Industry Welcomes Copyright Treaty
Music industry organizations are delighted that the first of the World Intellectual
Property Organization's (WIPO) two international copyright-protection treaties for the
digital age comes into force this March. The WIPO Copyright Treaty provides
guidelines on protecting the works of composers, lyricists, authors and publishers
when legitimately distributed via the Internet or other interactively transmitted
media. The second WIPO treaty is the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty.
"It's enormously significant, because the provisions on technology measures are
expressed internationally for the first time," says Richard Owens, international
intellectual property rights advisor at British Music Rights, the lobbying arm for U.K.
authors copyright organization MCPSPRS. "We now have a legally binding
instrument that should give teeth to international enforcement efforts."
Read More About the Treaty: http://www.wipo.org/
IFPI News, December 6, 2001; http://www.ifpi.org/site-content/press/20011206.html
Russian Programmer Can Go Home
The federal government agreed to defer the prosecution of a Russian computer
programmer who was the first person to be charged under a controversial digital-
copyright law. The programmer, Dmitri Sklyarov, 27, has been allowed to return to
Moscow. In July, 2001 he was arrested for writing a program that allowed people to
disable encryption software protecting electronic books.
Sklyarov's lawyers reached a compromise with the government that will defer
prosecution against Mr. Sklyarov in exchange for his cooperation in the prosecution
of his employer, ElcomSoft, based in Moscow. As part of the agreement, Mr.
Sklyarov is obligated to "appear at the trial and testify truthfully," according to a
statement from the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of
California. The trial date is set for April 15, 2002. ElcomSoft contends that the
decryption program is legal in Russia.
Sklyarov drew international attention as the first person to be criminally prosecuted
under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (See GrayZone Digest September 2001).
He could have faced up to five years in prison and a $500,000 fine.
In Digital Copyright Case, Programmer Can Go Home; New York Times, December 14, 2001 (Jennifer 8. Lee);
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/14/technology/14HACK.html
Russian Hacker Charges Dropped; Wired News, December 13, 2001 (Reuters);
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,49122,00.html
Professor's Suit Against RIAA Dismissed
A New Jersey judge threw out a lawsuit brought against the music industry, saying
that threatened legal action didn't keep a computer-science professor from
publishing research on anti-copying technology. The judge dismissed charges
brought by Princeton University professor Edward Felten, who said legal threats
stopped him from publishing a paper outlining the weaknesses in the industry's
technologies for protecting digital music. Felten had sued the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA).
"We are happy that the court recognized what we have been saying all along: there
is no dispute here. As we have said time and again, Professor Felten is free to
publish his findings," Cary Sherman, the RIAA's senior executive vice president, said
in a statement.
Princeton Professor's Digital-copying Suit Dismissed; USA Today, November 20, 2001 (Associated Press);
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001/11/29/princeton-professor.htm
Hollywood Studios Win Major Victory in DVD Case
In a major victory for Hollywood movie studios, a federal appeals court has barred a
website from revealing how to make unauthorized copies of digital videodiscs. The
2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that the controversial 1998 Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) does not infringe on the constitutional right to
freedom of speech. A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals issued a 71-page
decision affirming an August 2000 ruling by a federal district court judge. The lower
court ruling prohibited Eric Corley from posting DVD descrambling software on the
"2600: The Hacker Quarterly" http://www.2600.com/ magazine website he
publishes, or linking to websites that post the software. The software, called DeCSS
for Decoding Content Scramble System, can be used to decode the anti-piracy
safeguards embedded in DVDs.
Appeals Court Rules In Favor Of Studios In DVD Case; TechTV.com, November 29, 2001 (Elinor Mills Abreu/Reuters);
http://www.techtv.com/news/politicsandlaw/story/0,24195,3362792,00.html
Quick Bits and Bytes
But Are My MP3s Legal?
Every time someone downloads a tune off the Internet, he is almost certainly
stepping outside the law. "It's copyright infringement," says Andy Norwood, an
intellectual-property attorney at Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis in Nashville.
"Downloading a copyrighted file is making a copy, one of the exclusive rights of the
copyright holder."
You are on safe legal ground if you copy songs for your own use from CDs you own.
But duplicate a song and give it to a friend, whether on a burned disk or over the
Internet, and you too are violating copyright. And unless you know otherwise, it's
safe to assume that every piece of recorded music you encounter online is
copyrighted.
Cnnfn.com, November 29, 2001;
http://money.cnn.com/2001/11/29/saving/mp3_legal
Pirate-Proof Pop Goes Public
Music makers are stepping up attempts to stamp out piracy with the public release of
CDs that cannot be played on computers. Natalie Imbruglia's latest album "White
Lilies Island" is the first to go on general release with a copy-protection system built
in. Commentators say that soon many more CDs will employ similar anti-pirate
technologies. Before now, such systems have been added in a piecemeal fashion to a
limited number of releases in different countries.
BBC News, November 12, 2001;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1651000/1651544.stm
Pirates Sail Ahead of Porn on the Net
Queries for pirated software outstripped searches for "Harry Potter," the young
wizard-in-training from the popular J.K. Rowling books and blockbuster Hollywood
film. Internet searches for pirated software are on the rise, joining the ranks of such
popular search engine queries as "sex" and "MP3," according to US software firm
Websense. The availability of "warez" sites, virtual trading posts where pirated
software is made available free of charge to other Internet users, is on the rise.
In Web vernacular, "warez" refers to any illegally obtained software, ranging from
pornography to computer operating systems. A recent tally by Websense says the
number of hacker and pirate software sites numbers 5,400 representing a growth of
more than 240 percent in the past year.
Reuters/ZD Net, October 31, 2001
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