This decade witnessed the meteoric rise of BitTorrent, but during the last five years associated sites have endured some of the most aggressive anti-piracy legal action ever seen. The top three BitTorrent sites, after fending off threats for years, all lost in a big way during 2009. But the show ain’t over yet.
The FrostWire P2P client promotes music of starting and independent artists through its FrostClick service. The service has been running for over a year and is a great success. To celebrate the first million downloads of 2009, a compilation album has been released, featuring free Creative Commons-licensed tracks from 21 artists.
The Mad Hatter has a detailed post identifying a series of inaccuracies and misleading statements in a new post by CRIA lobbyist Barry Sookman on Canada and P2P. Sookman has now heavily edited the post, though many of the same claims can be found in other documents.
Health Action International Africa is challenging the constitutionality of a new Kenyan anti-counterfeiting law. The group argues that the law violates the right to health since it confuses generics with fake medicines and could lead to a health crisis.
Cory Doctorow, my former EFF colleague, now novelist and all-around-inspiration, gave a stirring speech entitled “How to Destroy the Book” in November at a Canadian conference dedicated to literacy. Fittingly, it was spontaneously transcribed and posted online at The Varsity.ca. The whole thing is terrific, but the first portion, an elegy to books and what they mean to us, is stirring and highly recommended to anyone who loves books:
When I buy an audiobook on CD, it’s mine. The license agreement, such as it is, is “don’t violate copyright law,” and I can rip that CD to mp3, I can load it to my iPod or any number of devises—it’s mine; I can give it away, I can sell it; it’s mine. But when you buy an audiobook through Audible, which now controls 90 per cent of the [downloadable] audiobook market, you get a license agreement, not a property interest. The things that you can do with it are limited by DRM; the players you can play it on are limited by the license agreements with Audible. Audible doesn’t do this because the publishers ask them to. Audible and iTunes, because Audible is the sole supplier to iTunes, do this because it’s in their own interest….
Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it.
As it happens, the battle over whether you “own” digital goods (like e-books, CDs, and software) or merely “license” them will be a hot issue in court in 2010, with EFF deeply involved in the fight.
This decade has not only brought us the file-sharing technology BitTorrent, but also social networks and social news sites that have really flourished in recent years. This Christmas, users of Reddit, one of the largest social news sites, decided to start their own BitTorrent tracker.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘Avatar’ tops the chart again this week followed by ‘The Invention of Lying’. ’2012′ completes the top three.
Earlier, ISP BT predicted that operating an anti-filesharing scheme in the UK would cost £365m a year. Now the government has admitted that not only will broadband customers have to foot a £500m bill, but that burden will prove too great for 40,000 households – who will have no choice but to give up their Internet connections.
The past twelve months in law and technology were exceptionally active, with new legislation, Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission hearings, national consultations, and very public battles over digital issues. My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) takes a look back at 2009 from A to Z:
A is for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, the secret copyright treaty that generated opposition at home and abroad as details on proposed language leaked out.
B is for Chet Baker, the former jazz great and current lead plaintiff in a $6 billion copyright class action lawsuit filed against the Canadian recording industry for its failure to pay artists for the use of their work.
C is for the Conference Board of Canada, which withdrew three intellectual property reports after acknowledging they contained plagiarized material.
D is for drugs for Africa legislation, which unexpectedly passed second reading in the House of Commons and will be considered by a committee next year.
E is for eBay power sellers, who faced an aggressive campaign by the Canada Revenue Agency to collect unpaid GST. The campaign followed a successful legal effort to force eBay to disclose the sellers' identities.
F is for Facebook, which agreed to make significant privacy changes following a well-publicized investigation by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
G is for Google Street View, which launched in Canada this fall, but not before a House of Commons committee probed the likely impact of the new mapping feature.
H is for Louis Rene Hache, who was convicted on charges under the Criminal Code for the illegal reproduction of the film "Dan in Real Life" at a Montreal movie theatre.
I is for i4i, the tiny Toronto firm that scored a big patent victory over software giant Microsoft.
J is for Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement, who presided over Canada's first national copyright consultation since 2001.
K is for CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein, who was in the spotlight with hearings on regulation of new media, Internet traffic management, and broadcast fees.
L is for Lawful access legislation introduced by Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan in June. Bills C-46 and C-47 languished, however, and have yet to be discussed at committee.
M is for marketing claims on network speed and reliability, the subject of multiple lawsuits that forced Bell and Rogers to drop claims from their advertising campaigns.
N is for net neutrality, which made regulatory and political progress with the release of new CRTC guidelines as well as garnering political support from both the federal Liberal and NDP parties.
O is for one-click, the controversial Amazon.com business method patent that was denied validity by the Canadian Patent Appeal Board.
P is for Psion, the Toronto-owned firm that threatened Dell over the use of the term “netbook.”
Q is for the Queen v. Vasic, a criminal case in which an Ontario court ruled that combining Internet provider customer name and address information with IP address data could render the information sensitive.
R is for Heather Robertson, the freelance writer whose longstanding copyright class action lawsuit neared a conclusive settlement.
S is for spam legislation that was introduced by Tony Clement in April. Bill C-27 is currently before the Senate.
T is for the TV Tax and Local TV Matters marketing campaigns that irritated Canadians from coast to coast.
U is for unwanted telemarketing calls that kept coming despite the existence of a national do-not-call list.
V is for Joanne Veit, an Alberta judge who ruled that Alberta Information and Privacy Commissioner Frank Work was wrong when he concluded the City of Edmonton can't force pawnshops to upload personal client details to an outside company's database.
W is for WindMobile, the operating name of Globalive, a new wireless carrier that was told by the CRTC that it did not comply with foreign control restrictions, only to have the federal Cabinet overrule the regulator weeks later.
X is for the future “X” on electronic voting technologies, which Elections Canada reported it is considering.
Y is for YouTube, which received a video takedown demand from Canada Post. The crown corporation objected to a union-inspired video about the mail carrier's CEO.
Z is for Zoocasa, the real estate search site that was sued by Century 21 Canada for scraping listings from its website.
As 2009 is slowly moving toward its end, we follow up our most pirated movies chart by taking a look at the most pirated games of the year. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is the absolute winner on the PC and Xbox 360, while New Super Mario Bros. scoops the title of most pirated Wii game of 2009.