The Beijing Intellectual Property Office asleep on the job

Most eyes in China have been watching the main stock index as it fell in response to a large rise on stock purchase stamp duty. That means that very few people probably noticed this classic photo posted on news.com from the 10th Chinese High Tech Expo. Let me quote news.com directly:

Here is the booth from the Beijing Intellectual Property Office. The office oversees intellectual property enforcement in the city. They have a hotline–dial 12312–to report intellectual property infringement in a country awash with pirated software and movies. (Pirated Windows XP sells for $1.30 in the streets, for example.) The man attending the booth, though, is taking a nap. Does anyone else see the irony?

Click on the following pages to see the kind of gadgets currently coming out of the Chinese tech industry.

“Social” ripping and burning

According to an NPD report cited in the New York Times:

 The “social” ripping and burning of CDs among friends — which takes place offline and almost entirely out of reach of industry policing efforts — accounted for 37 percent of all music consumption, more than file-sharing.

BPI gets huge damages win

Billboard reports that the BPI won its case (that we blogged about in february) against CD Wow for parallel importing with a damages award of more than £41m.

Is it okay to circumvent DRM in Europe?

A Finnish court has ruled that a defendent was innocent of infringing copyright by cracking CSS and publishing code to do so. The defendent’s blog tells the story which is retold elsewhere with an overview of the potential circularity of the logci and with the catchy headline – Legal Gymnastics: It’s okay to circumvent drm in europe if its circumventable. It remains to be seen what impact this decision will have outside of Finland.

Whittingdale vs Gowers

I forgot to mention in my post on Piracy in the UK that the government has torespond to every recommendation made in the Select Committee report within 60 days. So very soon it will be known where the UK government stands on the copyright extension debate (and other issues) that is now being seen as Whittingdale vs Gowers.

The Market Function of Piracy

Not much time to write today so here’s a link to an article on ‘The Market Function of Piracy‘ from The Ludwig von Mises Institute. No I hadn’t heard of them before.

A fair(y) use tale

Let’s turn to our most mentioned educational institution and hotbed of piracy, Stanford, where the School of Law’s Center for Internet and Society links to  this video mashup of Disney characters explaining copyright.  According to the Stanford page it was put together by Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University.

Copyright debate in the US

Following on from yesterday’s post about the new copyright promotion body, I noticed this post on Techdirt taking apart Mark Helprin’s article in The New York Times over the weekend titled “A Great Idea Lives Forever, Shouldn’t Its Copyright“.  Helprin makes the analogy between intellectual property and real physical property and it is this starting point that Techdirt believes undermines all his subsequent arguments.

This predictably stirred so much debate that i cannot help but wonder if Helprin was playing devil’s advocate. Some blogs, including this one which candidly admits to not having read the whole Helprin article, suggest that the logical extension of Helprin’s arguments means that all ideas could be copyrighted leading to the clearly ludicrous situation of owing usage fees for doing almost anything:

” If your book is in English, you give to the general English-language fund, and also some specific payments for English’s parent languages based on your vocabulary choices. If you use invented languages derived from real-world languages, you have to pay derivative-work fees for those. If you use any math in your book, there are fees for addition, subtraction, etc. Use of various plot structures, mythic archetypes, and so on are also billable. “

Whatever your stance, it is clear that the copyright debate is here to stay both in the traditional mass media and in the more niche world of blog debate.

“promoting the value of copyright as an agent for creativity, jobs and growth”

Digital Media Wire reports that 29 “copyright-related organisations” have clubbed together to form a trade group to promote the benefits of copyright. The organisations comprise a mixture of companies (such as Disney and Microsoft) and trade bodies (such as RIAA and MPAA).

There is some commentary online looking at the effects of piracy on regions, including an article on how piracy inhibits the European creative industries and, more relevant to this new US trade body, this on the cost of piracy to the Los Angeles region.

Metropolitan police involved in allofmp3 raid

A press release put out by the BPI has reported that a 25 year old man has been arrested in London for running the web site selling vouchers for allofmp3.com enabling the site to get around the removal of Paypal and credit card payment systems.

Interesting how bringing down a site in Russia has involved so much international lobbying for payment mechanisms to be removed and now is involving police raids in Western Europe. This is becoming increasingly commonplace and The Pirate Bay has already indicated that it has servers in multiple countries to enable it to survive action in Sweden.

From a UK legal perspective  this is interesting (snipped from BPI release):

As the unlicensed sale of music is a criminal offence in the UK, police executed the raid under Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006 – legislation introduced into UK law in January 2007 specifically to combat online fraud. This is the first time the new fraud legislation has been used in a copyright-related case.