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One of the heartening recent developments in the world of digital
copyright is that we have moved on from manifestly biased surveys about
the evils of piracy and how the solution to everything is harsher
punishment for infringement and longer copyright terms, to independent
analyses that seek to understand rather than judge and lecture. There's
also been a new focus on learning what the public thinks might be an
appropriate balance for modern copyright -- something that nobody cared
about in the past.
On
Techdirt.
One of the myths perpetuated by governments taking part in major
international treaty negotiations like ACTA, TPP and TAFTA/TTIP is that
somehow no national sovereignty is given up during the process, and that
therefore the public shouldn't worry about what goes on in those secret
meetings. That's clearly absurd, because negotiations involve
concessions, usually by the weaker parties, which often touch on
national competences.
On
Techdirt.
As we've noted before, many publishers have the crazy attitude that
ebooks shouldn't be lent by libraries, and that it should be made harder for people to access literature in these places if it's in a digital form. Over in the Netherlands, public libraries have had enough of this, and are taking legal action over the issue, as an article in Future of Copyright reports:
On
Techdirt.
There finally seems to be a growing recognition in many countries that
copyright is not fit for the digital age. In the US, the Copyright Registrar
has spoken on this; in the UK, the Hargreaves Review delineated many
problems; and more recently, Australia, too, is starting to address the
question. As part of the process of implementing Hargreaves'
recommendations, the UK government is carrying out a consultation on
whether the UK should adopt the full list of copyright exceptions that
are laid out in the EU Copyright Directive, which provides the
overarching framework for copyright in Europe. It has now published some questionnaires seeking input in this area:
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt readers may recall that over three years ago, the UK's Digital Economy Act was passed in totally disgraceful
circumstances. Since then, almost nothing has been heard about it, as
British civil servants grapple with the fact that this poorly-drafted
law is almost impossible to implement in any sensible way. If you were
wondering what is going on behind the scenes, James Firth has put
together a fascinating post piecing together the information that he was
able to glean. The main point is that the UK's "three-strike" warning letters won't be going out for years:
On
Techdirt.
Remember the Digital Economy Act, surely one of the most disgraceful
episodes in recent British political history? It was "passed" back 2010
- I use inverted commas, since it was actually rammed through an almost
empty House of Commons in the guttering hours of the previous
government, with no scrutiny, riding roughshod over all those pointing
out it was both unjust and unworkable.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As we've noted before, Hadopi has been a colossal failure
on just about every metric, and now seems on the way out. But French
taxpayers' money is still being wasted on the scheme, which continues to
send out huge numbers of warnings. Ironically, given its imminent
demise, Hadopi seems to have finally claimed its first disconnection
victim, as PC Inpact reports (original in French.)
The person involved has been sentenced to disconnection for 15 days,
and must pay a €600 fine. Strangely, it seems that he or she shared
only a couple of works, so even that brief period seems harsh. However,
there is still scope for an appeal, so the sentence is not yet definite.
On
Techdirt.
You might have hoped that the extensive discussions that took place
around SOPA a year or so ago would have warned off governments elsewhere
from replicating some of the really bad ideas there, like DNS blocking,
but it seems that Taiwan didn't get the message, as Global Voices reports:
On
Techdirt.
Back in February we reported on a worrying
attempt by the European Commission to reframe the discussion about
modernizing copyright in Europe purely in terms of licensing, reflected
in the name of the initiative, "Licences for Europe". Although originally a series of discussions
were promised to "explore the potential and limits of innovative
licensing and technological solutions in making EU copyright law and
practice fit for the digital age," in practice moderators shut down
discussions of things like exceptions or even Creative Commons
licensing. As far as the Commission was concerned, it seemed the answer
to updating copyright for the modern age was just old-style licensing
and nothing else.
On
Techdirt.
One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of
the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a global treaty
that would make it easier for the blind and visually impaired to read
books in format like Braille. The thinking seems to be that it's more
important to preserve copyright "inviolate" than to alleviate the
suffering of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The UK's new orphan works legislation allows works to be classed as
orphans only after a "diligent search" has been conducted to find the
owner. The fear expressed by some is that this "diligent" search won't
be very diligent, allowing publishers to use materials that aren't
orphans. That's actually wrong
for a number of reasons, as Techdirt explained recently, but the
continuing furor from photographers in particular has been such that the
UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) felt compelled to issue a
document entitled "The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 –Your photos and you" (pdf) explaining how the system would work, and why the fears were unjustified.
On
Techdirt.
If there's one clear trend that has emerged in recent years, it's that
those who download and share unauthorized copies of files the most also
tend to be the most avid purchasers of similar material. This
completely negates the copyright industry's rhetoric that people who
share files are just a bunch of freeloaders, suggesting instead that
it's more a matter of sampling materials before going on to buy. It also
implies that instead of seeking to punish such downloaders, the
copyright companies should actually try to nurture them as potentially
their best customers.
On
Techdirt.
If you wanted an indication of just how much copyright has moved on from
being a dry and boring topic of interest only to a few specialist
lawyers to an exciting area full of surprising twists and turns worthy
of a soap opera, you could do worse than look at what's been happening
in Colombia recently.
On
Techdirt.
Last week I reported on the reply I received from Jean Bergevin of the European Commission on the subject of the IPRED consultation,
and my own response to that. I wondered whether I would receive a
reply, suspecting that I might not. I was wrong: not only did a reply
turn up, it turned up almost by return of post. Here's what Mr Bergevin
wrote:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Back in November 2011, we wrote about the Belgian music royalty
collection agency SABAM's demand for 3.4% of Internet subscriber fees as
"compensation" for online piracy in Belgium. As Tim Cushing explained
back then, this was ridiculous
on just about every level. But SABAM doesn't let little things like
that get in the way of its desperate attempt to avoid moving with the
times and coming up with new business models. So after failing dismally
to convince Europe's highest court that it could force ISPs to spy on their customers, SABAM has now moved on to suing ISPs instead, as TorrentFreak reports:
On
Techdirt.
Here on Techdirt we often talk about the copyright ratchet
-- the fact that for three hundred years changes to copyright have
always been in one direction: longer, wider and stronger. But there's a
group of countries where the copyright ratchet isn't in place yet.
These are the so-called LDCs -- the Least Developed Countries -- where
many of the world's poorest citizens live. That's because the main
Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights,
better known as TRIPS, explicitly allows LDCs a transitional period of ten years,
during which time they are not required to meet all the stringent
requirements laid down there for granting intellectual monopolies.
Moreover, the TRIPS agreement specifies:
On
Techdirt.
The lawsuits brought against the media monitoring firm Meltwater in both
the US and the UK have not turned out too well for the company so far.
In the US, the district court handed down a summary judgment against Meltwater, while in the UK, two courts came to a particularly worrying conclusion: that simply viewing copyright material online without a license amounted to infringement.
On
Techdirt.
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