After all of the lobbying Disney did for the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (read as Mickey Mouse Protection Act), there’s some poetic justice in seeing them exposed to a $2 billion lawsuit for copyright and trademark infringement.
Copyright 
Michael Geist has an excellent BBC article on a recent report purportedly documenting inadequate copyright protections outside of the United States. But as Geist explains, in many cases it’s US law that’s out of touch:
Countries that have preserved their public domain by maintaining their term of copyright protection at the international treaty standard of life of the author plus an additional fifty years are criticised for not matching the US extension to life plus 70 years.
There are literally hundreds of similar examples, as countries from Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America are criticised for not adopting the DMCA, not extending the term of copyright, not throwing enough people in jail, or creating too many exceptions to support education and other societal goals.
In fact, the majority of the world’s population finds itself on the list, with 23 of the world’s 30 most populous countries targeted for criticism (the exceptions are the UK, Germany, Ethiopia, Iran, France, Congo, and Myanmar).
Countries singled out for criticism should not be deceived into thinking that their laws are failing to meet an international standard, no matter what US lobby groups say.
Rather, those countries should know that their approach – and the criticism that it inevitably brings from the US – places them in very good company.
The really funny thing about this (aside from us being on a list with Iran, the Congo, and Myanmar) is that on multiple occasions I’ve heard it argued that we needed to pass the DMCA and the CTEA to comply with international treaty obligations, as though we’re somehow behind the rest of the world in expanding copyright protections. But of course, those “treaty obligations” were largely imposed at the behest of the American copyright lobby.
But I can – to be the first to link to Mike Masnick’s very interesting post on the “can’t compete with free” meme.
It seems like a genuine problem content producers have, competing with those who would share content without regard to copyright law. But Mike points out that they have the same problem as the producer of any good. Competition drives their profits to zero, forcing them to innovate, which content producers seem reluctant to do.
In the comments, Mike is defending himself against some meritorious challenges, though. The marginal cost of distributing intellectual goods may be (effectively) nothing, but the marginal cost of the goods themselves is something above that. Content producers are looking at competion from those who would offer the same products at below marginal cost.
Google has lost its copyright appeal against Belgian newspaper publishers. There seem to be conflicting reports about what exactly Google was found liable for. Here’s the WSJ:
A Belgian court ruled Tuesday that Internet search engine Google Inc. violated Belgian copyright law when it published snippets and links to Belgian newspapers on its Web site without permission.
And here’s the AP:
A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 mostly French-language newspapers that complained the search engine’s “cached” links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis.
Snippets and entire cached pages are very different things. But whatever the case, what this case highlights is how unsettled copyright law is as it applies to search engines (and I’ll limit myself to just the U.S.). As for snippets, sure, there’s Kelly v. Arriba Soft, which found that indexing photographs and displaying their thumbnails is a fair use. But that’s just one circuit’s opinion, which is very persuasive, but not controlling in other circuits. Then there’s Perfect 10 v. Google, which cuts in the opposite direction.
When I was growing up, my parents Harper’s subscription seemed to go on in perpetuity. Occasionally it would have an article of interest to me; I remember one short story in particular, about a chap who became a mouse when he meditated, and decided to stay that way. But for the most part it was all dense grown-up stuff, like choral music and art history.
I never grew in to an appreciation of Harper’s, I’m afraid. I comment on a recent essay here.
Lawrence Lessig has a new half-hour presentation on his blog where he outlines his opposition to the Copyright Office’s recommendations on orphan copyright works that were the basis for the proposed Orphan Works Act of 2006, and which were very similar to the proposal Bridget Dooling and I made. He also proposes his own alternative solution, which is much like the proposed Public Domain Enhancement Act he helped craft and which Bridget and I have critiqued. I find his new articulation to still be completely unworkable. Let me explain.
My lefty alter ego Tom Lee comments on my post on video game piracy:
To some extent I think Tim is right: music is a unique case. But that’s mostly because the industry that arose to distribute music was so bloated, stupid and inefficient. Having claimed nearly all of the profit from retail music sales, the record companies are the part of the music industry that’ll withering first in the face of rampant piracy. That’s shielding the actual music creators from piracy’s effects–for now, anyway. Successful but non-superstar artists found different, largely concert- and merch-based means of earning a living a while ago.
But the lack of a large, parasitic & evil distribution mechanism (or at least one as evil) doesn’t mean that the videogame industry can be saved by copyright any more than the record companies can (the question of whether it should be saved strikes me as fairly irrelevant). The game companies’ business is vulnerable, too, and will ultimately have to transform itself. The wealth of DRM options available to game-makers and the console vendors’ closed systems give them a more luxurious position, but with the rise of networked consoles and the maturation of a market for pirate technologies like Alcohol 120% and console modchips, that era is coming to an end.
But that’s okay. The bloated budgets of the high-profile videogame franchises is a bug, not a feature. Look at the success of the videogames Burger King has been selling–they’re short and simple, but they only cost a few bucks and the restaurant has sold 3.2 million of them. I’m sure they were envisioned as a promotional tool more than anything else, but now BK is claiming they helped their bottom line. There’s clearly room for growth in this segment of the market. The idea that every videogame has to be a (shooter|RPG|platformer|sports game|GTA clone) and cost $60 is ridiculous.
I think there are actually two conceptually distinct questions here. One is the empirical question of whether rampant piracy will undermine the traditional business model for music, video games, etc. The other is a policy question about whether that process is something we ought to be cheering on, or if we should be looking for ways to reverse the process.
Ars reports on what seems to be a genuine case of piracy choking off a popular gaming title:
Sports Interactive had made Eastside Hockey Manager 2007 available only via digital distribution in an attempt to give the game a wider reach in Europe and North America. Unfortunately for Sports Interactive, the end result was a hacked version of the game that was quickly distributed via BitTorrent.
“The orders came in a drizzle, rather than a flood,” wrote Jacobson. “We scratched our heads trying to work out what had gone wrong. And then someone pointed out that the game was being pirated, and was available as a torrent from lots of different pirating sites. Then sat there and watched as the claimed amount of downloads on those sites went up and up, as sales stayed static.”
The end result was a popular game that had “more licenses than any other hockey game in history,” according to Jacobson, but was apparently so widely distributed over peer-to-peer networks that the company was not able to make back the development or licensing costs. Although Jacobson left open the possibility that SI may resurrect Eastside Hockey Manager in the future, he said that all development on the game has been halted and the programmers and others that worked on the title have been reassigned to other projects within the company.
In some industries, such as music, I’m sympathetic to the argument that we’d get along just fine without copyright. But as I’ve said before, I think there are other categories of content that would be significantly impoverished without copyright protections. Video games, which are subject to soaring costs appears to be in the latter category.
The New Yorker has a dispatch from Jefferey Toobin updating us on the Google Book Search case. It’s a good primer if you haven’t been following this issue, and also fills in some details if you have. Interesting tidbits include the fact that they haven’t started witness depositions yet, and the parties won’t be able to make motions for summary judgment for another year. More interesting is the fact that both Google and the plaintiffs (authors and publishers) are sure this will settle out of court.
“The suits that have been filed are a business negotiation that happens to be going on in the courts,” [Google’s] Marissa Mayer told me. “We think of it as a business negotiation that has a large legal-system component to it.” According to Pat Schroeder, the former congresswoman, who is the president of the Association of American Publishers, “This is basically a business deal. Let’s find a way to work this out. It can be done. Google can license these rights, go to the rights holder of these books, and make a deal.”
Lawrence Lessig points out that while a settlement would be good for both parties, it could create a practical precedent that if one wanted to start a book-scanning project, one had to license the books–a lot like the precedent set by the MP3.com case that was ultimately settled out of court.
Another interesting bit about the technology itself is how Google plans to rely on linking from the wider web to give the information in books the context its search algorithms need to produce good results:
“Web sites are part of a network, and that’s a significant part of how we rank sites in our search—how much other sites refer to the others.” But, he added, “Books are not part of a network. There is a huge research challenge, to understand the relationship between books. … We just started, and we need to make these books networked, and we need people to help us do that,” [Google’s Dan] Clancy said.
Chris Anderson points out another thriving sector of the music industry:
Music as a digital product enjoys near-zero costs of production and distribution–classic abundance economics. When costs are near zero, you might as well make the price zero, too, something thousands of bands have figured out.
Meanwhile, the one thing that you can’t digitize and distribute with full fidelity is a live show. That’s scarcity economics. No wonder the average price for a ticket was $61 last year, up 8%–in an era when digital products are commodities, there’s a premium on experience. No surprise that bands are increasingly giving away their recorded music as marketing for their concerts, which offer something no MP3 can match.
Live performance is the fastest growing part of the music industry (up 16% in 2006 to a record $3.6 billion in North America) and with services such as SonicLiving (brilliantly described as a “digital-to-analog lifestyle converter”) and TourFilter that notify you when some band in your library is coming to town, that’s only going to grow more.
So there’s big money in live shows (92% of the Rolling Stones’ revenues comes from performance, not recorded music). Sadly for the labels, they don’t get any of it. No wonder they’re so against free music. It only helps the bands (and consumers)!
When discussing the economics of copyright, it needs to be constantly kept in mind that the interests of artists and the companies that distribute their content are not always aligned. The distributor only benefits from the revenues generated by the product being sold. The artist, however, also receives publicity benefits from wide distribution of his product. It makes perfect sense, then, that many bands especially up-and-coming ones put a higher priority on getting their music to as many fans as possible than they do to maximizing revenue in the short term. Being less concerned about piracy is one aspect of this phenomenon. But even in a world with no piracy, many bands would find it in their interest to give a lot of their music away for free in order to build their fan base.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.