Tag: Copyright

Snocap, a company involving Napster founder Shawn Fanning, is trying to enable new peer-to-peer networks that identify copyrighted works and charge users for receiving them, according to Jeff Leeds’ story in Friday’s New York Times. Snocap is not itself building the P2P network(s), but is supplying the payment and song-identification technology. Based on press accounts,…

Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting piece in the Nov. 22 New Yorker, reflecting on the discovery that Frozen, a Broadway play, included language lifted from an earlier Gladwell article. Equally interesting is the reaction of Dorothy Lewis, a New York psychologist who was the subject of Gladwell’s earlier article. One of the characters in Frozen…

Continuing yesterday’s discussion of the new Rob/Waldfogel filesharing study, let’s look at the possible effect of authorized downloading services. As we saw yesterday, one of the main findings of the study is that people derive lots of benefit (about $45 annually per capita for the study’s sample population) from downloading songs that they don’t value…

There’s a new study out, by Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel, on the effect of filesharing on music sales. The news headlines will say that the study shows that filesharing hurts CD sales (as the BBC story does); but the full results are more complicated. The study relied on surveys of college students: a preliminary…

The big copyright owners have gotten pretty sophisticated about monitoring P2P applications to gather evidence for lawsuits. But now P2P traffic seems to be shifting to the BitTorrent system, which works differently from other P2P systems. This will affect the copyright owners’ monitoring strategy in some interesting ways. Most P2P systems allow users to choose…

The Motion Picture Association of America plans to file copyright infringement lawsuits against about 230 individuals today, according to a New York Times story by Laura M. Holson. Rumor has it that studio heads had long wanted to do this but former MPAA chief Jack Valenti had refused to go along with it. Now that…

Today, MIT’s LAMP system goes back on line, with a new design. LAMP (“Library Access to Music Project”) streams music to the MIT campus via the campus cable TV system. Any student can connect to LAMP’s website and choose a sequence of songs. The chosen songs are then scheduled for playing on one of sixteen…

Last week the Department of Justice issued a report on intellectual property enforcement. Public discussion has been slow to develop, since the report seems to be encoded in some variant of the PDF format that stops many people from reading it. (I could read it fine on one of my computers, but ran into an…

Remember when I suggested that Republicans might be more prone to copyright sanity than Democrats? Perhaps I was on to something. Consider a recent Senate exchange that was caught by Jason Schultz and Frank Field. Senator John McCain (Republican from Arizona) has placed a block on two copyright-expansion bills, H.R. 2391 and H.R. 4077, because…

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that Grokster (along with other vendors of decentralized P2P systems) is not liable for the copyright infringement of its users. Today’s decision upholds a lower court decision, which had been appealed by a group of music and movie companies. The Court largely accepted Grokster’s arguments, finding that…