Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Expendables Producers Drop Lawsuit Against 23K BitTorrent File-sharers

First off today, the U.S. Copryight Group, representing the producers behind the movie “The Expendables” have dropped their suit against 23,000 alleged Bittorrent file sharers. The movie comes after the Washington DC Federal Judge said the group would not be able to pursue infringers with that lawsuit if they are not in the court’s jurisdiction, theoretically eliminating all but 84 of the cases. However, the suit was dropped without prejudice leaving the U.S. Copyright Group open to refile.

2: Lakewood Church, Osteens Sued For $3M

Next up today, Houston-based Lakewood Church is being sued by two musicians, Richard Cupolo and John Emanuelle claiming that the church used a song created by the pair was used in commercials for the church after their license expired in February 2011. The church has said that the music, which was one minute of background music for the commercial, was licensed and that the musicians are “confused”.

3: Copyright Piracy Increasing in Asian Countries

Finally today, despite all the talk about Web-based piracy, printed book piracy is a growing problem in Asia where illegal copies of many bestsellers are printed in India and shipped throughout the continent. The illegal operations are controlled by highly organized gangs, often working alongside legitimate printing companies and are able to print and distribute between 75-80 western bestsellers a year.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 5 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Photobucket Easily Rebuffs A Copyright Lawsuit

First off today, Photobucket has fended off a pro se lawsuit filed by an artist, Sheila Wolk, who claimed that the company was not doing enough to keep her work off of their site. However, Photobucket, according to the court, qualified for safe harbor protection under the DMCA as it promptly removes works when notified and has completed all other formalities under the law. Wolk had wanted Photobucket to remove works preemptively or filter out infringing content but the judge, in issue the injunction, said that Photobucket had no such obligation.

2: Baidu CEO Seeks Win-Win Business Model in Copyright Dispute

Next up today, Robin Li, the Chariman and CEO of the Chinese search engine Baidu has issued an apology to authors who are upset about infringement on Baidu’s books and documents search tools. Talks between authors and the search engine broke down last week, leading Li to issue his statement, his first on the dispute. He went on to say that he is hoping to find a “win-win” business model that works for both side.

3: Anonymous Launches New DDoS Attack Against RIAA

Finally today, Anonymous has launched another DDOS attack against the RIAA’s site, this time in response to the RIAA’s ongoing case against Limewire, where the organization mentioned damages against the company could reach as high as $75 trillion. The judge denied those high damages, saying that the RIAA could only collect statutory damages once per work, rather than per download as the RIAA had claimed. The RIAA site has been up and down since the DDOS attack began.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 6 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Only 9% (and Falling) of US Internet Users are P2P Pirates

First off today, a study released by the research firm NPD Group found that only 9% of Internet users pirate music over P2P networks, down from 16% just three years ago. The study is not a complete picture of the piracy situation as it only covers P2P downloads, not illegal streaming and one-click hosting sites, which have been on the rise, but it does hint that at least certain elements of the piracy problem are on the wane.

2: To The Bitter End: AFACT Takes BitTorrent Piracy Case To The High Court

Next up today, Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) announced that it will be appealing its case against local ISP iiNet to the country’s High Court. AFACT previously had sued iiNet claiming that the ISP authorized copyright infringement on its service by failing to take action when notified of misuse. Two lower courts found that iiNet had not violated the law but the Appeals Court ruled that, if the notices had been more clear and other changes had been made, the verdict could have been different. In light of this, AFACT has decided to appeal the verdict to the High Court where, if it does make it, a verdict may be rendered by the end of this year or early next year.

3: Baidu to Introduce Anti-Piracy Technology for Books Product

Finally today, Baidu, China’s largest search engine, is combating criticism from authors that it enables and tolerates piracy on its book and document search product by introducing anti-piracy technology that will filter out infringing works. Baidu has also often been criticized for enabling illegal downloads of MP3 files via its music search, but Baidu said it is not taking the same approach with that search feature.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 6 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Blaming Piracy, Music Industry Says It’s Lost a Third of Its Value Over Past 7 Years

First off today, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI) released its annual report today and, as one might expect, it’s fairly grim. According to the report, the record industry has lost about 30% of its total value globally over the past 7 years and even the growth in digital music sales is slowing.The report places the blame for this on piracy and calls for governments to take stronger action against it, saying that some 1.2 million jobs in Europe may disappear by 2015 if nothing is done.

2: Record Labels Seek To Disqualify LimeWire’s Law Firm For Ethical Conflict

Next up today, though Limewire may have been shut down, the case against it continues as record industry attorneys attempt to get damages from the company. However, now the attorneys for the plaintiffs are attempting to get the opposing counsel disqualified for an alleged conflict of interest. According to the plaintiff’s attorneys, Cravath, Swaine & Moore (CSM), one of the core members of their team in the case, Jeffrey Korn, now works for Limewire’s counsel, Willkie Farr & Gallagher (WFG), and has a critical role in the case. This, according to CSM, creates a conflict of interest that should result in WFG from working on the case any farther. This could, potentially, slow down the case greatly as Limewire may have to obtain new counsel and bring them up to speed in the case.

3: Cheap Books or End of Indian Writing?

Finally today, publishers in India are worried about pending changes in the country’s copyright law that, they say, could flood the market with cheap books. The current law requires publishers to get specific territorial rights to distribute books in India but changes to the law, largely aimed at helping Bollywood handle licensing of music and other content, would allow books to be sold in the country that were printed anywhere. According to publishers, this could jeopardize the Indian publishing system as a flood of books unable to be sold in other markets are sold cheap within the country. Publishers have vowed to lobby against the law or for changes to it to protect them.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 6 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: No Ads, Domain Seized and No Anonymity For Pirate Site, Judge Rules

First off today, two book publishers, Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons have successfully convinced a Massachusetts to bar two advertising networks, Clicksor and Chitika and a domain privacy service, ENOM, from providing services to a suspected pirate site. The publishers sued the companies, claiming that they provided services to Pharmatext, a site they claimed was making illegal copies of their books available for download. Pharmatext, however, has already been shut down, making this ruling fairly meaningless beyond the potential precedent value, which could be very big as other copyright holders target advertisers and domain registrars.

2: Canadian-Uploaded YouTube Video Doesn’t Infringe in US–Shropshire v. Canning

Elmo Shropshire, co-performer of the Christmas novelty song Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer, has lost a legal battle with a YouTube uploader who had put a cover of the song in the background of a video she had posted. Shropshire had posted filed a takedown on the video but the uploader, a Canadian named Aubrey Canning, filed a counter-notice and got the video restored. Shropshire sued Canning but lost on both of his claims. The first claim, regarding the video itself, failed because the creation and upload took place entirely in Canada. The second, which claimed a false counternotice, failed when Shropshire could not point a material misrepresentation in the counternotice and failed to bring in a second plaintiff to avoid risking double or triple damages. Shropshire and Canning have been operating pro se in this case and Shropshire can amend his claims and refile.

3: Corbin Fisher Sues Hotfile, John Does for Copyright Infringement

Finally, the parent company of Corbin Fisher, a gay adult content provider, has filed suit against file hosting service Hotfile, PayPal and some 1000 “Does” claiming infringement for uploading their content to the service. According to Corbin fisher’s filing, the parties have been involved in a “theft scam” and are a “a confederation of intellectual property thieves”, though PayPal isn’t included in the latter. The plaintiffs are seeking reasonable attorneys fees and statutory damages of $150,000 per infringed work, which, considering the 800 works listed in the lawsuit, would make the maximum damages $120 million.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 6 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution License.

Content tracking company Attributor has come forward with the results of another study, this time on the topic of book piracy.

Though the title “Online Book Piracy Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $3 Billion” may be a bit of an exaggeration, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute, the study itself (PDF) is an interesting peek into how piracy is affecting the book industry and the specific areas that are seeing the largest impact.

Those findings, while likely eye-opening to the book publishing industry, are also useful for bloggers and other writers on the Web, especially those who market downloadable eBooks and other content for sale.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the study and what it actually means.

Methodology

Attributor, using its FairShare Guardian system, monitored piracy for 913 popular books that made up a cross-section of the current book publishing industry by tracking the works across the top 25 file hosting sites for 90 days beginning in October 2009.

The company also tracked the number of downloads that the books received on sites where the information was available (four out of the 25) and from there, based on traffic estimates, projected the total amount of piracy for each book and for the entire sample. From there, the value of the books was estimated and that amount was, in turn, projected on the industry at large.

It’s important to note that this study does come with several limitations including that there was no monitoring of P2P sources, such as Bittorrent sites, and the study does not make any attempt to estimate the actual financial loss the industry suffered due to the piracy as it refuses to make a guess as to the number of illegal downloads that otherwise would have been sales.

Despite the limitations, including the admitted guesswork and projections, there is a lot of interesting information in the report.

Results

According to the study, Attributor tracked some 3.2 million downloads of the books. Given the estimated market share of those sites, they estimated that some 9 million copies were downloaded in total for a total market value of $380 million. That, in turn, becomes an estimate $2.8 billion when looking at the entire industry.

But while those numbers have a lot of caveats and estimations, there are some hard numbers within the study itself that are very interesting for Webmasters and book publishers alike, including the following:

• Business and investing was the most downloaded genre of book, with almost 14,000 downloads per book. Professional and technical books were second, with almost 10,000 average. Fiction books fared somewhat better, about 6,000 downloads per book and reference books were the least downloaded, about 2,000 downloads per book.
• The potential lost sales per title were highest among business and investing, professional and technical as well as science books, all of which had en estimated potential loss of over $1 million per title. Fiction and reference books had an average potential loss of less than 1/10th that amount.
• Regarding hosting sites, book piracy was by far the most common at rapidshare and 4shared, the two sites having nearly 70% of the market share.

The impact of this is pretty clear. If your content fits into one of the niches that is commonly pirated, you should definitely be aware of the dangers and either you or your publisher should be ready to take action. Also, it gives you an idea as to the sites to be watching closely as they are likely candidates for your work to appear, with or without your permission.

Also, however, it may be an opportunity as well. Knowing that there is a genuine desire for free electronic books on certain topics may open the doors for other authors to exploit that market legitimately while allowing the traditional publishing market to thrive as well.

Either way, this is some very useful intelligence on what is going on with book piracy and the usefulness of this information go well beyond just the publishing industry.

Bottom Line

For me there were a few surprises in the study. Though I expected technology books to be routinely pirated, both due to the target audience and following my friend Patrick O’Keefe’s trials with piracy regarding his own book, I was surprised to see business and investing take the top slot. Likewise, I was also surprised to see fiction rated so low, especially considering my own work as a fiction author.

Though the extreme difference in potential monetary losses is largely due to the different price structures for the two kinds of works, business books also saw the most downloads per work.

In that regard alone the study has shifted some of the ways I think about piracy and content and made me take a longer look at the business and investing genres of work. For authors and creators in that field, this should be a wake up call.

Even though there is a fair amount of admitted guesswork and “ifs” in the study, it is clear that it is not one that can be easily ignored, especially if you are writing in the business or investing field.

Disclosure: I have previously consulted for Attributor and they are a technology partner for my current company, CopyByte.com

When I review books, or any other product, I feel that it is my duty to convey whether the book is worth the time and money to read. Since it is possible, maybe even easier, to enjoy and be provoked by a book that you have diverging opinions with, I would like to try and keep my opinions on copyright out of the work.

However, as was with the case with Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, the benefit of the book is greatly hindered by clearly erroneous and/or misguided arguments. As such, it is important to address both the book itself and the merits of the argument.

But, as I review Mark Helprin’s book Digital Barbarism, I am not going to turn my review into an assault on his positions. Many others, far more qualified than I, have done so already including the editors at Copysense and even Lawrence Lessig himself via his wiki.

So the goal of this review is not to refute or support Helprin, but to let you know whether or not you want to run to your bookstore and pick up a copy of the book.

Spoiler Alert: You won’t.

First Impressions

In the opening pages of the book, Helprin paints himself as a sympathetic character. We learn that the book is a response to a deluge of criticism that befell him after he penned a New York Times editorial about copyright entitled “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?“, which became the target for those wanting to argue against perpetual copyright.

But to hear Helprin tell the story, it was, in large part, a misunderstanding. The headline being the editor’s (poor) decision and much of the talk about perpetual copyright being a misunderstanding of his intentions.

As an author, I can understand and appreciate this. I know well what it is like to have the mob, with torches lit, come to your door over a misunderstanding. However, unlike Helprin, I realized that much of the fault was my own. After all, especially when writing in a journalistic setting, it is the writer’s responsibility to write so that they can not be misunderstood. Where I learned from my mistakes and moved on, Helprin wrote a book.

Helprin, however, walked into his column with a unique combination of arrogance and ignorance. When describing the decision to write on copyright, he says he asked himself, “Who thinks about copyrights other than the few who hold them?” and that his goal was to pick a topic so dull as to not attract any attention.

Not only does this show a great misrepresentation of the law, especially since nearly every human produces copyrightable works, but also of the current climate on the Web, where copyright is one of the most controversial topics. It was as if Helprin had slept through the entire Napster era, the 35,000 RIAA lawsuits and The Pirate Bay trial, all issues that brought copyright to the forefront of even most lay of laypeople.

However, for our copyright version of Rip Van Winkle, this book represented an opportunity. It was a chance to correct his mistakes and present either a modified argument or new support for his existing one.

That’s why it is a terrible shame he failed to do either.

The Meat of the Book

Helprin’s lack of understanding of the nature of copyright on the Web is understandable. By his own admission he is a man who spends as little time in front of a screen as possible and has an extreme love affair for more traditional means of communication. He drives the point home early by expressing preference for a fictional 1908 world versus an equally-fictional not-too-distant future one, even though the 1908 world required weeks for letters to be sent and received.

However, his decision to write a book entitled “Digital Barbarism” without a rudimentary study of the digital culture is rather striking. His first, and most critical, blunder was to lump all copyright reformists into one category. The Lessig’s of the world are no different than The Pirate Bay admins. All of them, in Helprin’s mind, are copyright abolitionists and need to be treated as such because any scaling back of rights or reform of copyright law (other than more extensions) is just a step down the road to abolition.

Of course, to read Lessig’s work and watch his lectures is to understand that he is very much a believer in copyright, Lessig does not wish to abolish copyright (without copyright Creative Commons would collapse) nor does he condone piracy, a point he makes repeatedly. His reforms, though still very sweeping, are targeted at re-balancing copyright law, not ending it.

But once Helprin lumps the commons into the abolitionist movement, he doesn’t stop. He plows forward with arguments against the abolition of copyright, many of which are very compelling and very correct, but are poorly targeted. It is like arguing against fascism to someone who just wishes to add a new tax. The “slippery slope” is neither slippery nor absolute. A movement in one direction does not always equal a revolutionary rush to the extreme on that side.

Yet, that’s how Helprin spends the book. Attacking shadows with arguments that don’t fit. Though at times the rocks he throws are well-aimed, the targets are a figment of his own imagination and a product of his own stereotyping.

Wasted Pages

Though the other reviews and even the big copyright symbol on the cover might lead many to believe that this is a book about copyright issues, much of it is not. Helprin makes much of his case against copyright abolition largely through anecdotes. But while personal stories are a natural addition to such books, both Lessig and Keen used them in theirs, Helprin’s anecdote/argument ratio is extremely high.

Helprin has led a very accomplished and exciting life, that much is clear from this book. I hope to have one half as exciting over the next thirty years or so. However “Barbarism” is not intended to be a memoir nor does it read like one.

The problem with “Barbarism” is that his stories, without any central plot or direction, tend to wonder aimlessly, often for pages at a time. When the word “copyright” is finally mentioned again, it feels as if it was the punchline to a very long, very bad joke. His stories are so tangential to the main issue that only one, the tale of him stealing an ear of corn from a farmer’s field, seemed to have any solid connection to the issue.

One example, he tells two stories about him fighting, or trying to fight, bulls. The first a bull in France that was rather tame and played nicely, the other one that had broken loose on his own property and nearly killed him. All of this was to explain that the response to his article was like a bull, specifically the second one. Many pages spent for an analogy that would have been just as effective with two lines.

In the end, much of the book felt like a stereotype portrayed by the character Abe (Grandpa) Simpson from The Simpsons. A teller of long, winding tales that go nowhere until the teller seems to fall asleep only to wake up back on topic.

Petty Insults

When Helprin isn’t telling stories that he tries to connect to copyright, he is insulting his perceived enemy. However, though he is at times a very witty author in this book, that edge seems to dissipate far too often and he uses words so blunt they could bludgeon someone to death.

For example, at one point, Helprin describes his opponents as “mouth breather”, “Slurpee-sucking geeks” “beer-drinking dufuses” and more (Thanks to the New York Times for pointing me to the quote I needed). Even the title of his book refers to his perceived opponents as “barbarians”, which in and of itself is a derogatory term.

For every valid point Helprin makes over the course of the book, his arguments are undermined endlessly by his pettiness and stereotyping. Since the targets of his insults are typically the younger generations, this also furthers the image of Helprin as an old man yelling at the “darn kids” even if the kids are twenty and thirty-somethings.

The result of Helprin’s painting with broad strokes is that even supporters of copyright, such as myself, find ourselves in his crosshairs, alienating the very people that may have been in the best position to rush to his defense.

Flawed Arguments

When you whittle away the personal asides and petty insults, you wind up with precious few pages that actually address the issues of copyright and offer any significant input on the issue.

On that front, I actually support some of Helprin’s founding principles, namely that no man should be entitled to the work of another for free without permission, that copyright has helped make possible the vast and diverse culture we have today, that artists create something well worth protecting and that copyright is, in large part, about protecting the investments of time, money and energy put into a work.

On that front, Helprin does a decent enough job defending the idea of copyright. In the third chapter, he has a fairly interesting discussion of the philosophies of Jefferson and Macaulay that, more than any other part of the book, actually provokes thought and makes a good case for copyright.

However, over the course of the book, he completely fails to answer to his detractors. While he cites thousands of nasty emails received, acknowledges the presence of Lessig’s wiki rebuttal to his Times column, he addresses the actual arguments of neither. He says they are there and moves on, only making fun of their grammar and/or the method with which they were delivered (Helprin really didn’t like that Wiki format Lessig used).

Worse still, he rehashes many of the same arguments form the column, only more fleshed out. For example, throughout the book he makes many (flawed) comparisons between intellectual property and real property. However, it was those arguments, in large part, that created the connection between his name and perpetual copyright, something he is now disavowing (though still favoring extensions).

In short, Helprin seems to have emerged from his ordeal with the Times none the wiser. He is repeating the same arguments like a failed General sticking to the same tactics. With no new arguments and a dismal failure at understanding what it is he is writing about, Helprin steps into the same tar pits again, just merely putting his foot down harder.

Helprin’s arguments fell flat in the 1000-word Times column and now fall equally flat over the course of a 220-page book.

The Devil Inside

However, perhaps Helprin’s greatest enemy is himself. Throughout the entire book he seems to contradict his own views and ideas. Though it may be an attempt to find balance within himself, it comes across as a see-saw back and forth between the extremes.

Where once he claims to hate the “infernal machines”, to prefer a circa-1900 life to a modern one and to spend as little time in front of a computer as possible, he also claims to own five computers, have come up with an idea for an eBook reader he proposed and even simply “loves” machines. (Note: He does say he is in favor of people using machiens but not machines using people. However, he fails to distinguish between our growing dependence on computers to, for example, our current dependence on cars.)

Where he claims to be against perpetual copyright due to the intent of the framers of the Constitution, he also bases many of his arguments on the ownership of physical property, which is perpetual.

Even the book itself is a contradiction, at the same time he cries out against iPhones and BlackBerries his book, most likely due to his publisher’s decision, is available on the Kindle and, thus, the iPhone, which is exactly how I read it.

But no matter the cause of the latter conflict, it is smacking to read an attack on iPhones and other smartphones that is being sold on the iPhone.

Sadly, of the three conflicts, it is the least confusing and the least troublesome.

Bottom Line

Helprin’s book is $25 dollars if you purchase the book in print or $10 if you purchase the Kindle version. However, it is not worth either. Though the Kindle version is the best way to read this book (I tried both), it is because it allows you to break the book up into much smaller sections than Helprin provides (Chapter 2 alone takes up almost half of the book) and makes it easier to go through Helprin’s rambling stories.

Though the book feels hefty when you pick it up at your bookstore, it is very thin on actual commentary and heavy with largely-unrelated stories, insults and stereotypes. There is little in this book that is not in his op-ed pieces and, I would argue, those pieces say it better. At least in those you do not have to sit through pages and pages of Helprin’s disjointed memories to reach a barely-tangential point about copyright.

Though Helprin is right when he says that this book is not a memoir, it is because a memoir would have an ongoing plot and a sense of direction. In truth, an actual memoir could have been a very good book, it is clear that Helprin is a talented author with a lot of great stories to tell, but this is not the format for them.

I would pass on this book and stick to his op-eds. The novel-length copyright polemic is one that few authors can tackle. Helprin is not one of them. Though I think he is a very talented writer and may look up some of his other work, this is not the format for him.

1: Taylor Wessing Global Intellectual Property Index 2009

The law firm Taylor Wessing has released its 2009 Global Intellectual Property Index, which it says “provides an assessment of the best and worst jurisdictions to obtain, exploit, enforce and attack particular types of IP”. The results were not very surprising this year with the United Kingdom taking the top spot, followed by Germany (which moved up one spot) and the United States (which Germany bumped down).

At the bottom of the 24-country list was Brazil, India and China, with China being the worst.

What is most interesting is that most of the countries on the list improved their “rating” since the first study last year, but the United States dropped 11 points, largely due to a “slip” in the patent index. down to 751. Still, that puts it well above China who, despite a 43 point improvement still only had a score of 491. The U.S. is also number one in the copyright index of the study.

2: RealNetworks accuses MPAA of antitrust violations

Next up, the fight between Real and the MPAA has gotten even dirtier as Real has now filed an antitrust complaint against the MPAA. As most probably already know the MPAA sued Real over its RealDVD product, which allowed users to rip DVDs and store them to their hard drives.

According to Real, the MPAA, which is made up of several different studios, conspired to boycott Real after the launch of the RealDVD project, which is currently not available for sale due to a restraining order. The company believes that the MPAA’s members engaed in a “horizontal conspiracy” to blacklist RealNetworks and other Real properties.

Whether this will pan out or not remains to be seen, but others have tried antitrust allegations as part of copyright lawsuits and, typically, have failed. Still, if Real is able to prove a conspiracy, that could change.

3: A Book Author Wonders How to Fight Piracy

Finally today, author Peter Wayner has posted an article on the New York Times site about book piracy and the problems it creates. He feels, as the author of technical textbooks, that the widespread piracy of textbooks has had an overwhelmingly negative impact and cautions that technical books are the “canary” warning other genres since they are typically pirated first.

One interesting point he makes, in a direct attempt to answer Cory Doctorow, is that obscurity is not his enemy. Once his books were pirated, his sales did not go up in any meaningful way. Whether this is unique to him or a broad trend will need more study but it seems to reason that, while piracy may help some authors, for those that write technical books, who are usually obscure even when their books are purchased, it might not.

He also points out that, even as other types of book publishing have seen growth, the tech publishing industry shrank by 8% last year. What exactly this means for books as it relates to piracy remains to be seen.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.