Michael Carrier, a law professor specializing in intellectual property law, was kind enough to let us know about a paper he recently wrote analyzing the Swedish court’s ruling in The Pirate Bay Case, and seeing how the reasoning set forth might apply to two other services: Grokster and Google (GOOG). Grokster, of course, was a key player in a similar US lawsuit, that eventually resulted in the service shutting down. While many believe that the Supreme Court said Grokster was illegal, in reality, the ruling on the case only found that Grokster could be liable as a third party.

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I knew this was common years ago, but I honestly had no clue that modern sports leagues were so clueless as to think that it made sense to blackout local TV broadcasting if the attendance at the event wasn’t a sell-out. Those rules were from a time (apparently still existing for some) where people actually thought that being able to see a game on TV would mean fewer people coming out to the actual game.

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Last year, we talked about some language in a contract being used by a company that was supposedly trying to help copyright holders track down content being shared online, for the purpose of sending out threatening “pre-settlement” letters. The contract appeared to indicate that the copyright holders were giving the tracking company permission to put their works on file sharing programs, for the sake of “catching” people downloading the content:

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Plenty of studies have shown, over and over again, that in an emerging market, the last thing you want is patent protection. It slows down innovation and adoption drastically. That’s because in a brand new emerging market, the bigger issue is actually figuring out how to get the market established.

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It appears that some (certainly not all) in the mainstream press still seems to have problems understanding the value of getting people to talk about what they reported on. They seem to come at this viewpoint from the old line of thinking that a reporter reported on the story and that was it. The story was done.

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Lots of attention is being paid today to an article in the Guardian about a new study claiming that illegal file sharing has collapsed in the UK and is being replaced by streaming music found on YouTube and through services like Spotify. The premise of the article is that now that kids have alternatives, they’re willing to dump unauthorized file sharing and get by with streaming.

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Ah, those collection societies just never learn, do they? We’ve discussed in the past how ASCAP once threatened the Girl Scouts for singing songs around the campfire, but in the past few years it’s been ASCAP’s counterpart in the UK that’s been in the news the most for things like threatening small business owners after calling them on the phone and saying they hear music in the background or threatening a stable owner for playing the radio to her horses. I guess ASCAP was feeling a bit left out.

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The NY Times (NYT) is running an article about a bunch of illustrators complaining that Google (GOOG) offered to promote their work for free as special skins for its Chrome browser. The concern? That Google wouldn’t pay them to promote their work.

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A week and a half ago, Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton made some news for saying that nothing good had come from the internet, period. Plenty of online sites (including ours) took him to task for that, wondering how one gets to be the CEO of a major content company without understanding the internet.

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When we first heard about President Obama’s “broadband” stimulus, we worried that it was nothing more than a boondoggle for incumbents rather than an actual broadband plan. One of his top advisors, Blair Levin, effectively acknowledged that by admitting that the stimulus package really had little to do with stimulating broadband, and a lot to do with stimulating jobs.

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One of the most common sayings in economics is “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” And, it’s true: Everything you do has some sort of cost in terms of opportunity costs. That was the point of that statement. Unfortunately, however, it appears that some have tried twisting that statement into saying that “free” doesn’t work as a part of economics.

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Another weekend goes by and another old school newspaper guy writes a long screed condemning Google (GOOG) as a menace hellbent on destroying all that is good and right in the news business. This one, by Henry Porter in The Guardian, is particularly amusing due to the logical inconsistencies within.

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A few weeks back, someone pointed me to a Twitter message where one Twitter user was (jokingly) accusing another of copyright infringement for repeating a message. While the situation was amusing, you knew it was only a matter of time until the question became more serious.

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There have been a series of ridiculous articles lately claiming that, with the collapse of some newspapers recently, somehow investigative reporting and local coverage won’t work, meaning an era of corruption and the collapse of democracy. Fortunately, some are demonstrating the fallacies underlying these proclamations of doom.

Jay Rosen has been running an interesting experiment trying to find out just how many truly local stories an average newspaper includes in its paper, between all the national wire service stories. A look through a recent Seattle Times issue showed a grand total of seven locally produced stories. And a look at an issue of the Chicago Tribune found a total of eight locally produced stories. We’re not talking about huge numbers here.

And, in fact, the finding of eight stories in the Trib comes from Geoff Dougherty, a guy who created quite a stir in newspaper circles when he claimed he could provide the equivalent (or better) local coverage of the Chicago Tribune for just $2 million a year, and provided the spreadsheet to back it up. And he’s not just talking in theory. He’s doing it. Today. For much less than the Tribune (which is bankrupt).

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It’s sometimes quite amusing to watch how various economic ecosystems grow, where multiple companies have symbiotic relationships, and then start to freak out when they think that other companies in the ecosystem are somehow earning “too much.” That, of course, is at the heart of many recent battles we’ve seen–from net neutrality (where the ISPs think Google is earning too much) to the music industry (where record labels think ISPs and Apple are earning too much). But sometimes it leads to rather amusing contrasts. For example, up in Canada, the entertainment industry is complaining that ISPs earn too much, and therefore are pushing for laws that would require broadband providers to pay money to the entertainment industry to develop new content.

But contrast that to the situation in the U.K., where there’s an ongoing push for content companies to pay extra to help subsidize the cost of broadband deployments. The argument there is that all the content that’s being put online is creating a drain on broadband network resources. But, isn’t that exactly what the content creators in Canada are saying is a “free ride” for the ISPs?

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