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...<br><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br><br>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.")
<br><br>Thoughts?<br><br>Parker<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Dec 10, 2007 12:54 AM, Max Berger <<a href="mailto:bergerm@reed.edu">bergerm@reed.edu</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I'm sure many of you already saw this, but it might be the single most<br>ridiculous IP related news item I've ever seen:<br><br>Christmas is known world-wide as a time for sharing, a time for giving.<br>But for one charity, instead of Santa arriving with gifts, the copyright
<br>police turned up demanding money. Why? Because the charity allows<br>children to sing carols on the premises and their kitchen radio is a<br>little loud. You couldn't make it up.<br><br><a href="http://torrentfreak.com/charity-forced-to-pay-copyright-police-so-kids-can-sing-071209/" target="_blank">
http://torrentfreak.com/charity-forced-to-pay-copyright-police-so-kids-can-sing-071209/</a><br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Discuss mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Discuss@freeculture.org">Discuss@freeculture.org
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