Archive for the ‘ Media Law ’ Category
I’m no legal expert, nor do I have much experience in business, but something tells me nothing good can come of this…
Granted, there are caveats, including concessions for AEG. Check it out yourself and let me know what you think.
Meanwhile, back in the world in intellectual property law, Allan Ellis who ran Oink’s Pink Palace until it was shut down by UK authorities in 2007, was recently aquited of “conspiracy to defraud the music industry.” Check it out over at Wired. com
The Globe and Mail‘s “Download Decade” series continues with parts 3 and 4 now up on their website.
I have to say that while the main stories don’t break a lot of new ground, they do an admirable job of summing up the story so far, which from the title of the series is what they intended to do.
Part 3 tackles the sticky problem of piracy (sorry, “copyright infringement” as one commenter posited. Downloading might be legal in Canada, but either way, nobody’s getting any money for the Green Day record you just downloaded) and how the habit might (if ever) be changed. It’s definitely the shortest entry and the least comprehensive in the series thus far. Curiously, Matt Hartley, who wrote the other three entries, didn’t contribute to this one.
Part 4 examines the lack of political will on behalf of Canadian politicians (thank you, minority government) to reform Canadian copyright law. The last time any new legislation was created was in 1997 and if you haven’t already heard, it’s a bit of a contentious issue these days. Personally I’m fine with this as I don’t really want Stephen Harper to be the one penning any such law. Quite frankly, I just don’t trust the guy.
Related Posts:
Before you pipe in with cries of “they always look like morons,” look at things from an outside the blogosphere perspective.
First the prosecution was baffled by the site’s open-source concept, uable to comprehend why a business wasn’t a for-profit hierarchy with a single person where the buck stopped. Not wanting to lose such an important case, the prosecution quickly altered the charges in order to better ensure a conviction. Then while testifying today the head of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries – the international version of the RIAA and CRIA – was insistent that every song downloaded, like ever, represented a lost sale for the record industry.
Obviously there’s a segment of us who already believe – with good reason – that the record industry has basically been out to lunch for the past decade. But think about what this would look like to an outsider; even my mom understands these basic online concepts. The record industry has been on a campaign for five years now, suing all over the place (though they say they’re now changing tactics), trying to convince the general public that downloading is a crime (which it is) and that it’s in the public interest to stop it. So far, reaction in the general public has been little more than a shrug of the shoulders. Something tells me that being outsmarted by a group of Swedish anarchists isn’t going to help their cause.
That is if the RIAA has it’s way. It seems that after waging a five-year litigation campaign against it’s own customer base, the music industry’s playground bully lobby arm is changing course. With the cooperation of certain ISPs the RIAA wants to cut people caught sharing music illegally on the internet off. You can read the details over at wired.com’s Epicenter and Threat Level blogs.
While I’m hardly in favour of anyone getting their online acces cut, this does seem to be a bit more of a sane (though still incredibly arbitrary and ineffective) way of dealing with illegal downloading. That said, I think this does present a slippery slope for ISPs, and hopefully here in Canada providers like Rogers, Bell and Shaw will recognize this and tell the CRIA to fuck off.
Also, the RIAA’s strategy to use screen caps as their only evidence of wrong doing seems a little fishy. Hopefully some judge with half a brain will deem this whole thing illegal (I hope).
There was an interesting story on wired.com last week about a Harvard Law professor who believes the US law which the RIAA has used as its basis in all of its legal suits against music downloaders in unconstitutional. The professor in question is Charles Nesson, best known for defending the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Check it out here.
Stalk me!