Google and friends spin search piracy study — Vox Indie’s Ellen Seidler thoroughly eviscerates the white paper on search engines’ role in facilitating online infringement released earlier this summer by the CCIA. This is the same report that argued on the one hand that search engines don’t drive traffic to infringing content, and, on the other hand, the solution to driving traffic to legitimate content is to take advantage of search engines.
Will copyright be extended 20 more years? An old debate returns — An article at Volokh Conspiracy asked earlier whether we should expect an extension of copyright term in 2018. Why this prediction? Because in the make-believe world of copyright skeptics, copyright term is extended every 20 years.
Internet Policy Task Force Is (Still) Not Sending Cover Artists to Jail — In July, the Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force released a comprehensive green paper looking at the current state of copyright law. Included within were several recommendations, among them, an alignment of criminal penalties for unauthorized public performances with the existing penalties for reproduction and distribution. A week later, the Washington Post weirdly reported this as news that the Obama Administration wanted to revive SOPA; it also resurrected the entirely bogus claim that the recommendation would land Justin Bieber in jail. Future of Music Coalition legal intern Michelle Davis sets the record straight.
Your Big Break: Hollywood Studio Programs for Emerging Writings — Looking to be a screenwriter? The Credits has put together a list of writing programs offered by major film studios that will help you hone yours skills. And if you haven’t checked out The Credits in general yet, do take a look, as the site has been cranking out some great stories that take a look behind the scenes at making television and film.
Why We Don’t Need More Domain Extensions — As ICANN inches closer to unleashing hundreds of new generic top-level domains, Jonathan Bailey takes a look at some of the potential problems that could arise and wonders if they outweigh any potential benefits.
When You Can’t Tell Web Suffixes Without a Scorecard — The NY Times has more on the new top-level domains. “‘You are creating a business, like derivatives on Wall Street, that has no value,’ says Esther Dyson, a technology investor who served as the founding chairwoman of Icann. ‘You can charge people for it, but you are contributing nothing to the happiness of humanity.'”
As for the Obama Administrarion and redoing SOPA for the streaming issue, I find it with great awe how that administration, with Al Gore on the board of Google, protect the Google/YouTube apparatus as if God said “Thow shall post anything on YouTube, including copyright theft for YouTube to abuse, placing the onus on copyright owners who will never know the theft will deplete your work in 6 hours with Google/YouTube stealing everything it will earn with appended ads around it.” But all business laws since the dawn of mankind know that a business enabling theft is evil, and there’s plenty of case-law that can destroy Google for good now.
Indeed, an inconvenient truth. Al Gore and Eric Schmidt protecting Google because of sick-conquer the world thinking. Worse than Watergate…..bribing internet users with theft for votes.