We noted that this was likely about a month ago, but IP-Watch is confirming that the USTR has bullied Japan, Canada, New Zealand and three other countries into agreeing that copyright terms must be life plus 70 years in the latest draft of the TPP agreement. This makes absolutely no sense, in part because even the head of the US copyright office has argued for the US to look at returning to the “life plus 50” baseline standard currently required by the Berne Agreement, and which those countries already abide by. Yet, here the USTR is rejecting that idea and saying that “life plus 70” will be required. That means that those countries will now have to jack up their copyright terms for absolutely no reason, even though it almost certainly harms the public for no benefit.
It’s not like these countries don’t know this is a bad idea. It’s been explained to them multiple times that even though the countries that have life plus 70 already are regretting it — and yet the USTR pushed for it anyway, and these countries backed down.
As we’ve noted for years, this is the really nefarious part of the agreements that the USTR negotiates. While this particular change won’t go against current US law, it makes copyright reform virtually impossible. That’s the real point of all this: by tying us up in “international obligations,” negotiated in backroom deals with no public input or review, the USTR is able to block Congress from having any meaningful chance at fixing the US’s broken copyright laws. Anyone who tries to put in place more sensible regimes will be told that they’re “violating international obligations” which will tie up the US government in things like those corporate sovereignty ISDS tribunals, in which merely fixing American copyright law will be seen as an unfair “appropriation” by the US government.
Category: Ignorant or unreasonable
Perfect 10 Ordered to Pay Giganews $5.6m After Failed Copyright Battle
Adult publisher Perfect 10 has developed a reputation for making a business out of suing Internet services for alleged copyright infringement.
In recent years the company has targeted Google, Amazon, MasterCard and Visa, RapidShare and Depositfiles, plus hosting providers LeaseWeb and OVH.
Perfect 10 has secured private settlements from several of these companies but has never succeeded in a contested court case. The company hoped that a new suit against Usenet provider Giganews would provide a much-needed victory, but the whole thing has turned into a disaster.
In November 2014 a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California found that Giganews was not liable for the infringing activities of its users and last month Perfect 10 was roundly criticized for multiple failings by the same Court.
“Perfect 10 failed to produce any evidence supporting its claim of direct
infringement,” the Judge wrote, adding that it also “failed to produce any evidence supporting its claim of indirect infringement.”While that was a particularly poor way to lose a case, a punishing costs ruling handed down yesterday rubbed salt into Perfect 10’s wounds. The United States District Court for the Central District of California ordered the publisher to pay Giganews $5.6m in attorney’s fees and costs.
Outlining his perception of Perfect 10’s business model, Judge Andre Birotte Jr said that the company hadn’t behaved like a wronged copyright holder.
“Perfect 10’s undisputed conduct in this action has been inconsistent with a party interested in protecting its copyrights. All of the evidence before the Court demonstrates that Perfect 10 is in the business of litigation, not protecting its copyrights or ‘stimulat[ing] artistic creativity for the general public good’,” the Judge wrote.
But that was just the beginning.
“Perfect 10 has never been a self-sustaining business, and to date, has lost more than $50 million dollars, if not more. However, this loss appears to be largely intended by Perfect 10’s President and CEO Norman Zada, who described Perfect 10 [..] as a ‘tax writeoff’,” Judge Birotte added.
“In fact, Zada [said] that he ‘needed [Perfect 10] to offset money he made in the market’ and ‘needed the loss’ to represent how small businesses couldn’t make money because of piracy on the Internet.”
Just how far Perfect 10 has immersed itself in copyright litigation is made in clear in the ruling, with the Judge noting that more than half of the company’s revenues had been derived from settlements and default judgments, with Zada spending “eight hours a day, 365 days a year” on litigation.
“Indeed, Zada admitted that, in the past, Perfect 10 has expressly purchased copyrights from other copyright holders ‘because [Perfect10] thought they would be helpful in [its] litigation efforts’,” the Judge added.
Also of note is that in many of its cases Perfect 10 criticized online service providers for not responding adequately to its complaints under the DMCA, but in Tuesday’s ruling the Judge makes it very clear that Perfect 10 is the party at fault.
“Perfect 10 has a long, documented history of sending service providers inadequate takedown notices under the DMCA that fail to identify specific infringing material, and then bringing suit for the service providers’ failure to respond to deficient DMCA takedown notices,” the Judge wrote.
While the victory will be sweet for Giganews, the company will be particularly pleased with Judge Birotte’s recognition of Perfect 10’s attack on its business model.
“Perfect 10’s unmeritorious claims against the leading Usenet service provider in the country posed a serious threat to the public’s access to free and competitive expression,” the Judge wrote.
In a statement sent to TorrentFreak, Giganews co-Founder Ron Yokubaitis welcomed the ruling.
“This judgment is a complete victory for Giganews, a validation of Usenet as one of the foundational protocols of the Internet, and a recognition of the users who rely on it every day,” he said.
“Online service providers and Internet companies are under assault from copyright trolls like Perfect 10, but we have followed the DMCA since its inception, and are proud to have stood up to the meritless claims of a serial litigator who was hoping for an easy pay day.”
The big question now is where Perfect 10 goes from here. With its business strategy now a record of the Court it seems likely that potential future targets will be less intimidated and settlements less forthcoming.
Five Cyberlocker Operators Jailed For Spreading ‘Depraved Culture”
Three years ago file-hosting site Ryushare was a rising star in the so-called cyberlocker scene. Operating healthy affiliate and rewards schemes the site became a magnet for those looking to upload popular content.
After mere months online the site was already pressing the market leaders and by early 2013 was looking to break into the Alexa 500. Progress continued for another year but in April 2014 the site suddenly disappeared without explanation.
Rumors began to circulate that the site’s operators had been arrested but it took weeks for the arrival of an official announcement. The Vietnamese government eventually delivered the news that Ryushare had been closed down following the arrest of site owner Nguyen Duc Nhat plus three of his associates. Cars, motorcycles, and around $350,000 were seized.
While arrests are not a particularly unusual development in file-sharing cases, copyright issues weren’t at the heart of the site’s problems. It transpired that the authorities had taken offense at the huge amounts of “depraved content” being made available via the site.
Cops To Congress: Please Leave Us And Our License Plates Readers Alone
Poor dears. A bunch of law enforcement associations are worried that they won’t be able to keep all that sweet, sweet ALPR (automatic license plate reader) data for as long as they want to. In fact, they’re so worried, they’ve issued a letter in response to a nonexistent legislative threat.
Despite the fact that no federal license plate legislation has been proposed, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) has sent a pre-emptive letter to top Congressional lawmakers, warning them against any future restrictions of automated license plate readers. The IACP claims to be the “world’s oldest and largest association of law enforcement executives.”
The letter is stained with the tears of law enforcement entities whose thirst for bulk collections is only rivaled by national security agencies.
We are deeply concerned about efforts to portray automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technology as a national real-time tracking capability for law enforcement. The fact is that this technology and the data it generates is not used to track people in real time. ALPR is used every day to generate investigative leads that help law enforcement solve murders, rapes, and serial property crimes, recover abducted children, detect drug and human trafficking rings, find stolen vehicles, apprehend violent criminal alien fugitives, and support terrorism investigations.
The “efforts to portray” ALPRs as ad hoc tracking devices aren’t limited to imaginative conspiracy theorists. Millions of plate scans are added to private companies’ databases every day. The total number of records retained by Vigilant, the most prominent manufacturer of ALPRs, totals in the billions. That amount of data can easily be used to track nearly anyone’s day-to-day movements. And the database is accessible by law enforcement agencies around the nation. There’s no geofencing keeping the data compartmentalized to what’s “relevant” to local agencies.
Despite privacy policy, RadioShack customer data up for sale in auction
RadioShack is trying to auction off its customer data on some 117 million customers as part of its court-supervised bankruptcy.
The data in question, according to a legal challenge launched by Texas regulators on Friday and joined by the state of Tennessee on Monday, includes “consumer names, phone numbers, mailing addresses, e-mail addresses, and, where allowed, activity data.”
The states say the sale breaches the 94-year-old chain’s promises to its in-store and online customers that it would not sell their personal identifying information (PII) data.
Despite Throwing Money At Congress, Comcast Finds Merger Support Hard To Come By
Poor Comcast. Despite throwing millions of dollars at think tanks, consultants, PR reps, editorial writers, various front groups and a myriad of other policy tendrils, genuine, meaningful support for the company’s $45 billion Time Warner Cable acquisition is still apparently hard to come by. You might recall that last year top Comcast lobbyist “Chief Diversity Officer” David Cohen proudly crowed that support for the company’s merger was “pouring in” — though he failed to mention that Comcast was paying people for that support, and that said support largely consisted of regurgitated form letters.
Despite the money spent however, it appears that actual support in Congress for the deal is tepid to non-existent. Comcast’s hometown paper the Philadelphia Inquirer points out that whereas the NBC deal saw major support efforts by members of Congress, politicians appear to want nothing to do with this latest merger attempt
Taiwan Lobbyist Wrote Republican Party Resolution Calling for More Weapons for Taiwan
When the Republican National Committee convened in Chicago last August for its annual summer meeting, it unanimously approved a resolution urging the White House to supply a host of weapons, ranging from submarines to advanced warplanes, to the island nation of Taiwan.
However, Justice Department records show the resolution was not written by any of the RNC’s members, but by Marshall Harris, a lobbyist who had been hired by the Taiwanese government to further its interests in Washington.
Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, lobbyists representing foreign governments are required to disclose their activities to the U.S. attorney general. According to the disclosure documents filed by Harris’ employer Alston & Bird, an Atlanta-based law firm, he wrote a draft of the resolution a month before the RNC’s 2014 summer meeting.
Once the text reached the RNC, committee members cut several phrases and paragraphs, one of which called for Taiwan’s inclusion in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed free trade agreement that has been described as a “high priority” by the Obama administration. The text that remained, however, was copied nearly word for word from Harris’ draft.
Neither the RNC nor Harris responded to questions about the resolution. Taiwan’s Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington, D.C. said the RNC often passes resolutions supporting Taiwan, and that the country has “a longstanding and solid friendship” with the Republican Party.
Taiwan engages in extensive lobbying of the U.S. government — not just representatives and senators but congressional staffers and even state-level officials — that receives less public attention than that of countries such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Prison Dispatches from the War on Terror: Gitmo Detainee’s Life an “Endless Horror Movie”
Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi, a Yemeni national who has been detained at the American prison facility at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, weighs only 98 pounds. Never charged with a crime, al-Alwi, now 35 years old, is one of many detainees at the camp who have gone on a prolonged hunger strike.
As described in a recent petition submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) by his lawyers, al-Alwi’s mental and physical state is seriously deteriorating after two years on hunger strike, and subsequent force-feeding.
Since commencing his strike in February 2013, al-Alwi alleges that he has been subjected to escalating physical and psychological abuse from guards, as well as increasingly brutal force-feeding procedures administered by medical personnel at the camp. Human rights organizations have described the force-feeding procedure employed at Guantánamo as torture, and the U.S. government has fought to keep video footage of the force-feeding of al-Alwi and other hunger-striking detainees from public view.
Al-Alwi, who has described his strike as “a form of peaceful protest against injustice,” has said that he will not resume eating until there is some sort of legal resolution to his case. Prison officials have responded to his hunger strike by placing him in solitary confinement, denying him access to prescribed medical items and subjecting him to extreme temperatures in his cell.
How The Copyright Industry Wants To Undermine Anonymity & Free Speech: ‘True Origin’ Bills
As we’ve noted many times in the past, the entertainment industry likes to take a multi-pronged approach to its quixotic efforts to “stop piracy” (which could be much better dealt with by simply giving the public more of what they want). Working on federal copyright law to continually expand it is one main strategy, but there are a lot of others as well, including pressuring private companies to voluntarily censor content, getting international trade agreements to force laws to change and… getting random state laws to force through big changes quietly. This last strategy has come into focus lately, especially with the rise of so-called “true origin” bills, that are almost certainly unconstitutional, but are rapidly popping up in a variety of states. This is actually a replay of an old strategy. I remember similar “true origin” efforts being pushed about a decade ago, and I’d thought they’d completely died out… but they’re back.
The way they work is pretty simple: they outlaw anonymity on the internet if your website distributes any kind of audiovisual work. The point of this is twofold: one, for those who “register” and reveal their name and address, it makes it easier for the RIAAs and MPAAs of the world to sue a site for copyright infringement. And, for those who don’t reveal their names, the RIAA and can ask the states to prosecute the site owners for failing to reveal their names.
State Of Tennessee Sues The FCC For Daring To Step In And Block Its Law Blocking Muni-Broadband
Apparently the state of Tennessee really doesn’t want its citizens to have good, competitive broadband. While the FCC’s net neutrality rules keep getting all the attention, as we’ve discussed, in the long run it may be a bigger deal that the FCC (the same day it released the net neutrality rules) also started dismantling protectionist state laws that block municipal broadband. Those laws — almost all of which were written directly by big broadband players afraid of competition — make it close to impossible for local municipalities to decide that they’re going to set up true competitors. The FCC pre-empted two such state laws, including in Tennessee, where one super successful municipal broadband project, in Chattanooga, wanted to expand to other nearby places. However, Tennessee’s law blocked this.
We already noted that Rep. Marsha Blackburn was trying to pass legislation that would block the FCC’s efforts here, but the state of Tennessee has taken it up a notch and sued the FCC over the rules. You will notice that the arguments used by the state of Tennessee are almost verbatim identical to the lawsuits we wrote about yesterday challenging the FCC’s net neutrality rules:
The State of Tennessee, as a sovereign and a party to the proceeding below, is aggrieved and seeks relief on the grounds that the Order: (1) is contrary to the United States Constitution; (2) is in excess of the Commission’s authority; (3) is arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion within the meaning of the Administrative Procedure Act; and (4) is otherwise contrary to law.
Yes, this is almost word-for-word identical to the claims made about the net neutrality rules and is basically the standard language to challenge any FCC ruling.
But here’s the larger question: if you’re a resident of Tennessee who likes having fast, affordable, competitive broadband, are you happy about your tax dollars being used to sue the FCC in an effort to uphold a law written by the big broadband players, focused on blocking such competition? It seems like the current Tennessee Attorney General, Herbert Slatery, has painted a giant target on his back for a challenger who actually wants to support the public in Tennessee.