Entries Tagged 'DMCA' ↓

This has been previously published on ITToolbox here and this raises some seriously interesting questions about colleges, text books, and the culture of free sharing. Not sure if this is good, bad, or ugly.

With the high cost of textbooks, there is no surprise that a group has gotten together to develop and deliver a torrent site that deals with nothing but college text books.

Textbook torrents starts off on legally dubious grounds, but that is also highly likely not going to stop the explosion of this web site. It is not about student’s spending money on books, it is really about folks getting something for free, and in this case it is college text books. This is interesting because most of the colleges that I interact with on a daily basis have an e-resource process where the college text books can be downloaded for free by the students. Of course it comes with Adobe DRM, but in general, if you want an e-book, you can get it for free from the college. Or not really free, e-resources are built into the cost of the class, and you pay for them even if you don’t use them.

A note on the Torrent Textbooks site says that Pearson Education (one of the major suppliers of text books) issued a C&D (Cease and Desist) note to the web site which they honored. But in light of other torrent sites being forced to turn over IIS/Apache logs and user information they state with a well deserved bit of paranoia

This is not a happy day, but I want to take the opportunity to make a few comments. First, I swear to you that I will do everything in my power to prevent the server’s logs from falling into the hands of those that might use them against you. If that means bankrupting myself in the process, so be it. I would prefer that it not come to that, but I have drawn a line which I will not cross no matter the cost. In the next few days, I will be drafting an agreement that all users must accept in order to continue using the site. This will be mutual in nature, with both parties agreeing to abide by certain guidelines and to uphold certain responsibilities. It will hopefully put us all in a more comfortable legal position. Source: TextbookTorrents.com

Right now any bittorrent site that deals with any pirated information is in trouble, frankly they would have been better off making a subgroup at The Pirate Bay rather than striking out on their own. Expect the shut down very soon, or the raid by the textbook police.

Publishers are in new ground with people sharing book torrents; they have not generally taken the uber aggressive stances that the RIAA and MPAA have in the past. But if Textbook Torrents takes off, this might be the straw that starts the brutal backlash lawsuit frenzy ala RIAA/MPAA tactics.

So far the publishing group has not sought to take legal action against individual student downloaders, as the Recording Industry Association of America has done in its campaign to stamp out the illegal trading of music at colleges. The book-publishing group has not sought to shut down entire Web sites that offer downloads either, said Mr. McCoyd. Instead, officials are doing research on the extent of the problem and asking Web-site owners to remove individual files. “We’ve just tried to keep sweeping away these infringements as they continue to come online,” he said. Source: Chronicle.com

In all it is a good thing that the publishers have not gone after individual downloader’s, but as time moves on and this problem gets worst, maybe the book publishers will try something different. Co-opt, subscription services, anything would be better than the strong arm tactics that torrent users have seen in the past. This is not likely to go away, what will be interesting is to see how the publishers attempt to work with sites in the future.

Tags: textbook torrents, download, textbook, bittorrent, pearson, downloads, money, college, education, infringement

I have been working on a book on how to be an Amazon seller, some of the tricks and tips that I have learned in nearly a year of selling books on Amazon. Just as I was getting into getting the proof developed with the publisher, along comes a person threatening to sue because they were quoted in the book. The interesting debate about Fair Use, permission, and the rest of it, and in looking at what passes the “reasonable person test”, the book got pulled.

Specifically this is the area that I seriously would run into trouble with. From the Copyright Office notice on what is fair use the following four rules apply in determining what is and what is not fair use. The interesting part is that I can punch holes in the argument on why you want to sue me based on these four rules.

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes

I would fail this test, as it is a book for commercial purposes, in other words, I plan on making money off the quotes that I would have used. While it would be great to call it educational, and the express purpose of the book is to educate people on how to be a better Amazon seller, it still falls under commercial purposes. The idea of writing the book is to make money.

The problem here is that this will require a substantial rewrite of the book to deal with this, and rather than directly quoting, provide the resource name, and where they can get additional information. While not optimal, this would seem the best way to work on removing potentially infringing information out of the book, and getting back into the publishing track.

2. The nature of the copyrighted work

The nature of the copyrighted work, the quotes are pulled from a forum, that has a clear copyright notice on the Amazon site, but since the quotes were pulled from there, it is possible to ask Amazon for permission to quote from the seller’s community. This would be the optimal way of getting around this, and the copyright office points out that if in doubt, seek permission, or show that you made every single attempt that a reasonable person could make in getting permission to use their content.

3. Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole

There are 4 specific quotes that need to be seriously revised to meet the substantiality portion, while the “300 word limit” was more of a secret handshake, with the nature of copyright rules, fair use in flux, with the confusing court cases around them, erring on the side of caution here is a much better idea. Cutting down or removing the quotes in its entirety would be the best way of going around this in lieu of getting permission from Amazon to use quotes from the system.

4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

This one is interesting, and could go either way in terms of how it is interpreted, the effect on the potential market is negligible. There is no Amazon book that is an excerpt from the sellers community, Amazon has not monetized the site at all, no ads, and the community participants self post information there. What would be a detriment though in the longer run would be if people thought they could be or would be quoted in a book, the loss of trust in the forum. While public, the impression that I get is that people believe that they are talking in a trusted community of peers, and to have their information published in a book is a breach of trust. That would have an influence on the marketability and use of the Amazon Sellers forum in the longer run, people might stop using it, which could have an influence or impact on the 3rd party sellers system used at Amazon.

Interesting in how you can look at things to go for or against the idea of “fair use” when looking at how the publication of words and idea’s in a book is somehow more substantial than the information that is put on a public forum.

In the mean time, the book has been pulled as a just in case, and a substantial rewrite needs to take place to meet a definitive “reasonable person test” when it comes to fair use.

Tags: Amazon, sellers, 3rd party sellers, community, book, fair use, copyright, publishing, pain

Utter sheer amazement, the sad part is that it is perfectly true, the music industry is all over radio right now to pay royalties for the first time ever; saying not to pay the artists for air time is tantamount to piracy.

The interesting part, read the wired story here, is that while Rome burns down to the ground, artists are playing around with new revenue models, people have completely altered how they search and consume music, the real question is just how viable is plain old radio on top of that. While independent stations might get a break in the annual fee’s, the larger radio stations will end up with the very short end of the stick if this kind of thing happens.

Many issues on how people can use their own digital media, or someone else’s digital media in what was formerly a fairly dull industry of payola, excess, and the host of other things that go along with it. One cannot but look at all these “last acts of a desperate company” and wonder where music is really going to go.

If we have to play something every time we start it off, that is going to be a real problem down the road, the money is just not there, at 99 cents or at any cost. Some will be able to afford it, but not many. Frankly, if radio is piracy, then we are all in for a very long dark night in relationship to copyright, what we buy, what we listen to, and the entertainment that we might just enjoy.

Gone will be the days of listening to the radio to hear a new band, gone will be the days of streaming radio in the office, gone will be many things that have been a way of life for everyone since the time radio was invented. So much to lose, for everyone.

Comcast buys Plaxo, which is making me really thank everyone that I never really got into plaxo, and while I am a comcast customer, it might be time to bail. Here is the nightmare scenario, comcast knows what I watch, and if I used plaxo it will also know my friends, and they will monitor what I watch, what I download, where I surf. Let alone all the traffic shaping controversies of the last year.

Habits, friends, what I watch, all owned by one company. If you bought the comcast package of services just add to that list.

This is the company that wanted to add a video camera to their set top boxes to know who was in the room.

Sorry if I am not convinced that this is the greatest deal in the world, many of the privacy, security, and personal issues are going to fly under the wire given the number of folks who are all thinking this is a great idea (back to techmeme).

Frankly it might be a great deal from the business side, but for everyone else, it might not be a great deal. When the first egregious privacy issue arises, everyone will freak out, and they need to. But right now you can do something for yourself, find the competitor that doesn’t have the same ethical challenges that comcast has.

ReadWriteWeb brings up the same questions on ethics that we are, two ethically challenged companies merging is not all that great for the customers. The most troublesome is that customers are going to remain blissfully unaware of the controversy until there is a major incident somewhere in the chain. While those that are technically savvy can figure this one out fairly quickly, the average person who is able to barely surf the Internet, they are going to be the real losers in this deal. They won’t know, they don’t want to know.

This also bring ups one other nagging issue of the “walled garden”, if Comcast is able to make their own “AOL Equivalent” as a walled garden of services and goods only for comcast customers, everyone will loose here as well. Walled gardens, traffic shaping, advertising, and a total life media intersection, on an ISP that has issues, this might not be a good thing for customers.

Tags: comcast, plaxo, buy out, deal, bad, customers, ethics, challenges, privacy, issues

Not to degenerate Venture Beat at all, but really a spat over attribution is one way to start out Monday morning, probably not the best one we could think of, but there it is all the same. Reminds me of academic honesty, there are no consequences for plagiarism on the internet, but boy do schools hammer students who do not properly attribute sources, and in some cases, to the point of bouncing students out of entire programs.

The whole story revolves around Ars Technica and Venture Beat, who both wrote about Apple IPhone penetration on the worldwide market. The striking similarity between maps and theory is there. If I was grading the paper, I would be running both of them through turitin and looking at more similarities along the way.

In a link from Paris Lemon points to Duncan Riley’s thoughts from 2007 on just how much does Ars Technica rip off story ideas? There is a certain amount of humor here though given our past encounter with someone claiming to be from Ars.

Our own issue with Ars Technica rolls around this article where they got all sorts of cranky pissed off because we quoted one of their articles. Hey who knew they didn’t like back links or attribution on their own right from another blog? Who knew we were a spam blog, really, we didn’t know that either.

Ars is Ars, they provide something and are popular, even if they hate backlinks, or do not properly attribute, in the end game, things like this happen, and while it is not right, Ars seems to be in their own universe when it comes to the blogging world. As long as they stay in their own universe things are ok and as long as they are not harassing us, that is even better.

We have seen this same issue played out all over the place, who owns the idea, who owns the content, and some ideas are just better than others. They inspire, and in reading the two articles, to me they seem very similar, again back to the school house and grading, I would be talking to both students about now.

Oh an on a closing note, we really dare Ars to come back and call us a spam blog again, because we linked to one of their articles with proper attribution.

tags: ars technica, venture beat, paris lemon, duncan riley, techwag, attribution, iphone, risk, map, spat

Jason Calcanais posted on twitter the question “Question of the day: Can you copyright your Twitter stream? Can anyone republish anyone’s twitter stream? Thoughts?” It is an interesting idea, how ephemeral is 140 words or less, and if they are pulled and reproduced like in the image below, who owns what? Does it in the longer run really matter?

One of the reasons that this is a good question, is that with passage of the Pro-IP act, the way that the DMCA has been subverted for illegal take downs (with evidently no back action on that issue), and the host of other copyright issues that seem to be touching on everything we do, someone coming along and copyrighting their twitter stream is not far fetched.

The idea of ownership, what we own, and what we don’t own, we merely rent is as complex and as convoluted now as they have ever been. America was built on piracy, the theft of intellectual property is a time honored tradition since the start of the country. China is now doing a one over on America, and building their country on the time honored tradition of IP theft. What we can’t create we steal. Been that way for a while now.

This brings us back to twitter stream and copyright. I like the question, but evidently this answer does not fit into another twitter stream, it is more pontificating on the idea. If Jason copyrights his question, which he can do, with or without merit, as well as all the answers that I screen capped above, who owns that? Does it matter?

Yes it does matter, because no one wants to be sued for doing something, while I am taking the question and running with it, at this point with blogging, and RSS feed scraping, and the host of other ways that the content off by pro and personal blog are used, the effort that I would have to go into policing the use of the stuff I write is well beyond me, and the recovery of any money would be pretty slim.

Add to that the twitter stream, and no one single person could hope to police the Internet for their own content, in or out of context. The copyright would not matter, the words will move too fast onto other sites, which would cause a logistical nightmare, huge costs, and little recovery. I know this sounds like the MPAA/RIAA copyright terrorism, but if we end up there with twitter, what a waste of time, resources, and people to hunt down 140 words or less.

Marketers and other folks will go anywhere do anything within the social networking space. Boundaries do not exist, and in general folks that market on the Internet are as busy using web 2.0 tools to send their message as you are talking back and forth with your friends.

Download Squad has a great article on twitter spam, and the problems that ensues when people randomly start following people because they decided to follow them.

Twitter users are increasingly starting to question whether the frequent number of Twitter accounts that are following them are actually people, or simply a form of Twitter spamming. The rule of thumb with that sort of question is usually that if you think something nefarious might be going on, unfortunately, you’re probably right. Source: Download Squad

The cool part is that there is also an introduction here to twitter twerp scan as a way to identify those folks who are spamming, although the thought that we are having is that this is only going to be as good as the collective community that starts adding things to the twerp scan process.

Askimet and other spam tools, even stopbadware.org are only as good as their scanners, and only as good as the people who report sites. There also has to be a mechanism to challenge the entry in twitter twerp, some nasty marketing folks think it is just fine to lodge complaints against all their competitors in systems like this.

Business is a nasty thing to be involved with, and if you don’t believe us, check out the Chilling Effects Clearing house to learn all about businesses that try to claim copyright against their competitors, and use the DMCA and other rules to get their competitors right off the Internet.

In all, it is a good idea, but as spammers get more creative, and marketers seem to be willing to take up any way to get their message across, all web 2.0 social systems need to take precautions. This should be a standard part of the business model for anyone that is hoping to make money off of user contributed content. Spammers are good, quick to hop on any new technology, and if they are allowed free reign on a system, will quickly figure out ways to saturate said system until it is no longer usable by anyone.

Keywords: twitter, twerp, scan, chilling effects, friends, idiots, web 2.0, users, sad