On Thursday, Tomczak tweeted a screenshot of the complaints that have been lodged against his video, “10 Hours of Low Level White Noise.” The clip is exactly what its title advertises, and the absurdity of someone claiming ownership of a bunch of frequencies with equal intensity playing simultaneously—that’s all white noise is—clearly illustrates just how beyond broken YouTube’s automated copyright system really is.
[…]
What’s most egregious about the situation is that the claimants aren’t just disputing Tomczak’s right to upload the video—they’ve elected to monetize it and leave it up. Tomczak isn’t missing out on any big profits (the video only has 1,485 views), but running around YouTube monetizing white noise has plenty of opportunities to be a moneymaker. A simple search pulls up millions of white noise videos and many of them have millions of views. A lot of the offerings are relaxing sounds like rain or a fan, but there’s plenty of good, old-fashioned TV static that’s quite popular.

Source: Man’s YouTube Video of White Noise Hit With Five Copyright Claims

According to Julia Reda’s blog, the only Pirate in the EU Parliament, the European Commission in 2014 paid the Dutch consulting firm Ecorys 360,000 euros (about $428,000) to research the effect piracy had on sales of copyrighted content. The final report was finished in May 2015, but was never published because the report concluded that piracy isn’t harmful. The Next Web reports:
The 300-page report seems to suggest that there’s no evidence that supports the idea that piracy has a negative effect on sales of copyrighted content (with some exceptions for recently released blockbusters). The report states: “In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect. An exception is the displacement of recent top films. The results show a displacement rate of 40 per cent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”

On her blog, Julia Reda says that a report like this is fundamental to discussions about copyright policies — where the general assumption is usually that piracy has a negative effect on rightsholders’ revenues. She also criticizes the Commissions reluctance to publish the report and says it probably wouldn’t have released it for several more years if it wasn’t for the access to documents request she filed in July.
As for why the Commission hadn’t published the report earlier, Reda says: “all available evidence suggests that the Commission actively chose to ignore the study except for the part that suited their agenda: In an academic article published in 2016, two European Commission officials reported a link between lost sales for blockbusters and illegal downloads of those films. They failed to disclose, however, that the study this was based on also looked at music, ebooks and games, where it found no such connection. On the contrary, in the case of video games, the study found the opposite link, indicating a positive influence of illegal game downloads on legal sales. That demonstrates that the study wasn’t forgotten by the Commission altogether…”

Source: EU Paid For Report That Said Piracy Isn’t Harmful — And Tried To Hide Findings – Slashdot

Subtitle lovers, beware: a court just ruled that making fan subtitles or translations is not protected by the law. A Dutch group called (translated) the Free Subtitles Foundation took anti-piracy group BREIN to court over “fansubbing.” BREIN has previously been active in taking fan subtitles and translations offline, and the Foundation was hoping a Dutch court would come down on the side of fair use.

The court didn’t quite see it that way. It ruled that making subtitles without permission from the property owners amounted to copyright infringement. BREIN wasn’t unsympathetic, but said it couldn’t allow fansubbers to continue doing what they’re doing (using the word “illegal” so many times I’ve almost forgotten what it means):

With this decision in hand it will be easier for BREIN to maintain its work against illegal subtitlers and against sites and services that collect illegal subtitles and add movies and TV shows from an illegal source.

While this only effects the Free Subtitles Foundation and BREIN at the moment, it could set legal precedent for subtitle-makers all over the world.

Source: Court rules fan subtitles on TV and movies are illegal

FFS so translated versions of texts that don’t exist yet fall under copyright?!

Cited in a DMCA takedown request filed against Google on behalf of Paramount Pictures, and spotted by TorrentFreak (and tipped to us by reader ~nonanonymous) is an innocuous link to a 32-bit alternate install image Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS.

The takedown request seeks to remove links to a number of torrent URLS that are alleged to infringe on Paramount movie ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction‘.

Ubuntu clearly doesn’t. All it takes is a quick glance at the URL in question to see that. It’s very much a stock iso of an old Ubuntu release.

And yet Google has complied with the request and scrubbed the link to the page in question from its search index.

Source: Ubuntu Torrent Removed from Google for ‘Infringing’ Transformers Movie – OMG! Ubuntu!

The writers of this article don’t blame Google for this, citing the amounts of DMCA takedowns Google has to cope with, but Google did manage to not take down Warner Brothers automated DMCA

Film studio Warner Brothers has asked Google to remove its own website from search results, saying it violates copyright laws.

It also asked the search giant to remove links to legitimate movie streaming websites run by Amazon and Sky, as well as the film database IMDB.

The request was submitted on behalf of Warner Brothers by Vobile, a company that files hundreds of thousands of takedown requests every month.

Source: Warner Brothers reports own site as illegal – BBC News

Google decided to not enforce the DCMA takedown. Which is strange: why should large companies be exempt from DCMA and get a proper hearing, whilst smaller companies just get taken down without any proper judgement?

All Prior Art is a project attempting to algorithmically create and publicly publish all possible new prior art, thereby making the published concepts not patent-able. The concept is to democratize ideas, provide an impetus for change in the patent system, and to preempt patent trolls. The system works by pulling text from the entire database of US issued and published (un-approved) patents and creating prior art from the patent language. While most inventions generated will be nonsensical, the cost to computationally create and publish millions of ideas is nearly zero – which allows for a higher probability of possible valid prior art.
[…]
The particular Creative Commons license was chosen to prevent commercial use of the text along with restricting derivatives, since the point of the prior art is to be publicly published unmodified (as it is to be a valid reference point)
[…]
-The intent is not to prevent actual creative and innovative patents from being filed, it is to take the obvious and easily automated ideas out-of-play. If an idea is truly creative and innovative, a computer should have difficulty coming up with it.

Source: About – All Prior Art

Copyright strikes again, with photographers and publishers hit particularly hard.

Changes to UK copyright law will soon mean that you may need to take out a licence to photograph classic designer objects even if you own them. That’s the result of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, which extends the copyright of artistic objects like designer chairs from 25 years after they were first marketed to 70 years after the creator’s death. In most cases, that will be well over a hundred years after the object was designed. During that period, taking a photo of the item will often require a licence from the copyright owner regardless of who owns the particular object in question.

Source: UK citizens may soon need licenses to photograph some stuff they already own

What is with these people? Are they determined to kill creativity and innovation? How can they possibly justify these kinds of period? Really? After the creator’s death? Why doesn’t the creator have to work daily like the rest of us? 5 years max, please. Nutters. This is an agenda being pushed by rich people who want to keep getting richer without having to do anything for it.

Mooney aka Suicide Girl has her picturers reused by Prince. Prince’s images, which consist of screen shots of other people’s Instagram photos enlarged to 4×5 foot inkjet prints with a single banal comment by Prince, have reportedly sold for $90,000.In response Mooney produced her own prints, identical in every way to Prince’s except for an additional, equally banal comment. She is offering them for peanuts – $90.The question of day:Could Richard Prince’s work be considered fair use while at the same time Selena Mooney’s print of Prince’s appropriation, whose primary element is her own photograph, be copyright infringement?

Source: The Richard Prince – Suicide Girls Circus

Once Apple saw it they went for the patent and yesterday got it. Prior art? Never heard of it. Well done Apple for copying someone else – yet again. And well done the patent system for giving up patents to people who have not rights to them. Yet again.
Apple patenteert Samsungs Edge-scherm – Webwereld.

Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1958 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2015, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2054.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1

via What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2015?.

So, the family of dead people are still being paid sometimes huge amounts of money for creativity they didn’t display themselves. Copyright is crazy.

A photographer who set up a load of cameras in the wild can’t get pictures of a monkey removed from Wikipedia, as the monkey pressed the shutter. Wikipedia argues that this means that nobody owns the copyright. I wonder what the BBC series Earth has to say about this?

Wikipedia refuses to delete photo as 'monkey owns it' – Telegraph.

Twitch TV – a gaming TV channel with billions of watchers – will attempt to detect music playing in the background. If a 10 second spell seems to be copyrighted, they will remove the sound for half an hour.
I suppose the rationale is that the music companies and the RIAA think this is a potentially lost sale or something? It’s not surprising the users are up in arms about this.

Twitch Cracks Down On Music In Videos, Users Freak Out.