Category Archives: Copyright

P2P: is giving access illegal?

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Two US judges gave a different answer to the question: “Is putting a copyright content in a folder accessible to P2P share illegal?” According to Judge Kenneth Karras of New York, it is illegal, whereas for Judge Nancy Gertner of Boston it is not an infringement until the content has been downloaded by someone. Nevertheless, both judges agree that downloading copyright content is an infringement. The judgments are not final.

Would Judge Nancy Gertner confirm her decision, then it would open new perspectives in future trials.

  • Content owners will not have to prove the exposure of copyrighted content, but would have to prove the actual download of the exposed content by someone else.
  • Content owners should probably also have to proof that the exposure was deliberate. Known examples have illustrated that people may inadvertently expose data to peer to peer networks. See Confidential data and P2P

An interesting issue to be followed.

Private copy levy or piracy levy?

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French government asked the Conseil d’Etat to review the calculation rules of the levy for private copy. Currently, the government levies a tax on every non volatile storage units. This tax is a levy for private copy. It applies to recordable CD, recordable DVD, hard disks, USB flash memory, memory cards, … Its value is defined by the Commission d’Albis. As an example, the tax for iPhone would be of 7€ (i.e. about $10). The tax is redistributed to rights owners.

In January, three associations of consumers complained to this authority about this levy. The controversy is that the levy takes into account the estimated level of piracy. A recent survey claimed that 40% of the content store on recordable media where coming from P2P. If the levy takes into account piracy, then it covers both private copy (of a legally acquired content) and illegal copy (of P2P downloaded content). Thus, P2P download should not be anymore illegal because integrated in the tax. Meanwhile, the representatives of the consumer electronics boycotted the commission d’Albis for mainly the same arguments.

Thus, they require either to make P2P download legal or reduce the levy. The answer of the wise men will be extremely interesting.

TorrentSPy: one round for studios

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On Friday 28th March, TorrentSpy, one of the main torrent tracker sites definitively closed. According to the site, the legal burden was becoming too heavy. Having the feeling that they could not preserve the interests of their users, they closed their site. Since 2006, MPAA was suing TorrentSpy for facilitating piracy.

Will it change something? Probably not much. Many tracker sites are available. TorrentSpy will disappear from toolbars and from filters of tools such as BitChe.

A theoretical interesting question: does the closing of a major site help or reduce piracy. On one hand, a wealth of torrent trackers have vanished. On the other hands, more people will connect on the currently available torrents thus making them more efficient in terms of sharing.

Extension of Copyright in Europe?

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EU commissioner McGreevy proposes to extend the copyright lifetime for performers from 50 years to 95 years. Interestingly copyright lifetime for composers is of 70 years after his/her death. In most of the world, the default length of copyright is the life of the author plus either 50 or 70 years.
The current limit of 50 years means that many songs from still alive performers will soon enter in public domain. According to some estimations, this extension represents a gain of 3 to 10% for the European phonographic industry. Electronic Free Foundation (EFF) has launched an online petition against this initiative.

Copyright lifetime expiration is an interesting problem for DRM. What happens for a protected song when it enters the public domain? Normally, they should be no more protected. Extension of 45 years may delay this technical issue for several years?  :Wink:

DVD Jon launches doubleTwist

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doubleTwistJon Lech JOHANSEN, together with Monique FARANTOS launched doubleTwist, a controversial software and service. Jon is better known as DVD Jon. In 1999, he wrote DeCSS, the software decrypting protected DVDs. DeCSS spread over the Internet despite the efforts of studios to stop it. The source code was even available on printed T-shirts. In 2006, he authored software defeating Apple’s DRM FairPlay. DoubleTwist seems to be a sequel of this early hack.

DoubleTwist allows sharing your contents on all your devices and sharing your contents with your friends on social networks such as FaceBook. Currently, doubleTwist supports a limited number of devices through iTunes synchronization: Nokia phones, Sony Walkmans, Sony PSP and Windows Mobile 6.0 platforms. Nevertheless, traditional USB download is valid. DoubleTwist is only available for Windows. The Mac version is under way.

Does doubleTwist infringe copyright laws? According to Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), it does not. To by pass FairPlay, doubleTwist uses the analog hole, i.e. it records content while played by iTunes. Thus, EFF claims that it does not circumvent any protection scheme and thus falls out of the scope of DMCA. Will this argument hold in front of a court?

Nevertheless, doubleTwist limited the duration of the shared video to ten minutes and the duration of shared audio to twenty minutes per file. This policy reminds the limitations of User Generated Content sites.

The launch of doubleTwist on 18th February raised a flurry of news. The personality of DVD Jon is probably one explication of such media interest. Since then, no news. Surprisingly, there is no known public reaction of Apple. Would a negative reaction be coherent with Steve Jobs advocating DRM-free content?