PI Newswire

Diaspora, the social network that sells itself as a privacy-conscious alternative to Facebook, is relying on user donations instead of advertising to get it going.

And by contrast to its other competitor, Google+, Diaspora also allows pseudonyms. The decentralised service aims to address some of the multitude of privacy and content control issues that have dogged Facebook and, arguable to a lesser extent, Google+, while still giving users the ability share content and ideas with their friends online.

Users retain the copyright of uploaded photos and the like, which is only shared among groups that users actively define, not friends-of-friends or the whole network (often the default options on Facebook).

The service was launched in November 2010 and remains in alpha. However having signed up to try the invitation-only service months ago, El Reg finally received an invitation to try it on Thursday, so things appear to be moving (albeit slowly). The emailed invitation (extract below) was nothing if not enthusiastic:

Finally – it’s here
The social network you have been waiting for has arrived. Revamped, more secure, and more fun, DIASPORA* is ready to help you share and explore the web in a whole new way.

Sign up now

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Bootleg copies of films and television shows have long been the bane of Hollywood studios trying to make a buck in China, where piracy is rampant. But video hosting sites in the country might be paving a way for these U.S. companies to start earning more revenue on their products by bringing their films and TV shows legally to China.

Last week, the operator of one of China’s largest video hosting sites Ku6 Media announced that it had signed a content deal with two major American studios. Both Sony Pictures Television and Warner Bros. will provide the broadcasting rights for several hundred films and TV episodes. This makes Ku6, “the first Chinese local video portal to acquire legitimate copyright content from major Hollywood studios,” according to the Chinese company.

Ku6 has yet to say what films and shows the deal will allow. But users can expect the first Hollywood content to arrive starting next month, said company spokesman Matthew Zhao.

Youku, China’s largest video hosting site with 30 million unique visitors a day, is also working on content deals with major film studios in the U.S. “The talks have mainly been smooth,” said Ding Heng, the director of media partnerships for Youku. “But the talks have gone on for over the last two years.”

The key issues have been how Youku will show and pay for the content the studios provide, he added without going in to details. “We feel like we will be able to satisfy these conditions,” he said.

Such content deals could be a reversal for China’s video sharing sites, which have been accused of hosting pirated American films and TV shows. Sites like Youku and Ku6 have worked to fight the illegal copies by deleting the videos when found. Ku6′s CEO, however, has acknowledged that Chinese users have had to rely on piracy to view foreign movies and TV shows.

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Copyright Czar Victoria Espinel unveiled Tuesday the Obama administration’s first “Joint Strategic Plan” concerning intellectual property enforcement — and she gave a big nod to fair use.

The plan was required under the Pro-IP Act of 2008, which created Espinel’s post. The act was watered down to eliminate a Justice Department mandate that it assume duties of the movie studios and recording industry and sue copyright scofflaws.

“Strong intellectual property enforcement efforts should be focused on stopping those stealing the work of others, not those who are appropriately building upon it,” said the report, referring to fair use.

To be sure, the plan was riddled with the usual bureaucratic language, like improving “coordination” with federal, state and local authorities. And it develops a “coordinated and comprehensive plan” to address foreign-based websites hawking pirated goods. The U.S. government, she wrote, must spend its enforcement dollars “wisely” and “address unlawful activity on the internet, such as illegal downloading and illegal internet pharmacies.”

The plan was applauded by both the copy right and the copy left.

Digital rights lobby Public Knowledge said the report shows Espinel “understands the balance in copyright law.” The Motion Picture Association of America, the legal and lobbying arm of the Hollywood studios, said the report was “an important step forward in combating intellectual property theft.”

One of the first recommendations to the president to bolster intellectual property enforcement was “transparency.” Espinel also discussed enforcing “American intellectual property rights in the global economy.”

Toward those ends, we need not look beyond the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

The proposed international accord fits nicely with the goal of American policy laundering. The United States is pushing a DMCA-style notice-and-takedown process on the two dozen negotiating countries.

Under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, internet companies are granted so-called safe-harbor status if they promptly remove allegedly infringing content at the request of the copyright holder.

But what’s been missing in the nearly 2-year-old ACTA negotiations is transparency.

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The U.S. Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress are due to rule any day whether iPhone jailbreaking should be exempted from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation asked regulators 18 months ago to add jailbreaking to a list of explicit exemptions to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions. Jailbreaking is hacking the phone’s OS to allow consumers to run any app on the phone they choose, including applications not authorized by Apple. At the last review three years ago, regulators approved six exemptions, including the ability to unlock your phone to change carriers.

At stake for Apple is the very closed business model the company has enjoyed since 2007, when the iPhone debuted. Apple says it’s unlawful to jailbreak, (.pdf) but has not taken legal action against the millions who have jailbroken their phones and used the underground app store Cydia. Apple maintains that its closed marketplace is what made the success of the iPhone possible, and sold more than three billion apps.

The EFF’s Fred von Lohmann said legitimizing jailbreaking would create an app gold rush, and bring the unauthorized app market to the mainstream.

What’s this all about?

Every three years, regulators entertain proposed exemptions to the DMCA, passed in 1998. The act forbids circumventing encryption technology to copy or modify copyrighted works — in this instance, Apple says the DMCA protects the encryption built into the bootloader that starts up the iPhone OS operating system.

Apple declined to be interviewed for this story. In an April security bulletin, it said “Unauthorized modification of iPhone OS has been a major source of instability, disruption of services, and other issues.”

In the video at the top, von Lohmann explains why EFF made the jailbreaking request to government regulators. Below is Threat Level’s foolproof demonstration of jailbreaking.

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Attorney Lorne Waldman filed a $50 million class action demand against Thomson Reuters Corp., claiming the media giant engages in and encourages mass copyright violations by publishing attorneys’ pleadings on its Litigator database service, and “brand(s) documents with a statement asserting that they are the owner of copyright.”

“The defendants took more than 50,000 legal documents created by members of the proposed class, removed them from court files and copied them, scanned them into a downloadable format, posted them in their database, and then made them available to subscribers for a fee,” the complaint states.

Waldman apparently objects not just to the scanning and posting of the documents, but to the fact that “The defendants brand documents with a statement asserting that they are the owner of copyright.” (Underlining as in complaint.) “The statement reads: ‘© Thomson Reuters Canada Limited or its Licensors. All rights reserved.’”

But Waldman points out, “The defendants neither sought permission from the owners to deal in the documents in any way, nor did they offer payment or obtain a licence of any kind from the copyright owners to do anything that the copyright owners have the exclusive right to do.

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Canadian actors, screenwriters and musicians eyeing lost revenue from content piracy have backed U.S.-style copyright legislation due shortly from the federal government in Ottawa.

The Creators Copyright Coalition, an umbrella group of Canadian content creators, called on Ottawa to ratify the WIPO Internet treaties, introduce “strong penalties” against content piracy and not expand “fair dealing” use of digital content by educational and media institutions.

The CCC coalition includes ACTRA, Canada’s actors union, the Writers Guild of Canada, and SOCAN, which collects royalties for domestic musicians.

Their demands came as Ottawa gets set to impose anti-circumvention measures and an anti-consumer crackdown on fair dealing and open licensing as early as June as part of the latest attempt by the feds to update Canada’s copyright laws for a digital age.

Earlier attempts by Ottawa to reform Canadian copyright rules stopped short of mirroring the U.S. Digital Millenium Copyright Act by introducing draconian anti-circumvention measures and making Internet service providers liable for piracy.

The last attempt at copyright reform in 2008, Bill C-61, which did include a proposal for digital locks, failed to pass through the House of Commons when the governing Conservatives prorogued Parliament.

Hollywood studios in 2007 succeeded in forcing Ottawa to pass anti-camcording legislation to help stamp out movie piracy here.

But Ottawa has frustrated Washington by consistently striking a balance between the rights of content creators and consumers to encourage industry innovation.

That included rejection by Canada of a notice and takedown regime that requires ISPs to remove infringing content identified by rights-holders.

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The British Parliament approved plans on Thursday to crack down on digital media piracy by authorizing the suspension of repeat offenders’ Internet connections.

After action by the House of Commons late on Wednesday, the House of Lords approved the bill on Thursday after heavy lobbying from the music and movie industries, which say they suffer huge losses from unauthorized copying over the Internet.

The law makes Britain the second large European country, after France, to approve a so-called graduated response system, under which online copyright violators face temporary suspensions of their Internet accounts if they ignore warning letters.

“The U.K. has today joined the ranks of those countries who have taken decisive and well-considered steps to address the issue,” John Kennedy, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, said in a statement. “We hope this will prompt more focus and urgency for similar measures in other countries where debate is under way.”

The antipiracy plan is part of a broader bill aimed at stimulating the digital economy in Britain.

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JAPAN’S cartoon industry, a mainstay of the country’s bid to revive the economy through soft exports, is losing $2.4 billion a year to Chinese piracy, The (London) Times reported.

The number represents more than twice what the Japanese animation industry made from total global exports of cartoons and cartoon-related goods during its best year.

Analysts have long warned that Japanese content producers and the Japanese government have been too complacent about protecting intellectual property abroad.

One studio chief described the report as “a belated alarm” for an industry in deep financial pain.

The high piracy figure, which has stunned animation studios and led to demands of much stronger action from the government, emerged from a report commissioned by the Japanese foreign ministry and obtained by The Times.

The research was conducted across several of China’s largest cities, which have a growing army of fans devoted to Japanese animation. The report found that Chinese cartoon addicts spend, on average, about $70 a year feeding their hunger for Japanese cartoons, with most of that sum spent on pirate DVDs.

It found that studios were unable to calculate the extent to which they were being ripped off by the Chinese criminals because the problem was “too extreme.”

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Media piracy is a bad problem in Spain for U.S.-based movie studios. Under Spanish law, piracy is only illegal if done for profit. Thus, many Spanish consumers feel taking free movies from illegal Web sites isn’t that bad — more like borrowing a book from a friend.

There are other isolated areas around the globe that have similar piracy issues, such as South Korea. But the bigger concern is that more powerful economies in Europe will head in the same direction as Spain.

Spain is trying to stop digital theft with new legislation — but it may be too late. The situation is so bad Sony Pictures Entertainment believes it might soon pull out of the DVD retail business there, leaving its after-market of movies to become a media free-for all. No advertising support, no user’s fees – all free.

To make matters worse, this development comes on top of global DVD revenue down-trending for the last several years.

The end game might mean studios need to cut their costs — fees to legal bricks and mortar retailers for the most part, as well as marketing costs.

And Sony and other studios also have a big theatrical distribution business to consider, bringing more extensive marketing costs to get those films off the ground. (Interestingly, theatrical revenues are up in Spain versus a year ago).

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Just as the three-year-long Viacom (VIA) lawsuit against YouTube/Google (GOOG) has reached a crucial decision moment, the case has burst into public view with the public release of the briefs each side filed earlier this month. If Google wins, the case ends; if Viacom does, the next stage is a trial on damages.

While I am a lawyer, I’m not a copyright lawyer, and this is a highly specialized area of law. Still, I’m guessing that Viacom will get its damages trial: YouTube’s early days involved a lot of knowing exploitation of copyrighted work without permission, according to emails filed with the briefs. If Viacom wins, I’ll be curious to see how much “damage” it’s found to have suffered, given Viacom’s own use of YouTube. Indeed, it embraced YouTube as an essential marketing medium.

For Viacom to win, the judge must find one of two things to be true: Either that YouTube, at any time prior to May 2008, was behaving sufficiently like Grokster (a “pirate” file-sharing service the U.S. Supreme Court ruled illegal in 2005) to be liable for its users’ uploads of proprietary content; or that prior to May 2008, YouTube did not always meet the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “safe harbor” clause, meaning that it didn’t have statutory protection. (If YouTube was like Grokster, it cannot claim safe harbor, no analysis needed.)

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The decision to send a Montreal man to prison for pirating movies has set a dangerous precedent that could threaten privacy rights, say civil rights advocates in Vancouver.

On Tuesday, Gérémi Adam, 27, became the first Canadian jailed for breaking cinematic copyright, when he was sentenced to 2½ months after pleading guilty to two counts of distributing high-quality pirated copies of Hollywood films.

Canadian film distributors welcomed the sentencing of Adam, whom the FBI once called Canada’s biggest movie pirate.

But Chris Brand, co-founder of the Vancouver Fair Copyright Coalition, questioned the sentencing.

“The question then comes down to what level of enforcement is reasonable and what level of punishment is reasonable,” said Brand.

Adam was arrested a first time in September 2006 after he was caught distributing pirated movies on the internet. He was then caught a second time in April 2008, filming the movie Street King at a downtown Montreal theatre.

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When asked how governments ought to deal with freeloaders who illegally copy music and movies on the Internet, James Murdoch, head of News Corp.’s European and Asian operations, does not mince his words: ‘‘Punish them.’’ ‘‘There is no difference with going into a store and stealing Pringles or a handbag and taking this stuff,’’ he said last week at a media conference in Abu Dhabi. ‘‘We need enforcement mechanisms and we need governments to play ball.’’ In Britain, where Mr. Murdoch is based, lawmakers have taken up the challenge — to the consternation of Internet companies and civil liberties groups, which are ratcheting up their own arguments against a tough anti-piracy bill that is nearing the make-orbreak stage in Parliament.

The measure, championed by the business secretary, Peter Mandelson, would give the British authorities new tools to clamp down on piracy, including the right to cut off the Internet connections of persistent copyright cheats.

Such a system has been approved, though not yet implemented, in France.

The British proposal, set to be taken up by the House of Commons on Monday, goes further. Under an amendment to the bill in the House of Lords this month, courts would be empowered to order Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that provide pirated movies, music and other media content.

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