3 Count: iPod You Pod

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: iPods, First Sale, President Obama, and the Queen of England

First off today President Obama is in the United Kingdom but his present to the Queen has drawn the attention of copyright-minded people has he presented Her Majesty with an iPod loaded with famous U.S. show tunes.

Almost instantly this raised a lot of questions about the copyright implications of the gift. Though no one is planning on suing the President or the Queen for the gift, there are several potential legal issues including the fact the songs were copied onto the iPod (meaning a copy still exists in the U.S), DRM may prevent the songs from working with another iTunes, the fact the iTunes contract forbids distribution of the songs in this manner.

Needless to say, there are more questions than answers about the legal implications but I don’t think anyone is going to go against the President to get the answers, especially not over a small show tunes collection.

2: MPAA President to be Thrown Out

Next up, the current chairman of the MPAA, Dan Glickman, is out of a job at the moment or at least will be in 18 months when he will be removed from his office, allegedly for his poor performance.

The post typically is a long-term job, previous head Jack Valenti was in office for 38 years before a controversy over his screener ban in 2003. Glickman has barely been in the position just under five years as of this writing.

Whether or not this will signal a shift in strategy over copyright matters for the MPAA will remain to be seen, but it would stand to reason that copyright issues would have played at least some role in the decision by the MPAA to oust Glickman.

3: Piracy law cuts internet traffic

Finally today, Sweden’s new anti-piracy law, IPRED, which allows copyright holders to force ISPs to give over information of file sharers, has had a drastic effect already. In short, traffic into and out of Sweden dropped by approximately 33%, from 120 Gbps to 80 Gbps, virtually overnight.

The article goes on to say that turning away now may be too little too late for some file sharers as book publishers in Sweden began applying the law literally the day it took effect to obtain IP information of file sharers that swapped audio books.

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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