Copyhype

3 Things I Learned When My Site’s Traffic Increased 25,000% in One Day — Self-published comics artist Lars Martinson reports on the results of blowing up on Reddit. 48,000 extra visitors led to 23 e-book sales.

Elliott v Google complaint — Is “Google” at risk of becoming generic? An individual had registered several domain names that included the word “google” in them. Google won a domain name dispute against the individual, so he has now filed a complaint in federal court seeking to have Google’s trademark cancelled, arguing that the term is generic. The claim is not entirely frivolous — here’s a 2006 article pondering the same issue. Also see the Wikipedia entry on google (verb).

It’s not the song, Stupid, it’s the right — Filmmaker David Newhoff on the reaction to the Supreme Court declining to hear Joel Tenenbaum’s latest appeal: “What the children of the digital age need to learn as they are now entering the world of grown-ups is that it’s not the song or the movie or the book they’re stealing, but the rights of the creator.  When a few million college kids copy and share a digital file of a creative work, they believe this is not stealing because 1) they’re focused on the file itself; and 2) they’re focused on what they want.  And it is always the folly of youth to confuse desire with rights while failing to recognize, to paraphrase Kant, that their rights end when they infringe on the rights of another.”

Amazon bans Kindle Store spam (finally) — Amazon appears to have a new policy of not accepting so-called “private-label rights content” and undifferentiated public domain content. Good move.

PA criticises ‘tawdry theft’ of copyright — Publishers Association chief executive Richard Mollet had strong words for organizations such as the Open Rights Group, saying they have “the temerity to appropriate the language of freedom of expression as a cloak for their tawdry theft” in a “a grotesque attempt to draw moral equivalence between stealing someone’s work and the struggle for political representation.”

It’s Broken: Google Is Now Fielding 300,000 Takedown Requests a Week… — Google released data on DMCA takedown notices it receives for its search engine this week. Paul Resnikoff at Digital Music News asks, “At what point do we admit that the DMCA just isn’t working? That diligent DMCA takedowns are great news for companies like Google, and a horrible cat-and-mouse reality for content owners?”

Op-ed: New digital music licenses good for fans, entrepreneurs — Cary Sherman, David Israelite, and Lee Knife announce new, easy to use “mechanical licenses” for five digital business models. Great news for artists, entrepreneurs, and fans.

New Study Confirms Benefits of Intellectual Property to State Economies — Creative America reports on a new study from the US Chamber of Commerce that breaks down the positive impact of IP state by state.

“Your Horses Seem to be Winning”: The European Commission’s Antitrust Case Against Google Matters to Artists and Songwriters — Chris Castle notes: “For artists, these cases are important because the central theme boils down to this:  If Google just offered search and sold its Adwords and Adsense products, the fact that the company had achieved at least a dominant position if not a monopoly over search on the Internet would not necessarily be bad.  It’s not illegal to be a monopolist. The harm comes with the almost inevitable hubris accompanying a monopoly position and the abuse of that monopoly position in one business line (or ‘vertical’) to extend the monopoly into other verticals.  This is particularly true when the monopoly profits from one vertical are used by the monopolist to subsidize another firm wholly owned by the monopolist that extends the monopoly to another vertical.”

GUEST POST: Enforcing Copyright is a Win for Both U.S. Media and the World’s Creative Upstarts — Prof. Mark F. Schultz talks about the importance of trade agreements like the TPP. They benefit not only US creators, but also its trading partners. Schultz points out especially the “Korean Wave” and Nollywood.