Speaking in Nashville, Tennessee yesterday at a symposium on intellectual property enforcement, US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke publicly staked out the Obama administration's position on piracy and copyright infringement. It involves a quote from Vice-President Joe Biden.

According to Locke, copyright infringement is simply theft and should be dealt with accordingly. He also has a lot of sympathy for songwriters - who are being ripped off when it comes to royalties. First his comments on copyright infringement:

"I think it's important to lay down a marker about how the Obama administration views this issue," he said of online copyright infringement. "As Vice President Biden has said on more than one occasion, 'Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft,' and it should be dealt with accordingly."

Strong medicine. Now his comments on the fate of songwriters: Read More

The flurry of actions between Edge Games, its CEO Tim Langdell and Electronic Arts continues with a new entry in the pair’s battle—EA has filed a countersuit against an action brought by Edge earlier this year, which involved the game Mirror’s Edge.

In June, Edge filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against EA, alleging “willful infringement and unfair competition” over the use of the Mirror’s Edge name. This action followed a Consolidated Petition for Cancellation filed by EA in September of 2009 against Edge trademarks, including “The Edge,” “Gamer’s Edge,” “Edge” and “Cutting Edge.”
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Just a few weeks after settling a copyright infringement against California Republican senatorial candidate Chuck DeVore, musician Don Henley lashed out at the current state of copyright laws in the U.S.

Henley settled his lawsuit over the unauthorized use of two songs— All She Wants to Do Is Dance and The Boys of Summer— with DeVore for an undisclosed amount of money. DeVore had claimed that the versions he used were parodies, but a judge ruled that the politician’s use did infringe on Henley’s copyrights.

The whole situation must have soured Henley. When asked by Rolling Stone what needs to be changed about U.S. enforcement of copyright, Henley answered: Read More

Australia's Federal Court has temporarily barred the import and sale of a USB device that gives its users the power to hack the PlayStation 3 (it's described as a plug-in copy protection bypass). No doubt Sony is delighted by the temporary injunction against the PSJailbreak USB modchip, but now the company must convince the court that the PSJailbreak is illegal. If Sony can’t convince the court, then the device will hit retail shelves in Australia sometime in Sept.

Expect a ruling sometime early next week as Sony's clock runs down to its August 31 deadline. While Sony is believed to be pursuing legal action in other countries besides Australia in an attempt to fight the PSJailbreak, it faces another problem: cheap knock offs of the device that have already been created - which means more court action.

With America basically making jailbreaking some devices legal, it will be interesting to see how a lawsuit against such a device here might play out. Chances are we'll get to see a this new device turns up all over the world.

Source: gi.biz

After accusing a member of a UK law firm of sending bullying letters to suspected (and often completely innocent) file sharers, a consumer magazine is proudly trumpeting news that a member of the firm will have to answer to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT).

Which? Magazine has been dogged in its pursuit of Andrew Crossley and ACS Law Solicitors, a firm that “specialises in assisting intellectual property rights holders exploit and enforce their rights globally.” The complaint filed by Which? with the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) revolved around a May 2009 incident in which ACS Law allegedly engaged in “bullying” and “excessive” actions towards the public, sending out thousands of letters accusing people of illegally downloading and sharing copyrighted material over peer-to-peer networks.
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Piazza del Campo is a historic space in Siena, Italy, famous for being the scene of a biannual bareback horse race named the Palio di Siena. The use of the space as a cart track in the upcoming Gran Turismo 5 however, as illustrated in the accompanying video, has angered at least one Italian official.

Kotaku reports that Anna Carli, CEO of the Consortium for the Protection of the Palio is reaching out to Sony officials in order to resolve this dispute. Read More

According to Politico’s Morning Tech blog, The RIAA, SoundExchange, BMI, The Recording Academy and nine other music groups have sent a letter to Eric Schmidt (Google's CEO) asking for more clarification on what it considers "lawful and unlawful activity on the Web." The question relates to Google and Verizon's proposals to the government on Net Neutrality which was released last week.

In a letter sent to Google yesterday, the groups asked for a more in-depth definition of activity, especially as it relates to "content rights." Here's an excerpt: Read More

In case you missed it, World of Warcraft developer Blizzard recently scored a whopping $88,594,539 judgment against a company that was operating and charging players to access World of Warcraft emulator servers.

The ruling was handed down on August 10 by the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California and targeted Alyson Reeves, who was operating under the business name of ScapeGaming. The huge dollar figure was calculated by combining the $3,052,339 the defendant received from users of her service via Paypal, statutory damages of $85,478,600 (calculated by multiplying ScapeGaming’s 427,393 users times the statutory minimum of $200 per “act of circumvention and/or performance of service”) and another $63,600 in attorney’s fees.

Additionally, if Reeves has trouble paying, she will see post-judgment interest accumulate at the “rate provided by law” until the entire sum is recovered.

Court documents reveal that up to 32,000 players were using the organization’s servers each day.

A statement from Blizzard on its victory read: Read More

Bannco Corp. has lost the first round in a legal battle with SplitFish AG, SplitFish Gameware, Inc., and Nabon Corp., in a U.S. District court this week over video game controllers. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia has ruled in favor of SplitFish and partners, granting a preliminary injunction against Bannco that stops the company from selling video game controllers that allegedly use software code copied from SplitFish's "FragFX" video game controllers.

The video game controllers at the heart of this legal battle are the "FRAGNSTEIN" and "SCORCH" which Bannco produced to "mimic the SPLITFISH FRAGFX design and function" - according to SplitFish.

The judge overseeing the case, T.S. Ellis, ruled that Nabon was the original owner of the software code that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their copyright infringement claim against Nabon. Ellis also ruled that the plaintiffs had made a "sufficient showing that failure to enjoin Bannco's conduct would result in irreparable harm to the plaintiff. Read More

Has the U.S. Copyright Group got you down because you might be a John Doe named in some blanket lawsuit concerning illegal movie downloads? Well buck up little camper, because the Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to help you.

The EFF has published "U.S. Copyright Group v. the People," a collection of resources to assist the thousands of individuals accused of online copyright infringement by the Washington, D.C.-based law firm, the U.S. Copyright Group (USCG).

As you are probably already aware, the USCG filed "John Doe" lawsuits on behalf of seven filmmakers against more than 14,000 anonymous defendants for "unauthorized downloads of films including Far Cry and The Hurt Locker. The group is threatening thousands of defendants with a judgment of up to $150,000 per downloaded movie in the hopes that they will settle out of court for a mere $1,500 - $2,500 per person.

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The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has contacted Wikipedia over the use of an FBI logo on a page dedicated to the history of the crime-fighting organization.

The FBI claimed that the logo accompanying an entry in the online encyclopedia was an “unauthorized reproduction of the FBI Seal” and “prohibited by law,” according to the BBC. The FBI’s letter stated that “Whoever possesses any insignia...or any colourable imitation thereof..shall be fined...or imprisoned... or both.”

Apparently offering the logo in four different sizes also posed a crisis, as the FBI stated that this was, “particularly problematic, because it facilitates both deliberate and unwitting violations of restrictions by Wikipedia users."
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A new study in Australia, commissioned by Village Roadshow and conducted by the University of Ballarat Internet Commerce Security Laboratory, has come to the conclusion that 89.9 percent of all torrents offer copyrighted materials.

Village Roadshow is suing Australian ISP iiNet for allegedly allowing its customers to share copyrighted films and television shows. Unfortunately for Village Roadshow, a Federal Court has already ruled that the ISP is not liable because it didn't "infringe copyright itself." The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, of which Village Roadshow is a member of, is appealing the decision.

So with that kind of court action as a backdrop, the results of the study commissioned by Village Roadshow seem skewed to support its current and future legal action. Here's some more information about the study: Read More

Las Vegas-based Righthaven has been buying the copyrights of newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that use articles without permission - his business model for this seems to be the tactics used by the RIAA against file sharers. CEO Steve Gibson says that he's already making money on his plan, though he doesn't offer any numbers.

Gibson’s plan is to monetize news content by sifting through the internet looking for websites and blogs that are infringing on client newspaper articles and then suing them for damages. This model relies on harsh penalties from Copyright Act — up to $150,000 for a single infringement - and quick settlements. Since its formation in March of this year, Righthaven claims to have filed around 80 federal lawsuits against websites and bloggers who have allegedly re-posted articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the company's first client. Read More

Michael Geist points out that Brazil’s new copyright reform proposal (translated) is very much unlike that of any other developing or established nation:

Not only does the proposal permit circumvention for fair dealing and public domain purposes, but it establishes equivalent penalties for hindering or preventing the users from exercising their fair dealing rights.

BoingBoing’s Cory Doctrow called it the “best-ever implementation” of the WIPO Copyright Treaty. Read More

Nevada Senator Harry Reid (D) and his campaign team have re-enabled a website featuring old images and position statements from his opponent, GOP Senatorial nominee Sharron Angle.

As reported yesterday, Angle’s team had issued a cease-and-desist to Reid’s camp over the reproduced content, taken an Angle website launched before she won the right to represent the Republican Party against the incumbent Reid. It was suggested that following her primary win, Angle toned down her rhetoric in a newly fashioned website.
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BattleGoat Studios co-founder and co-owner George Geczy has called Canada’s newly proposed copyright bill (C-32) “unacceptable and entirely unbalanced.”

Specifically, Geczy takes issue with the digital rights management section of the Bill, and is strongly in favor of allowing consumers to break digital locks in order to make a back up, or to unlock content from companies that may have gone out of business or had their copyright expire.

In a letter on the subject, as reported by CBC News, Geczy stated, “While nobody would question the cultural significance and imperative for preservation of a Shakespeare play or Beethoven symphony, cultural media in the past decades has suffered significant content losses when commercial entities do not see a financial benefit in preservation."
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As the battle for one of Nevada’s Senate seats heats up between incumbent Harry Reid (D) and challenger Sharron Angle (R), Angle’s camp issued a cease-and-desist letter to Reid’s team over images and position statements taken from an old Angle website, which were then posted to the website theRealSharronAngle.com.

TPM reported that Angle launched a new website after winning the Nevada Republican Senate primary, at least partly to tone down “her right-wing rhetoric.” The Reid campaign team had saved Angle’s old website contents however, and reproduced them on the aforementioned website (which has since been taken down and now forwards to SharronsUndergroundBunker.com).
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As part of its “Operation In Our Sites” initiative, which targets illegal items distributed via the Internet that “threaten public safety and health,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has seized a series of websites for criminal copyright violations.

In conjunction with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, ICE executed nine seizure warrants against websites, seized domain names, detained assets from 15 banking and associated accounts and enacted four residential search warrants in North Carolina, New Jersey, New York and Washington.

Downloading movies in an “undercover capacity,” led ICE officials to seize the following websites: TVShack.net, Movies-Links.tv, FilesPump.com, Now-Movies.com, PlanetMoviez.com, ThePirateCity.org, ZML.com, NinjaVideo.net and NinjaThis.net. Sites taken over are now decorated with a seizure notice, as illustrated here.
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Phoenix Online Studios, which had received a cease-and-desist from Activision over a fan-made King’s Quest game, has now been given the go-ahead by the publishing giant and will release the first episode of The Silver Lining on July 10.

At the end of June, the development team wrote that Activision reached out a few months earlier with “a desire to revisit their decision.” After some negotiating the cease-and-desist was rescinded and Phoenix was granted a non-commercial license.

Ironically, Phoenix went through the exact same scenario when King’s Quest was still under the control of Vivendi. That publisher too had issued a C&D on the project, only to cave to fan pressure later on and bestow a non-commercial license on the game.
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The US Copyright Group, a fancy name for the group of Virginia lawyers that like to sue file sharers in bulk, has told a federal judge that they "see no problem" with suing 5,000 Bittorrent users as John Does. Lawyers for the EFF and the ACLU have a different take on the matter entirely. The suits were "improperly joined," according to the EFF and ACLU. At least one judge hearing the case wants more information from all parties on the matter.

Yesterday, lawyer Tom Dunlap of the firm Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver, filed a 29-page document in the Washington, DC District Court. The gist of that brief was that, according to Dunlap, suing 5,000 anonymous users at once is proper because of how Bittorrent works. Dunlap's argument tries to distinguish Bittorrent from all other P2P networks: Read More

Ars Technica offers a fascinating interview with Preserving Virtual Worlds project coordinator, Jerome McDonough, detailing how the group will archive a dozen or so classic videogames including Doom, multiple Warcraft titles, and the MIT-developed 1962 classic Spacewar! The project, which is being spearheaded by librarians at the University of Illinois, hopes to archive these and other classics for posterity... but apparently not for consumpition. The group is headed by McDonough, who is also Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. Read More

A copyright infringement lawsuit filed over a Flash game that appeared on Facebook outlines “the slipperiness of enforcing intellectual property rights in a world where creating and dispersing infringing material to the public via social networking websites has become all too easy.”

After creating the Flash game Boomshine, Plaintiff Daniel Miller discovered a too similar, though differently named, game on Facebook entitled ChainRxn. Miller then filed suit, against developer Yao Wei Yeo (accused of direct infringement) and Facebook (accused of contributorily infringing). Miller alleged that ChainRxn incorporated the “same look and feel” of Boomshine, in addition to featuring “almost every visual element of the game.”

Unfortunately for Miller, Yeo could not be located in order to be served with a summons. Miller’s original complaint charged both defendants with copyright infringement, but after the complaint was dismissed, Miller amended his complaint to carry the currently stated charges.
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The provincial court of Madrid has concluded that popular file sharing site, CVCDGO.com, did not " transfer or host any copyrighted works" and therefore did not violate any laws. This ruling falls in line with other cases in Spain involving file sharing, to the chagrin of police and organizations like the EGEDA and Columbia Tristar.

The case has been tangled up in court since 2005; in early 2005 Spanish police under its Intellectual Property Crime Squad, or "Operation CVCD," and the audiovisual rights collecting society EGEDA conducted an investigation, collecting evidence on the web site. Shortly thereafter police conducted a raid in multiple cities (Malaga, Seville and Madrid) arresting the four male operators of the site.

According to published reports prosecutors allege that the site shared movies with users - many of which hadn't even a theatrical release in the region. Since its launch in 2004 CVCDGO.com made its money off of ads on the site from an estimated 11 million visits. Read More

Canadian Ministry of Industry Tony Clement (pictured) and Heritage Minister James Moore outlined new copyright legislation yesterday, and the pair’s choice of venue to introduce Bill C-32 might assist in indicating just which side (business or consumer) the legislation tends to favor.

While legislation is typically introduced amid the backdrop of Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, C-32 was introduced at the Montreal offices of Electronic Arts, which the Financial Post says was “a member of a lobby group that is pushing for a hard line approach to copyright.”

Among the Bill’s provisions, according to CBC.ca, is a measure that would criminalize the breaking of digital locks contained in media or devices. Shifting purchased media from one device to another, or from a CD to a device, would be legal however.
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Google joins the BAN-wagon with Apple in removing Tetris-like games from its Android app store, according to Ars. The Tetris Company, which handles licensing for the popular franchise created by Alexei Pajitnov, has sent a DMCA takedown to Google, who in turn has eliminated all Teris-like games from its store.

35 Tetris-like games have been removed from the Android market - even though many of them didn't use any art or knock off names that might trick users into thinking the games were the "real deal."

Tetris Company's challenge to these games, according to ARS, is that they "infringe on the game's trade dress, which is protected under the Lanham Act" (see bitlaw.com for the actual law). Trade dress relates to the "likeness of a product" and deals with copy cat products that might be confused with the real product.

The official game created by EA sucks, says Ars. I'll take their word for it.

Responding to a call for more transparency on negotiations surrounding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a public “predecisional” draft of the document, as it currently stands, has been released to the public.

 Dubbed “Consolidated Text Prepared for Public Release,” the ACTA document (PDF) was issued following the latest round of negotiations, which wrapped up in New Zealand last week. Prior to this release, all previous versions of ACTA text that made it into the public eye were leaked.

Ars Technica waded through the legal-jargon to decode the document for us mere mortals. In terms of Digital Rights Management (DRM), the ACTA text, as it reads now, would ban any attempt to circumvent DRM, or “the unauthorized circumvention of an effective technological measure.”
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Seemingly every story on piracy or counterfeiting throws out figures of how such practices cost businesses XXX amount of dollars per year. For those who may have questioned the legitimacy of such figures, the results of a new government report validate taking such a “Doubting Thomas” approach.

The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report entitled Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods (PDF). GAO issued its findings as a directive emanating from 2008’s Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (Pro-IP Act), in which the organization was asked to provide information on, and quantify, the impact of counterfeit and pirated goods.
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A Canadian politician who proposed a tax on digital media devices, in addition to amending the country’s Copyright Act, has written a blistering op-ed for The Star.

New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Charlie Angus previously admitted that the change he proposed to the Copyright Act—which would protect the “reasonable” use of copyrighted materials for “innovation, research and study”—was designed to stimulate conversation, and he begins his article by asking, “Is it possible in Canada to have a grown up conversation about copyright?”
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A newly proposed Canadian bill would affix a tax on digital media storage devices ranging from personal MP3 players to computer hard drives.

Democratic MP Charlie Angus (pictured) is behind the proposed measure C-499 (PDF), which would extend the country’s 1997 Private Copying Levy to cover “copying devices,” specifically "a device that contains a permanently embedded data storage medium, including solid state or hard disk, designed, manufactured and advertised for the purpose of copying sound recordings, excluding any prescribed kind of recording device."

Angus, for his part, does not expect the bill to get very far, but hoped that its introduction would spark debate on the topic. He stated in a press release that “it’s time parliamentarians got serious about updating our copyright laws.”

Angus continued: Read More

David Jaffe can breathe a little easier today. According to the embattled developer, Bissoon Dath v. SCEA and David Jaffe, a copyright infringement lawsuit over various themes in the God of War series, was dismissed by a federal court judge last week. Read More