2008 January :: Copyright Reform

Australian govt draft says piracy stats are made up

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/54
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) January 2008

A private draft prepared by the Australian Institute of Criminology for the Attorney-General’s Department says that piracy stats aren’t backed up by fact and that copyright holders “failed to explain” how they came up with financial loss figures.

The draft questions whether the techniques used by copyright holders (record companies etc.) to determine piracy statistics are valid and if the data they come up with is accurate.

The Business Software Association, an international software body, claimed that in the year 2005 piracy in Australia cost them $361 million. The draft says these figures are “unverified and epistemologically unreliable.” It even goes so far as to call some of the stats used by copyright holders “absurd,” and adds that “of greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law.”

MIPI Logo According to the draft, the RIAA’s Australian arm, the MIPI did not know how they calculated piracy stats, because the IPFI never told them. Strange? Maybe that’s just how things work with international organisations.

The reasoning behind the statements in the draft is that anti-piracy organisations calculate losses by counting each pirated good that is sold. They are making the assumption that each person who buys a pirated CD, for example, would have bought an original one instead. This cannot be backed up, as many of those people might not have been able to buy, or might not have bought the original CD.

The draft concluded with a statement asking for statistics that cannot be verified to be withdrawn. “Either these statistics must be withdrawn or the purveyors of these statistics must supply valid and transparent substantiation.”

Source: TorrentFreak

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Cease and Desist Censorship

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/cease_and_desist_censorship
Posted by kfogel | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) January 2008

A US court has found that copyright law can cover "cease-and-desist letters", that is, letters sent by copyright holders telling someone to stop distributing copyrighted content.

Cease-and-desist letters are frequently used as tools of censorship (as Chilling Effects has ably documented). A common scenario is that someone gets upset at having something of theirs quoted, and is able to shut down the quotation by claiming copyright over its text and then sending C&D letters to anyone who displays it. The quoted text is not royalty-generating for the copyright holder (not that it would excuse censorship even if it were); rather, the sender of the C&D is simply using copyright law as a tool to prevent the publication of potentially embarrassing information — that is, to censor.

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MPAA Botched Study On College Downloading

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/52
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) January 2008

“The Associated Press reports that in a 2005 study the MPAA conducted through an outfit called LEK, the movie trade association vastly overestimated how much college students engage in illegal movie downloading. Instead of ‘44 percent of the industry’s domestic losses’ owing to their piracy, it’s 15 percent — and one expert is quoted as saying even that number is way too high. Dan ‘Sammy’ Glickman’s gang admitted to the mishap, blaming ‘human error,’ and promised ‘immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report.’”

Source: Slashdot

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ISP Filters & Copyright Extension Defeated In EU

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/51
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) January 2008

“Last November, EU regulators in the European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education began looking at how culture affects the economy and recommended a ‘balance between the opportunities for access to cultural events and content and intellectual property’ saying that ‘criminalizing consumers so as to combat digital piracy is not the right solution.’ Industry lobbyists, of course, immediately sprang into action to try to turn that around, writing amendments that would set up mandatory ISP copyright filters and extend EU copyrights to match the USA’s life-plus-70 term. Thankfully, the committee rejected all of those amendments: ‘Clearly, they’re not going to let the ITRE or the European recording industry push them around, which is great news for Europeans. Now if we could only get the US Congress to show as much spine as the French (ouch).’”

Source: Slashdot

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Privacy Commissioner Criticizes Canadian DMCA

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/50
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) January 2008

“Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, has criticized the proposed Canadian DMCA in a public letter to Jim Prentice, the Canadian Minister of Industry. Specifically, she’s asking them not to protect any DRM from circumvention that gathers and transmits personal data, because that would give abusive DRM makers a legal cudgel to use against anyone who exposes them. The proposed bill, which was recently delayed due to heavy opposition, is thought to contain DMCA-style anti-circumvention provisions that would make it illegal to investigate or remove intrusive DRM, even if that DRM was violating Canadian privacy laws.”

Source: Slashdot

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Musicians Censoring Themselves

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/musicians_censoring_themselves
Posted by kfogel | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) January 2008

Reader Ben Collins-Sussman sent us this letter after watching a group of hobbyist banjo players in an Internet forum shy away from sharing music because they were worried about copyright issues. It's hard to add to Ben's eloquent outrage, but we should step back and ask: how did we get here? When did the inconceivable become everyday? When did musicians start censoring themselves as a matter of course? (Notice how copyright issues actually come up twice, independently, in the Internet forum discussion Ben points to. That's two times in a discussion that's only nineteen posts long. It would be nice if this were somehow exceptional... but sadly, it's not.)

Here's Ben's letter:

I frequent exciting websites like www.banjohangout.org, where banjoists from all over the world talk about banjos, songs we like, how to play things, and so on.

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A Classroom Teacher on Copying vs Plagiarism

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/classroom_teacher_on_copying_vs_plagiarism
Posted by jessica.ferris | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) January 2008

photo by Colin Lieberman

Jessica Ferris is a writer, performer, and teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. After reading the article "New York University Confuses Filesharing with Plagiarism", she wrote this response, exploring the process by which copying and plagiarism get mixed up with each other. [Note: this article first appeared in October; we are reprinting it due to heavy traffic.]

So an NYU provost confused filesharing with plagiarism. Many people do. How come?

I have a hunch that one of the contributing factors is the "Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" Syndrome.

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A Music Teacher Describes How Copyright Hinders Music Education

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/teaching_music_under_copyright
Posted by junderhill | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) January 2008

(Translations: 中文)

Janet Underhill has been teaching music for 30 years at a private school in Chicago. She has taught piano, voice, guitar, recorder and general music to students of all ages, from kindergarten to graduate school. In this article, she tells how copyright prevents her from providing her students the best possible materials. [Note: this article first appeared in 2005; we are reprinting it due to heavy traffic.]

I teach general music. My goal is to engage all of my students in music making, to develop their musical skills, and then to send them on to their choice of band, chorus, private lessons, ensembles. Hopefully, my students will continue to connect with music, singing and playing, as part of their lives.

I need materials that are formatted for the elementary student that will foster the development of musical skills as well as provide the materials for enjoyable singing experiences. Such music should contain the changes that the beginning guitar student can handle.

True, there are plenty of songs written expressly for the music classroom. They come with permission to copy for classroom use; they're cute, clever, integrated with the broader curriculum, written in the service of math, social science, English -- and have no connection whatsoever to the wider world of parents, grandparents, the community and the culture. The songs are disconnected, expressively flat, remarkably forgettable. They cannot be shared with parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles. They don't exist outside of the walls of the school. The children sense this, and do not take them very seriously.

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The Promise of a Post-Copyright World

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/promise
Posted by kfogel | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) January 2008

(Translations: Italiano, Polski.)

[Note: this was one of the first articles to appear on QuestionCopyright.org; we are reprinting it due to heavy traffic.]

There is one group of people not shocked by the record industry's policy of suing randomly chosen file sharers: historians of copyright. They already know what everyone else is slowly finding out: that copyright was never about paying artists for their work, and that far from being designed to support creators, copyright was designed by and for distributors — that is, publishers, which today includes record companies. But now that the Internet has given us a world without distribution costs, it no longer makes any sense to restrict sharing in order to pay for centralized distribution. Abandoning copyright is now not only possible, but desirable. Both artists and audiences would benefit, financially and aesthetically. In place of corporate gatekeepers determining what can and can't be distributed, a much finer-grained filtering process would allow works to spread based on their merit alone. We would see a return to an older and richer cosmology of creativity, one in which copying and borrowing openly from others' works is simply a normal part of the creative process, a way of acknowledging one's sources and of improving on what has come before. And the old canard that artists need copyright to earn a living would be revealed as the pretense it has always been.

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DMCA Used To Try And Silence Movie Reviewer

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/46
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) January 2008

BJ and Julia Davis, director and screenwriter of deathless cinematic masterpiece Forget About It, are attempting to silence Gregory Conley’s negative review with a Mardi Gras of meaningless claims, such as “bashing our actors” and the classic “linking to our websites without authorization.”

Source: Wired