Category: Uncategorized
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Reputation
Big copyright owners have apparently had some degree of success in their efforts to flood file-sharing networks with decoy files, thereby frustrating users’ attempts to find copyrighted works. Conventional wisdom is that file-sharing systems will institute some kind of reputation-feedback system to help their users determine which sources tend to offer real files and which…
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Trade Agreement
Donna Wentworth at Copyfight reports that the U.S. has signed a trade agreement with Singapore that requires the U.S. to refrain from repealing the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This looks suspiciously like an end-run around the legislative process. One complaint about the DMCA has been that it holds back the development…
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RIAA Hackathon Not Likely
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s much-discussed article in Saturday’s New York Times details planning by the record industry to launch aggressive cyber-attacks against suspected copyright infringers. Some of the world’s biggest record companies, facing rampant online piracy, are quietly financing the development and testing of software programs that would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people…
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RIAA-Student Lawsuits Settle
The RIAA has settled its lawsuits against four college students, dropping the suits in exchange for a payment of between $12,000 and $17,500 from each student. The settlements did not require the students to admit any wrongdoing. The students had been accused of direct infringement (for allegedly offering copyrighted files directly from their own computers)…
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Copyright Factions
Eric Rescorla, in response to my previous entry on music economics, offers an analysis of the politics of copyright. Roughly speaking, there are two camps working to loosen (or at least prevent tightening) of intellectual property. For lack of better words let’s call them Idealists and Pragmatists. The Idealists really don’t want to have any…
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RIAA-Student Suits to Be Settled?
In today’s Daily Princetonian, Josh Brodie reports that an “announcement” will be probably made today regarding the RIAA lawsuit against Princeton student Dan Peng. Reading between the lines, it appears the predicted announcement probably involves some kind of settlement of the case.
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RIAA IM-Spams Kazaa/Grokster Users
Many reports are circulating about the RIAA’s use of instant-messaging features of Kazaa and Grokster to send warning messsages yesterday to users of those systems. Conventional wisdom in blogland seems to be that this will have little if any impact on users’ behavior. I disagree. Consider this excerpt from Amy Harmon’s New York Times story:…
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Where the Money Goes
Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy points to Terry Fisher’s data on where the $18 paid for a typical music CD goes: $7.00 to the retailer, $1.50 to the distributor, $9.31 for record company expenses (including performer and composer royalties of $2.85), and $0.19 for record company profit. Kerr comments: I understand that the record…
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Grokster Ruling: Instant Analysis
Judge Wilson’s opinion, dismissing the music industry suit against Grokster and Morpheus, contains few surprises beyond the result itself. Judge Wilson ruled, essentially, that although some users of the defendants’ P2P software used the software to infringe copyrights, this infringing activity was beyond the control of the defendants. Unlike Napster, these defendants had no active,…
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Judge Rules Morpheus, Grokster Legal to Distribute
A Federal court has granted summary judgment in favor of Grokster et al., ruling that it is legal to distribute these peer-to-peer file sharing tools. More later, after I have had a chance to read the ruling.