Tag: Copyright
-
Grokster Case Lumbers On; Judge To Issue Permanent Injunction
Remember the Grokster case? In which the Supreme Court found the filesharing companies Grokster and StreamCast liable for indirect copyright infringement, for “inducing” infringement by their users? You might have thought that case ended back in 2005. But it’s still going on, and the original judge just issued an interesting ruling. (Jason Schultz has a…
-
Infinite Storage for Music
Last week I spoke on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage”, at the “Pop [Music] and Policy” conference at McGill University in Montreal. The panel’s title referred to an interesting fact: sometime in the next decade, we’ll see a $100 device that fits in your pocket and holds all of the music ever…
-
Jury Finds User Liable for Downloading, Awards $9250 Per Song in Damages
The first Recording Industry v. End User lawsuit to go to trial just ended, and the industry won big. Jammie Thomas, a single mother in northern Minnesota, was found liable for illegally downloading 24 songs via Kazaa, and the jury awarded damages of $222,000, or $9250 per song. It’s always risky to extrapolate much from…
-
Amazon’s MP3 Store Wisely Forgoes Watermarks
Last week Amazon.com launched a DRM-free music store. It sells tracks from two major labels and many independents in the unprotected MP3 file format. In addition to being DRM-free, Amazon’s songs are not individually watermarked. This is an important step forward for the music industry. Some content companies see individualized watermarks as a consumer-friendly alternative…
-
Major Intrusion at MediaDefender
MediaDefender, a company providing technical countermeasures and intelligence gathering for copyright owners, suffered a severe cyber-intrusion over the past year or so. This was revealed last week when the intruders released what appears to be most of MediaDefender’s email from this calendar year, along with the source code for its products, and even one of…
-
iPhone Unlocking Secret Revealed
The iPhone unlocking story took its next logical turn this week, with the release of a free iPhone unlocking program. Previously, unlocking required buying a commercial program or following a scary sequence of documented hardware and software tweaks. How this happened is interesting in itself. (Caveat: This is based on the stories I’m hearing; I…
-
Intellectual Property and Magicians
Jacob Loshin has an interesting draft paper on intellectual property among magicians. Stage magic is a form of technology, relying on both apparatus and technique to mislead the audience about what is really happening. As in any other technical field, innovations are valuable, and practitioners look for ways to cash in on their inventions. They…
-
Does Apple Object to iPhone Unlocking?
I wrote Monday about efforts to “unlock” the iPhone so it worked on non-AT&T cell networks, and the associated legal and policy issues. AT&T lawyers have aggressively tried to stop unlocking; but Apple has been pretty silent. What position will Apple take? It might seem that Apple has nothing to lose from unlocking, but that’s…
-
iPhone Unlocked; Legal Battle Looming?
In the past few days several groups declared victory in the battle to unlock the iPhone – to make the iPhone work on cellular networks other than AT&T’s. New Jersey teenager George Hotz published instructions (starting here) for a geeks-only unlock procedure involving hardware and software tweaks. An anonymous group called iPhoneSimFree reportedly has an…
-
Why Did Universal Threaten to Pull Out of iTunes?
Last week brought news that Universal Music, the world’s largest record company, was threatening to pull its music from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Why would Universal do this? The obvious answer is that the companies are renegotiating their contract and Universal wants to get the best deal they can. Threatening to walk is one way…