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

1: Book, Record Industries Attack Righthaven Fair Use Ruling

First off today, the Association of American Publishers and the Recording Industry Association of America both filed amicus briefs with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in one of Righthaven’s lawsuits. Righthaven, which sued nearly 300 bloggers and webmasters over alleged infringement of content from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Denver Post, has had their campaign on hold in recent weeks due to a string of legal defeats. However, the associations aren’t filing briefs in hope of reviving the lawsuits, rather, they are addressing a narrow fair use issue in one of the cases, a ruling that, according to them, could be disastrous for copyright holders. Neither brief addresses the issue of Righthaven’s position to use, the grounds on which it lost the case.

2: Ad Network Not Guilty of Copyright Infringement For Serving Pirate Site

Next up today, the ad network Chitika has come out victorious in a lawsuit that pitted them against publishers Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons. The publishers had claimed that Chitika, which was running ads on Pharmatext, a site that previously offered pirated ebooks. However, according to several industry experts, including attorney Eric Goldman, the ruling leaves the door open for services like Chitika to lose similar fights if copyright holders notify them of the infringement first. If the publishers could have shown that Chitika was aware of the infringement, the result could have been very different and that, in turn, may pave the way for a “notice and takedown” system for ad networks similar to what is proposed in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

3: Celeb Photo Agency Sues Gossip Site

Finally today, celebrity photo agency Mavrix has filed a lawsuit against Idontlikeyouinthatway.com as well as related companies CraveOnline Media and AtomicOnline claiming that the site is has unlawfully used photos from the service on “numerous occasions”. The lawsuit is seeking some $3 million in damages as well as an injunction barring the site from using any more of their photos in the future. According to the lawsuit, Mavrix has licensed images for as much as $100,000 a piece, opening the door also to high actual damages as well as statutory ones.

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: Music Publishing Group Drops Appeal of YouTube Copyright Infringement Case

First off today, the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) has settled its long-running suit with Google over its YouTube property. In 2007, the NMPA was a plaintiff in a companion suit to Viacom’s now-famous lawsuit against YouTube. They have agreed to waive their right to join the appeal that’s ongoing in the Viacom case and voluntarily dismissed their claims. This, in turn, paves the way for publishers to start signing royalty deals with YouTube and begin earning revenue from YouTube plays.

2: Court Rejects Freelancer Settlement: Still No Payment From Tasini Court Win

Next up today, even as one settlement is going through, another is getting shot down. A proposed settlement in a class action lawsuit that pits freelance authors against newspapers and magazines they’ve worked for has been rejected by the Court of Appeals. The lawsuit stems from newspapers and magazines including freelance works in various databases, including Lexis Nexis, even though such inclusion was not part of the original contracts. The settlement was rejected because, according to the court, the majority of the plaintiffs were not represented adequately in it. Those who failed to register copyrights in their works would only receive a small fraction of what those who had would, something the courts found unacceptable. The case is now headed back to the district court where it will likely be re-framed to better represent such plaintiffs.

3: U.S. Judge Slaps Around Brazilian Court In Zynga v. Vostu

Finally today, the case between Zynga and Vostu has taken a strange twist as a U.S. judge has issued an order against Zynga instructing them not to enforce a Brazillian court’s injunction ordering Vostu to shutter some of its games. The lawsuit, which saw U.S. game maker Zynga, best known for its Facebook games, sue its Brazillian rival Vostu claiming that the company has too closely mirrored several of Zynga’s games. Zynga, which filed both in the U.S. and Brazil, got an injunction against Vostu in Brazil but the U.S. court, at Vostu’s request, has ruled that Zynga can’t enforce that ruling until they’ve had a chance to weigh in on the same issue.

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.

1: Smaller Damages Sought in Music Case

First off today Joel Tenenbaum, who was found liable for $675,000 in damages for sharing music files online, was the subject of a hearing where his attorney, Charles Nesson, asked a sympathetic judge to reduce the damages. The record label attorneys disagreed, saying that these were the kinds of damages that the law intended but the judge hinted she sided more closely with Nesson’s arguments. The similar Thomas case is heading to a third trial after the judge in that case significantly reduced the damages.

2: A Win For Publishers

Next up today, a group of academic publishers have won an injunction against the file sharing site Rapidshare that prohibits the site from making available for download dozens of various academic works. Rapidshare accepts uploads from users and makes those files available for download. It profits from selling premium accounts. The company has said it plans to appeal the decision but publishers are calling it the biggest single threat in terms of piracy of academic works.

3: Consumers ‘Confused by Copyright’

Finally today, a poll from Great Britain indicates that 73% of consumers do not realize that it is illegal, in that country, to format shift CDs to their computer. According to the report, this highlights much of the underlying confusion over copyright and is an example of the challenges the government and copyright holders face in changing consumer behavior.

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 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.

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

The invite-only group is targeted at published authors to discuss “how authors and publishers can prevent electronic publications from being freely distributed by software pirates and pirate Web sites.”

If you wish to join this group, you need to contact Maria and introduce yourself, being sure to include your most recently published work. Other than those requirements, membership is free.

Also, be sure to take a look at her post about ebooks, which contains the information about the group in the callout as well as some background information on the problem.

If you are a blogger or Webmaster and wanting to discuss legal issues faced by them, be sure to visit the Performancing Legal Issues Forum where I am offering assistance for free.