Europeana to be boosted, could develop into a serious alternative to Google Books

The ministers of the EU member states have decided to establish a committee charged with accelerating digitising European cultural heritage.  The committee will emphasise the importance of a digital library with member states and will oversee the development of a coherent policy on this subject.

There already is an EU institution that is tasked with making digital copies of cultural heritage, Europeana. Europeana was established in the autumn of 2008 and has digitised around 4,5 million works. However, the institution lacks a clear focus and is completely dependent on member states for extending its catalogue.

The European ministers will have jealously regarded the rapid progress of Google Books. The French minister of Culture Frederic Mitterand denies that forming the committee is a reaction to the American company’s approach. “It is not only up to the private sector to decide on digitising our cultural heritage,” says Mitterand on Tweakers.net.

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Mininova closes part of the site that offers infringing content

Miniova is one of the hundred most visited sites in the world. It has decided to close down the part of the site on which infringing content is offered. A Dutch court ordered Mininova three months ago to remove torrents that link to copyrighted works. The site has now responded by choosing to close down the part of the site that was mostly used to share copyrighted works completely.

The site had more than 50 million unique users every day that generated over 800 million pageviews. It listed over 1,3 million trackers, the vast majority of which linked to copyrighted works.

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As e-readers become mainstream, so does pirating e-books

e-Readers are on the rise. In the United States, there are approximately 1,7 million e-readers in circulation. The expectation is that this number will increase to 4 million before year’s end.

More and more companies are developing and marketing the devices. Amazon has its Kindle, Sony the Reader. Then there are Samsung, iRex, Elonex and Bookeen, to name a few. Apple plans to release a tablet computer next year, which will also contribute to the demand of e-books.

The market for reading digital books is maturing. In Great Britain, the number of available titles increased by 300% over the last year reports Times online. However, so does the threat of literature piracy. A case in point is Dan Brown’s new book, Lost Symbol. Pirated version of the book circulated the Internet even before it was published. Reportedly, it was downloaded more than 100.000 times within half a week.

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Microsoft opens the battle for news

Microsoft has offered News Corp, the mother company of the Wall Street Journal amongst others, a significant sum if they would de-index their news pages from Google. Besides News Corp, the software giant has approached other news media with a similar offer, reports Financial Times.
Both Microsoft and News Corp do not comment on the plan.

Microsoft’s move follows remarks made by Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp, that the company thinks about having the news its media publish removed from search engines’ lists and to restrict access to online news to paying visitors.

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Piracy reduces market for African productions

Nearly always, we write about copyright issues is the West. There, where a strong copyright tradition is troubled by technical change. Despite these problems, rights holders can rely on the support of courts that aim to enforce and protect these rights.

Not every country has such strong copyright systems. West Africa, for example, a region with a large creative community, lacks such a system. The development of a  strong creative industry is hampered by rampant piracy in many West African countries. According to The Monitor’s website, piracy levels in many West African countries often reach 90%.  And no country in Africa has a piracy level of under 25%, although it is unclear what exactly is meant by the ‘piracy level’.

The consequence is that artists and producers only have a very short time to recoup their investment. Very quickly after an album or movie proves successful, it finds its way to the back market.

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Digital Economy Bill presented, ISPs voice criticism

The Digital Economy Bill intends to reduce file-sharing of copyrighted works in the UK. In the Bill, Ofcom, the UK’s telecoms authority, is charged with supervising actions to curb piracy.

Contrary to previous speculation, the Bill does not include technical measures such as suspending Internet accounts of repeating file-sharers. However, technical measures are not excluded. If Ofcom does not manage to reduce piracy by 70% before a currently unspecified date, the Secretary of State may ask Parliament to approve technical measures such as bandwidth caps, data limits or even account termination may be introduced.

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Supreme Court in South Korea bans tools to play pirated games

In South Korea, the Supreme Court confirmed sentencing a games retailer to jail for selling hardware needed to play illegal copies of console games.

Nintendo welcomed this verdict, that was the first Supreme Court verdict on using hardware to play pirated games.

“We will continue to take stern actions against illegality and institute legal proceedings,” Nintendo Korea’s CEO, Mineo Koda, said in a statement quoted by Telecoms Korea. “Our efforts will contribute to protection of the game developers’ rights as well as to the reinforcement of the South Korean game industry.”

Creative Commons holiday guide: “gifts that won’t get you sued”

The website safe.1889.ca has compiled a list of products that have a Creative Commons licence. The site, entitled “the safe holiday guide – great gifts that won’t get you sued” contains music, movies and books that are either for sale or free to download on other sites.

Not all content is free, but is published under a CC license. However, CC licenses exist in many different varieties. In some cases, it means that content is actually free. In other cases, content still needs to be purchased, but the content is then free to be shared and copied amongst your own playback devices.

The site is on the lookout for more content with a Creative Commons licence and is open to suggestions should anyone have any CC-licenced goods on offer.

Internet becoming a viable alternative for broadcasted TV

The Netherlands is one of the countries with the highest broadband penetrations. High quality networks enable quick and easy transfer of large files, such as movies or TV shows. This enables not only file-sharing, it also means the Internet could become a serious alternative to traditional channels of TV broadcasting. Watching favourite TV shows whenever you want, without the hassle of ads.

Such a transition is already underway in the United States. Services like Netflix, Hulu and the iTunes store offer a rich and varied catalogue of TV shows and movies. In Europe, pickings are slimmer. In the Netherlands, home of Future of Copyright, good alternatives to broadcasting are not at all impressive. A few cable companies offer video on demand as part of digital TV services. Ok, and some TV channels offer a service to review recently broadcasted content, but not in a quality that makes it any threat to broadcasted TV.

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Verizon to forward RIAA notices to file-sharing customers

Verizon, a large ISP in the United States, together with the Recording Industry Association of America, is going to commence a test in which it will send letters to their customers who are suspected of file-sharing.

While such cooperation is not unique, it is significant as Verizon has been one of the more hesitant ISPs when it comes to cooperating with the entertainment industry to enforce copyright. It has a history of opposing anti piracy legislation. Verizon has even fought the RIAA in court when the latter demanded that Verizon released the identity of one of its customers that was a suspected chronic file-sharer.

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EFF mapping copyright systems all over the world

The digital civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation has participated in an ambitious project: creating an overview of copyright systems in all countries of the world. The project is called Copyright Watch and can be accessed here.

The EFF embarks on this project in cooperation with copyright monitors, academics and libraries from all over the globe. It is primarily funded by the Open Society Institute.

Copyright systems vary greatly across the globe. The United States has one of the most elaborate systems, spanning over 130.000 words or roughly 2600 pages of copyright legislation. The shortest the project found so far is Afghanistan’s copyright, which is virtually non-existent.

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Competition on cable networks would violate copyright

When cable companies Ziggo and UPC allow competitors onto their market, both them and the newcomers would violate copyright. This occurs as selling the TV licences to newcomers entails renewed publication. And neither the cable companies nor the new competitors have a license for this.

OPTA, the Dutch cable authority that forces this market to open, forces the vested cable companies to sell their television packages to newcomers, so they can broadcast too. This causes both parties to find themselves in a sticky copyright situation, as the vested companies only own a license for one single publication. And selling the package to newcomers is seen as a renewed, combined publication.

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Microsoft means business by banning modded consoles

Earlier this fall, Microsoft started banning people playing illegal copies of their Xbox 360 games from the online service Xbox Live. According to the ‘360’s user license agreement, console modders lose the warranty on their console and might access to Live be denied.

Live is the console’s community platform, where a player’s game statistics, achievements and friends are kept track of. Furthermore, and more importantly, it also serves as portal for all multiplayer activities and game store for online content. Games on demand, casual games, downloadable content, demos, etc: they’re accessible only through Xbox Live.

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Murdoch’s news sites: Google needs to wait at the door

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch thinks of making his news sites accessible only to paying viewers. At the same time, search engines will be denied access, reports Emerce.
 
Murdoch, owner of, amongst others, the Wall Street Journal and the Times, says to benefit preciously little from traffic that reaches his sites via search engines. The bulk is hardly interested and he gains no loyal readers. “Ok, it’s good for web stats. So what?”
 
“Google gets the traffic and runs away with it. Yes, these are visitors that otherwise wouldn’t have come, but what good are they to me? I don’t know who they are, where they come from. I would rather have good, paying readers.”
 
This problem, says Murdoch, does not only affect his companies. Nearly all news media have trouble to remain healthy in the midst of all the free content and news circulating the Internet.

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BREIN pleads for inclusion of online environment in ACTA

A large number of Western countries, in which European nations are represented by the EU, is negotiating a common policy on enforcing intellectual property and fighting piracy since 2007. These negotiations, the Anti Counterfeit Trade Agreement, ACTA in short, is predominantly aimed at compliance with patent laws and reducing the number of counterfeit goods such as medicines or Louis Vuitton bags, but also contains a proposal to make agreements on the online distribution of digital media.

The ACTA negotiations occur behind closed doors, which is not uncommon when trying to establish international treaties.

Civil rights organisations and ISPs have acted against the proposal to include the online environment in the treaty.

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Scandinavian pirates had a good weekend

Last week, judges both in Denmark and in Norway have ruled to the disadvantage of rights holders.

In Norway, the court decided that ISP Telenor, the biggest Internet provider of the nation, does not need to block access to The Pirate Bay, reports Torrentfreak. Ifpi, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, representing the music industry worldwide, had summoned Telenor last March to try and secure such a ban. That has not worked. The judge ruled that Telenor is not accomplishing copyright infringement when her clients share protected content. Therefore, according to the court, there are no legal grounds for ordering Telenor to block TPB.

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Dutch Parliament wants to stimulate implementation of fibreglass networks

The Netherlands need to speed up building fibreglass communication data networks, says a great majority of the Dutch House of representatives. The government ought to take a more pro-active, facilitating role. Members of Parliament have little faith that reducing the administrative burden will provide the market with enough incentive to take action.

Boris van der Ham and Kees Vendrk (GroenLinks) put forward this motion. The motion “requests the government to put forward a detailed plan for how a next generation network will be built with a country-wide coverage in The Netherlands in the next five to ten years,  and furthermore, also to acknowledge an active role and to support municipalities.”

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Hollywood wants to make new movies rapidly accessible online

The MPAA, representing the big movie studios, has filed for approval with the FCC a plan to make new movies available online.

The MPAA proposes to cooperate with cable companies and satellite communications providers to release movies for home viewing close to or even during the time they play in theatres. “Many of us love movies, but we just can’t make it to the theater as often as we’d like. That is especially true for parents of young children and rural Americans who live far from the multiplex,” MPAA Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said.

In the plan, the MPAA emphasises the secure transmission of the content. The proposed method, Selective Output Control (SOC), ensures that the content can only be transmitted using secure digital channels, not over analogue lines. Digital-analogue converting is where pirates do step in to rip movies.

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French artists protest the Hadopi law

Forty French artists have published a book entitled la Bataille Hadopi, the Hadopi battle. In this book, the artists oppose the recently adopted law that has been designed to protect the creative industries against piracy. The contributing artists believe that cutting people off from such an important resource as the Internet is not a proper way to fight piracy.

One of the contributing artists is Francis Lalanne, a well known (in France, at least) French chansonnier. At the meeting the book was presented to the press, Lalanne announced to release a CD, a movie and a book under an open licence in January 2010.

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Is Google the new Microsoft?

Google is the public’s good friend. The company gives us Internet search, access to maps, software for writing and calculating, et cetera. And all for free! As a company, it has always maintained to have the public interest at heart. In the words of Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin: "We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free, and unbiased access to high-quality information." In their vision, this required "a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good."

Furthermore, their investor relations’ page states words that speak volumes: “Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served by a company that does good things for the world (…). This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.”

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Dutch gov’t plans to make file-sharing illegal

The Dutch ministry of Justice is preparing legislation that makes downloading and sharing copyrighted material unlawful. The new regulations should take effect within three years. However, it has stated one condition: that the entertainment industry offers enough alternatives by that time. Minister of Justice Hirsch Ballin announced this in a reaction to the copyright report of the Gerkens committee.

The goal of the parliament is to strike the right balance between the rights of producers and artists at the one hand and the rights of the public to access information and culture at the other hand. The current copyright system may have worked in an offline environment, but online, this system falls short of reaching its goals.

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