It is Friday again and that means that it is time for another episode of the Copyright 2.0 Show.

With the holiday weekend in the U.S., it was a slow week for copyright news but that doesn’t mean Patrick and I got to rest any. We had several major developments in the U.S. Copyright Group legal battle with Time Warner Cable, the conclusion of the Men at Work case and a politician that doesn’t understand copyright isn’t a magic eraser.

This week’s stories include:

• Time Warner/U.S. Copyright Group Have to Work Together
• U.S. Copyright Group to Only Get 28 IPs Per Month
• Men at Work Get to Keep Most of Their Money
• Politician Complains About Her Old Viewpoints Being Repeated
• Hulu Launches a Plus Program
• Woot and the AP Have a Spat

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

Also, just a small programming note, we will NOT be having an episode of the Copyright 2.0 Show next week as we will both be taking a week off. You’ll instead get to listen to our failed attempts to get caught back up two week from today!

About the Hosts

Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey (@plagiarismtoday) is the Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today (Hint: You’re there now) and works as a copyright and plagiarism consultant. Though not an attorney, he has resolved over 700 cases of plagiarism involving his own work and has helped countless others protect their work and develop strategies for making their content work as hard as possible toward their goals.

Patrick O’Keefe

Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy) is the owner of the iFroggy Network, a network of websites covering various interests. He’s the author of the book “Managing Online Forums,” a practical guide to managing online communities and social spaces. He maintains a blog about online community management at ManagingCommunities.com and a personal blog at patrickokeefe.com.

1: Judge Orders User-Friendly Notices for Does Targeted By USCG Suits

First off today, the judge in the U.S. Copyright Group case has asked the group, along with Time Warner Cable, the EFF and Public Knowledge to sit down and hammer out a letter to send to the does in the lawsuit to alert them to their rights, including the ability to contest jurisdiction. The U.S. Copyright Group has sued tens of thousands of alleged file sharers hoping to obtain their information and send letters seeking a settlement. Time Warner Cable claimed that the subpoena was overly burdensome and the EFF and Public Knowledge claimed that the bundling of the lawsuits was improper, requesting that a new lawsuit be filed for each defendant.

2: US Cracks Down on Internet Movie Pirates, Websites Seized

Next up today, the U.S. has shut down 9 different piracy-related domains, replacing their home pages with warnings from the various agencies involved, and executed four residential search warrants in a massive piracy crackdown. This comes one week after Vice President Joe Biden unveiled his administration’s intellectual property enforcement plan.

3: Hulu Plus Plagued With Minuses

Finally today, video streaming site Hulu, which is co-owned by NBC and Fox, has announced a premium or “Plus” package for $9.99 per month but it has failed to win over much of the Web. Though the plan offers greater access to Hulu’s shows, including many of television’s most popular series, on more devices, including XBox 360, Playstation 3, iPad and iPhone, it doesn’t eliminate the commercial breaks, which has many wondering if it is worth the price.

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.

1: Big Music Will Surrender, But Not Until At Least 2011

First off today, an article on Techcrunch over the weekend told us that maybe music executives aren’t as clueless as some people seem to think. According to the piece by Michael Arrington, he had a “Surprisingly candid lunch conversation last week with a big music label executive” and found out that the record labels are fully aware of what is happening to their business but that they are aware that they well have to alter their business models, but not until 2013.

According to the article, the math, predictions and other tools just say that there is too much money in the current model to engage in a shift of policies until at least 2011, probably 2013. CD sales, licensing deals, etc., though waning in their revenue potential, are still big income makers and will continue to be for the next few years at least.

What exactly will happen when and if the record labels change their business model is unclear.

2: Hulu Goes Medieval on Boxee

What started as a gentleman’s disagreement between Hulu and Boxee has now degenerated into a game of Whac-A-Mole. Recently, Hulu asked Boxee, a service that makes it easy to get online video to your TV, to disable access to Hulu at the request of Hulu’s content partners. Boxee complied and the matter seemed resolved in a very gentlemanly way.

However, Boxee decided it wasn’t done. It then re-added support for Hulu, this time using Hulu’s RSS feeds, in turn prompting Hulu to block Boxee from accessing their content. Boxee, then, modified their side to ensure that Hulu continued to work on their service.

Why Boxee did this is unclear as is what, if any, action Hulu plans on taking.

3: Re/Max says local agency’s logo too similar to its own

Finally today, in a trademark story from my native South Carolina, real estate agency Re/Max has filed a trademark dispute lawsuit against Charleston, S.C.-based agency Rehava saying that their logo is too similar to their own, even though Rehava’s logo doesn’t use any of the same fonts, colors, images or anything else in common with the Re/Max logo.

Rehava says the challenge to their trademark filing is a form of “harassment” and that they intend to fight the challenge, even though it will likely be expensive.

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.

1: CBS Interactive: “Well Within Our Rights To Stream Hulu Content”

CBS, the owners of TV.com, say that the contract they have with Hulu allows them to stream Hulu videos and that the recent move by Hulu, which gets most of its content from NBC and Fox, is a violation of those terms.

Though there is no word as to what, if any, action CBS plans to take at this time, it seems pretty clear that this one is not over and will be a dispute for some time to come, especially considering that TV.com now matches Hulu in functionality and has grown, according to some estimates, larger than Hulu in terms of traffic.

2: Oh, the humanity: Windows 7′s draconian DRM?

Second, in an article on Ars Technica, Peter Bright takes a serious look at the upcoming DRM on Windows 7 and finds that it isn’t nearly as bad as people actually think it is. In fact, he concludes that most people won’t even notice it at all.

He also works to quell some of the alarm around other articles pertaining to Windows 7 DRM and works to answer some of the question raised by them.

3: xkcd – Music DRM

Finally today, the popular Webcomic xkcd took on the issue of music DRM explaining that we “won” the DRM wars and taking a quick stab at why the argument still continues.

Anyone who enjoys talking/thinking about these issues will almost certainly get at least a chuckle.

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.

1: Content Owners Force Hulu To Kneecap Boxee

Content owners who put their shows and movies on Hulu have demanded that Boxee stop carrying Hulu-based content. Boxee, a video conversion service that allows videos on the Web to be converted to a format usable by media centers and TVs, has removed the site from its list of compatible services as a show of “good faith”.

Though there is a lot of speculation as to why Hulu’s providers wanted Boxee cut off, it seems likely that the service’s function of moving content to a TV. Hulu has worked to be “TV for your Computer” and it is likely content creators worried that allowing Hulu to be shown trivially on TVs would make it a replacement for the original programs.

2: Judge reaffirms 1918 legal doctrine in AP lawsuit

A 90-year-old legal doctrine dealing with “hot news” has been upheld in a New York courtroom. In the lawsuit, the Associated Press has sued AHN claiming that AHN copies stories from legitimate AP subscribers and republishes them without permission or attribution. To help make its case, the AP cited a 1918 ruling, which it was also the victor in, that found companies can sue when others copy and redistribute timely or “hot news” without permission.

This is, of course, counter in many ways to recent changes in copyright law that have held facts can not be copyrighted. The judge, however, did not rule on the merits of the case and, instead, only allowed it to go forward in front of a jury.

This case is very similar to a 1997 case dealing with box scores from basketball games, where the “hot news” doctrine was also upheld.

3: U2’s New Album Leaks Early Despite ‘Private Hearings’

Finally today, despite serious security measures, private screenings where cell phones were banned and many threats by the band, U2′s latest album, slated for release in just over a week, has leaked out over Bittorrent. Though some of the music could be found on bittorrent for some time, the new recordings are said to be of end user quality and may actually harm the album’s sales.

According to TorrentFreak, the album has been downloaded some 100,000 times already with, almost certainly, many times the downloads to come.

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.

In other copyright news, a UK ISP has started sending warning letters to customers, a Swedish party wants to legalize piracy, Metallica finds itself in controversy again and we have updates on the RedLasso story, the cost of settling with the RIAA and even a case where the police get busted by the copyright cops.

Remember, as usual, this week’s linkroll is a “raw” link list. Some stories are duplicated, some do not point to their original sources and some may not be accurate. A great deal of refining goes into producing the show notes for the Copyright 2.0 Show.

We also have updates to several cases including Madonna’s new album, the Irate Gamer gets parodied and Hulu comes back to YouTube.

Finally, in weird copyright news, there is a debate about whether or not PostSecret is having their rights violated by NBC, visual evidence why Linux is cooler than Windows and conclusive proof that there is no honor among thieves.

Remember, as usual, this week’s linkroll is a “raw” link list. Some stories are duplicated, some do not point to their original sources and some may not be accurate. A great deal of refining goes into producing the show notes for the Copyright 2.0 Show.

Finally, there was an issue with the feed for this site over the past week. For those of you that are getting this entry along with the previous five or more, I apologize. There is a bug in WordPress 2.5 that causes the feed to break when a site uses fancy permalinks. The fix is easy, but it has to be done by hand. For more information, see this link on the WordPress Forums.

The feed should function normally now. Thank you for your patience.

All totaled, the show had sixteen stories, including the following:

• The NBC/Veoh Saga Continues
• Hulu Gets a C&D From Lulu
• The Pirate Bay Fires at the U.S.
• The Bible is Still Copyrighted
• A New, Experimental, Intro
• And Many more…

You can download the MP3 file here. Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

[audio:http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/audio/copyright20eps23.mp3]