On Aug. 5, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced S.3728: the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act. He’s got 10 cosponsors—including three Republicans—and a big idea: to extend copyright protections to the fashion industry, where none currently exist. That’s right: none. I—well, not I, but someone who can sew—can copy Vera Wang’s (extremely expensive) dress and sell it to you right now (for much less), and Wang can’t do a thing about it.

Allan Schwartz, founder and lead designer of the label ABS, has already promised to do exactly that. He’ll take the dress, remake it, and sell it to the masses for much cheaper. Is he stealing? Or is he popularizing? Schumer’s legislation suggests his answer: he wants to make Schwartz’s imitation illegal. Only Vera Wang should be able to profit from her designs, at least for the first three years (the length of Schumer’s proposed copyright). But what if he’s wrong? What if copying, despite what your teacher always told you, is … good?

» via Newsweek

A 22-year-old woman jailed two days in November after being arrested for filming two brief snippets of a motion picture is lashing back at the theater, claiming its manager demanded her arrest despite the police department’s reluctance.

In a civil suit lodged in federal court in Illinois, Samantha Tumpach claims local police and the Motion Picture Association of American recommended against arresting her. A felony theater-filming charge that risked up to three years in prison was subsequently dropped.

The woman filed suit Monday, claiming emotional distress and malicious prosecution on behalf of Muvico Theaters, whose manager allegedly demanded her arrest in a bid to win a financial reward. The MPAA, and the National Association of Theater Owners offers $500 rewards (.pdf) to movie-house workers who catch pirates.

» via Wired

The MPAA is at it again, going after movie pirates. This time, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is helping out the movie industry, and they’ve seized nine different domains: Movies-links.TV, nowmovies.com, thepiratecity.org, filespump.com, planetmoviez.com, zml.org, tvshack.net, ninjavideo.net and thisninja.net. These were mostly ad-supported movie streaming sites that showed pirated versions of current theatrical releases.

» via Download Squad

Federal judge Rosemary Collyer sits on the DC District Court, where several of the recent US Copyright Group lawsuits against alleged P2P users have been filed. A few of those lawsuits ended up on Judge Collyer’s calendar, one of them filed against over 4,000 anonymous “John Does” at once.

This week, Judge Collyer issued a terse demand to the lawyers behind these cases: convince me within two weeks that jamming 4,577 people into a single lawsuit is a proper use of the court system.

» via ars technica

The record labels have told a federal judge LimeWire is liable for possibly “over a billion dollars” — the latest sign that the industry is seeking to annihilate the New York-based file sharing company.

» via Wired

The plaintiff will soon subpoena ISPs to identify the individuals behind the alleged IP addresses used for copyright infringement. Once people have been identified as targets, demand letters will go out. According to a settlement website in one of the earlier, related lawsuits, the plaintiffs are demanding $1500 to release each alleged pirate from liability. The penalties go up further without response. Ultimately, if an accused copyright infringer goes to trial, the plaintiff could seek maximum statutory damages in the amount of $150,000 per infringement, attorneys fees, and costs.

» via The Hollywood Reporter

Voltage Pictures and the US Copyright Group are teaming up to sue “tens of thousands” of P2P users who downloaded the film The Hurt Locker illegally. A lawyer from the group confirmed the studio’s plans to the Hollywood Reporter Wednesday, noting that the scope of this lawsuit is much more far-reaching than the copyright group’s past pursuits.

» via ars technica

LimeWire has been tied up in court over copyright infringement claims for years, but LimeWire, CEO Mark Gorton, and the Lime Group are all feeling especially sour today—the recording industry has won a major victory in federal court.

Judge Kimba Wood has just granted summary judgment against LimeWire, agreeing with the labels that the peer-to-peer company was liable for inducing copyright infringement. Turns out that asking LimeWire downloaders to check a box marked “I will not use LimeWire for copyright infringement” before proceeding doesn’t count as “meaningful efforts to mitigate infringement.”

» via ars technica

Three commonly cited estimates of U.S. industry losses due to counterfeiting have been sourced to U.S. agencies, but cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology. First, a number of industry, media, and government publications have cited an FBI estimate that U.S. businesses lose $200-$250 billion to counterfeiting on an annual basis. This estimate was contained in a 2002 FBI press release, but FBI officials told us that it has no record of source data or methodology for generating the estimate and that it cannot be corroborated. Second, a 2002 CBP press release contained an estimate that U.S. businesses and industries lose $200 billion a year in revenue and 750,000 jobs due to counterfeits of merchandise. However, a CBP official stated that these figures are of uncertain origin, have been discredited, and are no longer used by CBP. A March 2009 CBP internal memo was circulated to inform staff not to use the figures. However, another entity within DHS continues to use them. Third, the Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Association reported an estimate that the U.S. automotive parts industry has lost $3 billion in sales due to counterfeit goods and attributed the figure to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The OECD has also referenced this estimate in its report on counterfeiting and piracy, citing the association report that is sourced to the FTC. However, when we contacted FTC officials to substantiate the estimate, they were unable to locate any record or source of this estimate within its reports or archives, and officials could not recall the agency ever developing or using this estimate. These estimates attributed to FBI, CBP, and FTC continue to be referenced by various industry and government sources as evidence of the significance of the counterfeiting and piracy problem to the U.S. economy.

» via Government Accounting Office

One of the means of tracking physical discs is to actually examine the minute defects a CD-ROM stamper creates as it presses the discs. These pits, grooves, or other defects can be scanned and placed into a database, to help track the spread of physical discs across the globe, Krumm said.

Each unique disc stamp is called a “strain”; Microsoft has tracked over 580,000 throughout the world. When a disc’s “fingerprints” are matched to a database that Microsoft maintains, the disc’s origin can be linked to a particular facility, which could be tied to a piracy operation. Tracking the discs allows Microsoft and investigators to build “intelligent maps” of a piracy operation and its distribution methods.

“We can understand the life of a stamper,” Krumm said. “We know how long they last, and when the end-of-life begins at a stamper facility.”

Microsoft has also begun building out an “action mapping tool,” which it will provide to local law enforcement. Layers on top of Bing maps of a given area, such as Southern California, can track cease-and-desist letters, civil and criminal suits and seizures, and other metrics to provide visual clues of piracy hotspots.

» via Yahoo! News