[FC-discuss] Merry Christmas from the IP Police

[Parker Higgins]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and it seems to me like there's
been a major uptick in ridiculous public-performance oriented infringement
claims.  I think I've got an explanation...

The average person on the street is, I'd guess, a lot more sympathetic to
public-performance (and probably, without really thinking about it, wouldn't
consider things like royalties for music playing on the PA in a store, or
something) than they are to the "distribution" cases that have come up
recently.  As a result, public-performance was, in terms of norms, a much
less enforced area of copyright law than distribution, which in pre-internet
days usually only applied in the case of big time pirates.  Of course, the
individual had little or no interaction with copyright law, because it was
only the big operations that ran into distribution infringement.

Then, with the advent (Christmas pun? maybe.) of file sharing, distribution
claims became much more publicly enforced, most notably with the 20k+ RIAA
lawsuits.  I think this began an era of copyright enforcement on the
individual, and along with the dubious distribution claims which may or may
not have a significant impact on the RIAA's bottom line (and they certainly
think it does), came the dubious public-performance claims, which almost
certainly do not affect profits.  However, now that it's the content
industry's position to prosecute all infringement, including that done by
the individual, they've left common sense by the wayside when decided which
of these things to go after.

Basically, to summarize, the content industry has started going after the
individual in file-sharing cases, and now can't stop.  Most of the time,
pursuing individual infringement seems ridiculous (hence John Tehranian's
recent paper, "Infringement Nation.")

Thoughts?

Parker

On Dec 10, 2007 12:54 AM, Max Berger <bergerm at reed.edu> wrote:

> I'm sure many of you already saw this, but it might be the single most
> ridiculous IP related news item I've ever seen:
>
> Christmas is known world-wide as a time for sharing, a time for giving.
> But for one charity, instead of Santa arriving with gifts, the copyright
> police turned up demanding money. Why? Because the charity allows
> children to sing carols on the premises and their kitchen radio is a
> little loud. You couldn't make it up.
>
>
> http://torrentfreak.com/charity-forced-to-pay-copyright-police-so-kids-can-sing-071209/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at freeculture.org
> http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://freeculture.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20071210/32462c5c/attachment.htm