Category Archives: Copyright

YouTube versus Viacom: privacy does not matter

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In 2007, Viacom launched a suit against YouTube for copyright infringement. Viacom requested $1 billion of damages. In this battle of giants, the latest court order is surprising.

L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, ordered YouTube to deliver to Viacom the list of every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. The objective of Viacom is to evaluate popularity of copyrighted content on the viewing habits of YouTube users. It seems obvious that this evaluation could have been done through anonymized data, as commonly done for statistics. Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.”

More interestingly is that the judge refused to deliver the source code of YouTube software to Viacom to protect the business of YouTube. According to him, the source code could allow competitors to set up a similar system.

According to me, the judge through his decision offers to Viacom the treasure of YouTube. The business model of YouTube is to better know its users so to display more targeted, and thus higher value, advertisments to users. This has only value due to the huge database of collected user viewing habits, i.e., the one to be passed to Viacom. In YouTube software, the most valuable part is probably the profiling one that the judge could have isolated and protected. The rest of the software is available or deployed by many competitors.

Of course, EFF already fight against this breach of privacy.

This type of case becomes more and more complex requiring a good understanding of many fields in addition to legislation. Judges will have to understand technical details as well as business theories. The future of experts to the courts and testifiers seems bright.

Carnage on French piracy

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French cybercops are extremely active these last weeks. They stopped members of two famous French warez. If you are used to scout P2P for French movies, then the names of CaRNaGe and cinefox are probably familiar to you. Four members of CaRNaGe have been arrested. CaRNaGe was the first release group to provide a cam of latest French blockbuster: “Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis” the day of the theatrical release. A few days later, an excellent version ripped from a DVD version used in post production houses was in circulation on P2P, delivered by another release group.

They may incur up to 5 years of jail and a fine of 500,000€. The timing of these arrests is interesting. It coincides with the French presidency of EU. French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has promised that fight against piracy will be of of his priorities during this coming semester of presidency.

CaRNaGe, as a warez, collected terabytes of movies, songs and software. Typically, warez data flows after a few days or weeks to P2P networks. Release groups are at the top of the pyramid of Internet piracy.

New strategy for RIAA?

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According to Ars Technica, it seems that RIAA has decided to strike back the current tactic to quash their subpoenas. Many students try to thwart the threat of RIAA’s pre-litigation letter by an escalating strategy of successive motion filings.

The tactic is simple: escalate the fees. RIAA proposes to settle the case for $3,000 after reception of the pre-litigation letter. This settlement fee jumps at $4,000 in case of going in front of the court. If the subpoena is challenged, then the fees rockets at $8,000.

Will this new tactic:
1- reduce the number of challenged subpoenas? Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) already challenges this new technique.
2- significantly reduce the amount of downloaded songs through P2P?

In addition to this US strategy, we see more and more legal offers of DRM-free downloads. This is probably the best strategy (If we believe that honest people stay honest.

Japan: iPod taxed?

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Japanese government plans to tax iPods and other hard disk equipped portable players. The DVD recorders have already such a tax. The tax would probably be around 100yens (0.61€) A similar tentative failed in December 2005.

Many countries adopt similar strategy. Recently, French government planned to extend its copyright tax to iPhones (for about 7€). Obviously, each time, consumer electronics industry fight back.

This type of tax opens a gray area. For instance, is it legal then to rip DVD content for copy (even if it is not granted by studios)?

TorrentSpy: second round for studios

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 End of March, under the pressure of studios TorrentSpy ceased to work (see TorrentSpy: first round for studios. A Californian federal judge knocked down for a second time TorrentSpy. The judge ordered TorrentSpy to pay 111M$ (72M€) to MPAA. This high penalty is mostly due the accusation that TorrentSpy destroyed evidences. TorrentSPy refused to gave information about its “customers” and destroyed the corresponding data.

Having ceased any activity, TorrentSpy will not be able to pay MPAA. But the message is a strong warning for tracker sites based in the United States. Will it have any impact on the other tracker sites (for instance The Pirate Bay, or Mininova)?

RIAA forecasts the return of DRM

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At last conference Digital Hollywood, David HUGHES, head of RIAA’s technology division, forecast that DRM will return to protect music. His rationales are simple. He listed 22 ways (or should we say business models) to sell music. Twenty methods require some way to enforce some limitations in consumption, i.e. DRM.

In fact, HUGHES highlighted one characteristics of DRM that is often forgotten. DRM facilitates versioning, i.e., different types of commercialization of the same song. Currently, DRM free songs are sold either as a song, or as a full album. Other ways , for instance as part of a subscription, or pay per listen, may sell this same song at a lower price (but with less freedom of consumption). But, these methods require to limit the consumption to the defined limitations (for instance only once in case of pay per listen). Here comes back DRM.

HUGHES highlighted that DRM should become transparent for consumers. Then, they would not care any more.

Currently, DRM free is the trend in music industry. Four majors sell some songs DRM free. Nevertheless, if they will find new ways to sell songs, HUGHES may be right.

RIAA attacks project Playlist

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 RIAA is suing Project PlayList. RIAA claims that “Project Playlist performs and reproduces Plaintiffs’ valuable works (and induces and enables others to do so) without any authorization whatsoever and without paying any compensation whatsoever.”

Project playlist allows users to build playlist and share them through social networks such as mySpace. In fact, project playlist does not store any songs. They offer a search tool that proposes only contents that are found on Internet public sites. Here is the description of their music search engine:

Our internet search engine allows you to locate media files that are freely available on the world wide web. The listings in our search engine are automatically gathered from music blogs, trade-friendly concert archives, artist websites, record label websites and other public sources. In addition to automatic gathering, we accept submissions to our search engine by our users.…

Unfortunately, being available on web sites does not mean copyright free. Sources such as blogs are for instance often not extremely regarding about copyright. Thus, when giving access to the hosting site of the link, project playlist displays a banner with legal notices.

Below is the website (http://xxx.xxx/) containing the music file. Some music files located in this site may be subject to copyright. To be safe, don’t download from this site. If you like it, click here to download from iTunes or you can download the ringtone!

The page about copyright notices is extremely interesting to read. Some extracts:

– Project Playlist, Inc. aspires to index and organize the music on the Internet in a responsible and efficient manner, and is therefore committed to copyright protection.…

– The creators and publishers of the songs you hear through project playlist.com or our embedded music player, are being paid a royalty for their work if they are members of ASCAP, BMI or SESAC or any one of over 125 other PSOs that represent songwriters and music publishers around the world. The more a song is included on our users’ playlists, the more royalties the writer and publisher of that song are paid by Project Playlist, Inc. …

– Our users are also allowed to post URLs of music files that they discover on the Internet. Our Terms of Use Agreement prohibits a user from posting a link to a music file that the user knows is not posted by the artist, record label, a music blogger or other third party for promotional or other legal uses.…

Will it be sufficient for RIAA? Wait and see.