3 Count: Witness Protection

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1: Jail-Breaking Law Change Will Have Limited Impact: Analysts, Companies

First off today, analysts are concurring with my opinion that the new exemptions to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions will have little practical impact, especially in terms of jailbreaking. Not only has jailbreaking been occurring without retribution by Apple before the new exemptions were handed down, but other protections, such as terms of services signed at the time of signup and invalidated warranties still protect the iPhone (and other handsets) from being jailbroken. In short, most of those who want to do it have done it and those who don’t likely won’t be swayed by the new rules.

2: R-J Mob Source Hit With Copyright Suit

Next up today, mob enforcer turned government witness Anthony Fiato is the latest person to be sued by Righthaven on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Fiato had used several articles about the mafia from the Review-Journal on his blog, which is hosted at wordpress.com. Fiato is in the witness protection program and Righthaven is seeking some $75,000 in statutory damages from him. Fiato, for his part, feels that the suit was a “mistake”.

3: Publisher Fined Record $250M in Copyright Case

Finally today, a court in Russia has handed down the largest copyright award in the nation’s history, some 7.6 billion rubles in damages or about $250 million. The judgment was filed against the publishing company Astrel, owned by its parent company AST, which the court found had illegally published copies of science fiction author Alexander Belyayev’s books and calculated the damages by multiplying the copies of his books AST sold by the cost of a luxury set of books sold in Italy. The amount of damages is approximately equal to AST’s annual turnover making it unclear if and how AST/Astrel will be able to pay.

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.

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