Source: http://blog.pff.org/archives/ip/
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 02:43:56+00:00

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The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) just released a useful new study entitled Policy Complements to the Strengthening of IPRs in Developing Countries. It significantly undermines the claims of "public interest" advocates who wail that they just know intuitively that improved legal protection for intellectual property rights (IPRs) are merely one more means through which developed countries oppress developing countries. While such claims often sound lofty and compassionate, very ugly prejudices often lurk beneath them. Fortunately, by actually studying real data, the OECD found that such claims are wrong as applied to actual developing countries: "[T]the results point to a tendency for IPR reform to deliver positive economic results."
Continue reading New OECD Study Finds That Improved IPR Protections Benefit Developing Countries . . .
Over at Digital Society, Jim DeLong's Filesharing in Underdeveloped Nations: Let's Take from the Poor and Give to the Rich does a fine job of ripping apart the latest round of nonsense from the economically challenged blog TechDirt. I won't spoil the fun, but suffice it to say that Jim shreds TechDirt "arguments" with casual ease.
Jim's piece also highlights a fundamental problem with TechDirt's childish, copyright-hating worldview: TechDirt brews its venom from an ugly blend of hubris and cowardice.
Continue reading Hubris, Cowardice, File-sharing, and TechDirt . . .
In the National Law Journal, Dan Brenner's piece, Apps decision: no big deal, provides a thoughtful debunking of the hype that surrounded this summer's decision by the Librarian of Congress to exempt the "jailbreaking" of iPhones from the anti-circumvention provisions of 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a). I tried to make similar points back when the ruling was first issued, but I think that Brenner has better explained the underlying issues.
Continue reading iPhones, DRM, and Doom-Mongers . . .
Over at the Washington Legal Foundation, Ben Sheffner of Copyrights & Campaigns just published a thoughtful Legal Backgrounder entitled Due Process Limits on Statutory Civil Damages? Ben makes an interesting point. In my own post on Judge Gertner's recent Opinion in Tenenbaum, I argued that Judge Gertner's excuses for reducing the jury's statutory-damage award are so absurdly illogical and lawless that she ended up pretending that college guys like Joel Tenenbaum are just inevitably "risk averse."
Continue reading Tenenbaum: Ben Sheffner Concludes That Judge Gertner's Ruling Made No Sense from Any Perspective . . .
Why the Viacom v. YouTube Summary-Judgment Ruling Will Be Reversed.
After reviewing the commentary on Judge Stanton's summary judgment ruling in Viacom v. YouTube, I note the lack of substantive defenses of its legal merits. See Viacom Int'l, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 62829 (S.D.N.Y. 2010) (the "Viacom Opinion"). This Opinion held that because the original founders of YouTube had responded to takedown notices, they were protected from civil liability for copyright infringement by § 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the "DMCA")—even if they were also intentionally inducing mass copyright piracy like the Defendants in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913 (2005).
But this Opinion will be reversed on appeal for at least two reasons. First, no judge can legally find something so daft as a civil safe-harbor for criminal racketeering lurking in the unspoken implications of the "tenor" of excerpts of legislative history. Second, no judge can legally hold that the DMCA adopted terms that judges used to convey the lack of any knowledge requirement in order to tell judges to impose an "item-specific" knowledge requirement. As singer Katy Perry might put it, unless the DMCA was "a [law] bipolar," it did not use "in" to mean "out" or "up" to mean "down...."
Consequently, the Viacom Opinion is not really a huge win for those who want foreign corporations to be able profit by intentionally inducing mass piracy. Indeed, apart from the usual applause from the usual suspect—and a switch-of-sides at Slate—no one seems to be praising or even defending the substance of Judge' Stanton's legal analysis. And with good reason—it is indefensible.
Continue reading Why the Viacom v. YouTube Summary-Judgment Ruling Will Be Reversed. . . .
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes it a crime to circumvent digital rights management technologies but allows the Librarian of Congress to exempt certain classes of works from this prohibition.
The Copyright Office just released a new rulemaking on this issue in which it allows people to "unlock" their cell phones so they can be used on other networks and "jailbreak" closed mobile phone operating systems like the iOS operating system on Apple's iPhones so that they will run unapproved third-party software.
This is arguably good news for consumers: Those willing to void their warranties so they can teach their phone some new tricks no longer have to fear having their phone confiscated, being sued, or being imprisoned. (The civil and criminal penalties are described in 17 USC 1203 and 17 USC 1204.) Although the new exemption does not protect those who distribute unlocking and/or jailbreaking software (which would be classified under 17 USC 1201(b), and thus outside the exemption of 17 USC 1201(a)), the cases discussed below could mean that jailbreaking phones simply falls outside of the scope of all of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.
Apple opposed this idea when it was initially proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, arguing that legalizing jailbreaking constituted a forced restructuring of its business model that would result in "significant functional problems" for consumers that could include "security holes and malware, as well as possible physical damage." But who beyond a small number of geeks brave enough to give up their warranties and risk bricking their devices, is really going to attempt jailbreaking? One survey found that only 10% of iPhone users have jailbroken their phones, and the majority are in China, where the iPhone was not available legally until recently. Is it really likely that giving the tinkering minority the legal right to void their product warranties would cause any harm to the non-tinkering majority that will likely choose to instead remain within a manufacturer's "walled garden"? I don't think so. If, as a result of this ruling, large numbers of consumers jailbreak their phones and install pirated software, the Copyright Office can easily reconsider the exemption in its next Triennial Rulemaking.
Continue reading "Jailbreaking" Won't Land You In Jail . . .
Was the Tenenbaum Statutory-Damage Verdict Unconstitutional? Only If College Guys Are Irrationally "Risk-Averse...."
On July 9th, Judge Nancy Gertner issued an Order holding that the $22,500/song jury verdict assessed against file-sharing, oath-violating, evidence-concealing, family-framing willful mass pirate Joel Tenenbaum was unconstitutionally excessive. Judge Gertner then reduced the award by 90% to $2,250/per song—the maximum award that her Constitution would permit. See Sony BMG Music Ent. v. Tenenbaum, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 68642 (D. Mass.).
But those who get their copyright news from the Internet might be shocked that the record labels have just dared to appeal Judge Gertner's allegedly brilliant legal analysis. After all, Public Knowledge hailed Judge Gertner's reasoning as a triumph of common sense. And at the blog TechDirt, Mike Masnick gushed, "Gertner knows this is going to be appealed, and she put a lot of effort into making the case for why this ruling was excessive, in hopes of having her reasoning help carry the later appeals."
Such fawning is silly. Judge Gertner's reasoning is far too profoundly flawed to have much chance of surviving appellate review. I will thus note three defects in Judge Gertner's analysis that should prove fatal. None is merely technical; all involve basic disregard for settled law, the facts, or reality itself.
Continue reading Was the Tenenbaum Statutory-Damage Verdict Unconstitutional? Only If College Guys Are Irrationally "Risk-Averse...." . . .
Wow, Part II: USPTO, NTIA, and Commerce Officials Urge ISPs, Ad Networks, Payment Processors, and Search Engines to Cooperate and Create a Law-Abiding Internet that Deters Counterfeiting and Piracy.
Recently, I used the word "Wow" in the title of a post because a hearing held by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary produced bipartisan calls for broad voluntary cooperation to ensure that Internet commerce--like real-world American Commerce--abides by the rule of law, including those rules of law that prohibit copyright infringement and trademark counterfeiting.
What inspired me about those calls to restore the rule of law was not that they were substantively controversial. For example, the World Bank estimates that intangible capital accounts for 80% of the wealth in the developed world, and that 57% of that intangible capital arises from the rule of law--including all those government-granted monopoly rights that most call "private-property rights" See The World Bank, Where Is the Wealth of Nations? 20, 87 (2006). (Education was the next-largest contributor; it accounted for 36% of intangible capital.) In effect, the World Bank thus concluded that the rule of law accounts for almost 50% of American wealth. Obviously, an Internet that fails to preserve rule of law will thus become a job-killing economic catastrophe for the United States.
Continue reading Wow, Part II: USPTO, NTIA, and Commerce Officials Urge ISPs, Ad Networks, Payment Processors, and Search Engines to Cooperate and Create a Law-Abiding Internet that Deters Counterfeiting and Piracy. . . .
TechDirt Errs Again: Copyrights Are the Definition of "Market Forces" in Action.
[I]t's flat out wrong to say that copyright (or patents, for that matter) are about "allowing market forces" to act. By definition, copyright and patent laws are the opposite of allowing market forces. It's the government stepping up and providing monopoly rights because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that basic market forces don't work in those areas and, thus, the government needs to step in and "correct" some sort of imbalance.
This is all--as Masnick might put it--"flat out wrong...." Economists and the economically literate know that if we want "market forces" to encourage the consumer-driven private production of any resource (including expressive works) then we must grant exclusive rights to private producers of that socially valuable resource. In other words, property rights---government-granted, legally protected exclusive rights--are required to use "market forces" to encourage the production of any resource.
Continue reading TechDirt Errs Again: Copyrights Are the Definition of "Market Forces" in Action. . . .
Recently, Nate Anderson of Ars Technica published File-sharing has weakened copyright—and helped society. This story's title summarizes the thesis of a "new" paper by those Grokster-loving, Free-Culture-Movement Professors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Coleman Strumpf (collectively, "OGS"). Their "new" paper is entitled File-Sharing and Copyright. Fortunately, their non-sequitur thesis does not follow from their clown-car collection of factual, legal, economic, and historical errors that poses as "scholarship."
Indeed, I just published a blog post and a longer paper to show that those who listen to the likes of Oberholzer-Gee merely end up accusing the Government Accountability Office of decades of wrongdoing by celebrating the "positive economic effects" of criminal racketeering. The blog post is entitled, Why Copyright Industry Costs-of-Piracy Studies Correctly Ignore the "Positive Economic Effects of Criminal Racketeering; the paper is entitled, Punk'd: GAO Celebrates the "Positive Economic Effects of Counterfeiting and Other Criminal Racketeering.
Continue reading Send In the Clowns: A Review of Oberholzer-Gee and Stumpf's Copyright and File-Sharing (Part 1) . . .
Viacom v. YouTube: Why Are We Re-Litigating Grokster?
LimeWire Begs for a... "Second" Chance?
ACTA: USTR Was Right, and the Histrionics Were Wrong--Again.
Public Knowledge's "Copyright Reform Act of 2010": More Banal Cheerleading-for-Piracy.
The FTC Warns Businesses of "Widespread" Inadvertent File-Sharing: The Costs of File-Sharing Piracy Just Keep on Increasing.
Copyrights in Music Do NOT Exist Only "To Benefit [Matthew Yglesias]"
U.S. Legislators CANNOT Trust Claims that 37% of the DMCA Takedown Notices That Google Receives Fail to State "Valid Copyright Claims."
Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: Losing a Fight with a Hand-Picked Strawman Is Not an "Extensive Examination" of "Economic Evidence."
Internuts Blame Copyright Enforcement for the Sins of BitTorrent Tracker-Site Operators.
Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: EFF Condemns Patry For "Assembling the Rhetorical Siege Engines of the Copyright Wars...."
The Self-Parody of Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: "Figurative Language at its Best" Does NOT "Declare War" on Copyright-Enforcing "Terror[ists]" by Objectifying Women.
The DVD Rental Window: Fiddling while Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars Burns.
The "Moral Panic" of "Copyright Wars": Part One of a Reply.
UMG Recordings v. Veoh Networks: Pushing the facts (and the law) too far.
The "Lessigation" of Copyright Scholarship: A Review of Statutory Damages in Copyright Law: A Remedy in Need of Reform (Part I).
Trademarks and Search-Engine Ads: What's Permissible?
Copyrights, UGC Sites and "Fair-Use Bootstrapping"
A Blanket License for Music Soon To Arrive?
Google Book Search deal = ASCAP / online collective licensing model for the future?
What's Left of Title I After the Broadcast Flag Case?
- Why the Viacom v. YouTube Summary-Judgment Ruling Will Be Reversed.
- Was the Tenenbaum Statutory-Damage Verdict Unconstitutional? Only If College Guys Are Irrationally "Risk-Averse...."
- Wow, Part II: USPTO, NTIA, and Commerce Officials Urge ISPs, Ad Networks, Payment Processors, and Search Engines to Cooperate and Create a Law-Abiding Internet that Deters Counterfeiting and Piracy.
- TechDirt Errs Again: Copyrights Are the Definition of "Market Forces" in Action.

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