Viacom is in court with YouTube claiming more than $1 billion for copyright infringement — to be exact, for using advertisement over or around the videos and thus making money. However, Viacom is now caught red-handed doing the same to a teeny-weeny small time artist, who released his content under the Creative Commons license.
Spike.com the subsidiary of Viacom has a video of Jonathan Coulton singing, which is an excellent music video made with a slide-show of Creative Commons pictures from Flickr (the video is by itself titled “Flickr”). This slide-show is released under CC license, which implies that the video can be reused only for non-commercial purposes and with proper attribution. The problem here is that, you can’t watch the video on Spike.com unless you watch a handful of advertisements.
If the same crazy math Viacom used to calculate the over $1 billion claim against YouTube (which uses a very idealistic income one could make out of advertisements from the video), it works out to $13,823 – based on the 18,000 views the video has had on Spike.com. However, the video embedded below only asks for a practical and fair compensation of $37.
Few days back, Viacom forced a tiny clip showing Transformers 3 being shot in public to be taken down from YouTube, claiming copyright violation. Now, a case has been filed against Viacom for allegedly ripping off a whole movie, with no credit or royalties to the rightful owner (per the copyright laws Viacom supports) of the story.
Movie studios, which are the biggest lobbyists of draconian copyright laws (which they use to threaten unsuspecting users all over the internet) are slowly starting to taste how it feels to be on the other side of the table – yes, they are starting to take friendly fire, which are a result of the very same copyright laws they support.
A case has been filed at New York District Court by American Rights Management Company, alleging that the Bollywood (Indian) movie “Singh is Kinng” which was released 20 months back and made $108 million is based on a short story “Madame La Gimp” written by Damon Runyon in 1929 and its derivatives. This movie was financed and distributed by Viacom along with a few other companies, with music by US rapper Snoop-Dogg.
Yet again, Viacom strikes with a totally insane copyright claim – on a clip which shows few seconds of the making of Transformers 3, which happened in public.
Paramount recently began the filming of Transformers 3 in LA, for which Michael Bay and his crew were filming an action shot of flipping a smart car down an alley. Ben Brown and Micki Krimmel who work in a building on the same alley were obviously excited to see this happen. Just like you or I would do, they got their iPhones out, to film a very small clip. Both of them uploaded their clips to YouTube.
Doesn’t this all sound very normal to you? Well no, Viacom (parent company of Paramount) issued a take down notice to Ben Brown, and YouTube took down the clip, claiming “matched third party content”. The ridiculousness of this claim is just multi-fold. How could a clip of a movie being filmed, which is not finished, match the movie (to be logical enough to issue a DMCA claim)? How can footage being shot in a public space violate copyright ever?
The never ending war between content creators and alleged infringers has been heating up lately. UK recently passed the Digital Economy Act 2010, which covers various aspects of internet, televisions or other forms of digital media. One major area it overhauls is with respect to internet piracy. For example, the bill requires ISPs to suspend connections to alleged copyright infringers, which makes operating public WiFi connection at stores, libraries etc impossible.
Outraged by the passing of this bill and with questions, a concerned citizen wrote to his MP (Emily Thornberry). The MP forwarded the letter to the Department for Business Innovation & Skills, which is behind the passing of the bill.
In reply (addressed to Emily) the MP responsible for the Department for Business Innovation & Skills, Stephen Timms (Digital Britain’s chief) sent a letter which explains how a copyright owner would be able to track down the alleged infringer(s). Whether a conceptual error or a typo, the letter had a very contextually relevant mistake, making us think, if IP addresses should be traceable at all. Given below is the letter in its entirety.
What would work best against digital piracy, in a country which is culturally very different from the States? This was the question, researchers wanted to address. To no surprise, just as in US, legal options against the pirates do not help at all, but two other factors seem to significantly help.
In a developing Gulf country filled with moderate and conservative Muslims, piracy is just a very normal affair. Pirated CDs and DVDs could be easily obtained, though not on public display after recent pressure from US through WTO etc. The cultural differences between this country and USA are well documented and are several folds. This raised the question to the researchers, if this cultural change will give a different way to approach the fight against digital piracy.
In a business college in Kuwait, researchers recruited 12 classes of students (319 students). They were then split into four groups with each group consisting of a freshman, a sophomore and a junior level class in it. All groups were given a pre-questionnaire at the beginning of the semester, which evaluated their intention to pirate in the near future. At the ending of the semester, except for one group (control group) every other group got a treatment (a statement being read in the class). The legal/law group was informed about the new laws/regulations/enforcements of new laws related to digital piracy. The religion group was informed about a new edict/fatwa which considers digital piracy to be immoral from a religious point of view. The last group, awareness group was informed about the consequences of piracy. Upon the “treatment”, all of the groups were administered the post-questionnaire, which again evaluated their intention to pirate in the near future.
RIAA and anti-p2p companies have constantly engaged in various methods to thwart sharing of albums and movies over BitTorrent. Detailed research on one of the popular methods (leecher attack) has proven that, the time and money spent on this method is just a waste. The researchers also suggest methods to completely nullify these attacks.
With law suits against BitTorrent users being very unpopular and legal action against every tracker being impossible, RIAA and record labels have long been using anti-p2p companies such as Media Defender, Safenet and Macrovision to engage in online attacks on various components of the BitTorrent ecosystem.
Of the many attacks used, a few are popular. Seeder attack focuses on attacking the seeder (uploader), in order to prevent the file reaching other users; however this attack needs to initiated at the very early stages of protecting an album or movie from propagating and seeders are usually experienced p2p users. Tracker attack involves flooding the tracker, however most trackers employ high bandwidth servers and many BitTorrent clients have employed other mechanisms such as distributed hash tables and gossips (letting other peers know about the peers discovered by a client). Uploading fake torrents to trackers is one other method used, however this only just frustrates the users but does not prevent or block the sharing of their valued content. Leecher attack is one of the most popular attack, for that it attempts to attack the majority of the BitTorrent ecosystem, the users actively downloading parts of a movie or album. Researchers have paid special attention to leecher attacks, due to this reason.
Is the RIAA’s strategy to stop music piracy working? According to a recent study, interesting data has been collected from college students that holds both good and bad news for the RIAA. Where does this leave the future of downloading?
204 undergraduates from a large Midwestern University were promised anonymity and were recently sampled in a piracy study since students download more often than non-students. Researchers believed college students were the best representatives of digital music consumers and studied an equal number of males and females in regards to software piracy, movie piracy, and music piracy. The Elsevier findings blew away previous research and statistics about digital pirates.
Researchers set out to test these business students for the decision factors of obtaining online music, such as how important the ethical, legal and social consequences are in of music piracy. Motivations and theoretical research found that among 24 kinds of questionable Internet behaviors, downloading copyright-protected music and movies is considered the least wrong. An acquisition-mode framework for musical piracy was developed and was based upon previous research.
