This is actually a potentially big deal for the net.
Gatehouse, which publishes community newspapers, sued the New York Times, because the Boston Globe, which it owns, was generating “Google News” style links, which show the hed and the first sentence or so.
Basically, the Times agreed not to link, but maintains its right to do so.
Complicating the issue was that the Globe tech folk went out of their way to avoid technical measures that Gatehouse put up to prevent this.
Basically, the complaint is that S&P is the sole supplier of unique identifiers for securities in the US for the American Banking Associations, and it has been using that status to extract payments from people who want to use those identifiers:
Each security such as a stock or bond has a unique number to ensure there is no confusion when it comes to clearing and settling a trade in that security.
Standard & Poor’s operates the CUSIP service bureau on behalf of the American Bankers Association, the sole issuer of identifiers for U.S. securities.
Standard & Poor’s says it charges a license fee when the numbers are used for purposes other than clearing and settlement.
The complaints focus on whether Standard & Poor’s can charge financial market data vendors such as Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg News as well as end users of these identifiers, such as asset managers and banks.
It is alleged that S&P forces vendors to cut off financial institutions from data feeds on U.S. securities unless they have licensing agreements.
These are serial numbers, and as such, they should not be protected by IP law, and the EU is going after them on this.
It appears that there has now been some response from the lower tier ISPs about the RIAA’s proposal attempting to dragoon them into doing their copyright enforcement work for them.
At least one relatively small ISP is saying pay to play:
Jerry Scroggin, owner-operator of Bayou Internet and Communications, wants the music and film industries to know that he’s not a cop and he doesn’t work for free.
Scroggin, who sells Internet access to between 10,000 and 12,000 customers in Louisiana, heard the news on Friday that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has opted out of suing individuals for pirating music. Instead, the group representing the four largest music labels is forging partnerships with Internet service providers and asking them to crack down on suspected file sharers.
According to Scroggin, if RIAA representatives ask the help of his ISP, they had better bring their checkbook–and leave the legal threats at home. (CNET News obtained a copy of the RIAA’s new notice to ISPs here). Scroggin said that he receives several notices each month with requests that he remove suspected file sharers from his network. Each time, he gets such a notice from an entertainment company, he sends the same reply.
“I ask for their billing address,” Scroggin said. “Usually, I never hear back.”
This makes sense.
Not only is it an expensive process, it is one that is fraught with liability issues from disgruntled customers.
If I were operating an ISP, I’d tell them to pound sand, but I’m not a businessman who has to deal with these compromises. For me, it’s a moral decision: Without a court order, I do not spy on customers.
Were I willing to make a compromise, at a minimum, my price for cooperation would be as follows:
The last two are the most important, because when the RIAA goes after a grandmother for downloading the rap song I Want to F*^% You In the A@#, and they already have done so, I would not want to be left holding the bag.
One of the basics of law, in the US at least, is that ISPs are viewed as common carriers, which means that, much like phone companies, they are not responsible for activity that takes place on their networks.
Much like the phone company is not responsible for people who, for example, plan a bank robbery over their network, so the ISPs are not responsible if these same people were to do so using email or VOIP.
Well, the good folks at the RIAA* have come up with a way to put an end to this legal arrangement, which has served telecommunications for over 100 years now.
Basically, they have decided to abandon their strategy of suing grandmothers for multimillion dollar lawsuits based on dubious data, and instead, they are asking ISPs to take responsibility for the actions that people take through their networks, and threaten them and disconnect them, based on the same bogus data.:
Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take.
Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.
So, they are getting ISPs to agree to take legal responsibility for this, and exposing these same ISPs to legal jeopardy from their customers when they get this wrong.
This is, as Matthew Yglesias frequently notes, a consequence of a lack of understanding of what IP in general, and copyright in particular are actually about.
The purpose of IP is not about the creation of property, nor the guarantee of profits, its purpose is one of public interest. To quote the pertinent section of the US Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
(emphasis mine)
Or, as Yglesias puts it:
But boosting album sales is not a legitimate public policy objective. Nor is boosting record company profits. Nor, even tough musicians themselves are a much more sympathetic claimant than record company shareholders, is boosting musician incomes. The purpose of intellectual property law is to protect the interests of consumers. I’ve never seen anybody attempt to argue that people aren’t forming new bands or recording new songs anymore. Nor have I seen anybody attempt to argue that it’s more difficult today to find new music to listen to than it was ten or twenty years ago. In fact, the reverse is the case. The very trends toward digitization and file-copying have made music much more widely available than it was in the past.
Of course, the folks always trot out this graph showing declining album sales, but, as the other Matthew notes, selling albums is not the business of the US government.
Additionally, this is not a graph of album sales, but a graph of album shipments, and the record companies have improved inventory system over the past decade, using software to predict sales, so they ship fewer albums to stores, and get fewer returns.
As if we did not already know that they were lying sacks of sh%$, they are attempting to use new efficiencies in distribution to create the illusion that “pirates” are “destroying their industry”.
*And by, “good folks at the RIAA,” I mean, “bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.”
The decision reversing the 1998 case which allowed things like risk hedging strategies, the “U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in Washington, voted 9-3 that patents should be limited to ‘physical objects or substances’ and not be awarded to ‘abstractions’ like a bank’s risk-hedging strategy.”
Thiw will doubtless go to the Supreme Court, but this is fundamentally a good decision:
In its 132-page decision, the court said a patent can cover a “process that transforms a particular article to a specified different state or thing by applying a fundamental principle” but cannot cover the principle itself.
This is, I think, a response to the fact that the Supreme Court consistently reversing the court, and an understanding that they can no longer subscribe to the theory that everything should be patentable.
Here is some sanity on trademark:
Lego has failed in its bid to register the shape of its play bricks as trade marks. A European court said that the brick shape was functional and that it had to be that shape to operate as it did, so could not be registered as a trade mark.
The Court of First Instance (CFI) of the European Communities backed a 2004 decision of the EU’s trade marks office the Office for the Harmonisation of the Internal Market (OHIM) to cancel Lego’s trade mark registration.
You heard right….The Lego Corporation was trying to trademark a brick.
Because a company has filed for a patent on patent trolling.
If that weren’t enough, the company in question is…..
….wait for it….
….wait for it….
….wait for it….
Halliburton.
Berlin public transportation company BVG and Netherlands Dutch Rail have banned iPhone applications that give users schedule data (see also here).
By “banned” we mean pulled off of iTunes, because they claim that the programs violate their copyright on their transit schedules:
The application – which locates users via their mobile telephone network, tells them which BVG metro stops they can find nearby and helps plan timely routes – is popular with users, but not BVG. The company contacted Witt three weeks ago, telling him the program violated their copyright and demanding he remove it from iTunes. The decision has raised user hackles on internet forums, the paper reported.
I can think of no better example of how IP laws have become insane.
The idea that transit companies would assert property rights over their schedules is completely delusional.
Business Method, patent 11,346,823:
Brief: How to f$@k up a Country and create a Police State.
It is believed that George W. Bush is filing a challenge, claiming prior art.*
*Not actual news, I just riffed on an inspired comment in El Reg suggesting that Labour should patent the business method.
From the pen of Randall Munroe:
Apparently, it appears that Mr. Congeniality has sent a letter to the European Commission demanding that authorities be able to cut off people accused of violations of IP laws without judicial review.
It seems that a bill going through the European parliment has the following language:
No restriction may be imposed on the fundamental rights and freedoms of end-users without a prior ruling by the judicial authorities.
It also appears that Sarkozy thinks that this is too much of an imposition on the IP dependent industry.
The European commission told him to go pound sand.
One of the frequent refrains about the “costs” of “piracy” is, “750,000 and $200 to $250 billion”.
Well Aris Technica took a look at this number to figure out where it came from, and the answer is: Nowhere.
The Commerce department did a study recently, and said, “$60 billion,” but the authors admit that this is a guess, based from data collected from self selected respondents who are overhwelmingly tied into IP intensive business models.
All they could show on their own was $23 billion.
Of course, $23 billion ain’t chicken feed….That’s what 50 days in Iraq?
You know that the current IP regime, and the drooling morons at the USPTO have jumped the proverbial shark.
The first reform that should be made is to treat patents like civil rights lawsuit, in that you can challenge a law as a violation of civil rights before anyone is charged, because of the chilling effects on society.
Interestingly, we are not talking about arms control treaties or UN resolutions here.
We are talking about violations of Russian licenses on their designs, which I find interesting because it dovetails into two of my geek areas of interest, defense procurement, and IP law.
It appears that licenses granted by the Soviets, and later the Russians on things like AK’s and RPG’s were for domestic production only, and did not include the right to sell internationally, so the US is breaking the law by selling the weapons to the security apparatus of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Somehow, I imaging that the US trade rep will not address this as strongly as they would bootleg albums from She Who Must Not Be Named being sold by Chinese street vendors.
This is a very good thing.
In the case in question, a parent uploaded a video of their kid dancing to a song by Prince, and because there was 30 seconds of the song in the background, Universal Music issued a DMCA take down notice.
The Judge said that they can’t simply determine that it is their material, but whether it is legal or not:
“Fair use is a lawful use of a copyright,” the judge wrote. “Accordingly, in order for a copyright owner to proceed under the DMCA with ‘a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law,’ the owner must evaluate whether the material makes fair use of the copyright.”
The video of the kid is below…It’s 30 seconds long, and I can’t even recognize the song.
The judge says that, “The Court has considerable doubt that Lenz will be able to prove that Universal acted with the subjective bad faith,” but if I were on the jury I’d vote for the muthas to fry.
Well, it appears that Senator Patrick Leahy has merged two draconian IP bills to create a bill that combines the worst of both.
I think that the problem is two fold:
So, we now have
Bad law, bad policy, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the reasons behind copyright and patent protections.
Armin Meiwes, who killed and ate a voluntary victim Christmas in 2001, has succeeded in obtaining an injunction against the release of a horror film, because it is based on what he did.
He claimed that the film infringed on his, “Personality Rights”, which in Germany is something in between privacy rights and the “right of publicity” that is used against Elvis impersonators:
The Court looked into the degree to which the pursuit of artistic freedom interfered with the personality rights of Meiwes. It found that artistic freedom was not so powerful a right that it allowed for someone’s life to be made into a horror film.
Meiwes advertised online for someone to be killed and eaten by him. Bernd Jürgen Brandes responded to his advert and tried to join Meiwes in eating his own severed penis before being killed and eaten.
Meiwes was arrested and in 2004 convicted of manslaughter. Prosecutors then changed their case and asked for a retrial in 2005, questioning whether Brandes was in a fit mental state to have given his consent to the killing.
Meiwes was convicted of murder and is serving an eight and a half year jail term. Reports have emerged that in prison he has become a vegetarian.
I guess it’s refreshing to know that the internet doesn’t have a monopoly on really sick sh#@.
Japan has scrapped legislation that would tax MP3 players, and give the proceeds to the music industry.
Note that they do have taxes on things like DVD burners, but ann MP3 player is different, because it does not copy music, it just plays music.
It’s a bad law, and it’s a good thing that it’s off the table for the moment.
Well, we are now finding that major technology players are forming patent cartels in order to defend themselves against patent trolls.
They have created Allied Security Trust, a non profit, that will aggressively buy up anything that might look like a valid patent to protect its members, currently, Verizon, Google ., Cisco , Ericsson, Sony, and Hewlett-Packard Co.
They throw a bunch of money in the pot, and they get a non-exclusive to whatever Allied Security Trust buys, and then the patents are resold.
It’s about a $5 million buy in.
As a start, congress needs to ban patents on software and business plans, which were never necessary, and on genes and species (though not gene splicing technologies) because it is unconscionable.
Additionally, they should change the law to allow people who think that a patent is invalid to file suit, as opposed to waiting for a suit to be filed, because, much like civil rights law, where a suit can be filed against a law without a complaint filed by the authorities, this allows people to fight the chilling effects of bad patents.
It would also help if the special patent appeals court were disbanded, as it has gone off the rails, which is why the Supreme Court is slapping it down on a regular basis now.
George Monbiot notes that smaller farms actually produced more food per acre than large ones.
He notes that he agrees with Robert Mugabe is right, that land reform is crucial in agricultural production and food security, and then further notes:
Of course the old bastard has done just the opposite. He has evicted his opponents and given land to his supporters. He has failed to support the new settlements with credit or expertise, with the result that farming in Zimbabwe has collapsed. The country was in desperate need of land reform when Mugabe became president. It remains in desperate need of land reform today.
Which is, of course, completely true.
In his extensively footnoted essay, which also appeared in the The Grauniad*, he notes that in nearly every case where it has been examined, smaller farms outperform larger ones.
Of course, the developed world is working against this reality:
Big business is killing small farming. By extending intellectual property rights over every aspect of production; by developing plants which either won’t breed true or which don’t reproduce at all, it ensures that only those with access to capital can cultivate. As it captures both the wholesale and retail markets, it seeks to reduce its transaction costs by engaging only with major sellers. If you think that supermarkets are giving farmers in the UK a hard time, you should see what they are doing to growers in the poor world. As developing countries sweep away street markets and hawkers’ stalls and replace them with superstores and glossy malls, the most productive farmers lose their customers and are forced to sell up. The rich nations support this process by demanding access for their companies. Their agricultural subsidies still help their own, large farmers to compete unfairly with the small producers of the poor world.
Obviously, as he concludes, the moves of people to buy into “fair trade” agricultural practices do more than lift small farmers out of abject poverty. They actually produce more food for everyone in the end.
It is remarkable just how destructive, and just plain evil the agricultural practices of the Western World are.
*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”