“the law recognizes that there is a legitimate reason to reverse-engineer a competitor’s products and make new products that replace, expand and augment them.

Companies don’t like this. It interferes with the “razor blade” business model of subsidizing one part of a product and charging high margins on some other part. It undermines efforts to corner markets and freeze out disruptive innovation. It lowers prices and forces you to spend more money on R&D to get the next product out because the profits have started to fall on the old products.”

“So, did the entertainment industry “stop complaining”? No. Since the Copyright Act of 1976 went into effect (in 1978), we’ve expanded copyright law 15 times on issues related to “stopping piracy” (and many, many more if you look at all copyright law expansions — beyond just anti-piracy efforts — such as expanding coverage to semiconductor chip designs, boat hulls and other things). It really started in 1982, meaning that we’ve had 15 new anti-piracy laws in just 30 years. If SOPA/PIPA had passed, it would have been 16 — or more than once every two years.”

“Wie Techdirt berichtet, wurde die Website RnB Exclusive von der britischen Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) aufgrund “Gewerbsmäßiger Urheberrechtsverletzungen” beschlagnahmt. RnB Exclusiv war laut Angaben von Techdirt lediglich ein Austauschforum für Musikinteressierte, Copyrightverletzungen kamen vor Allem über Beiträge von Nutzern des Portals zustande.”

“Fun fact: People are citizens while on the internet too”

“Imagine that you have a friend who wants to clean the public golf course of chipmunks by dumping rat poison by the bucketful from helicopters. You think this is a… misguided idea. But the friend has the ear of the town council and convinces one member to introduce a bill mandating mass quantities of arsenic to be dumped on the golf course. You show up to a hearing and suggest the poison could cause other problems. The friend then goes to a local newspaper and for months trashes your good name, suggesting that you are a dishonest scumbag who furthermore likes the golf course chipmunks and probably profits from them by selling them to research labs by the minivan load. For what it’s worth, the friend suggests that you also support killing the town’s seniors with tainted heart medication imported from abroad. When the town rises up to reject the rat poison bill and suggests that, perhaps, some less barmy idea might work, your friend then repeats all his old allegations while throwing in new ones about “abuse of power.” But when defeat is clear, your friend calls you up on Saturday afternoon and expresses his thanks that you agree the golf course has a chipmunk problem. He hopes you can both sit down and work out a rational compromise—though not one that starts from your own idea, which was simply to employ a full-time golf course cat.”

“Why would VEVO pirate content? Because it was easier than getting it legally. This is the actual root cause of piracy online. It’s not shady, masked individuals at swanky events commandeering computers to pirate for the hell of it. It’s VEVO employees. It’s everyone.”

“BTjunkie, one of the largest BitTorrent indexes on the Internet, has decided to shut down voluntarily today. A combination of legal actions against fellow file-sharing sites and time-consuming projects have led to the drastic decision that takes out one the main players in the BitTorrent landscape.
Founded in June 2005, BTjunkie has been among the top BitTorrent sites for more than half a decade.
The site was never involved in any legal action, and to keep it this way the site’s operators decided to shut the site down for good today. “

“Copying is not theft, but censorship is. When a video is blocked, banned, erased, or otherwise censored, we don’t have it any more. The commons is robbed. When B. Storm copied the song Crazy into his video, WMG’s copies were still there. When WMG censored B. Storm’s video, it was gone.”

“But, in the short term, this really does (yet again) highlight one of the many problems of an aggressive takedown system. UMG clearly screwed up here and shut down an independent act’s own song — which, honestly, one of its own acts had infringed on the copyright for. This is really quite an amazing form of copyright abuse when you think about it: UMG artist fails to license beat on a song that is leaked… and then UMG claims copyright over the official song over the same beat. That’s definitely adding insult to injury — or, perhaps, adding injunction to infringement. While it appears that cooler heads prevailed and got this worked out eventually, it seems pretty crazy that any artist should have to deal with some giant industry conglomerate completely shutting down their own works based on bogus copyright claims.”

“There’s no denying that some author might thing its a good idea… even though it might look suspicious that they could get only a hundred of them among their 25k+ registered members; and even though that roughly 20% of those 100 are the association board members; the really horrendous part is that we now found that some of those nomes were put there without any consent from the authors!”

“One thing that anyone just becoming aware of these fights needs to know: the entertainment industry lobby is very, very good at what they do, and they never put all their eggs in one basket. While they love pushing for ever more draconian federal laws, they’re always working multiple angles, including international trade agreements, laws in foreign countries and… state laws around the US, which they can then leverage to get other states to follow suit. If SOPA/PIPA really fails on the federal level, you’ll see the same ideas pop up in all of those other places. In fact, we’re already hearing stories of such plans in all three things, which we’ll be covering in the days and weeks ahead.”

“In the wake of last week’s Megaupload shutdown, some of the biggest names in the market are taking drastic action. During the last 48 hours many sites have completely withdrawn their systems for paying uploaders when their files are shared with others, but one of the most dramatic moves came first from Filesonic and today Fileserve. Both services now forbid people from downloading any files they didn’t upload themselves.”

Lesenswerter Text von Musiker Jonathan Coulton. “I believe in copyright. I benefit from it. I don’t want it to go away. I love that we have laws and people to enforce them. But if I had to give up one thing, if I had to choose between copyright and the wild west, semi-lawless, innovation-fest that is the internet? I’ll take the internet every time.”

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