Tag: Piracy

On Monday, Judge Richard Sullivan of the Southern District of New York ruled resoundingly for eBay in its defense against Tiffany’s various claims of trademark infringement. Coming as it does in the wake of eBay’s $63 million loss to Louis Vuitton in France, this decision stands as an unambiguous breath of sanity. It’s great to see that France’s nakedly protectionist, moral rights-influenced, lack-of-first-sale-doctrine decision has been quarantined to France for the time being. As Judge Sullivan affirmed, “The law clearly protects secondary markets in authentic goods.”

The Court detailed the myriad ways in which eBay extended itself in trying to accommodate Tiffany by removing listings featuring counterfeit Tiffany merchandise.

The first Senate hearing I attended struck me as a “dog and pony show” since the witnesses were presented for display purposes, merely echoing the pre-determined opinions of the presiding Senators. I’m beginning to see the animals in a less benign light.

Today, Senator Baucus (D-MT), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, held a hearing on “International Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights and American Competitiveness,” with Ranking Member, Senator Grassley (R-IA), in the wings and with Senators Kyl (R-AZ) and Roberts (R-KS) making cameo appearances towards the end. As for the witnesses, the deck was stacked, as appears to be more the norm than the exception.

In its “Declaration on the World Economy”, the G-8 included an endorsement of ACTA and ongoing efforts to “standardize” IP enforcement through customs organizations. “We encourage the acceleration of negotiations to establish a new international legal framework, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and seek to complete the negotiation by the end of this year,” the statement says.

So we have a major endorsement of ACTA from the leadership of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. And pressure to have this international legal agreement ready to roll at the end of the year. So what’s going to be in this critically important, possibly binding international agreement, to be completed in less than six months?

We have no idea.

We recently scanned all of the documents filed in response to the USTR’s request for public comments regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). They are presented below, if sometimes angularly, as well as on our issue summary page here.

Rm 226, Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC

The Senate Committee on the Judiciary has scheduled a hearing on “Protecting Consumers by Protecting Intellectual Property” for Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 10:00 a.m. in Room 226 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building.

The hearing notice and witness list is available here.

Representatives from the US, EC, Japan, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, S. Korea, Canada, and Mexico have been holding close-to clandestine meetings over the past year to construct a trade agreement that tightens the level of regulations on IP-related goods and services. This proposed pact is called ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. No official agendas or results of the talks have been released, though a “discussion paper” was leaked to Wikileaks in late May. This discussion paper is the basic extent of the world’s knowledge on ACTA, yet some version of ACTA will apparently be up for adoption at the G8 Summit in July.

Ever since my policy blog and Huffington Post responses to Larry Lessig’s New York Times op-ed on orphan works last week, I have received a large number of fairly unfriendly comments and emails. I won’t quote them here for fear of being sued for copyright infringement (I wish I was kidding). Rather than respond to each one individually, I address the vast majority of the arguments raised in this speech, which I will be giving today at a conference at the University of Maryland University College. I look forward to a new barrage of comments.

If you haven’t read about it, the New York Times reported yesterday that: Microsoft May Build a Copyright Cop Into Every Zune. Essentially, the large content provider would withhold their content from a distributor unless the distributor put in effective measures to prevent against piracy. We’re not talking about DRM here, we’re talking about filtering software, whether it resides on the playback device like a Zune or iPod, or in the software on a syncing computer that stores the consumers’ library of music and movies like the Zune or iTunes software. This software would troll your library checking for content that was somehow infringing or unauthorized. It may even be spyware that could report back to someone about the contents of your media library.

Earlier today, the House Judiciary Committee approved HR 4279, the Pro-IP bill, which would increase penalties for violations of intellectual property laws, among other items.

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

“We are pleased that the Committee amended the bill (HR 4279) to make clear there has to be a ‘substantial connection’ between property to be seized, such as a computer, a car or a house, and any violations of the copyright law. Now that the Committee has approved the bill, we look forward to legislative action on Orphan Works legislation, (HR 5889), that would work to restore balance in copyright law.”

Yesterday, the FCC took a field trip to the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. There it heard from two panels of experts and policy shapers on the issue of network management and more broadly net neutrality. If you didn’t see it, or listen to the FCC’s stream of it, thankfully, it’s been video recorded and put on the web…

Panel I: Network Management and Consumer Expectations

Professor Lessig presented one of his illustrative keynotes at the start, and apparently he recorded the live audio and dubbed it to the video later: