simply migrated to alternative illegal streaming sites and HTTP-based download services. The cultural change expected by adoption of the Daconian ‘stick’ approach has apparently failed to address the fundamental problem and merely made consumers turn to other sources. The problem is not in enforcing the law, but in educating consumers and providing a market of ‘give and take’. It like soft drugs you don’t lock up the casual user, you target the source and face the reality that a certain amount of tolerance is required. Copyright infringement will never be a zero tolerant zone in a digital world.

The research backs up what recent the BBC Panorama report in claiming that pirate users are also regular digital music or video buyers and not everything they download is illegal. This is even more a reason to not criminalise users, but to look to ways in which to strike a compromise and gain and share a level of common understanding. To often we find its commercial bodies who drive the draconian measures, only to find that they alienate and don’t work.

We were surprised at the pages of comments on the Ars Technica article and perhaps these start to show the divide in thinking between the sides. It is alarming how easy it is to drive consumers into a position which many on the other side don’t accept or understand. This cultural gap was further amplified in another article about French language comics and a term we had not heard before ‘Scanlations’. Scanlations are the unauthorized scans , translations, editing and distribution of comics. The practice is often used to take Japanese (manga), Korean (manhwa) and Chinese (manhua) comics and make them available on the web for free. The issue is that the copyright is infringed and the problem is significant with sites being openly embraced in the western readers and now evenly openly available via mobile apps. The opportunity arose due to the general lack of Japanese manga releases outside of Japan and that importing manga directly from Japan was expensive and required knowledge of Japanese language and culture to understand the originals and translate then for western youth.

Now some 750 French-language comics authors and creators have signed a declaration to stop granting digital rights to their publishers until digital industry models are established and the broader issues of copyright infringement are addressed. This was reported by Icarus Publishing in an article ‘Why should publishers pay for digital rights?’ and reference a very informative article by Jason Thompson, ’How To Illegally Read Manga Anywhere: The iPhone Manga Wars of 2010’

However as with the Ars Techinca article we were surprised at the volume and strength of comments on the Thompson article. It clearly indicates that we have a growing digital divide and one that needs to be listened to and understood if we are to avoid creating a wider chasm between users of digital stuff.

The UK Digital Economy Bill = A Dog’s Dinner

The Digital Economy Bill, looks more like a dog’s dinner every day.

We have written about the fact that IP addresses are not a safe identification of copyright infringement and that the IP owner may not be the guilty party. The issue can effect and criminalise large families, people sharing communal hubs, businesses, people providing WIFi hot spots etc. You are not innocent until proven guilty, but rather guilty until proven innocent. We have written only this week about the alarming rise of copyright legal letters being sent out in the UK and the manner of these demands. The bill proposes not only Draconian measures but could set back user confidence in their usage for a few pieces of silver.

Then there is the issue of clause 43 which enables collection agencies and parties to effectively land grab and authorises a grant of copyright in respect of works in which copyright is not owned by the body or a person on whose behalf the body acts". If this sounds very much like a an open invitation for Google to come to the UK it not surprising given the same people supporting the Google Book Settlement were consulted in this rushed law. We now potentially give the Secretary of State power to approve clause 43 applications.

We forget that publishing is a rights business without universal or common rights registry and management. This bill fails to even start to address this flaw.

Many artists, agents and ISPs have opposed the bill but have been brushed aside in the need to beat the election deadline and create a Mandleson legacy. This is a bad law being pushed through on the basis of saving the creative industry. It makes changes that potentially impose a Google Books-style scheme in the UK, re writes contracts and imposes Draconian laws on all. It is a pity that the industry bodies that should represent have once again failed to promote dialogue within the community.

We would suggest that anyone who shares our concerns visit 38degrees.org and considers following the led of many and writing to their MPs about the act before its too late.

So Who Are The Pirates?

You know that feeling when you return to your car and find a large clamp immobilising it, a instant demand from a man in a white van and him pointing out a parking sign, which often was not exactly always in clear sight. We have only had one such incident and on occasion had bought a parking ticket, but because it ‘was not properly displayed’, we were fined.

Today, even before the three strikes rule passes into law, thousand of demands are being made to alleged illegal file-sharers in the UK. UK law firm ACS:Law acting on behalf of DigiProtect, are issuing letters on behalf of content owners.The numbers are not small with some 60,000 UK IP addresses being identified today and ACS is now applying for court orders to force the ISP to release the IP owner’s physical address. The letters ‘invite’ the IP owner to respond to their evidence and enter into an out of court settlement for around £500 per infringement ‘to avoid litigation’.

Earlier this week the BBC demonstrated how easy it was to steal IP addresses, resulting in owners being potentially falsely accused. The Solicitors Regulation Authority are currently now investigating complaints against ACS:Law and another law firm Davenport Lyons. BPI, the UK music industry body, says that it has no intention of following a similar legal path.

The IP owner is not always the offender. The IP address is not even a ‘safe’ identifier. How do a WiFi hot spot, parents with teenage children, flat mates who shares a communal hub and the innocent defend themselves? How many innocent IP owners may find themselves criminalised in the search of a few dollars? How much of the money collected will be held as a management fee by the collector? Given that claims have been raised against adult material and games, who are the actual content owners and what is the value of the content?

Wheel clampers once had licence to demand money with what some said was malice and it took time before common sense prevailed. In our case we were lucky and our appeal to the ultimate property owner, British Rail, resulted in our getting our money back off the clampers. We doubt that much will come back from these collectors.

To Read more at he BBC:
02 condemns file-sharing letters
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8570913.stm
Law firm's piracy hunt condemned

Google Acts On Copyright Infringement?

Google has deleted a number of popular music blogs that it claims violated copyright law. Some may say that this is an ironic twist at this moment in time.
The sites, hosted by Google's Blogger and Blogspot services, received DMCA complaints and were issued notices only after their sites and their content were wiped from the internet.

Google’s notice stated, 'Upon review of your account, we've noted that your blog has repeatedly violated Blogger's Terms of Service ... [and] we've been forced to remove your blog. Thank you for your understanding.'

This is despite the open relationship between labels to review and promote and as one blogger Lipold wrote to Google, 'I assure you that everything I've posted for, let's say, the past two years, has either been provided by a promotional company, came directly from the record label, or came directly from the artist.'

However, we would like to ask Google why we can enter a search on torrent ebook sites and get many results of sites who are clearly sailing close to the copyright wind. We appreciate that these are not blog sites controlled by Google and DMCA take down applies to the site, but they can be discovered through Google and Google derives revenues from associated advertising.

Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law

We once again bring you another thought provoking video from TED. This one is by Larry Lessig who talks about reinventing, re-purposing and unlocking content within the 21st century and the principles behind licences such as Creative Commons. Worth watching but give yourself time to absorb.