Today, exactly four years have passed since The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. While the entertainment industries hoped that this would be the end of their troubles, in hindsight they’ve created a a multi-headed hydra that is impossible to kill. The events that unfolded could easily be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster.
Plenty of folks, from copyright lawyers to Internet entrepreneurs to investment bankers, have been watching the long-running legal battle between Viacom and Google/YouTube carefully, well aware that a decision in the case could have a profound effect on the future of the Internet. But most YouTube users probably haven’t given it the same attention. They should, and in an amicus brief filed in support of YouTube last week, a group of YouTube video creators explains why.
Calling themselves “The Sideshow Coalition” (because Viacom has called their interests a “sideshow”), these creators tell their own personal stories of how YouTube has helped them find a broader audience than they had ever imagined they could reach, with all kinds of unexpected effects. A few examples from the brief:
These creators praise YouTube for removing the gatekeeper between them and their audiences. “We can now be our own television and cable stations and our own record labels and record stores. We suspect that the threat that truly concerns Plaintiffs is not copyright infringement but just competition.”
Unlike most of the parties and amici who have filed in this case (including EFF), these friends of the court don’t focus on the legal doctrines at stake in this case. Instead, they remind us why these legal issues matter, i.e., what’s really at stake in a case that tries to hold intermediaries liable for what users post online:
It is pretty clear that on a scale of incentives to censor, the billion dollars that Plaintiffs seek in this lawsuit rates pretty high. If YouTube is made responsible for everything that we say, then naturally YouTube will want to exercise control over what we say. No online service would risk enabling the universe of users to speak in their own words if it faced liability for anything that anyone said.
Therefore, we ask that as the Court decides this case, it consider not just the interests of those who appear in the caption, but also our interests as creative professionals and the interests of the hundreds of millions of people who have viewed our work.
We are not a sideshow. We are what YouTube is all about and what this lawsuit should be about.
Just so.
For the London Free Press – May 31, 2010 Read this on Canoe You’ll have to act fast to protect your brand The country of Colombia is making its .co domain names available to those with no connection to the South American country. Typically, country level domains (such as .ca in Canada) can only be [...]
Due to several verdicts against them, The Pirate Bay team were ordered to pay the entertainment industries $6 million in fines. As predicted, actually getting hold of the money is not going to be an easy job for them. Thus far, the debt collecting agency has only seized $30,000 of the total sum.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, ‘The Wolfman’ tops the chart this week followed by ‘The Book of Eli’. ‘Kick-Ass’ completes the top three.
This is copyright week in Canada as multiple reports indicate that the long-awaited copyright bill will be tabled on Thursday. The recent round of reports are noteworthy for several reasons. First, they confirm earlier reports that the government plans to introduce DMCA-style anti-circumvention legislation. This suggests that the digital lock provisions that were the source of enormous public outrage (and the dominant issue during last summer's copyright consultation) will remain largely unchanged from Bill C-61 and will unquestionably be the most hotly debated aspect of the bill.
Second, the reports also drop hints of other aspects of the bill. While I previously reported there will be no flexible fair dealing provision, the reports indicate that there will some changes to fair dealing. This comes as little surprise, given that C-61 included provisions on time shifting and format shifting.
Third, the government is increasingly turning its attention to what comes after the bill is introduced. The Canadian Press reports that the government is planning to pressure the opposition parties to hold summer hearings in an effort to fast-track the bill through the House of Commons. While this raises concern for many groups who may face challenges participating in summer hearings (and the hearings themselves risk becoming abbreviated as MPs cut the process short to get back to their constituencies), Industry Minister Tony Clement has also indicated that the government is open to compromise:
“I’m not coming down from the mountain with this chiselled in stone. This bill may have elements in it where we could seek some consensus and there could be some positive amendments to this bill. That’s certainly in the realm of possibility too, and let the process begin."
These comments make it absolutely crucial for Canadians to take stock of the bill once introduced and to ensure that their voices are heard. As I argued in my recent Hill Times piece, there is room for compromise on anti-circumvention legislation in the form of a provision confirming that circumvention of a digital lock is not prohibited when undertaken for lawful purposes. This would be consistent with the WIPO Internet treaties and a previous Canadian bill (Bill C-60).
My colleague Ian Kerr published a terrific op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen over the weekend addressing Facebook, privacy, and the importance of focusing on the defaults used by the social networking giant.
I’ve just finished Adrian Johns’ 2009 book, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, a 500+ page magnum opus stretching from the 1600s to the present. Johns is a noted University of Chicago historian, and his book is a fascinating and essential read for anyone interested in the history of the term “intellectual property” and development of the modern copyright and patent systems.
A warning to readers: you may not want to start at the beginning, unless you’re really interested in the organization of pre-industrial printing in England in the 1700s. Because the book is organized chronologically, the first several chapters are, well, a bit less accessible.
So here’s my advice: start with Chapter 13, which is about the rise of radio in the UK in the 1920s. Turns out that history is remarkably relevant today. Radio arose in the shadow of a patent thicket, became the province of tinkers, and posed a puzzle for a government worried that “experimenters” would ruin things by mis-adjusting their sets and flooding the ether with howling oscillation. Many will immediately recognize the parallels to modern controversies about iPhone “jailbreaking,” user innovation, and the future of the Internet.
The momentum of Chapter 13 should carry you through to the end of the book. Along the way, you’ll be reminded that today’s debates have historical roots in controversies over computer hacking, phone phreaking, home taping, and ultimately the 1920s patent-law rebellions against AT&T. This is history every interested copy-fighter, patent reformer, and netizen needs to know. Prof. Johns ends his book by describing the unique thing about our current historical moment: the rise of what he calls an “intellectual property defense industry”:
As piracy has grown and diversified, so a counterindustry has emerged, dedicated to combating it. The coherence and scope of this industry are relatively new and remarkable. In previous centuries, particular groups or industries mounted efforts against piracy; but they did not generally regard them as fronts in one common cause. Now they do. … So the first implication is that we need to appreciate the historical significance of this industry of antipiracy policing and apprehend its consequences, at every social level. The second implication follows from that. Measures adopted against piracy can sometimes impinge on other, equally valued, aspects of society. Indeed, it is possible that they must do so, given the nature of the task. When that happens, however, they can trigger deeply felt reactions. The result is a crisis, with the potential to create a moment of genuine transformation.
If that’s right (and I think it is), then opposing the “intellectual property defense industry” is not the same thing as opposing “intellectual property.” Rather, it is about insisting on values like civil liberties, privacy, and autonomy, and not allowing antipiracy enforcement to trample them.
But don’t stop reading at the end of the book. Go back for the earlier chapters. For example, Chapter 10 (Google Books excerpt) tells the story of how the term “intellectual property” arose as the byproduct of efforts in the 1870s to abolish the patent system altogether—patent advocates popularized the term to harness their cart to copyright (“literary property”), which was perceived as the more secure and legitimate institution. Chapter 8 reminds us how the United States was born as a “pirate nation,” refusing to recognize the copyrights of foreign (mainly British) authors. Chapter 9 explains the early history of “legal deposit” as a requirement for copyright (and how publishers hated it), which in turn became an important foundation for many of our most revered national research libraries. Chapter 12 describes the origins of the first organized, industry-supported, private antipiracy enforcement operation (it was music publishers fighting against sheet music reprinters in 1903).
All fascinating stuff.
Hollywood often complains that unauthorized downloads are causing the industry to lose huge sums of money. The makers of The Hurt Locker discovered that this doesn’t always have to be the case. Through an extortion-like scheme, The Hurt Locker is set to make more money from settlements with BitTorrent users than it ever made at the box office.
Earlier this year, malware which purported to be an erotic PC game punished file-sharers who believed they were downloading the real thing. Instead of endless hours of digital titillation, unlucky pirates had their personal details published on the Internet and had to pay a fee to have them removed. Now police have arrested two men in connection with this unusual fraud.