Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Blog Entries

Just as it has sought to offset slower CD sales with its digital music store, Walmart—the nation’s largest DVD retailer—is looking to insure against lower DVD sales by purchasing the online video company Vudu.

But Vudu isn’t just another Internet video company with a loopy name offering a pure over-the-top video service. Like Sezmi, its delivery method is an interesting hybrid. While Sezmi leverages free over-the-air TV, leased spectrum, and broadband (with ample local storage as a force multiplier), Vudu uses a hybrid peer-to-peer model. Content is both delivered to a Vudu device through a standard client/server model, as well as peer-to-peer between different Vudu devices. Additionally, content is pre-positioned at the edge of the network to increase the number of peers.

Today’s news that Google shut down music blogs that were accused of copyright infringement is rightfully getting plenty of coverage. Mostly, it is being held up as another in a long line of examples of problems with the DMCA notice-and-takedown system. This is a great example of a problem with the DMCA because, at least according to The Guardian, the notices that Google relied on to delete the blogs were woefully incomplete. Google should not have acted until it had proper notices from rights holders, including the name of the actual work allegedly infringed. Since many of the notices did not even include this information, there was no way for the bloggers to file a DMCA counternotice. For an update on the DMCA part of this story, check out Wired and Google’s own post. Of course, the DMCA confusion does a great job of illustrating the points about filtering below.

It is important that this story is being used to point out problems with the DMCA, and with Google’s policies for dealing with DMCA complaints. how complicated DMCA implementation can be. What it equally important, if less commented on, is what it can tell us about copyright filtering.

For those of us who believe that the Internet should remain an open, democratic and non-discriminatory platform, with few exceptions, the last two years have brought a steady stream of bad news from Down Under. First, there were rumblings that Australia was seeking to implement a "three strikes" policy toward those accused of online filesharing. Next, New Zealand came close to instituting its own three strikes mandate, though thanks to the efforts of activists, that deeply-flawed law was struck down at the last minute. Finally, after a number of previous, failed attempts, the Australian government announced that it plans to mandate the use of real-time filtering technologies on public ISPs sometime during the next year.

Just when it seemed like no one in the Australian and New Zealand governments appreciated the damaging effects of such policies, an Australian federal court judge has ruled that the ISP iiNet is not responsible for the actions of its subscribers. In the landmark ruling (full text here), which will likely have ramifications in the U.S. and elsewhere, the judge rebuffs Hollywood's attempt to require iiNet to act as a copyright cop, dealing a blow to three strikes in the process. Let's take a closer look.

Yesterday, the MPAA and RIAA made a giant political misstep by refusing to participate in a debate about three strikes. In doing so, they exposed the public and a number of US policy makers to policy that would strip Internet subscribers of their constitutional due process rights.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I attended this year’s State of the Net Conference beautifully orchestrated by Tim Lordan and his crew at the Internet Caucus Advisory Committee.

In the media world, there’s an ongoing war about what it means to “own” a copy of something. Most of us are used to the world of paper books and plastic CDs, where the media you buy is yours to do what you like with, be that play it in your living room, lend it to a friend, or (as a practical matter) rip it to your computer for your own use on other devices or locations. But in the world of DRM, the copyright owner gets to decide when, if, and for how long you get to do those things. The latest salvo in the battle to get consumers to accept DRM is DECE: the “Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem.” DECE appears to be an attempt to make DRM interoperate better across different devices, services, and content sources. Is this a good thing – or at least a less bad thing – for content users? I’m not holding my breath…

Second Panel —Commentary, Criticism and the New Publishing Paradigm, moderated by David Bollier.

The first speaker is Pat Aufderheide, director of social media at American University’s School of Communications. The purpose of copyright is to promote culture, with “limited” monopoly and provide balance with exemptions to make new culture. Copyright holders created imbalance in copyright. At this point, fair use which was “dinky backwater” is now escape hatch from copyright holders. It’s the most flexible copyright exemption in the world. Best Practices movement is about education. AU has published best practices guides, with filmmakers as first one. Eight weeks after guide, three films went to Sundance and got picked up.

Although overshadowed by Joe Biden’s big party for his Copyright buddies, the good folks at the House Judiciary Committee staged their own holiday party for Hollywood. Since “p2p” is now passe, the Judiciary’s Secret Santa brought Hollywood a whole new villain to attack in the name of piracy, streaming media. (Hey everyone, remember when ‘streaming media’ was the good way to get content online because it could be protected unlike that evil peer-2-peer stuff so Hollywood pretended they loved streaming media so they could outlaw peer-2-peer? Boy, we were so young back then . .

Copyright owners have often used the DMCA’s notice and take down procedure to silence criticism instead of preventing copyright infringement. A recent DMCA take down involving the group Yes Men is yet another example of this phenomenon. On October 22, a website created by the Yes Men which parodied the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s stance on a climate change bill was taken down pursuant to a DMCA notice.

The Yes Men is a group that exposes corporate greed by posing as corporate representatives and pulling off the “world’s most outrageous pranks.” Their most recent prank that caused the ire of the Chamber involved the Kerry-Boxer climate change bill. The Chamber opposes the bill even though its decision to do so has been controversial.

In our last interview in this series, we meet Francesca Coppa (pronounced cope-a). Francesca is many things — English professor, author, feminist. She’s also a vidder of long-standing and provides a fascinating glimpse into how the underground culture of women in video grew from working with tapes to the current digital environment — with all of the dangers and opportunities that change entails.

Of course, fair use is central to what she does, and that narrative runs through our chat with her.

This is the last of four interviews, for now at least. We hope you have enjoyed them. We realize they are a little long for such things, but we think they are well worth your time in helping to realize that “creators” are not restricted to big companies, or to certain California locales.

Jonny McIntosh calls his site rebellious pixels. There is certainly a lot of rebellion there, but also a lot of painstaking work pulling images from different videos and putting them into a coherent narrative with seamless imagery.

One video that caught my eye mashed up the 2008 presidential debates with a popular dance contest show. Another, a commentary on stalking, combined two popular vampire worlds. Fair use is essential to each of them.