Posts tagged copyright

U.S. Patent No. 8,171,128 — “Communicating a newsfeed of media content based on a member’s interactions in a social network environment” – Filed on August 11, 2006, and granted on May 1, 2012.

Facebook patents the News Feed, via ZDNet.

The question then becomes: will they use the patent offensively or defensively against other social networks that display news feeds in much the same way (eg., Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.).

Via ZDNet:

Reading the patent more closely, you’ll see Facebook discusses how to let users see certain status updates, pictures, links to videos, and even actions friends take. The social networking giant describes keeping a profile of each person on the social network in a database, identifying relationships between said users, generating “stories” based on the connections, and then creating a News Feed for each user.

Last but certainly not least, Facebook watches what actions the viewer takes in response to the stories (such as Liking, Sharing, or commenting), and then uses that information to serve more stories. It’s also noted that content can come from outside the social network and that users can change preference settings to filter in or out what stories they see.

[It] is threatening the rights of people in America, and effectively rights everywhere, because what happens in America tends to affect people all over the world. Even though the Sopa and Pipa acts were stopped by huge public outcry, it’s staggering how quickly the US government has come back with a new, different, threat to the rights of its citizens.

In an interview with The Guardian, Web godfather Tim Berners-Lee warns about a proposed US bill called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act that would increase the government’s ability to enforce patents and copyright.

CISPA is the love child of the recently defeated SOPA and PIPA bills that attempted to do more or less the same.

The other day I talked about Insurgents vs Incumbents. This is the framework we use at [Union Square Ventures] to think about a lot of things. And in the world of patents, the advantage goes to the Incumbents who can hoard patents and use them to their advantage. The insurgent, three engineers in a walk up in Bushwick, can’t even afford the lawyer or the time to file a patent. So it is very encouraging to see an emerging incumbent, Twitter, do something like this. They are saying to the world that they do not intend to compete on the basis of patents and instead they will compete on the basis of product, feature set, user experience, etc, etc.

USV is committed to support this initiative. We are instructing the startup lawyers we work with to insert the patent hack language in our standard forms. We are reaching out to our friends in the startup world including other VCs, accelerator programs, and the startup lawyer universe to suggest that they to insert the patent hack into their standard forms. And we will recommend to our existing portfolio companies that they adopt it as well. Of course, entrepreneurs and their companies will have to be the ultimate determinator of whether they want this provision in their inventions assignments agreement. If an entrepreneur we invest in does not want this provision, we will certainly support that decision. But we will want to have a conversation about why they would want to do that.

Fred Wilson, Principal, Union Square Ventures. The Twitter “Patent Hack”.

Background: Yesterday Twitter announced its Innovator’s Patent Agreement whereby it will put patents in control of its designers and engineers. The goal is make sure that patents are only used defensively against potential lawsuits. As Adam Messinger, Twitter’s vice-president of engineering writes:

Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company any patents filed related to the employee’s work. The company then has control over the patents and can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.

An important move, to be sure. M-CAM, a global asset management firm, reports that there are “over 30,000 patents that describe key aspects of social networking, ecommerce, and data management” with companies spending $83 billion each year defending themselves against them.

Twitter’s IPA move is the company’s attempt to reinvent how patents are used (for defense only) and we hope others are inspired to do the same. It’s great to see major tech players like Union Square Ventures looking to bake the concept into all the startups it works with — Michael

Oh, Canada: Music Publishers Target the CBC Over its Streaming Music Site

Head over to CBC Music and you’ll find a streaming music site run by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Canadian media companies aren’t happy about the on-demand, Web-based service and are taking steps to block the country’s national broadcaster from providing the tunes for free.

At issue is the lower royalty rates the CBC — as a public broadcaster — pays for the music compared to what private companies pay.

Via the Globe and Mail:

The companies argue they must charge customers to offset royalty costs which are triggered every time a song is played, while the CBC gets around the pay-per-click problem because it is considered a non-profit corporation.

They want Ottawa to intervene and they’ve offered Federal Heritage Minister James Moore some alternatives: Shut the site down, force it to play only Canadian music, or insist that it charge for access in the same way private broadcasters do.

“The only music that you can hear for free is when the birds sing,” Eric Boyko, CEO of Stingray, a company that has a subscription-based music app on the market, tells the Globe and Mail.

Let’s hope that remains true. In February, a YouTube user had his videos removed for violating a copyright claim by Rumblefish, a music licensing company. The offending audio: birds chirping in the background as the video creator walked about outside.

UK Foundation to Launch Free Academic Journal Over the past number of years a growing, vocal group of researchers has protested the rising cost and copyright restrictions academic publishers place on their journals. Part of the issue is that many academic researchers are publicly funded and believe their work should be released under an Open Access model, made freely available to the public with few copyright restrictions. This has led to thousands of academics to boycott publishing giants such as Elsevier over its practice of bundling journals (ie., institutions can’t buy one without purchasing many others) and placing restrictive copyright over journal articles). Much of this came to a head over the last few months with academic publisher support for the now-defunct US Research Works Act, a bill that would have prohibited open access mandates for federally funded research (eg., the US National Institutes of Health mandates that research conducted with its grants must be freely accessible online. The Research Works Act would have eliminated the mandate along with similar ones from other governmental agencies). Enter into all this the Wellcome Trust, a UK-based foundation focussing on scientific research. Via the BBC: One of the world’s largest research charities, the Wellcome Trust, is to support efforts by scientists to make their work freely available for all. The Trust is to establish a free, online publication to compete with established academic journals. They say their new title could be a “game changer” forcing other publishing houses to increase free access. More than 9,000 scientists are boycotting a leading paid-for publisher for restricting access to their papers. The Wellcome Trust’s move is the latest salvo in a battle about ownership of, and access to, the published work of scientists that has been simmering underneath the sedate surface of scientific research for years. The majority of the world’s scientific journals are accessible only via subscription, including highly influential titles such as Nature, Science and the New England Journal of Medicine. This isn’t be the first attempt at Open Access academic publishing. A personal favorite is arXiv, and open archive hosted by Cornell University. For the math nerds, you might remember it as the place where Gregori Perelman originally published his solution to the century-old Poincaré conjecture. But while not the first, the Wellcome Trust’s move is a very important step in increasing the flow and access to the world’s scientific research.

UK Foundation to Launch Free Academic Journal

Over the past number of years a growing, vocal group of researchers has protested the rising cost and copyright restrictions academic publishers place on their journals.

Part of the issue is that many academic researchers are publicly funded and believe their work should be released under an Open Access model, made freely available to the public with few copyright restrictions.

This has led to thousands of academics to boycott publishing giants such as Elsevier over its practice of bundling journals (ie., institutions can’t buy one without purchasing many others) and placing restrictive copyright over journal articles). Much of this came to a head over the last few months with academic publisher support for the now-defunct US Research Works Act, a bill that would have prohibited open access mandates for federally funded research (eg., the US National Institutes of Health mandates that research conducted with its grants must be freely accessible online. The Research Works Act would have eliminated the mandate along with similar ones from other governmental agencies).

Enter into all this the Wellcome Trust, a UK-based foundation focussing on scientific research.

Via the BBC:

One of the world’s largest research charities, the Wellcome Trust, is to support efforts by scientists to make their work freely available for all.

The Trust is to establish a free, online publication to compete with established academic journals.

They say their new title could be a “game changer” forcing other publishing houses to increase free access.

More than 9,000 scientists are boycotting a leading paid-for publisher for restricting access to their papers.

The Wellcome Trust’s move is the latest salvo in a battle about ownership of, and access to, the published work of scientists that has been simmering underneath the sedate surface of scientific research for years.

The majority of the world’s scientific journals are accessible only via subscription, including highly influential titles such as Nature, Science and the New England Journal of Medicine.

This isn’t be the first attempt at Open Access academic publishing. A personal favorite is arXiv, and open archive hosted by Cornell University. For the math nerds, you might remember it as the place where Gregori Perelman originally published his solution to the century-old Poincaré conjecture.

But while not the first, the Wellcome Trust’s move is a very important step in increasing the flow and access to the world’s scientific research.

Pinterest, Copyright and Fair Use While Pinterest is now the number three social media site behind Facebook and Twitter there’s still a bit of confusion over copyright and fair use when it comes to pinning. Fortunately, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a Pinterest-specific article about just that and looks at online precedents for fair use of copyrighted material. The short of it runs like so: For most users, Pinterest’s platform will provide a forum for fair uses. Posting pictures with captions and commentary, designed to spur further commentary and collaboration, are paradigmatic fair uses. Most users seek no commercial benefit, and only use as much of the underlying image as is necessary for the commentary. Thus, a typical Pinterest user, to the extent she draws from copyrighted works, will be making acceptable fair uses of those works. For the long of it, visit the EFF. Besides copyright and fair use, they dive into Pinterests’ evolving terms and conditions and the confusion that they spawned. Image: Screenshot of the FJP Infographics and Visualization board.

Pinterest, Copyright and Fair Use

While Pinterest is now the number three social media site behind Facebook and Twitter there’s still a bit of confusion over copyright and fair use when it comes to pinning.

Fortunately, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a Pinterest-specific article about just that and looks at online precedents for fair use of copyrighted material.

The short of it runs like so:

For most users, Pinterest’s platform will provide a forum for fair uses. Posting pictures with captions and commentary, designed to spur further commentary and collaboration, are paradigmatic fair uses. Most users seek no commercial benefit, and only use as much of the underlying image as is necessary for the commentary. Thus, a typical Pinterest user, to the extent she draws from copyrighted works, will be making acceptable fair uses of those works.

For the long of it, visit the EFF. Besides copyright and fair use, they dive into Pinterests’ evolving terms and conditions and the confusion that they spawned.

Image: Screenshot of the FJP Infographics and Visualization board.

ICANN Confirms it Will Work Closely with Governments to Shutter Domains Over Copyright Infringement

At the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers global meeting in Costa Rica this week, ICANN board members confirmed they will work closely with governmental bodies to shut down domains that are accused of copyright infringement.

ICANN governs the global naming system of the Internet.

Via Computer World:

Efforts to take down websites for copyright infringement are likely to move beyond U.S.-based registries, with ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) promising to more closely cooperate with global law enforcement agencies and governments…

…During an open session with the Government Advisory Committee (GAC), the ICANN board confirmed that it will enforce its contracts with registrars more effectively in order to meet expectations from governments and law enforcement authorities. The expectations were contained in a 12- page document submitted by the GAC, which also includes representatives from national law enforcement agencies as well as Interpol.

While ICANN itself will not shutter domains, its participation and support for law enforcement efforts will enable governments creating SOPA-style laws to more easily pursue and shut down alleged copyright infringers.

Just like I told a French journalist and to the lady at the Washington Post, pirates are thieves and they do steal. Yeah yeah, “when I steal your DVD, you have no DVD, but when I copy a file, you still have a file” – I get that BS. We all know that it’s BS too. However, SOPAs and PIPAs create tyranny. If given the choice between thieves and tyranny, I’d rather stay with the thieves.

Suren Ter, creator of YouHaveDownloaded.com to Privacy Online News.

You Have Downloaded indexes IP addresses that have been used to download torrent files. If you visit the site, it will display what files have been downloaded on your network. 

The site, says Ter, is a proof of concept to show visitors what the entertainment industry might see as it tracks downloads across peer-to-peer networks.

H/T: Slashdot.

Want an Open Internet? There's a Blueprint for That

Yesterday Jihii wrote about an effort originating in the Reddit community to crowdsource a privacy bill to protect people’s online rights.

Perhaps, then, a trend, because yesterday also saw the launch The Internet Blueprint, an effort by Public Knowledge, a Washington DC-based digital advocacy group, that crowdsources technology bills that members of Congress can then pick up and run with.

The idea is certainly interesting. What we saw recently in the fights over SOPA and PIPA — and see generally over everything else — is reactive protests against proposed laws drafted with little public input and often by the lobbyists whose groups will most benefit from them.

The Internet Blueprint attempts to turn this process on its head by proactively promoting Internet-related laws that are written in public, by the public (and with Public Knowledge lawyers massaging them into proper DC legalese). Visitors to the site can vote up and comment on particular bills, vote on ideas they think should become proposed bills, and contact their representatives to get behind completed bills.

Via Public Knowledge:

While it can be reasonably easy to get people to agree on broad principles, conflict can often come when it is time to focus on details. That is especially true when it comes to legislative language – a single word (or even a single comma) can change the impact of a bill. That is why The Internet Blueprint goes beyond broad concepts and proposes concrete legislative language. The bills on The Internet Blueprint could be introduced and passed as-is.

The Internet Blueprint is a place for everyone – individuals, organizations, and companies – to come together and make it clear what is important to them. When you visit the site, the first thing you will see is a list of complete bills. Along with the text there is a headline, a short explanation, and a more detailed explanation of both the problem and our solution.

Public Knowledge has seeded the site with a few completed bills that focus on copyright policy and openness in international intellectual property negotiations. You can view them here.

ACTA Protests in Europe

Over the past few weeks protests have erupted across Europe against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Act, an international treaty that would standardize criminal targeting and enforcement in counterfeit goods, generic medicine and copyright infringement on the Internet.

Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

ACTA has several features that raise significant potential concerns for consumers’ privacy and civil liberties for innovation and the free flow of information on the Internet, legitimate commerce and for developing countries’ ability to choose policy options that best suit their domestic priorities and level of economic development.

ACTA is being negotiated by a select group of industrialized countries outside of existing international multilateral venues for creating new IP norms such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and (since TRIPs) the World Trade Organization. Both civil society and developing countries are intentionally being excluded from these negotiations. While the existing international fora provide (at least to some extent) room for a range of views to be heard and addressed no such checks and balances will influence the outcome of the ACTA negotiations.

To date, 31 countries have signed the treaty, including the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and most members of the European Union.

For more information about ACTA, see University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist’s ACTA tracker and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s ACTA topic page.

Images: Anti-ACTA signs from European protests, via OWNI.

If you have downloaded music using this website you may have committed a criminal offence which carries a maximum penalty of up to 10 years imprisonment and an unlimited fine under UK law. And we thought the $150,000 per infringement fine under US copyright law was steep. Via Ars Technica: The 70,000 daily visitors to popular music site RnBXclusive.com were met with a purposely terrifying message on Tuesday and part of Wednesday. The UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) took the site down, arrested its operator, and threw up a splash page that warned downloaders of “up to 10 years imprisonment.” Thought statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement in the US were ludicrous? SOCA warns that downloaders from the site could face an “unlimited fine under UK law.”… …While RnBxclusive.com might have been a hive a scum and villainy, SOCA agents hardly give the impression of acting as neutral agents of justice. The takedown was clearly pushed by the recording industry, which in itself is fine; all sorts of private parties complain to police when laws have been broken. But the SOCA warning page on RnBxclusive.com went well beyond a mere legal statement and warning. “As a result of illegal downloads young, emerging artists may have had their careers damaged,” it said. “If you have illegally downloaded music you will have damaged the future of the music industry.” Random aside: The Serious Organized Crime Agency? That’s a Monty Python skit waiting to happen.

If you have downloaded music using this website you may have committed a criminal offence which carries a maximum penalty of up to 10 years imprisonment and an unlimited fine under UK law.

And we thought the $150,000 per infringement fine under US copyright law was steep.

Via Ars Technica:

The 70,000 daily visitors to popular music site RnBXclusive.com were met with a purposely terrifying message on Tuesday and part of Wednesday. The UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) took the site down, arrested its operator, and threw up a splash page that warned downloaders of “up to 10 years imprisonment.” Thought statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement in the US were ludicrous? SOCA warns that downloaders from the site could face an “unlimited fine under UK law.”…

…While RnBxclusive.com might have been a hive a scum and villainy, SOCA agents hardly give the impression of acting as neutral agents of justice. The takedown was clearly pushed by the recording industry, which in itself is fine; all sorts of private parties complain to police when laws have been broken. But the SOCA warning page on RnBxclusive.com went well beyond a mere legal statement and warning.

“As a result of illegal downloads young, emerging artists may have had their careers damaged,” it said. “If you have illegally downloaded music you will have damaged the future of the music industry.”

Random aside: The Serious Organized Crime Agency? That’s a Monty Python skit waiting to happen.

AP Says News Aggregator Infringes Copyright

As many traditional businesses have done before it, Associated Press digs in to protect its core business from disruption in a digital age:

The Associated Press on Tuesday took aim at Meltwater, a company that offers a paid clipping service to clients including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“Meltwater has built its business on the willful exploitation and copying of the AP’s and other publishers’ news articles for profit,” the AP alleges in a lawsuit accusing Meltwater of infringing copyright and misappropriating so-called “hot news.”

“Meltwater contributes no creative content and provides no editorial commentary,” states the complaint, which was filed in the Southern District of New York. “Its business serves no independent purpose other than the distribution of news created by others.”

The lawsuit accuses Meltwater of infringing copyright by “routinely copying verbatim the heart of the AP’s and other publishers’ news stories and selling that content to its subscribers for a profit.”

More analysis from:

GigaOm

paidContent

mediapost.com

Via kenyatta:

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) vs Ghost in the Shell (1995)

The FJP (I pronounce that like ‘The Wu’) posted Rob G. Wilson and Kirby Ferguson’s “Everything is a Remix: The Matrix” earlier today which shows how much of the iconic imagery of The Matrix was created by aping scenes from the classic 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell.

Also, I just posted a photoset about how the classic Fritz Lang film ‘Metropolis’ actually owed it’s signature look to an earlier Russian film, Aelita.

Similarly, the visually striking title sequence to David Fincher’s ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ seems to also owe much to the opening credits of Ghost in the Shell when placed alongside each other in the photoset above.

All of this serves to remake Kirby Ferguson’s point with his ‘Everything is a Remix’ series: while established content IP holders like to treat remix as near piracy, mimicry has always existed (good thing) but without attribution (bad thing), especially among Hollywood’s own practitioners.

So let’s move the ball forward. What if instead of considering any of these examples ‘ripoffs’, we treated this imagery (the framing of a shot, the pace of movement) the same way that hip hop treats samples and beats?

If the imagery is effective in conveying a particular thought or emotion, why not allow that as a building block of ‘content’?

FJP: Agreed. Where do we sign up?

This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!

Message on the home page of BTJunkie, one of the Internet’s largest BitTorrent indices, indicating that they are voluntarily shutting down.

As TorrentFreak notes:

The site was never involved in any legal action, and to keep it this way the site’s operators decided to shut the site down for good today…

…Talking to TorrentFreak, BTjunkie’s founder said that the legal actions against other file-sharing sites such as MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay played an important role in making the difficult decision. Witnessing all the trouble colleagues got into was cause for a lot of worry and stress, and those will now belong to the past.

TechSpot adds that other popular file sharing sites have also shut down and/or blocked US traffic to their servers in the wake of January’s MegaUpload raid.

Speaking of MegaUpload, TorrentFreak reports that New Zealand’s counter-terrorism police were used to ambush the company founder’s mansion. 

Read more simply: counter-terrorism police were used to enforce a copyright case.