Digital Rights Network

The American content industry is feeling a bit chipper at the moment. With the recent judgements of Grokster and Kazaa having gone, to a significant extent, their way the MPAA and RIAA clearly hope that the demon spectre of unpaid file sharing can be brought under control, if not exactly *their* control. The Grokster case laid a potential for liability on a technology innovators. The Kazaa judgement in turn mandated that judicially enforceable anti-infringment technology be incorporated into Kazaa. They will hope that this sets a trend for any technology with a potential for infringement. Perhaps all these will, in time, become well controlled distribution channels, forcing consumers to pay their monopoly prices for a diet of the usual high quality boy bands and highly original Hollywood plots with Tom Cruise.

This is an email written back in February 2005 during a discussion of why activism on open knowledge/digital rights issues was as active as it could be (and specifically why there wasn't an EFF UK).

1. I think it /is/ essential that there is *more* coordination on digital rights/open knowledge issues.

2. Doing this through a large member-funded organiziation is difficult. Why? Because even if building such an organization were the optimal strategy it would take time and significant amounts of money. Money, in particular, is not /currently/ ubiquitous.

[Aside on EFF: My understanding was that EFF in the US was started off with a load of funding from various well-off high-tech entrepreneurs and that its core work is still funding driven rather than member-driven. Moreover the EFF model was, and continues to be, strongly oriented around litigation - a high-profile and costly activity which is suited to specialists]

Comments in ## .... ##

Full version available from the WIPO IIM page

## If all you've got is a hammer then everything's a nail: need to move away from IP monoculture in approach to innovation and creativity, access to knowledge etc##

4. Experience demonstrates that WIPO has concentrated its efforts in the diffusion of standardized approaches to IP policies that assume, from an uncritical standpoint, that development follows suit as intellectual property rights protection is strengthened. Current worldwide debate questioning the appropriateness of such an approach has not been reflected in WIPO's work. Rather, discussions in WIPO have overlooked the importance of a systematic assessment of the implications of increased and standardized IPR protection in terms of access to and diffusion of science, technology and related knowledge and know-how, especially for LDCs and developing countries.

The Board is aware that its comparatively broad interpretation of the term "invention" in Article 52(1) EPC will include activities which are so familiar that their technical character tends to be overlooked, such as the act of writing using pen and paper.

In a decision of September 7th 2004 the US Sixth Circuit court of appeal ruled that a taking of a sample as short as 2 seconds constituted copyright infringement. Apparently the court's intention in creating this 'bright line' was to reduce uncertainty by making it a simple case of any taking implied infringement. However, it was also ruled that were it the case that the riff had been rerecorded no infringement would have been found - a necessary viewpoint if compatibility were to be maintained with previous decisions implying that such minor taking was not infringement of authorial copyright.

This decision is so extreme, and so threatening to established interests in music and in advertising, that even the RIAA is protesting it. Here is the full text of the decision.