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A Southern California college student faces 10 years in prison for violating section 1201 of the Digital Millinium Copyright Act, which forbids circumvention of electronic copy protection schemes.

The Entertainment Consumers Association accuses him of illegally modifying game consoles.

A possible 10 years in prison for tinkering.

Why is copyright infringement punishable with a jail sentence?

Repeal the DMCA, completely.

Stop putting DRM systems in software and electronics.

Stop “licensing” products to consumers.

And get the ESA out of the copyfight completely.

Warner Music issued a DMCA takedown notice against one of Lawrence Lessigs presentations that was posted online.  Here is that presentation, reposted.  I recommend watching every minute of it, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two:

I want to know who at Warner Music thought it was a good idea to assault the founder of Creative Commons, and one of the most renowned free culture activists in the world about copyright policy.  Surely a Stanford University Law professor, board member of the Software Freedom Law Center and a former board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation would know a thing or two about fair use.  And this is fair use.

Consider the irony in this.

I can’t help but scream out of sheer frustration with the dictators of read-only culture.  Situation like this, this and this, don’t help those feelings.

Warner Bros. Acquires The Pirate Bay | TorrentFreak.

After years of hostility, lawsuits, police raids and heated invective between the two groups, the Pirate Bay has today announced they have settled their differences with US media conglomerate Warner Bros. The largest BitTorrent tracker has sold out to Hollywood and the two have agreed a deal.

The world as I know it would be doomed if this actually happened.

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Last month, the Author’s Guild threatened Amazon over the Kindle 2’s ability to read books aloud.  They claimed that the text-to-speech feature violated copyrights on audiobooks, and went so far as to call the feature “a new format of an audiobook”.

Even though text-to-speech has been around for well over a decade.

Now the deal is that Amazon is giving publishers the the right to decide if their kindle books will allow text-to-speech or not.  And that apparently includes Kindle books that are in the public domain.

I want to address something here.

The Author’s Guild made noise about this issue because they were afraid that this feature would threaten revenue from audiobooks.  I say that if indeed an electronic voice can sell better than a professional reader, audiobooks are done for, and we need not worry.

Either way, this situation is shining a bright light on a broader issue.  That is, the simple fact that these “representatives” of rights holders have much too much power in deciding what consumers can and cannot do with their own property.

On a side note, the Entertainment Software Association is a good example of a “representative” mafia that needs to be abolished.

“If I have all this money they claim, someone has apparently stolen it from me.”

That was Peter Sunde’s twitter response to IFPI’s Peter Danowsky on his claim that the Pirate Bay was “organized crime on a grand scale” and that they netted “significant revenues.”

Day three of the trial consisted of a lot of talk about damages, and the plaintiffs argued that the amount of the damages (13 million USD) reflects the cost of aquiring a global distribution license, and a global preview license (for the content that was leaked before air date).

Because of yesterdays developments regarding the charge of assisting in copyright infringement, the defense called for their clients to be acquitted.

Gottfrid Svartholm’s lawyer made the point that users control the content on The Pirate Bay, and the four defendants have no control over it.

Per E Samuelsson, Lundström’s lawyer, pointed to an EU directive regarding e-commerce:

Section 42, EU directive 2000/31/EC:

The exemptions from liability established in this Directive cover only cases where the activity of the information society service[e-commerce service] provider is limited to the technical process of operating and giving access to a communication network over which information made available by third parties is transmitted or temporarily stored, for the sole purpose of making the transmission more efficient; this activity is of a mere technical, automatic and passive nature, which implies that the information society service provider has neither knowledge of nor control over the information which is transmitted or stored.

While it can easily be argued that the Pirate Bay does not control the content on it’s site, they surely know about it.

Day three finished early, and so far the trial is ahead of schedule.  It looks like the Pirate Bay is winning.

Day one of the trial against the Pirate Bay saw the lead prosecutor Håkan Roswal, who claimed to be an expert in computer crime, fail to start his powerpoint presentation.  though a trivial situation, it’s a fun example of just how out-of-touch the prosecution is.

The defendents, Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, and Fredrik Neij, who have been extremely confident that they’ll win the trial, all pleaded not-guilty.

The charges amount to assisting in copyright infringement on a commercial-scale, and the plaintiffs (Warner Bros., MGM, EMI, Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG and Universal), are claiming thirteen million dollars in damages.

Right off the bat, day two of the trial went very well for the accused.  According to Fredrik Neij, the prosecution misunderstood how BitTorrent works, and he pointed out that Roswal couldn’t prove the torrents presented as evidence the day before were in fact using The Pirate Bay as a tracker.  The prosecution had to alter it’s charge of ‘assisting copyright infringement’ to read ‘assisting in making available infringing material’.

In yet another ridiculous case of people caring about things that don’t matter, the Authors Guild is making the claim that a new text-to-speech feature in Amazon’s Kindle 2 violates audiobook copyrights.

Paul Aiken, exo of the Authors Guild:

“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud, that’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

yes, he actually said that.

If Amazon were bundling the audiobook with the written copy, and not handing out the royalties, then I’d understand. But there is a huge difference between an audiobook and a text-to-speech reading of a book. the text-to-speech on the Kindle 2 is an electronic voice, like MacinTalk or Microsoft Sam, not Morgan Freeman sitting in a recording studio with a bag full of cough drops.

another did-he-really-just-say-that remark from Aiken:

“They [e-books and audio books] are derivative works of a book and fall under the copyright, this [the text to speech capability] is a new format of an audio book.”

The Kindle’s text-to-speech feature is not a recording of any book, it is a library of code, referenced by a complex algorithm that sounds out words, then transmits the sounds electronically to the built in speaker. Nothing is ever recorded on a non-volatile basis.

Neil Gaimen [citation not necessary] had something to say as well:

“When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one’s going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors’ societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what’s good about them with it.”

The trial, set to begin on February 16th is the culmination of a two-year investigation into The Pirate Bay by Swedish police. The Pirate Bay stands accused of assisting in copyright infringement, and the plaintiffs are claiming over $100 million in damages.

The Pirate Bay is expressly confident that they will win the trial:

“In case we lose the pending trial (yeah right) there will still not be any changes to the site. The Pirate Bay will keep operating just as always. We’ve been here for years and we will be here for many more.”

you can follow the trial here.

New documents revealing ACTA details have been leaked, and there is some good news.  But let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

Apparently, The United States and Japan want the possibility for criminal sanctions to be brought against any commercial-scale copyright and/or trademark infringement, even if it has “no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain.”

This is certainly targeting sites that use a P2P protocol for sharing files, like The Pirate Bay, or Gnutella.

Next up, a proposal that would impose criminal penalties against unauthorized ‘camcording’ of ‘audiovisual’ works:

Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied against any person who, without authorization of the holder of copyright or related rights in a motion picture or other audiovisual work, knowingly uses an audiovisual recording device to transmit or make a copy of or transmits to the public the motion picture or other audiovisual work, or any part thereof, from a performance of the motion picture or other audiovisual work in a motion picture exhibition facility open to the public.

So, basically, you would be fined if you recorded a movie with a camcorder.  Notice it does not mention specifically a theater setting.  I can imagine a situation similar to the Stephanie Lenz debacle here.  This next one goes all the way back to the first leak of the ACTA proposal, and is perhaps one of the most Orwellian policies in ACTA:  border measures.

With a view to establishing whether an intellectual property right has been infringed under national law and in accordance with national provisions on the protection of personal data, commercial and industrial secrecy and professional and administrative confidentiality, the competent authorities have detained infringing goods, shall inform the right holder of the names and addresses of the consignor, importer, exporter, or consignee, and provide to the right holder a description of the goods, the quantity of the goods, and, if known, the country of origin and name and addresses of producers of the goods.

‘Competent authorities’ would have the right to seize any material in transit(at the airport/checkpoint/dock) that is, or that contains, Intellectual Property infringement.  And according to Law Professor Michael Geist, who is somewhat privy to the information in these leaks, they can keep that material for up to one year before releasing it, and they only need an accusation by the Rights Holder (the ones powerful enough to enforce this policy, corporations) to warrant the seizure of your property.

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Manuel Medina Ortega, a member of the European Parliament for the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party, has released his report on piracy(PDF). His wish list is very similiar to that of the RIAA/IFPI ACTA wishlist.

Number 31, under “Implementation of rights”, Medina calls for:

“the setting up in the individual Member States of administrative authorities responsible, on instruction from rightholders and using a graduated approach, for the enforcement of copyright on the internet;”

That’s a fancy way of saying he wants a 3-strikes law enforcible across all countries in the EU. Keep in mind that no proof is needed for an ISP to disconnect a customer, just the word of the rightsholder (which will almost always be a corporation with an army of lawyers begging for the chance to take every penny you’ve ever earned, just because you downloaded a single mp3 from the Pirate Bay).

Number 35, under “Implementation of rights”:

“Encourages the use of work identification and recognition technologies with a view to distinguishing more easily between legal and pirated products;”

Here, Medina is endorsing digital rights management systems. It would seem also that Medina want to criminalize all P2P usage, infringing or not:

(Under “Sanctions and the protection of copyright and related rights holders”) “So the activity of internet users who send files to their peers must be regarded as an illegal act of communication to the public without the possibility of exceptions being applied.”

Under the “Explanatory Statement”, in big bold text:

The nature of copyright must not be allowed to change as a result of technological progress

The above heading goes against logic in every way.

The European Parliament has voted against 3 strikes proposals twice before, but this report is being touted as a much more reasonable approach to copyright law. I don’t see that.