The Government of Antigua is planning to launch a website selling movies, music and software, without paying U.S. copyright holders. The Caribbean island is taking the unprecedented step because the United States refuses to lift a trade “blockade” preventing the island from offering Internet gambling services, despite several WTO decisions in Antigua’s favor. The country now hopes to recoup some of the lost income through a WTO approved “warez” site.

Antigua and Barbuda is a small country in the Caribbean that for years had a flourishing gambling industry.

A few years ago 5% of all Antiguans worked at gambling related companies. However, when the U.S. prevented the island from accessing their market the industry collapsed.

“What was once a multi-billion dollar industry in our country, employing almost 5% of our population has now shrunk to virtually nothing,” Antigua’s High Commissioner to London, Carl Roberts, said previously.

Hoping to rebuild the gambling business Antigua filed a dispute at the World Trade Organization (WTO), which they won.

In 2005 the WTO ruled that the US refusal to let Antiguan gambling companies access their market violated free-trade, as domestic companies were allowed to operate freely. In 2007 the WTO went a step further and granted Antigua the right to suspend U.S. copyrights up to $21 million annually.

TorrentFreak is informed by a source close to Antigua’s Government that the country now plans to capitalize on this option. The authorities want to launch a website selling U.S. media to customers worldwide, without compensating the makers.

The plan has been in the works for several months already and Antigua is ready to proceed once they have informed the WTO about their plan. Initially the island put the topic on the WTO meeting last month, but the U.S. blocked it from being discussed by arguing that the request was “untimely.”

This month Antigua will try again, and if they succeed their media hub is expected to launch soon after.

Antigua’s attorney Mark Mendel told TorrentFreak that he can’t reveal any details on the plans. However, he emphasized that the term “piracy” doesn’t apply here as the WTO has granted Antigua the right to suspend U.S. copyrights.

“There is no body in the world that can stop us from doing this, as we already have approval from the international governing body WTO,” Mendel told us.

TorrentFreak is in the process of obtaining details of the content to be offered and the prices to be charged. One option would be to ask users for $5 a month in return for unlimited access to U.S. media.

As predicted, the suggestion to suspend U.S. copyrights is already meeting resistance from United States authorities.

“If Antigua actually proceeds with a plan for its government to authorize the theft of intellectual property, it would only serve to hurt Antigua’s own interests,” the U.S warned in a letter to the WTO last month.

According to the letter Antigua will ruin their chances of getting a settlement should they approve a site that sels U.S. copyrighted goods without compensating the makers.

“Government-authorized piracy would undermine chances for a settlement that would provide real benefits to Antigua. It also would serve as a major impediment to foreign investment in the Antiguan economy, particularly in high-tech industries,” the U.S. added.

Antigua doesn’t appear to be impressed much by these threats and is continuing with its plan.

If the Antiguan media portal indeed launches, it will make headlines all across the world, which may result in the site becoming one of the larger authorized suppliers of U.S. media on the Internet.

via Antigua Government Set to Launch “Pirate” Website To Punish United States | TorrentFreak.

According to the Federal Court, RapidShare has to take all “technically and economically reasonable precautions” without compromising its business model to ensure that its users do not upload Atari’s game. The Court also noted that by not installing a word filter RapidShare may have already breached the “reasonable” threshold.One of the additional steps that the Court said RapidShare must take is to monitor a “manageable number” of third-party sites that offer “link collections” of content available on RapidShare. Should it find them indexing a copy of Atari’s game available on RapidShare it should then delete it from its servers.

via Supreme Court: RapidShare Liable For Copyright Infringement – Sometimes | TorrentFreak.

.http://fortunebrainstormtech.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/041112-us-v-apple-complaint.pdf

Allowing students access to unpaid, small excerpts of copyrighted works promotes the spread of knowledge because it reduces the cost of education, the judge said. On the other hand, decreased income for publishers could reduce their ability to produce academic textbooks and scholarly works, thereby diminishing the spread of knowledge.Evans said that “decidedly small” excerpts could be copied by Georgia State. In most circumstances, she determined, it is permissible for universities and colleges to copy 10 percent of a book or one chapter of a book with 10 or more chapters.Brandon Butler, director of public policy initiatives for the Association of Research Libraries, said the publishers lawsuit had had a chilling effect on university libraries. “There was a feeling of being under siege,” he said. “They took us to court saying we were shameless pirates.”

via Judge rules largely for Georgia State in copyright case  | ajc.com.

WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

via WordPress › Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS.

One in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet and since last year the government has been wondering what to do about it. This week their response was published and it was crystal clear. Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won’t suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products.

swissIn Switzerland, just as in dozens of other countries, the entertainment industries have been complaining about dramatic losses in revenue due to online piracy.

In a response, the Swiss government has been conducting a study into the impact downloading has on society, and this week their findings were presented.

The overall conclusion of the study is that the current copyright law, under which downloading copyrighted material for personal use is permitted, doesn’t have to change.

Their report begins with noting that when it comes to copying files, the Internet has proven a game-changer. While the photocopier, audio cassette tape and VCR allowed users to make good quality copies of various media, these devices lacked a in-built distribution method. The world-wide web changed all that.

Distribution method or not, the entertainment industries have opposed all these technological inventions out of fear that their businesses would be crushed. This is not the right response according to the Swiss government, which favors the option of putting technology to good use instead of taking the repressive approach.

“Every time a new media technology has been made available, it has always been ‘abused’. This is the price we pay for progress. Winners will be those who are able to use the new technology to their advantages and losers those who missed this development and continue to follow old business models,” the report notes.

The government report further concludes that even in the current situation where piracy is rampant, the entertainment industries are not necessarily losing money. To reach this conclusion, the researchers extrapolated the findings of a study conducted by the Dutch government last year, since the countries are considered to be similar in many aspects.

The report states that around a third of Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people don’t spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary.

The other side of piracy, based on the Dutch study, is that downloaders are reported to be more frequent visitors to concerts, and game downloaders actually bought more games than those who didn’t. And in the music industry, lesser-know bands profit most from the sampling effect of file-sharing.

The Swiss report then goes on to review several of the repressive anti-piracy laws and regulations that have been implemented in other countries recently, such as the three-strikes Hadopi law in France. According to the report 12 million was spent on Hadopi in France this year, a figure the Swiss deem too high.

The report further states that it is questionable whether a three-strikes law would be legal in the first place, as the UN’s Human Rights Council labeled Internet access a human right. The Council specifically argued that Hadopi is a disproportionate law that should be repealed.

Other measures such as filtering or blocking content and websites are also rejected, because these would hurt freedom of speech and violate privacy protection laws. The report notes that even if these measures were implemented, there would be several ways to circumvent them.

The overall suggestion the Swiss government communicates to the entertainment industries is that they should adapt to the change in consumer behavior, or die. They see absolutely no need to change the law because downloading has no proven negative impact on the production of national culture.

Aside from downloading, it is also practically impossible for companies in Switzerland to go after casual uploaders. In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled that tracking companies are not allowed to log IP-addresses of file-sharers, making it impossible for rightsholders to gather evidence.

via Swiss Govt: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal | TorrentFreak.

What should we call this ad hoc association of Silicon Valley businesses, venture capitalists, law professors, civil libertarians, and avid Internet users? Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute told me he’d brand it a “populist technocratic coalition,” which is somehow both oxymoronic and apt. Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, says it calls to mind the old buzzword Netizens. My preferred term: the geek lobby.

via Stop Online Piracy Act: Can the geek lobby stop Hollywood from wrecking the Internet? – Slate Magazine.

Analysis: Did the content industry lose the legal battle?

Do you remember back in 2001 when Napster shut down its servers? US courts found Napster Inc was likely to be liable for the copyright infringements of its users. Many of Napster’s successors were also shut down.

Aimster and its controversial CEO were forced into bankruptcy, the highest court in the US strongly suggested that those behind Grokster and Morpheus ought to be held liable for “inducing” their users to infringe, and Kazaa’s owners were held liable for authorisation by our own Federal Court. Countless others fled the market in the wake of these decisions with some, like the formerly defiant owners of Bearshare and eDonkey, paying big settlements on the way out.

By most measures, this sounds like an emphatic victory for content owners. But a funny thing happened in the wake of all of these injunctions, shutdowns and settlements: the number of P2P file sharing apps available in the market exploded.

By 2007, two years after the US Supreme Court decided Grokster, there were more individual P2P applications available than there had ever been before. The average number of users sharing files on file sharing networks at any one time was nudging ten million and it was estimated that P2P traffic had grown to comprise up to 90 percent of global internet traffic. At that point content owners tacitly admitted defeat, largely abandoning their long-time strategy of suing key P2P software providers and diverting enforcement resources to alternatives like graduated response or “three strikes” laws.

Why is it that, despite being ultimately successful in holding individual P2P software providers liable for their users’ infringement, content owners’ litigation strategy has failed to bring about any meaningful reduction in the amount of P2P development and infringement?

Physical vs digital

I would argue pre-P2P era law was based on a number of “physical world” assumptions. That makes sense, since it evolved almost exclusively with reference to physical world scenarios and technologies. However, as it turns out, there is often a gap between those assumptions and the realities of P2P software development.

Four such physical world assumptions are particularly notable in explaining this phenomenon.

The first is that everybody is bound by physical world rules. Assuming this rule had universal application, various secondary liability principles evolved to make knowledge and control pre-requisites to liability. But software has no such constraint. Programmers can write software that will do things that are simply not possible or feasible in the physical world. So once the Napster litigation made P2P programmers aware of the rules about knowledge and control, they simply coded Napster’s successors to eliminate them – something no provider of a physical world distribution technology ever managed to do.

In response, the US Supreme Court in Grokster created a brand new legal doctrine, called inducement, that did not rely on either knowledge or control. That rule was aimed at capturing “bad actors” – those P2P providers who aimed to profit from their users’ infringement and whose nefarious intent was demonstrated by “smoking guns” in their marketing and other communications. But the inducement law failed to appreciate some of the other differences that make the software world special and thus led directly to the explosion in the number of P2P technologies. In understanding why, three other physical world assumptions come into play.

One is that it is expensive to create distribution technologies that are capable of vast amounts of infringement. Of course in the physical world, the creation of such technologies, like printing presses, photocopiers, and VCRs required large investment. Research and development, mass-manufacturing, marketing and delivery all require massive amounts of cash. Thus, the law came to assume that the creation of such technologies was expensive.

That led directly to the next assumption – that distribution technologies are developed for profit. After all, nobody would be investing those massive sums without some prospect of a return.

Finally comes the fourth assumption: that rational developers of distribution technologies won’t share their secrets with consumers or competitors. Since they needed to recoup those massive investments, they had no interest at all in giving them away.

All of these assumptions certainly can hold up in the software development context. For example, those behind Kazaa spent a lot on its development, squeezed out the maximum possible profit and kept its source code a closely guarded secret. By creating a law that focused on profits, business models and marketing, the Supreme Court succeeded in shaking out Kazaa and its ilk from the market.

But the Court failed to appreciate that none of these things are actually necessary to the creation of P2P file sharing software. It can be so inexpensive to develop that some university programming courses actually require students to make an app as part of an assignment. When the software provider puts in such a small investment, there’s much less need to realise a profit. This, combined with widespread norms within the software development community encouraging sharing and collaboration, also leads to some individuals making the source code of their software publicly available for others to adapt and copy.

When the US Supreme Court created its new law holding P2P providers liable where they “fostered” third party infringement, as evidenced by such things as business models, marketing and internal communications, the result was an enormous number of programmers choosing to create new applications without any of those liability attracting elements. In the absence of any evidence that they had set out to foster infringement, they could not be liable for inducement, and having coded out of knowledge and control they could not be held liable under the pre-P2P law either.

The end result? The mismatch between the law’s physical world assumptions and the realities of the software world meant that the law created to respond to the challenges of P2P file sharing led to the opposite of the desired result: a massive increase in the availability of P2P file sharing software. The failure of the law to recognise the unique characteristics of software and software development meant the abandonment of the litigation campaign against P2P providers was only a matter of time.

Dr Rebecca Giblin is a member of Monash University’s law faculty in Melbourne. Her new book Code Wars tells the story of the decade-long struggle between content owners and P2P software providers, tracing the development of the fledgling technologies, the attempts to crush them through litigation and legislation, and the remarkable ways in which they evolved as their programmers sought ever more ingenious means to remain one step ahead of the law. The book explains why the litigation strategy against P2P providers was ultimately unsuccessful in bringing about any meaningful reduction in the amount of P2P development of infringement.

Visit codewarsbook.com where you can read the first chapter in full. Physical copies can be ordered online from stores like Amazon and Book Depository, and electronic copies are available via Google books at a heavily discounted price.

via How litigation only spurred on P2P file sharing – Telco/ISP – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au.

A court has overturned a 2010 ruling which said that blocking The Pirate Bay at the ISP level was “disproportionate”. The Antwerp Court of Appeal sided with the Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation in their quest to force two ISPs to block subscriber access to the world’s most famous torrent site. Belgacom and Telenet must now implement a DNS blockade of the site within 14 days or face fines.

via Belgian ISPs Ordered To Block The Pirate Bay | TorrentFreak.

The deed is done. Copyright term extension for sound recordings from 50 to 70 years was adopted yesterday (12 September 2011) by qualified majority in the European Council. The remaining opposition came from Belgium, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Sweden. Austria and Estonia abstained.

The chorus of approval has been led by aging artists, masking the fact that for more than a decade the lobby for copyright extension has been resourced by the multinational record industry. Labels do not want to lose the revenues of the classic recordings of the 1960s which are reaching the end of their current 50 year term. Rather than innovating, right holders find it much easier to exclude competition. Europe is in danger of locking away her music heritage just as digital technology is enabling the opening of the archives.

via Copyright Term | Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management | Bournemouth University.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) has a rejoinder to those who argue copyright laws must be further strengthened: “I think if we were to do nothing on copyright law, we would be getting it just about right.”

Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley, spoke this week at a meeting of the Intellectual Property Breakfast Club in Washington, DC. She offered her typically blunt assessments of digital copyright, arguing that “the focus on copyright has almost been an impediment for content owners to really embrace streaming and to really understand how to make money utilizing the Internet.” In her view, copyright was partially responsible for a mindset that focused too much on control just as the Internet was offering a different distribution model.

via US Rep: Copyright has actually been an “impediment” to rightsholders.

Advisory Committee on Enforcement : Sixth Session

Meeting Documents

Code	Title(s)	File(s)
WIPO/ACE/6/INF/1	: Liste des participants/ List of Participants : Liste des participants/ List of Participants
WIPO/ACE/6/1	: Agenda : Projet d’ordre du jour : Proyecto de Orden del día
WIPO/ACE/6/2	: Recent Activities of WIPO in the Field of Building Respect for Intellectual Property (IP) : Activités récentes de l’OMPI dans el domaine de la promotion du respect de la propriété intellectuelle : Actividades reicentes de la OMPI dirigidas a cultivas el respeto por la propiedad intelectual
WIPO/ACE/6/3	: Future Work of the Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) : Travaux futurs du Comité consultatif sur l’application des droits (ACE) : Labor futura del Comité asesor sobre observancia (ACE)
WIPO/ACE/6/4	: Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods : Observations sur les efforts visant à quantifier les répercussions sur l’économie des produits contrefaisants ou pirates : Observaciones sobre los esfuerzos para cuantificar los efectos económicos de los productos falsificados y pirateados
WIPO/ACE/6/5	: Media Piracy in Emerging Economies: Price, Market Structure and Consumer Behavior : Le piratage des supports d’information dans les économies des paye émergents: prix, structure du marché et compportement du consommateur : La piratería de productos audiovisuales y de software en las economías emergentes: precios, estructura de mercado y comportamiento de los consumidores
WIPO/ACE/6/6	: Research Report on Consumer Attitudes and Perceptions on Counterfeiting and Piracy : Rapport de recherche sur l’attitude et la perception des consommatuers en matière de contrefaçon et de piratage : Informe de investigación sobre las actitudes y percepciones de los consumidores respecto de la fialsificaión y la piratería
WIPO/ACE/6/7	: The Economic Effects of Counterfeiting and Piracy: A Literature Review : Examen des études consacrées aux conséquences économiques de la contrefaçon et du piratage : Examen de la documentación acerca de la de los efectos económicos de la falsificación y la piratería
WIPO/ACE/6/8	: A Study Relating to Existing Methods of Disposal and Destruction of Counterfeit Goods and Pirated Goods within the Asia Pacific Region : Étude relative aux méthodes actuelles d’écoulement et de destruction des produits contrefaisants et pirates dans le région asie et pacifique : Estudio sobre los métodos de eliminación y destrucción de mercancías falsificadas o pirateadas en la región de asia y el pacífico
WIPO/ACE/6/10	: IPR Infringements and Enforcement – Accounting for Socio-Economic, Technical and Dvelopment Variables : Atteintes aux droits de propriété intellectuelle et application des droits – la prise en consideration des variables socioéconomiques, techniques et en rapport avec le développement : Infracciones y observancia de los derechos de propiedad intelectual. La toma en consideración de las variables socioeconómicas, técnicas y de desarrollo
WIPO/ACE/6/11	: Summary by the Chair : Résumé du Président : Resumen del Presidente

via Advisory Committee on Enforcement.

As was widely reported last week, several major internet access providers including, very likely, yours struck a deal last week with big content providers to help them police online infringement, educate allegedly infringing subscribers and, if subscribers resist such education, take various steps including restricting their internet access. We’ve now had a chance to peruse the lengthy “Memorandum of Understanding” MOU behind this deal. Turns out, as is often observed, the devil is in the details – and they are devilish indeed.

via The “Graduated Response” Deal: What if Users Had Been At the Table? | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

American Internet users, get ready for three strikes “six strikes.” Major US Internet providers—including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable—have just signed on to a voluntary agreement with the movie and music businesses to crack down on online copyright infringers. But they will protect subscriber privacy and they won’t filter or monitor their own networks for infringement. And after the sixth “strike,” you won’t necessarily be “out.”Much of the scheme mirrors what ISPs do now. Copyright holders will scan the ‘Net for infringement, grabbing suspect IP addresses from peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. If they see your IP address participating in a swarm for, say, Transformers, they will look up that IP address to see which ISP controls it, then fire off a message.ISPs have committed to forward such notices to subscribers—though, crucially, they won’t turn over actual subscriber names or addresses without a court order. This is a one-way notification process.

via Major ISPs agree to “six strikes” copyright enforcement plan.

We are informed by the BBC that the MPA is in the UK High Court today seeking to force the ISP British Telecom to block us from Stephen Fry’s web browser. Charming, we thought, bloody charming: “A Newzbin2 themed costume party, with horsehair wigs, and no-one invited us.” The MPA didn’t invite us, BT didn’t invite us, the court didn’t invite us. Team R Dogs would have loved to have had some say.What is worse is that it is a UK legal first: the first time anyone there has sought a blocking order in the High Court. The only blocking so far has been done by British Telecom using their Cleanfeed system to filter out kiddyporn sites on a list created by the Internet Watch Foundation, but that has been done without a court order.If the MPA get this injunction they will certainly, in the mould of the Internet Watch Foundation, start to add to the list other sites that offend them, e.g. the Pirate Bay. All of this will probably also be secret and, like us, not subject to an appeal or any due process.

via Press statement for immediate release. 29/6/2011 | NZBlog.

ars technica

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA, S.3804) sets up a system through which the US government can blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid online ad networks from working with the site. It passed the Senate Judiciary Committee 19-0 this week, but it’s never going to pass the Senate before the end of the current Congress.

That’s due to resistance from people like Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who announced at a separate trade hearing of his own yesterday that he was going to “take the necessary steps to stop [COICA] from passing the United States Senate.”

“It seems to me that online copyright infringement is a legitimate problem,” he said in the midst of his questioning, “but it seems to me that COICA as written is the wrong medicine. Deploying this statute to combat online copyright infringement seems almost like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb when what you really need is a precision-guided missile.”

“The collateral damage of this statute could be American innovation, American jobs, and a secure Internet.”

Ed Black, CEO of computing industry trade group CCIA, was testifying at the hearing, and he agreed that COICA was a “good example of what not to do in an important, complicated digital ecosystem.”

Sweet sanity! And yet—this thing passed out of committee 19-0 with minimal hearings? Presumably there’s a big bipartisan bloc in the Senate which doesn’t think a major new Internet censorship regime—and one that applies only to copyright—needs much in the way of oversight. While the bill looks dead this year, the idea has met with thunderous applause from the movie and music industries, who are sure to back it next year. Hopefully, something more considered will be on the table the second time around.

- Asva.info

Szóval mi a tanulság? Az, hogy a pedofília miatt kap az ember 2 év felfüggesztett börtönt, míg kalóz szoftverek használata miatt nyolcmilliós bírságot. Félre ne értsen senki, egyáltalán nem akarom védeni az embert, nekem csak az fáj, hogy ha ez két külön személy lett volna, mennyivel rosszabbul  járt volna a másolt Photoshop-ot futtató ember.

Necessity knows no laws – the role of copyright pirates in the cultural ecosystem from printing to file sharing networks

This is the title of my PhD turned into a forthcoming book in Hungarian.

In this book my aim was to look beyond the legal and economic readings of contemporary western copyright piracy and understand it as a unique social practice that merits attention not only because of its dubious legality, ubiquity, or the havoc it has played with copyright-based business models, but first and foremost because it shapes the ideas and attitudes of millions of netizens about what intellectual property is and could be; what sharing and online cooperation means in a p2p setting; what privacy is and how it can be protected; how to form and negotiate online identities in an anonymous environment, just to name a few issues. Piracy is not just a drain on the cultural economy, but a powerful productive force whose legacy in social relations will stay with us long after the economic conditions that called it into being –and the power vacuum that enabled it – have passed.
The notion that piracy is more than just a legally contested shadow economy is further supported by the body of research that documents historical examples of copyright piracy either from a social/media history, literary studies perspective (Bender & Sampliner, 1996-1997; Darnton, 2003; Feather, 1987; Heylin, 1995; Judge, 1934; Kaser, 1969; Pollard, 1916, 1920; Rose, 1993; Wittmann, 2004, Johns 2010) or from a legal history standpoint (Khan, 2002; Khan & Sokoloff, 2001; May & Sell, 2006; Redmond, 1990; Scott, 1998). These historical accounts of copyright piracy describe the internal norms of information markets both before and after the establishment of national and international layers of regulation. The faces, motivations, and fates of the copyright pirates are many, but there is  one thing that is common to all of them: they all exist in the extra-legal domain at the edges of state authority. In this semi-autonomous space,  “Honor Amongst Thieves,”  “synthetic copyright”,  entries in the Registry of the Stationer’s Company,  server-enforced share ratios, and other non-legal structures organize pirate activity. In each and every case we find norms that — while competing with the legal –  act to encourage the production of a common pool resource, offer methods to settle disputes and limit free-riding. In other words these bottom up norms sometimes substitute, sometimes replicate  state sanctioned layers of regulation that are missing or being denied.

Why is the study of piracy especially interesting today? For several reasons. First, even though on paper we have seen a steady strengthening of the protection of Intellectual Property, the inability to enforce them resulted in a significantly weaker copyright protection than any time during the last hundred years. That vacuum is partly caused, partly filled by the competing, bottom up norms of  file-sharing communities. The weakened property rights, along with the emergence of file­sharing networks created a de facto common pool of resources from the musical, audiovisual, textual works circulating in the digital underground. This commons has proved to be quite resilient to attacks from the outside as well as to those internal issues that can lead to a tragedy of commons. Many file-sharing communities seem to have successfully solved the problems of managing a common pool resource as well as protecting it from – in this case (re) – enclosure. There is, however, little to no research on the actual mechanisms of how these commons are maintained, protected and replenished. Only a few unconfirmed accounts describe the internal workings of online cultural black markets (b-bstf, Summer 2004; Howe, January 2005).

Second, even from these shallow accounts it is evident that non-monetary incentives and complex social motivations play a crucial role in the existence and successful survival of file-sharing communities and of those resource pools around which these communities gather. To illustrate this point it is worth examining the ways community norms manifest themselves in the technological restraints and defaults (Strahilevitz, 2003). Employed at the level of both software clients (like the design principle of bittorrent) and servers (minimum shared library size or upload/download ratio) technology is fine-tuned to reflect the characteristics of content flows, the relative popularity of different titles, the aesthetic judgments, and the thematic preferences of file-sharers. Global, open, mainstream bittorrent trackers for example set no minimum level of contribution – they rely on the sheer number of users and the loyalty of some to provide the necessary level of resources for all. On the other hand, while many national level trackers prohibit the exchange of current local goods, they highly reward the making available of local back catalogs and out of print works. Some allow only a trusted circle of releasers to provide them with digital copies of new titles. Others allow, even encourage each and every user to upload and seed whatever they see fit. From this latter group some set and enforce highly detailed technical specifications regarding video encoding, sound quality, etc. Others provide the community collaborative filtering tools to assess the quality of contributions. Beyond the technologically enforced compulsory rules, informal community norms encourage voluntary cooperation. The exclusivity, notoriety of some communities guarantees a loyal and enthusiastic user base. Their fame inspires others into competition, trying to replicate their success. Many fail, a few prefer to stay small and secluded, but some develop into big, extraordinarily powerful underground marketplaces.

Third, none of these subtle differences between different pirate communities is described with the current economic and legal language used to discuss copyright piracy, despite the fact that they have profound economic and legal consequences on legal markets and on general copynorms (Schultz, 2006) alike. Current discourse on copyright piracy tends to homogenize a wide variety of fundamentally different practices with reductionist legal /economic arguments.

Following the footsteps of Lessig (2004) I hope that the time is now ripe to step beyond the monolithic understanding of  p2p file-sharing by enriching the currently fragmented research landscape with a social-sciences based piracy research that
- describes the role copyright pirates played throughout the history of printing,
- describes the international flow of intellectual property to explain piratical states such as China,
- based on these findings situates current file-sharing and assesses its impact on legal markets.

Techdirt

We were just talking about whether or not countries are really able to push back on the US’s attempts to export draconian anti-competition/anti-innovation copyright and patent policies elsewhere. Michael Geist points us to two cases where US trade representatives are going overboard in trying to get foreign countries to put in place stringent intellectual property rules. The first is in Costa Rica, which is included in the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Yet like with other free trade agreements that the US has agreed to elsewhere, this one includes draconian intellectual property law requirements. I still cannot understand why intellectual monopoly protectionism — the exact opposite of “free trade” — gets included in free trade agreements. At least in Costa Rica, a lot of people started protesting these rules, pointing out that it would be harmful for the economy, for education and for healthcare. So the Costa Rican government has not moved forward with such laws. How has the US responded? It’s blocking access to the US market of Costa Rican sugar until Costa Rica approves new copyright laws. Nice of the US, right? Bankrupting Costa Rican farmers to force Costa Rica to put in place a copyright regime it does not want.

Then there’s the Bahamas, where US trade representatives are demanding new intellectual property laws, claiming that the country is not in agreement with WTO treaties. Apparently, the USTR is particularly upset about the police force in the Bahamas not cracking down on the sale of unauthorized DVDs, CDs and counterfeit clothing. However, as the Bahamas Chamber of Commerce president notes, nearly all of those counterfeit products actually originated in the US — and that the majority of people doing the buying are US tourists. In other words, the issue is really with the US, but it seems to want everyone else to deal with it.

TorrentFreak

Lawyers have presented their final arguments in the trial of Alan Ellis. The prosecution slammed the ex-OiNK admin, saying that the site was set up with dishonest and profiteering intentions right from the start. The defense tore into IFPI and countered by calling Ellis an innovator with talents to be nurtured. Today the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty, and Ellis walked free.

After a very long wait of more than two years, last week the OiNK trial got underway with the prosecution making their case against Alan Ellis. This week it was the turn of the defense and yesterday both sides had the opportunity to summarize their positions by submitting their closing arguments to the jury at Teesside Crown Court.

Peter Makepeace, prosecuting, naturally painted an extremely negative picture, labeling the Pink Palace as a place designed from the ground up as a personal money-making machine for Ellis.

“21 million downloads. 600,000-plus albums. £300,000. This was a cash cow, it was perfectly designed to profit him and it was as dishonest as the day is long,” said Makepeace.

It is common sense to come to the conclusion that Oink was dishonest, claimed the prosecution lawyer, adding that Ellis knows that it’s dishonest “to promote, encourage and facilitate criminal activity,” and accusing him of telling the jury “persistent, cunning, calculated lies.”

It would, of course, be dishonest to promote “criminal activity”, but Mr Makepeace should be very well aware that the activity engaged in by OiNK’s users is covered under civil law.

Switching momentarily from criticism to praise and then back again, Makepeace said that the OiNK website was a “wonderful machine” for sharing music but noted that while the site had a really good brand name, it was a brand synonymous with “ripping off music.”

University of London professor Birgitte Andersenok gave evidence earlier in the trial, stating that file-sharing didn’t hurt the music industry and led to more sales. Mr Makepeace trashed her evidence.

“It’s nonsense, it’s flannel, it’s verbiage, it’s garbage,” he told the Court.

For the defense, Alex Stein said that Ellis had never knowingly acted dishonestly and that in 2004 when OiNK was launched, it was a “brave new world” on the Internet.

“In many societies he’d be an innovator, a creator, a Richard Branson. His talent would be moulded, not crushed by some sort of media organization,” he said.

The media organization being referred to by Stein was the IFPI, who he said had never requested that OiNK be shut down, and had instead “sat and watched.”

Gazette Live reports that Stein went on to launch a scathing attack on the IFPI.

“They used this site. Their own members used this site to promote their own music and now they’re crushing him. Maybe he grew too big for them, maybe they’ve taken a different marketing approach. I don’t know. But it was decided that this site should be taken down.

“All of us here are being manipulated to some sort of marketing strategy by the IFPI. If anybody’s acting dishonestly it’s them,” he said.

At the end of the two week trial the jury returned a unanimous verdict (12 to 0). Alan Ellis is not guilty of Conspiracy to Defraud the music industry. He walked out of Teesside Crown Court a free man today, his name cleared.

The verdict cannot be appealed and Ellis can finally put the past behind him and move on.