Tag: Intellectual Property

Content and Its Discontents

Gigi Sohn — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:00:00 -0500

Public Knowledge recently celebrated its 8th birthday of defending citizens’ rights in the digital culture. Unlike any other public interest group in Washington or elsewhere, we are dedicated to ensuring openness at every layer of our communication system, and that includes the content layer. That’s why our work to ensure balanced copyright is so important - we cannot have an open Internet if large corporate copyright holders can exploit overly burdensome copyright laws to sacrifice legitimate speech at the altar of trying to stop piracy.

I discussed the clash of copyright and an open Internet at a talk that I gave to the Yale Law School Information and Society Project last week. Some in Hollywood, like Disney, were in favor of net neutrality in the late 90’s because they knew well the powers that the network owner has.

BitStalker: Positives and Negatives

John Bergmayer — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:36:05 -0500

BitStalker is a good way to get around some of the obfuscatory methods employed by some BitTorrent trackers that are primarily used for infringing content, like the Pirate Bay. It uses some clever data-gathering techniques to avoid falling for some kinds of spoofing (like listing phony IP addresses as peers). I’m glad that some of the people at my old school, the University of Colorado, are seriously addressing the fact that current anti-piracy technology used on the Internet is inadequate.

One thing needs to be clear, though: when the paper claims that “false positives are rare with our active approach,” it’s referring to false positives as to whether a particular IP address is part of a BitTorrent swarm. That is, if a particular file is known to be infringing, this method is better at identifying the IP addresses that are downloading it.

5 Minutes with Harold Feld: Crashing Hollywood's Special Party with the U.S. Trade Representative

Alex Curtis — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:25:08 -0500

Channel

5 Minutes with Harold Feld

Click thumbnail above for video

In this episode of 5 Minutes with Harold Feld, Harold explains the “Special 301” process being conducted by the US Trade Representative (USTR) used to shape copyright, trademark, and patent policy abroad. Under this process, the USTR seeks input from US intellectual property owners about whether IP protection is strong enough in other countries. The process has generally been used by big media companies to bolster IP enforcement overseas. This time around, PK and others want to make sure the importance of limitations and exceptions — like fair use — that are beneficial to libraries, to education, to innovation, and to the public interest generally, are a healthy part of the Special 301 discussion.

How Balanced Copyright Gives Us As Many Freaky Alice in Wonderlands as We Can Handle

Michael Weinberg — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:46:18 -0500

Oftentimes, opponents of Public Knowledge suggest that our calls for a balanced copyright is really a call for everything to be free. First off, this is wrong. Balanced copyright is an attempt to find a way to promote creation without restricting innovation or creativity (or “balance” the rights of the creators of the past, creators of the future, and the public), not make everything free (for the 2 page handout version of PK’s take on balanced copyright, click here (PDF)).

Second, and what really annoys me, is the implication that there is no real value to works once they are in the public domain.

IPEC Asks Loaded Questions, But Public Can Respond

John Bergmayer — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:46:15 -0500

Victoria Espinel gets the Internet. From blogging on whitehouse.gov, to personally reaching out to BoingBoing, she’s trying to assure the public that her office, the newly-created Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC), doesn’t exist to put Hollywood’s or the pharmaceutical industry’s interests first—rather, she sees her job as to “help protect the ideas and creativity of the American public.” To that end, her office is soliciting comment from the public as to what the IPEC’s priorities should be.

But outreach by itself won’t lead to good policy. The Federal Register Notice the office put out asks some good questions, but plenty of loaded ones.

ACTA Makes ISPs An Offer They Can't Refuse

John Bergmayer — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:50:08 -0500

The leaked ACTA Internet chapter has a footnote that says an ISP can only hang on to its “safe harbor” by implementing certain policies designed to discourage the use of their networks for copyright infringement, and that “An example of such a policy is providing for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscriptions and accounts in the service provider’s system or network of repeat infringers.” Three strikes and you’re out.

USTR’s claim that ACTA wouldn’t “change” US law is plausible (if not comforting). Similar language is already part of US law (17 U.S.C. 512 §(i)(1)(A))—as is the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, of course, which assures that no person can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” One would hope that, like the existing statute, the ACTA language will be read in the context of the Constitution, which assures that mere accusations of copyright infringement are not enough to kick someone off the Internet. One would also hope that other countries, if they end up agreeing to a version of ACTA with this language, also understand that a “repeat infringer” must have been afforded due process.

ACTA Internet Chapter Leaked, Transparency Still Absent

Sherwin Siy — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:58:24 -0500

Yesterday, PC World came out with the news that the much-discussed, but long-secret Internet chapter of the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was leaked to the public. The leak confirms a number of suspicions that had been raised by previously leaked European analysis papers. So with this revelation, what remains of calls for transparency?

Everything.

For instance, Michael Geist compares the text of this leak with the statement that Stan McCoy of the U.S. Trade Representative gave to us, noting that McCoy emphatically denied that the United States was asking for ACTA to include mandatory 3 strikes provisions. Of course, the key word there was mandatory.

PK and EFF: 2010 Special 301 Review Should Respect Copyright Balance and Increase Transparency

Rashmi Rangnath — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:06:57 -0500

Today, Public Knowledge, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed comments in the 2010 Special 301 review process. We wrote about this issue last time calling upon you to file comments with the USTR. I want to thank everyone who responded to our call and filed comments. Here are our comments.

As we said before, the Special 301 process, which is supposed to ensure protection for US intellectual property, has morphed into an instrument used to exert pressure on foreign countries to curtail socially beneficial intellectual property limitations and exceptions, ratchet up penalties for infringement, and force countries to sign treaties that are not necessarily in their best interest.

Public Knowledge Statement on DoJ Intellectual Property Task Force

Art Brodsky — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:03:44 -0500

For Immediate Release:

February 12, 2010

The following statement is attributed to Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge:

“Today the Justice Department announced the formation of a new Intellectual Property Task Force. We hope the DoJ is intent on focusing this task force on prosecuting mass illegal reproduction of copyrighted material such as CDs and DVDs. At the same time, we believe it would be a mistake, and a misuse of government resources, for the Department to pursue cases against non-commercial consumer activity.

“The Department noted the Task Force is being formed as a result of a summit meeting held by Vice President Biden, at which most of the discussion was held behind closed doors with industry representatives. We noted at the time that no consumer representatives were allowed to participate in that meeting, nor was anyone present who would speak for a balanced copyright policy.

Public Knowledge, EFF, Consumer and Library Groups Urge Court to Protect Your Right to Own Your Own Software

Sherwin Siy — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:44:23 -0500

Today, Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a coalition of consumer and library groups filed a friend of the court brief before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a case devoted to protecting the first sale doctrine.

In Vernor v. Autodesk, Timothy Vernor bought four copies of AutoCAD software from a design firm that was having an office sale. Vernor then put the disks up for sale on eBay. Autodesk, the publishers of AutoCAD, complained to eBay, claiming that the sale of the software was an infringement of its copyrights getting the listing taken down and eventually getting Vernor kicked off of eBay.