In October 2008, MPAA succeeded to stop the sales of realDVD. The main concept of realDVD is to rip a DVD and store a PROTECTED copy on the hard disk of a computer. A first decision of justice banned the sale. Of course, RealDVD appealed this ruling.

Currently, RealDVD site displays:

RealDVD is currently unavailable
Due to recent legal action taken by the Hollywood movie studios against us, RealDVD is temporarily unavailable. Rest assured, we will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use.

Last week, judge Patel granted a preliminary injunction in favor studios. RealDVD has been granted a license by DVD-CCA. DVD-CCA is the licensing authority for DVD. This license is mandatory to legally get the keys that allow to descramble CSS protected discs. According to judge Patel, the license of DVD forbids to make permanent copies of CSS protected DVDs. Furthermore, according to judge Patel, fair use does not allow to circumvent a protection under DMCA.

Interestingly, Kaleidescape that has the same issues (but for a high end expensive product) has also been ruled against by a Californian court during the same week.

The story continues…

In April, The Pirate Bay (TPB) was sentenced by a Swedish court. In the last months, the storm grew strong on the bay.

End of June, A company, Global Gaming Factory, announced that it would purchase TPB for 5.5 M€. The announced objective is to turn TPB into a legal distribution platform (using P2P) but for paid contents. The Global Gaming Factory owns a large network of cybercafes and develops cybercafe dedicated applications.

End of July,two gusts:

• The US movie majors file in order to have the site shut down, citing the downloading of 100 TV shows and films download.
• A Dutch court requires TPB to block access to their sites to all Dutch citizen. For each day the site remains accessible from Netherlands, the fine will grow by 30,000€. Funnily, it was probably the first time that a court sent a subpoena by Twitter.

4th August, one of the founders, Peter Sunde announced that he leaves the boat.

Meanwhile, many rumors circulated that Global Gaming Factory had not the money to purchase TPB. But, the company has just announced that it will officially acquire TPB on 27th August after its extraordinary shareholders meeting.

The Pirate Bay is still operating!

On July 17th, some Kindle’s users had the surprise to see the following message.

We recently discovered a problem with a Kindle book that you have purchased. We have processed a refund to the payment method used to acquire this book. The next time the wireless is activated on your device, the problematic item will be removed. If you are not in a wireless coverage area, please connect your device to a computer using your USB cable and delete the file from the documents folder.

In fact, Amazon removed two George Orwell titles: 1984 and Animal farm. Amazon refunded the customers of the price of the erased eBooks. As expected, this immediately raised the fury of medias.

It is interesting to remind some real facts:

• – Amazon erased only the versions from publisher Mobile Reference.
• – Mobile Reference is specialized to distribute eBooks from titles that are in the public domain for the modest price of 1$
• – Unfortunately, these books are not yet in the public domain (at least not in every countries)
• -The same titles are available in digital format from other publishers but at higher price (around 10$)

Thus, the action of Amazon was legitimate. A publisher sold illegal content through Amazon. Amazon solved the issue by erasing the illegal books and redeeming the customers. What may be more questionable is the cryptic message. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, later issued personal apologies.

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

This is not the first time that Amazon removed a title. Recently, a version of Harry Potter was illegally available for a few hours.

What can we learn?

• – e-sell through, ie. selling the right to access content for ever, is a complex task
• – People have the same expectations of usage from digital content than from physical content. I’m still reading paper books I purchased twenty years ago. (I want to soon read again Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber )
• – Copyright issue is a complex problem. Not all countries have teh same laws. Thus, we end up with Ubuesque situations like here. 1984 is in public domain in Australia, but other visitors have to apply this notice.
  

  Under Australian copyright laws, copyright in literary works of authors, who died before 1955, has expired. These works are now within the ‘public domain’ in Australia and this is why the University is able to reproduce such works on this site. HOWEVER, works may remain copyrighted in other countries. If copyright in the work still subsists in the country from which you are accessing this website, it will be illegal for you to download the work. It is your responsibility to check the applicable copyright laws in your country.

• – When you are a digital store, it is your responsibility to check all copyright/infringement issues. This may be tricky if the store is large.

In any case, it was “funny” that the incriminated book was 1984. By the way, if you have not yet read it, read it

UK Government just published its vision of the future of Digital Britain. As expected, a section is dedicated to copyright issues. In chapter 4, “Creative Industries in the Digital World”, the report highlights the need to fight unlawful file sharing. It describes the two stage mechanism that the Government foresees to deploy.

The first step is the typical spotting of illegal file sharers and sending notifications. It is expected that this should seriously deter the piracy. nevertheless, if it would not be sufficient then other tools such as traffic shaping, bandwidth capping or address filtering would be deployed.

Legislation to reduce unlawful peer-to-peer file-sharing

The key elements of what we are proposing to do are:
● Ofcom will be placed under a duty to take steps aimed at reducing online copyright infringement. Specifically they will be required to place obligations on ISPs to require them:
– to notify alleged infringers of rights (subject to reasonable levels of proof from rights-holders) that their conduct is unlawful; and
– to collect anonymised information on serious repeat infringers (derived from their notification activities), to be made available to rights-holders together with personal details on receipt of a court order.
Ofcom will also be given the power to specify, by Statutory Instrument, other conditions to be imposed on ISPs aimed at preventing, deterring or reducing online copyright infringement, such as:
●Blocking (Site, IP, URL);
●Protocol blocking;
●Port blocking;
●Bandwidth capping (capping the speed of a subscriber’s Internet connection and/or capping the volume of data traffic which a subscriber can access);
●Bandwidth shaping (limiting the speed of a subscriber’s access to selected protocols/services and/or capping the volume of data to selected protocols/services); and
● Content identification and filtering.
This power would be triggered if the notification process has not been successful after a year in reducing infringement by 70% of the number of people notified.

After one year of experiment, the government would check the efficiency. The objective is to reduce by 70 to 80% unlawful file sharing. If the objective would not be reached, then the Government would study new measures.

The interesting part is the attempt to limit the network use to fight piracy. Nevertheless, it may open the Pandora box. Is it the end of Net neutrality in UK?

The full report is available here.

Thanks to MJC for the pointer to the doc :Happy:

The French site Beezik just opened. This interesting site proposes an alternate distribution scheme for music.

Beezik allows to legally download songs for free! Yes, you pay no dime! And it is legal. The announced size of the catalog is about 2 million songs. And they offer some of the current blockbusters. (when exploring some of my favorite performers, I often found (in the style of …)? Nevertheless I found some original interesting titles.

So where is the trick? The clearly announced one is the mandatory exposure to advertisement. Once you selected your song, you have to choose among 4 advertisers. During the download time of the song, the ad is displayed full screen. If you reduce to window size, the download of the song is interrupted. In other words, your computer is “blocked” to display an ad during the download time. The obvious thought to escape advertisement is “Ok, lets go drink a coffee or a coke, or whatever you want, I’ll come back later”. This does not work. Once the download completed, you have 6 seconds to click on the screen in order to launch the screen that saves the song on the computer, else you loose it.

Thus, it has been wisely designed to maximize the advertisement exposure. This has strong value for advertisers. Of course, your selection of ad, plus your selection of songs will allow to profile you. Thus, increasing the value of the ad. Well done.

There are a few non announced limitations:

• The songs are protected by Windows DRM 11; So long for iPod afficionados.
• The licenses are valid for one month. Each time you download a song, it extends all licenses for a new month. If you did not download during the month, you loose all licenses (it seems that licenses are not renewable later, you have to download again the obsolete song). Once more, this monthly obligation of download is a nice trick to increase advertisement exposure.

Two nice tricks:

• Beezik does not sell any song. Nevertheless, it displays the value of the song. This enforces the feeling that you make a good bargain. 1 minute of ad for 0.99€
• The more you download, the more points you gain. The points can be converted in coupons for sponsors.

Beezik explores an interesting business model. It has been well designed to offer the highest value for advertisers. Are you aware of similar sites elsewhere? If yes, please send the pointer.

Would you use such service?

P.S.: Beezik is only available for France and Monaco (at least currently)