Crosbie has a nice post. Here's to piracy.

You may have heard that a judge in Sweden found against the Pirate Bay for copyright violation. He concluded that linking to material that might be under copyright is a violation of copyright. Here is a letter summarizing what is going on now:

Dear David:

I just had to write and tell you what has happened the last few days.

In about five days that has gone since The Pirate Bay verdict, the Pirateparty has now become 38.000 members strong. Still increasing fast. Six days ago we were only 14.000 - now we are Swedens fourth largest party - counting members. A couple of days later we will be no:3 if things keep going like they do.

To get in to the European parliament we need about 100.000 votes.

That goal actually seems quite reachable right now. Last election we had about 6000 members and we got 37.000 votes. And things are hot like never before right now for our questions - and nothing else seems really to be a hot topic. And, it´s less than 30 days left to the election.

Hope to keep you updated - this is going to be really exiting!

Today the newspapers blew up a scandal that the judge for The Pirate Bay trial actually also was a member of a couple copyright organisations. He had also worked with some of the lawyers that represented the copyright industry in the trial.

If you are interested read more about the incredible story you can read it in english at:

link here

I am currently writing a book called "The Pirate Manual - How to speak with voters" in swedish. I hope you don´t mind I mention your books.

Sincerely yours

Mika Sjöman The Swedish Pirate Party

I'd like to welcome our newest blogger Meera Nair. Meera has a PhD from the School of Communication, Dept. of Applied Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Canada, and is interested in "fair dealing" in Canada - what is called "fair use" in the United States. I'm doing her first post for her as she is having trouble typing right now.

Meera sends a brief summary of the state of fair dealing in Canada as seen by the courts there.

Supreme Court of Canada 2002: Thaberge v. Galerie d'Art du Petit Champlain inc. 2002 SCC 34

This case concerned a transformation of legally purchased artwork; infringement was the charge, the majority opinion disagreed. They said:

Parliament formulated restrictive provisions which gave the owner of the copyright a certain control power of the uses. There is no general right to control subsequent uses.The proper balance among these and other public policy objectives lies not only in recognizing the creator's rights but in giving due weight to their limited nature.

Supreme Court of Canada 2004: CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, 2004 SCC 13

This case concerned, amongst other things, a library making photocopies of copyrighted materials (at the request of patrons.) In a unanimous decision, Fair Dealing was held to be an integral part of the law. There were quite a few gems in the decision; here are a few of them Fair dealing is always available; Research must be given a large and liberal interpretation in order to ensure that user's rights are not unduly constrained; Research is not limited to non-commercial or private contexts; The availability of a license is not relevant to deciding whether a dealing has been fair.

Supreme Court of Canada 2004: Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada v. Canadian Association of Internet Providers, 2004 SCC 45

With an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that ISPs are not liable if copyrighted material passes through their servers. (The dissenting opinion was related to a question of territoriality.):

[The Canadian] Parliament made a policy distinction between those who abuse the Internet to obtain cheap music and those who are part of the infrastructure of the Internet itself. It is clear that Parliament did not want copyright disputes between creators and users to be visited on the heads of the Internet intermediaries, whose continued expansion and development is considered vital to national economic growth.

Supreme Court of Canada 2006: Robertson v. Thomson 2006 SCC 43:

A freelance journalistic objected to the inclusion of her work in a CD-ROM of the publishing newspaper, and in two databases. The court grappled with the question: where are the boundaries to copyright in the individual work, and the publisher's compilation? Both the majority and minority opinions expressed the view that copyright is a limited right, AND, that transformation into a new medium did not recast the ambit of that right. Taken together, it is a strong rebuttal to those who continue to insist that digital works have absolute copyright.

Although they are working hard. Stephan points us to a list of libraries available online.

Mario Stargard submits the following observations about whether copyright leads to innovation:

Sure it does. Seems that every time a P2P protocol is shutdown, new ones emerge to circumvent the previous problems.

Napster had the problem of being centrally controlled, and attacked by the RIAA. Gnutella and eDonkey had the problem of being inefficient for large files and they faded into irrelevance but also suffered from some legal setbacks. Kazaa had the problem of still having some central controls that were legally attacked. Bittorrent has the problem of throttling, and now legal problems because pointing to a copyright work is copyright infringement a la Pirate Bay. Kind of makes you wonder if a torrent file is a derivative work.

The throttling issue is being worked on by utorrent, a client that is implementing a udp based bittorrent protocol. udp has the advantage of not having tcp's congestion control mechanism. It is this mechanism that is being exploited by the Deep Packet Inspection throttlers at major ISP's such as Bell Canada. ISP's will, of course, have to innovate a new throttling mechanism to overcome this new development. Throttling is an intellectual property issue because, at least in Canada, the last mile to consumers is controlled by media companies.

Continued works on avoidance schemes and anonymous networks are being fueled by these developments. The Onion Router (TOR) and the freenet project are two great examples. http://www.torproject.org/ http://freenetproject.org/

TOR is currently a mechanism that almost any Bittorrent client can use to obscure your IP address.

What is this leading to? Will the use of encryption or the possession of certain software eventually become a criminal offense? One wonders.

The paper is here. I suppose the message is: "the system works sort of."

Excluding business and financial methods per se from patentability, although perhaps desirable, is not really feasible given the difficult of defining what they are. Even at the EPO, where there is a general exclusion, such patents do exist whenever the invention solves a particular technical problem. The language in the recent Bilski deiciosn in the United States seems to move in that direction, and to exclude those patents with overbroad and vague cliams which are perceived by many to be the main drag on the innovative system.

You can find more of her research on patents here.

The fools are at it again. Despite the wide availability of tools for copying DVDs to hard drives, the MPAA is suing RealNetworks for selling a copying tool that will only make one copy and doesn't undo the encryption. Details here and a quote:

In October, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel temporarily barred sales of RealDVD after the product was on the market for a few days. At the time, the judge said it appeared the software did violate federal law against digital piracy, but ordered detailed court filings and the trial to better understand how RealDVD works.

Notice what is happening: the DMCA allows a single judge to take a product preemptively off the market based on an "appearance" of guilt.

Much of the harm in IP law would no doubt be alleviated if we just got rid of the use of injunctions.

Fifth RIAA appointment to the Department of Justice. No revolving door of lobbyists here.