3 Count: CMIdea

This is daily column on Plagiarism Today where the site brings you three of the days biggest, most important copyright and plagiarism news links. If you want to offer your feedback on the column, use the contact form or just follow me on Twitter at @plagiarismtoday.

1: AT&T first to test RIAA antipiracy plan

First off today, AT&T, one of the United States’ largest ISPS, has begun a trial of the “graduated response” system, sending out warning letters to alleged file shares. They join Comcast and Cox in this project but AT&T has become the first to actually send out the first warning letters.

AT&T has clarified and said that they do not plan on disconnecting any customers without a court order but their letters do indicate that they reserve the right to terminate services. According to them, they have the right to terminate users that engage in “illegal activity” but that they are the finders of fact and will not disconnect solely on the word of copyright holders.

Where I am in New Orleans, the two major ISPs are Cox and AT&T with Comcast holding most of the neighboring area. Meaning file sharers near me don’t have a lot of options if they want to avoid this system.

2: AP Invokes DMCA Against Obama “Hope” Poster Artist

Next, the lawsuit between Shepard Fairey and the AP over the Obama Hope poster has taken yet another strange twist. As the EFF discusses, one of the elements of the AP’s counterclaims against Fairey includes a mention of stripping out Copyright Management Information (CMI).

According to the DMCA, it is illegal to strip out CMI, which the law defines as “identifying information about the work, the author, the copyright owner, and in certain cases, the performer, writer or director of the work, as well as the terms and conditions for use of the work,” however the information must be affixed to the work itself, not displayed around it.

The complaint alleges that Fairey’s removal of metadata and an attribution line beside the image amount to a violation of their CMI and are seeking damages, in part, on those grounds.

3: Myspace Banishment, LastFM, my Mp3 albums for $1.09

Finally today, in a tale of content identification gone horribly wrong, when musician Emily Bezar attempted to upload some of her own music tracks to her Myspace page, she got an ugly surprise when Myspace flagged her MP3s as infringing.

According to Bezar, “somehow during the convoluted process of ripping them from my CDs, uploading, waiting around for myspace to crunch them into distorted granola and exhibit them for you here etc…. somehow I got flagged as a “copyright violator” who risked ‘termination of myspace privileges’ because I had, well, ripped and uploaded mp3s from my own self-produced CDs.”

Bezar has instead decided to stream her music from Last.FM and is offering her CDs for download for $1.09 at CDBaby.

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.

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