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Copyright Politics Uncategorized

Illegal downloaders ‘face UK ban’

British internet users face ban for illegal downloads. A draft copy of a Green Paper produced by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was leaked to The Times newspaper which detailed how the government was considering introducing legislation that would require ISPs to take action against users who access pirated material.

The Government’s resolve on the issue has apparently been stiffened following similar proposals made by the governments of the US and France. The proposal is designed to bolster the UK’s creative industries but it is questionable how much impact it will have on piracy and how willing Internet Service Providers will be to cut off their revenue by banning their own customers.

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Copyright Uncategorized

Shiver me timbers! Pirate Bay hit with legal action

The four guys that run The Pirate Bay have been charged with conspiracy to break copyright law in Sweden.

Well it was bound to happen wasn’t it as the Swedish authorities have been building their case against The Pirate Bay since they seized their computers back in late May of 2006.

But it is by no means clear cut whether or not they will actually get convicted of the offence they’ve been charged with. They would contend that what they are doing is merely running a search engine and that there are not any substantial differences between them and Google other than the fact they they restrict their searches to torrent files.

In any case whether convicted or not The Pirate Bay website will still continue as it is no longer hosted on a server located in Sweden and the founders claim that they do not actually know where the server is located.

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Copyright Uncategorized

Copyright regime vs. civil liberties

In this special interview Rick Falkvinge, the founder and the leader of Swedish Pirate Party, gives his own views on the wildly heated political filesharing debate in Sweden, evaluates the political and technological prospects of P2P and talks about the dangers of citizen surveillance and Big Brother society. “Our enemy has no intellectual capital to bring to the battle”

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Copyright Uncategorized

Warhammer 40KO’d: Fan film scuppered by Games Workshop

Damnatus an ambitious fan-film produced by German fans of the Warhammer 40K game, made by the company Games Workshop, may never be seen by an audience according to BBC News due to copyright issues.

The German producers of Damnatus had tried to make the film as professional looking as possible and spent over 10 000 Euros and months of filming on the project. Unfortunately Games Workshop say that due to German copyright law there is a danger of them losing control over their Intellectual Property should they let the fan film be distributed.

Andy Jones, legal and licensing head for Games Workshop, said this law confers rights on the creators of works that cannot be given away.

This means that the creators of Damnatus cannot assign their rights to Games Workshop even if they wanted to.

But by sanctioning the release of the film without this “assignment” Games Workshop would essentially be giving up the title to the Warhammer 40,000 intellectual property.

In a lengthy response explaining the ban on Damnatus Mr Jones wrote: “To lose control of Warhammer or Warhammer 40,000 is simply unthinkable.

“So we must be vigilant, and perhaps sometimes seemingly heartless in our decisions to safeguard the IP for the future success of the business and the hobby.”

I have to say that I’m dubious about the truth of Games Workshop’s position here. I’m no expert on German copyright law but I can’t believe there is no possible work around to this obstacle if Games Workshop truly wished to help their German fans release the movie.

If German law is like any other countries’ copyright law then there must be provision within that law to licence the copyrighted works of others to create new works. How else could the movie Perfume: The Story of a Murderer have been produced unless their licensed the right from the book’s author Patrick Süskind?

A contract could surely be drawn up to licence the copyright of Games Workshop on a limited basis for a nominal sum of 1 Euro to the German film producers that would allow the movie to be released on a non-commercial basis.

Mr Jones said despite Games Workshop’s “admiration” for Damnatus it could not change its policy and allow the film to be shown.

He said Games Workshop was not acting “malevolently” but that this was a case where an agreement has “failed to be reached”.

Said Mr Jones: “This is perhaps to be regretted, nonetheless in the final analysis we simply have no choice but to say ‘no’.”

I have a feeling that the BBC article does not tell the full story, either there is some genuine confusion here or Games Workshop is saying one thing in public and trying to muddy the waters with talk of copyright issues but is in reality opposed to the release of this movie.

Edit: A commenter at TechDirt with some familiarity of German law suggests that the company find a new copyright lawyer as like I wrote above it’s perfectly possible for them to grant a limited licence to use their copyrighted works without losing control over their Intellectual Property.

Also another commenter suggests that there might be some confusion and it is actually a Trademark issue instead, I could believe that this might be the case but surely there is a workable solution if this is the case too.

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Copyright Uncategorized

US summer box office to top $4bn

The BBC reports that North American cinemas are experiencing a record-breaking summer at the box office. Takings are expected to top the $4bn (£1.98bn) barrier for the first time.

Box office analysts Media By Numbers say the $4bn figure outclasses summer ticket sales of $3.95bn (£1.95bn) set in 2004.

Their estimates suggest that this summer’s box office returns will stand at $4.15bn (£2.05bn) by the time the season officially ends on 3 September.

But they added that actual summer ticket sales are expected to be about 606m, only the sixth-best in modern times.

There’s a similar picture at our cinema, we’ve experienced a better summer than the past few years and that’s without any summer blockbusters as we tend towards the arthouse end of the market.

It seems that the death knell of the movie industry sounded by the MPAA in the US has been premature to say the least if in spite of rising numbers of people using BitTorrent to download movies that box office revenue is on the up too.

In fact MPAA research statistics would seem to indicate that it has not only been a good summer 2007 at the box office but that the figures for the year 2006 showed a rising trend across the board.

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Copyright Uncategorized

Copyright for kids

Copyright rights, unregulated uses, and fair use is kid’s stuff

Lawyer Erik J. Heels explained copyright law to his friend’s daughter using the above drawing. [via]

Nice simple breakdown of copyright in my opinion.

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Copyright Uncategorized

YouTubing to become a paying job

BBC News: YouTubers to get ad money share

It was bound to happen at some point that Youtube would have to start pay those people that make the site what it is today – the video makers. Although to be honest the success has mostly been off the back of material that infringes copyright rather than the truly user-generated stuff.

But with other video sharing sites such as MetaCafe and Revver already having business models that reward the creators of well viewed movies then YouTube had to do the same or risk losing their number one spot.

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Copyright Uncategorized

UK artists are creatively common

Release of Report on ‘UK Artists, Copyright and Creative Commons’

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Copyright Uncategorized

Musical copyright terms ‘to stay’

BBC News: Musical copyright terms ‘to stay’

See also ReleaseTheMusic.org

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Comics Copyright Uncategorized

Alan Moore’s Lost Girls

Alan Moore writer of seminal graphic novels Watchmen and From Hell faces controversy and accusations of copyright infringement over his latest work Lost Girls.

Moore not only faces criticism for the pornographic content of the graphic novel but also because Great Ormond Street Hospital maintains that it holds the copyright for the character of Wendy Darling from Peter Pan, who is one of the main charcters in Lost Girls.

But is Peter Pan in the public domain and if it isn’t are the characters copyrighted. Never Neverland: Peter Pan and perpetual copyright

Alan Moore discusses Lost Girls and the issues surrounding it in this BBC Radio interview.

Neil Gaiman has written in his online journal about Lost Girls.