End of the WIPO Broadcast Treaty, for now

Not enough time to write on this today but WIPO is the UN’s copyright agency and they have been proposing a treaty to deal with signal theft. As with much deal making at the international level negotiations have rendered the treaty unworkable (talk of anti-copyright org.s and some countries peddling their own agendas). The Hollywood Reporter link fills in quite well and there’s always the EFF for the view from one side of the copyright debate…

http://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/broadcasting_treaty/

http://www.hollywoodreporteresq.com/thresq/government/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003600679

China

When I did a China update before I saw a large spike in reader interest. So, following China’s acquisition of a $3bn stake in Blackstone, the US private equity company, the ramifications of which are still being discussed, it seemed a good time to revisit China.

There has been much to and fro-ing between the US and China, what with the WTO activity, and now there is also a pact on physical piracy data. Not before time since China is behind 93% of euro cd piracy according to Billboard. 

In music the mobile market is picking up in China driven not least by realistic pricing, huge numbers of handset owners and a degree of distrust of online payment mechanisms meaning consumers lean towards the operator-controlled billing. An interesting aside is that there has been moves to adopt Western mobile standards  in China.

There has been much copyright related legal activity with Baidu and Yahoo! China and there are other similar services online already, as well as talk of plans from Baidu to expand overseas.
Another interesting aside is Google’s testimony on China which can be read here.  

After all this criticism the Chinese launched a 2007 Action Plan which may be aimed at tackling protectionist measures in the US. (more detail on the Plan here)

So, battle lines are being drawn at the same time as increases in trade and investment. With internet penetration at 10%, and that already equating to an online audience of 60m, there is huge potential in this market but the question remains how to make digital entertainment pay.

Pirate of the Week #1

Piracy comes in many forms, and so do pirates…

from http://www.weatherby.info/shazam/generalrubbish/PirateDog.jpg 

Leader of online piracy group is jailed

A US court has jailed the British leader of an online piracy group, DrinkOrDie, which specialised in software cracks. Founded in 1993 the group ran until 2001 when raids in six countries broke up the group. As the BBC article points out the case was one of the first to involve extradition for IP crime.

Perez Hilton blog mired in legal complaints

Here’s a bit of an aside from what we normally cover, but still raises interesting issues. The gossip blog PerezHilton.com is finding it hard to stay fully functioning under the weight of complaints from photo agencies and the consequent lack of support from ISPs. The article at Plagiarism Today notes that Perez’s high volume of complaints, coupled with high volume of visitors mean he is probably an unattractive proposition for many ISPs. Unless an ISP can streamline it’s take down program, the costs are unlikely to be met by the hosting fees being paid byt the site incurring the takedown requests.

Dutch ISP forced to take down torrent site

Slyck reports that Dutch music industry group BREIN have succeded in getting a notorious Dutch ISP Leaseweb to shut down a torrent site and reveal the identity of the web site owner. BREIN have had similar success before, although I am not suer that included revealing owner details, so expect more of this in the Netherlands.

Public shaming of leakers of content

Idolator posted a link to this blog before the writer could even get his first name and shame live. The idea according to the blogger behind the site is to:

…create a little blog to post the names, indelible and set out for all to see, of those people who’ve been given the care of having an early copy of a release and have set that responsibility aside and leaked the record they were entrusted with.

The comments are of course growing…

It’s obviously quite a shaky approach to trying to quell pre-release leaks of music being vulnerable to people sending in names maliciously. But it does suggest an interesting extension of some of the discussion that goes on in fans’ forums about whether to upload pre-release material. Some are so desperate to hear it that they want it posted, claiming they will buy it anyway. Others cite the undermining of an artist’s hard work and intentions as a reason not to post.

If this blog takes off, and I am not sure it will, it will be interesting to see what effect it has and the discussion that follow.

GE step into the digital piracy arena

“Now that ISPs are moving to offer video-on-demand and some of their own content, facilitating the theft of content doesn’t make sense,”

Those were the words of GE’s Vice Chairman Bob Wright talking at a trade show earlier this week. News.com gives a good summary of what Bob said but the interesting point, following the AT&T news last week, is that there appears to have been progress with getting US ISPs to terminate the accounts of users engaged in piracy. Wright says six of the eight largest ISPs in the US have agreed to adopt intially notification, followed by termination for repeated transgressions, for users engaged in online piracy.

The content industry, including NBC Universal (owned by GE), will be delighted if these intiatives are enforced and spread.

Lucky and Flo

Haven’t got much time today so here’s a crazy story about dogs, Lucky and Flo, trained to sniff out pirate optical discs. I had to double check this wasn’t posted on April 1st!

Taiwan tightens up P2P laws

Taiwan‘s laws needed clarification after Kuro settled with the IFPI in 2005 and then the following year EZPeer won their case (subsequently going legit anyway). Billboard reports that recent changes to the law make those providing p2p software liable (criminally and civilly) for copyright infringment. It’s obviously easier to pass such a law when there are no longer major p2p operators in the country, but I suspect this will be used as an exemplar to other countries in the region. It’s also notable that this new law requires the operator to be making a ‘profit’ – there is suggestion that ‘profit’ may not have to be pecuniary.