Legal news stories and other items of interest

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Russia set to streamline anti-piracy procedure
25/ 08/ 2006

MOSCOW, August 25 (RIA Novosti) - Russia is going to simplify the procedure for enforcing copyrights and related rights, an Economic Development and Trade Ministry official said Friday.

The widespread violation of intellectual property rights is a bitter point of contention in the currently stalled bilateral World Trade Organization accession talks between Russia and the United States.

The U.S. has repeatedly demanded more effective steps to curb piracy in Russia, which it said costs American companies millions of dollars in losses.

"We are now preparing an array of measures, both on the legislative and on the law-enforcement level," said Yury Lyubimov, an aide to the economic development and trade minister.

He said Article 146 of the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure would be amended to refine the definition of copyright damages and simplify the procedure for assessing damages caused by copyright infringement.

He said the current definition of the size of statutory damages provides a loophole for pirates, who usually sell small quantities of counterfeit products that cannot be used as sufficient grounds for prosecution.
Source: en.rian.ru

Now the Cartels are using the World Trade Organization accession talks to get Russia to change (or is that force?) there intellectual property laws.

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DCIA writes to Congress
August 24, 2006
Thomas Mennecke


Who is the DCIA? The DCIA is the Distributed Computer Industry Association, a trade organization that lobbies on behalf of commercial P2P developers. What’s a commercial P2P developer? A commercial P2P developer represents a growing aspect of file-sharing, composed of networks that were once considered "unauthorized."

In the DCIA’s ongoing struggle to persuade the Congress of the United States that file-sharing has legitimate and practical uses beyond unauthorized content distribution; CEO Marty Lafferty has penned a letter to our representatives with the intentions of convincing, or at least earning the consideration, of the DCIA’s intentions. Seven years since the advent of mainstream file-sharing under Napster, this task continues to prove difficult, as the entertainment industry continues to struggle against unauthorized file-sharing networks.
Source:slyck
Read the article at the above link.

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Day 07: DRM-Free Library Deposits (Public Protection)

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Cable firm loses court case over file swapping

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Dutch judge told cable operator and Internet broadband provider UPC, a unit of Liberty Global, on Thursday to give the name and address of one its clients to an anti-piracy agency.

The result is a breakthrough for Dutch copyright holders interest group Brein, which has long tried to gain access to names and addresses of individuals who it suspects of swapping large numbers of songs, films and other copyrighted material.

Internet lawyers said it is the first time a Dutch internet service provider will have to hand over personal details of file swappers who store copyrighted content on their own computers.

UPC said it had always refused to supply subscriber data because this would be a breach of Dutch privacy laws.

But the Amsterdam judge said that privacy rules did not apply if two conditions were met: copyright holders needed to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that files had been swapped illegally, and also that the person swapping the files was the same person who was the registered customer.

UPC said it would consider its position after the ruling in the summary proceedings.

Source: Reuters

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Day 08: Privacy (Circumvention Rights)

Today's post kicks off the heart of the 30 Days of DRM series - circumvention rights. Circumvention rights are necessary since everyone agrees that an absolute anti-circumvention provision (ie. circumvention prohibited in all circumstances) is unworkable.

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Paving the way for a tax on media
By Fernando Cassia in Argentina: Friday 25 August 2006.

LAST WEEK the customs office in Argentina seized a shipment of recordable CD and DVD media which was smuggled to pay lower duties. Amazingly, local media presented this as proof of music and movies piracy.

The Inquirer

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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A Florida man who made millions of dollars selling illegal copies of computer programs was sentenced Friday to six years in prison in one of the nation's largest software piracy cases.

Danny Ferrer, of Lakeland, Fla., pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy and copyright infringement charges after an FBI investigation of his Web site, BuysUSA.com. Ferrer also was ordered to pay more than $4.1 million in restitution to software makers Adobe Systems Inc., Autodesk, and Macromedia Inc.
Fox News

That's a real Pirate that the Cartels should be going after not some kid downloading & sharing the latest pop musick singles , dead people and even people who don't even own a PC or know what P2P is.

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NZ FACT claims to have some sort of pirate tracking program that can work out who is looking for what, and based on that, prosecute people. So what is the Proprietary Content Filtering System or PCFS that NZ FACT refuses to show to the Herald, yet asserts does not have access to anyone's computers and therefore cannot be spyware or a virus?

Geek Zone

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Day 09: Reverse Engineering (Circumvention Rights)

The inclusion of a reverse engineering circumvention right is another obvious necessary provision. Reverse engineering is described by the Chilling Effects site as follows:

Reverse engineering is the scientific method of taking something apart in order to figure out how it works. Reverse engineering has been used by innovators to determine a product's structure in order to develop competing or interoperable products. Reverse engineering is also an invaluable teaching tool used by researchers, academics and students in many disciplines, who reverse engineer technology to discover, and learn from, its structure and design.

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Day 10: Security Research (Circumvention Rights)

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30 Days of DRM - Day 11: Involuntary Installation of Software (Circumvention Rights)

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Music publishers are taking action against guitar fan websites which they say infringe songwriters' copyrights. Publishers have started to use copyright lawsuits to shut down sites which share notations to help musicians to play songs at home.

Called guitar tablature, or tab, the notations indicate where players should put their fingers. Books filled with tab are available in shops, but a number of websites make tab notations available for free. Now trade bodies are taking action against those sites.

The New York Times reports that the Music Publishers' Association (MPA) and the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) have shut down several websites or forced them to remove all tabs using threats of copyright lawsuits. The sites are typically fan-run and not significant profit-making enterprises.

Read more @ theregister.

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p2pnet.net News:- Retribution has been swift for two Chinese journalists who first reported staff at Apple iPod maker Foxconn were working under allegedly bad conditions.

They're being sued by Foxconn subsidiary the Hongfujin Precision Industry Shenzhen Company in what China Daily says is the largest sum in damages ever sought in a Chinese defamation case, and the first defamation lawsuit against individual journalists in China.

Read the story @ p2pnet. with related links news stories.

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Software industry lobby group the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has called for government to mandate stiff penalties for companies using unlicensed software.

The organisation says it wants a "harder enforcement stick" to ensure compliance.

Read more of the article @ The Register.

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30 Days of DRM - Day 12: Research and Private Study (Circumvention Rights)