A coalition of traditional and digital publishers this month will launch the first-ever concerted crackdown on copyright pirates on the web, initially targeting violators who use large numbers of intact articles.

Details of the crackdown were provided by Jim Pitkow, the chief executive of Attributor, a Silicon Valley start-up that has been selected as the agent for several publishers who want to be compensated by websites that are using their content without paying licensing fees.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Pitkow declined to identify the individual publishers in his coalition, but said they include “about a dozen” organizations representing wire services, traditional print publishers and “top-tier blog networks.”

The first offending sites to be targeted will be those using 80% or more of copyrighted stories more than 10 times per month.

» via Reflections of a Newsosaur

The University of California at Los Angeles on Tuesday announced that it will continue streaming copyrighted videos in online “virtual classrooms” despite legal objections from an educational media trade group.

The university’s decision is the latest development in a copyright dispute with the Association for Information and Media Equipment over whether it is legal for the university to convert DVDs from its libraries into a digital format that students can stream from password-protected course Web sites. UCLA considers the practice “essential,” since it allows students to watch the videos on their own computers and on their own time, rather than having to gather in a classroom. Many educators at other colleges have watched the case with intent, waiting to see what implications, if any, the spat might have on their own institutions’ use of streaming video.

» via Inside Higher Ed

techspotlight:

One of the most contentious parts of the controversial Digital Economy bill was voted down by the House of Lords last night - only to be replaced by a clause that campaigners say is even more draconian.

The Liberal Democrats forced through a surprise amendment to the bill’s notorious Clause 17 on Wednesday - in a move that dealt a defeat to the government but troubled critics, who suggest it will have the opposite effect that its creators intend.

Instead of sweeping new powers that threatened sweeping alterations to British copyright law, the Lib Dems added a clause that gives extra oversight to the high court.

The new proposal - which was passed in the House of Lords by 165 votes to 140 - gives a high court judge the right to issue an injunction against a website accused of hosting a “substantial” amount of copyright infringing material, potentially forcing the entire site offline.

The history of publishing is swimming with pirates—far more than Adrian Johns expected when he started hunting through the archives for them. And he thinks their stories may hold keys to understanding the latest battles over digital publishing—and the future of the book.

Johns, a historian at the University of Chicago, has done much of his hunting from his office here, which is packed so high with books that the professor bought a rolling ladder to keep them in easy reach. He can rattle off a long list of noted pirates through the years:

Alexander Pope accused “pyrates” of publishing unauthorized copies of his work in the 18th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, a man known as the “king of the pirates” used the then-new technology of photolithography to spread cheap reprints of popular sheet music. In the 1950s, a pirate music label named Jolly Roger issued recordings by Louis Armstrong and other jazz greats from LP’s that the major labels were no longer publishing. A similar label put out opera recordings smuggled from the Soviet bloc.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

A federal appeals court is ordering a university student to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $27,750 — $750 a track — for file sharing 37 songs when she was a high school cheerleader.

The decision Thursday by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a Texas federal judge who had ordered defendant Whitney Harper to pay $7,400, or $200 per song. The lower court had granted her an “innocent infringer’s” exemption to the Copyright Act’s minimum of $750 per track because she said she didn’t know she was violating copyrights and thought file sharing was akin to internet radio streaming.

The appeals court, however, said the woman was not eligible for such a defense — even if it was true she was between 14 and 16 years old when the infringing activity occurred on Limewire. The reason, the court concluded, is that the Copyright Act precludes such a defense if the legitimate CDs of the music in question provide copyright notices.

» via Wired

It’s no secret that online service providers cooperate with law enforcement agencies and will hand over personal information of various kinds when subpoenaed, subject to court order, or compelled by search warrant. What is secret has been exactly what information these companies store about their users, and what they will hand over to the authorities when required. In recent days a series of these documents have been leaked to whistle-blowing site Cryptome. The policies of (among others) Facebook, AOL, and Skype have all been posted to the site, and several more were posted last December, including those of Verizon, Sprint, and Yahoo.

While most companies have not responded to these leaks, Yahoo, back in December, and Microsoft, whose Global Criminal Compliance Handbook was posted on Saturday, both issued DMCA takedown notices to have the documents removed. In both cases, Cryptome refused to take any action. Yahoo’s demand went no further, but Microsoft decided to take things to the next stage, and told Cryptome’s ISP, Network Solutions, to take the site down. Network Solutions duly complied. Microsoft now has 14 business days to begin litigation, after which the site will be reinstated.

» via ars technica

The new “IP Czar” in the White House is cooking up a “Joint Strategic Plan” to better enforce copyrights, trademarks, and patents—and she wants your help.

Victoria Espinel is the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, a position created in 2008 by the PRO-IP Act. She took to the White House blog yesterday to introduce herself and her work, saying, “My job is to help protect the ideas and creativity of the American public.”

» via ars technica

British Library wants to archive the UK web, creating an invaluable national treasure trove of porn, celebrity trivia gossip and Daily Mail comments. But it admits it can’t put a figure on the project - which looks like becoming a huge, open-ended commitment for the taxpayer.

Today the Library stepped up the pressure for the law to be changed, giving copyright libraries to create copies of web material for research purposes of other copyright holders material. Five statutory libraries already have permission to make printed material available. Now the British Library says it wants the Web too.

» via The Register

The oddest thing about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) secrecy is that, whenever we see leaked drafts of the text, there’s nothing particularly “secret” about them. That was also the case with this weekend’s leak of the “Internet enforcement” section of the ACTA draft; as we’ve noted in the past, ACTA appears to be a measure to extend the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to the rest of the world, and that’s exactly what the Internet section tries to do.

» via ars technica

The Library Copyright Alliance has issued a legal analysis of the issues associated with the use of streaming video for educational purposes. The brief focuses on characteristics that could result in such use being considered “fair use” and thus legal. The issue has attracted attention of late because of an industry group’s challenge of the use of such video by the University of California at Los Angeles.

» via Inside Higher Ed

Google has been awarded a patent that describes a software method for selectively restricting the availability of content on the basis of access privileges and geographical location. On the surface, it may look like this patent covers techniques for censoring politically sensitive content in specific countries—a practice that Google has recently spoken out against in its ongoing feud with China. A closer look at the patent’s claims, however, shows that it has little to do with censorship and may actually relate to the company’s controversial book scanning initiative.

Patent #7,664,751, “Variable user interface based on document access privileges,” submitted to the patent office in September, 2004 and was awarded to Google on Tuesday. Like most patents, it is written to be very broad, but it identifies some specific use cases. The major case it covers is a system where the availability of scanned documents, such as books and magazines, is constrained to selected portions or restricted entirely based on access privileges that are derived from copyright law and other related factors. In cases where access is limited or restricted, the patent explains that the software could supply the user with links to buy the full document.

» via ars technica

With the Super Bowl just concluded and baseball’s spring training only weeks away, a question occurred to us: whatever happened to the push for copyright holders to tone down their copyright notices?

We hear and see the warnings whenever a football or baseball game is televised, whenever we read books, whenever we watch a movie. These are the sort of warnings that make claims like, “Any other use of this telecast or any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL’s consent is prohibited,” despite the apparent wrongheadedness of the statement.

Should copyright holders be held more accountable for inaccurate warnings? In 2007, two different efforts to provoke change on the issue tried to force the issue. Both ended without success, even as courts have cracked down on some of the worst copyright overreaching by the leagues.

» via ars technica

When Jammie Thomas (now Thomas-Rasset) became the first alleged P2P file-swapper to take her case all the way to trial and verdict, no one suspected that she would actually have three trials and verdicts, but that’s the case today, as the RIAA rejected a federal judge’s decision to slash Thomas-Rasset’s damage award. Instead, we’re headed to a truncated third trial on the issue of damages.

The recording industry also made it clear this week that both Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum (the second P2P defendant to go to trial and verdict) are, in its view, quite terrible people: lying, deceiving, irresponsible, and unreasonable. And the industry can’t understand why they’re both fighting on.

» via ars technica

In a post on the declining revenues of the record business, progressive blogger Matt Yglesias wrote last week, “It is, of course, possible that at some point the digital music situation will start imperiling the ability of consumers to enjoy music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to prevent that from happening, and if it does come to pass we’ll need to think seriously about rejiggering things.”

Is that the purpose of copyright law? Sonny Bunch at America’s Future Foundation didn’t think so, but his debate with Yglesias turned out to be much more than one of the numerous daily spats that make up life in the blogosphere. Instead, it went to very nature of a crucial institution like copyright—and it asks whether that institution exists to help the creators or society at large.

It’s worth thinking about the answers.

» via ars technica