Archive for March 2005
cable to try out "DVR-like" services
Cablevision and Time Warner plan trials of recording shows to a central server instead of putting DVRs in customers homes. Of course, Time Warner says they will only allow recording of shows that programmers have agreed to include, because of copyright laws. And, oh yes, they’d also disable fast-forward to prevent skipping commercials. Read the article in Communications Engineering & Design.
MGM vs. Grokster
The Supreme Court heard MGM vs. Grokster and StreamCast today. MGM contends that they should be able to sue for copyright infringement those who sell file-sharing software and services, even though it’s not them but their customers that are swapping illegal files. Here’s the CNN Technology article. Another CNN article giving more background leading up to the case.
Frankly, I’m disappointed, though not surprised, that the Business Software Alliance, Christian Coalition of America, and the American Federation of Musicians are all on MGM’s side. File sharing has a great many legitimate uses, and something like this ends up killing it all together. They don’t want to be bothered suing individuals, besides that tends to upset customers.
It’s not a perfect analogy but imagine someone suing the phone companies because they allow people to drive and talk on the cell phone at the same time. Why haven’t phone companies put software in place that triangulates your position and disconnects the call if you travel more than a few feet from where you initiated the call? Oops. I’m already sorry I mentioned it, because someone’s going to think that’s a good idea. OK, here’s a better one: we don’t really want to have to write speeding tickets for individuals, lets sue the car companies for building cars that allow them to speed on expressways. I’m perfectly confident that meets the greater than 50% illegal use that MGM wants to use as criteria.
Brand X vs. FCC
“Ren Bucholz”: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21598/ activism coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on why he thinks Brand X should win its case before the Supreme Court.
AFP sues Google
AFP, the French equivalent of the Associated Press is suing Google for copyright infringement. Google’s web crawlers collect news stories from around the internet. AFP has sued them for 3 types of infringement: for publishing their headlines, reprinting their photos, and stripping copyright info from their material. Of course, there are scripts and commands that AFP could use on it’s web site to prevent Google from collecting this info. So the question AFP is asking is: why should we have to go to the trouble and expense of preventing their grabbing our material, shouldn’t the copyright notice itself be enough?
This one’s interesting. It boils down to: is aggregating a limited subset of others’ material fair use, since it does link back to the original source? Is my summarizing like this fair use? Preventing Google, doesn’t necessary prevent me, because my process isn’t automated. Hmmm. See the internetnews.com article.
MPAA targets first posters
Slyck posts a story on the RIAA and MPAA using new software, “FirstSource”, to identify “original seeds”, the first or handful of first file sharers to post the complete copy of a movie or software using BitTorrent.
It seems like an improvement over suing the ISP, which has almost no control over content and results in the ISP closing down or preventing all file sharing, even that of legitimate files.
Though it probably won’t take long for someone to find a way around it.
Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005
The full Senate passed the bill back on Feb. 1. Now a House Judiciary Subcommittee has passed the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005: which moves it forward toward a full House vote. The House appears to be in a hurry to get it done before the Supreme Court Grokster case.
The bill makes explicitly legal software like ClearPlay that skips over portions of the content to turn an R movie into, say, a G movie. Notice that this just addresses movies and doesn’t say anything about skipping commercials with a VCR or Digital Video Recorder. It also creates criminal penalties for recording motion pictures in a movie theatre.
Interesting, too, that the bill uses the term “uploading” but never mentions “downloading”.
Nice article about the bill on Wired.
Friend of the Court Brief for Grokster
The Distributed Computing Industry Association(DCIA) has filed a Friend of the Court brief in support of Grokster in the upcoming Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer vs. Grokster Supreme Court case due for hearing on Mar. 29th, 2005. Get the story here.
