Articles For Week 1
Porn filmmakers join fight against Internet piracy
http://www.aviransplace.com/2008/01/14/porn-filmmakers-join-fight-against-internet-piracy/
In an almost exact mirror of the YouTube vs. Viacom suit for $1 billion over the hosting and providing of copyrighted materials on their site, a simmilar site called PornoTube is being sued by Hirsch's Vivid Entertainment, a $12 billion dollar company in this business of making adult videos. The suit blames PornoTube for it's user contributed content, that may or may not be copyrighted. HVE says that PornoTube is at blame for not filtering their user's submissions. This relates to the topic of who should be in controll of a commons. Who owns the library of user donated content? Do the users as a people, or does the library, or the company that produced the videos in the first place?
MPAA admits mistake on downloading study
http://www.newsweek.com/id/98009
College students are often blamed for the majority of movie piracy. Justing Pope writes for Newsweek, "...The Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry's domestic losseess came from illegal downloading of movies by college students..." They say that one of the key reasons they are able to get away with the theft is high-bandwidth networks often available on college campuses. The MPAA has been using the 44% figure to put pressure on colleges to police their own networks, and when they refuse, putting pressure on legislature to make them comply. Now, however, the MPAA claims that a human error blew the number out of proportion and admits that the losses due to college piracy are more like 15%. Considering that many students live off campus and don't use the network the college provides, Mark Luker, vice president of campus IT group Educause says that the piracy conducted on colege networks is something more like 5%. It seems as though the entertainment industry has put undue pressure on the universities to enforce anti-piracy policy. This relates to the idea of being able to bully people around with not just the law, but the threatening use of the law. A mentality that money is a power greater than the rights of the poorer is the kind of mentality that allows for such miscalculation to continue.
Music Biz Pushes Piracy Blame To ISPs; Digital Sales Up 40 Percent
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-music-biz-pushes-piracy-blame-to-isps-digital-sales-up-40-percent/
According to the IFPI in its 2008 Digital Music report, dispite claims that 80% of all internet traffic contains some form of copyright infringing material on P2P, the Major Record labels digital album business has grown 40%, perhaps because of pressures from the record labels to shift the blame from users to ISPs. John Kennedy, the chairperson of the IFPI gobal record label umbrella, is hoping to force ISPs to keep track of their customers internet use and then block them after 3 attempts to send copyrighted materials. He says that the very infastructure of the net is at risk as P2P "chokes (their) bandwidth". The model has already been put into place in some countries such as France, and soon very likely Belgum, and Kennedy is seeking to get the program in the USA. This is relevant to the topic of who is responsible for the sharing of copyrighted materials, and the weight that record labels throw around, even though their business is growing.