After scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site thePirateBay.org composed a colorful message for “all publishers” of college textbooks, warning them that “myself and all other students are tired of getting” ripped off. All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, [...]
“The Dark Knight” made a mind-warping, record-breaking $155.3 million at the box office over the weekend. Thousands of people waited hours in line to sit in a dark room and watch the movie with strangers. They didn’t have to wait in line, though–they could have watched it at home.
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A whole bunch of folks have sent in the “debate” that was held on the BBC Web site last week, starting with regular columnist Bill Thompson trashing Virgin Media, a U.K.-based broadband provider, for agreeing to send out warning “notices” to folks that the entertainment industry claims are file sharing.
To catch college students trading copyrighted songs online, the Recording Industry Association of America uses the same file-sharing software that online pirates love, an RIAA representative told The Chronicle at the organization’s offices during a private demonstration of how it catches alleged music pirates. He also said the group does not single out specific colleges in its investigations.
Like David going 15 rounds with Goliath, StreamCast Networks Inc. battled the biggest companies in the entertainment industry for nearly six and a half years before finally dropping the slingshot and hitting the dirt. The file-sharing company filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition last week, sending it down the road to liquidation. But the company’s demise wasn’t triggered by Hollywood studios or the major record labels, as much as they would have liked to have done so.
More than half of young people copy the songs on their hard drives to friends and even more swap CD copies, according to research that reveals the huge challenge home copying poses to a music industry already battling Internet file-sharing. Three decades after cassette decks first allowed people to make free music tapes for friends, a study by the industry group British Music Rights suggests home copying remains just as ingrained in U.K. culture.
Japan’s four big ISP organizations have taken a logical step toward controlling file sharing: Flagrant violators will be warned via email and then disconnected, the Yomiuri Shimbun says. Although this practice will horrify the content-should-be-free community, it’s actually a far more sensible approach than, say, the RIAA’s suing sharers. It is also, presumably, a smart step for ISPs struggling to control the exploding use of bandwidth.
Michael Eisner gave an interview at SXSW on Tuesday and at one point he was asked about copyright issues. He responded with a strongly pro-copyright statement:
“I have a long history, obviously, of believing in copyright. I think basically what separated this country from the rest of the world was patents and copyrights. President Lincoln introduced a lot of this, fought for (the idea that) to pay people for their intellectual work was no different than paying them for their physical work. And nobody would think twice about paying someone for their physical work.”
Eisner has been repeating this bizarre and near totally incorrect claim about Lincoln for years. In fact, in 2002 he wrote an editorial for the Financial Times with the bizarre claim that Abraham Lincoln would hate file sharing. Then, last year, in another interview he talked about how important intellectual property was in the U.S. since the time of Lincoln. It certainly would appear that he has Lincoln on the brain when it comes to intellectual property. There are just a few problems with this, with the first one being that Lincoln had almost nothing to do with intellectual property laws in this country.
A few days ago I came across an op-ed submission that called for file sharing to be decriminalized. The editors here decided not to run it, but it intrigued me for a couple of reasons. First, the author, Karl Sigfrid, is a member of the Swedish Parliament from the Moderate Party–a pro-business party that’s akin to this country’s Libertarians (except in Sweden they’re more than just a fringe group). Second, although he covered much of the same ground earlier this year in a Swedish paper, Sigfrid’s new piece added another provocative contention: that unauthorized downloading isn’t actually theft.
Comcast, the second largest Internet service provider in the country, is making the controversial and aggressive case that Internet service providers should be allowed to serve as traffic cops on the Internet. In an 80-page filing with the Federal Communications Commission yesterday, the company says it has a right to clamp down on the use of peer-to-peer file-sharing programs on its network to preserve the smooth flow of bits to and from all its customers. The filing was in response to an FCC complaint from network neutrality groups in November after the Associated Press revealed that Comcast was stopping some customers from using BitTorrent, a file-sharing program often used to swap copyrighted copies of songs and movies over the Internet.
While the IFPI and the RIAA have been actively pushing for ISP liability for file-sharing, it appears some in the industry are taking it even further. U2’s manager for 30 years, Paul McGuinness, gave a talk at the Midem conference where he blamed Silicon Valley’s “hippie values” for creating the problem and demanded that tech companies of all stripes start paying the recording industry. He’s talking not only about ISPs, but also Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and basically every other successful tech company. There are so many problems with this, it’s difficult to know where to begin.
More and more musicians seem to be recognizing what fans have been trying to tell them since Napster first came on the scene nearly a decade ago: It’s not file sharing that hurts the music business, it’s treating your fans badly that hurts the business.
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