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infringement

willy wonka’s ip policy

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Ran across the article “What’s Good for Willy Wonka is Good for America” while reading about the sad demise of a company called Miller & Kriesel, which I like (liked?) quite a bit. Ken Kriesel referred to this article in an intereview, so I thought it would be worth reading.

Not that I necessarily agree with what the article alludes to when it comes to policy for safeguarding one’s IP, but noneless an interesting take on IP lessons to be learned from the world’s most famous (albeit fictional) chocolatier:

When it came to internal IP theft, Willy Wonka did not mess around, and others can learn from his success.

Oh, BTW, in case you’re curious, M&K were the folks that invented the concept of the subwoofer and, I think, if not invented, at least helped pioneer surround sound. They’re also the folks that Lucasfilm (I guess perhaps until recently) used for all the speakers in all their studios. The story of their demise can be found relatively easily – suffice it to say, think twice before bringing your key IP over to China.

canadians – as bad as the chinese (almost)

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Well, this story certainly has got a lot of coverage. I was quite surprised to read in Wired that quite of bit of IP is stolen in Canada. To wit:

But — surprise, surprise — IIPA also wants Canada added to the list of the most egregious violators. That’s right. Canada. According to the IIPA, Canada was responsible for $551 million in lost revenue in 2006, all of it in the business software sector (numbers from other industries were not available). That makes Canada the fourth-worst offender. See the chart here.

I was also at a very interesting speech that Graham Henderson of CRIA gave on the proliferation of counterfeit goods in Canada. Again, though I knew of some counterfeiting of goods going on here, I was a bit surprised at the numbers that were presented and also the types of counterfeiting – everything from extension cords to batteries to pharmaceuticals.

Of course that’s one side of it. And like everything else there are always two side to a story. Michael Geist is quoted in the story as asserting that the IIPA is out of touch with the rest of the world by criticizing countries who have less stringent measures in place than US legislation, which he asserts to be the world’s toughest.

Its interesting to compare this with the MPAA’s position on proposals in the use on fair use, which I mentioned a bit earlier. Perhaps best described like this:

Geist on IP infringement issues in Canada: “Problem? What problem?”

The MPAA on fair use issues in the US: “Problem? What problem?”

And so it goes. <sigh>

Belgian Court Slaps Google News

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The short story: a Belgian court has ruled that Google must remove headlines and links posted on its news site for which it did not obtain permission to post, based on copyright law.

Rather unfortunate, I think. Sure, there are cases where some links and even partial reproduction should be prohibited, but in the context of what Google was doing its difficult to see the harm. In fact, I’m a bit surprised that the content owner would have pursued the claim. Google’s take:

“We believe that Google News is entirely legal,” the company said in a statement. “We only ever show the headlines and a few snippets of text and small thumbnail images. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site.”

Google said its service actually does newspaper a favor by driving traffic to their sites.

But the court said Google’s innovations don’t get exemptions from Belgian data storage law.

“We confirm that the activities of Google News, the reproduction and publication of headlines as well as short extracts, and the use of Google’s cache, the publicly available data storage of articles and documents, violate the law on authors’ rights,” the ruling said.

If Google News violates authors’ rights, there will be a lot more that does as well. Tons. It will be interesting to see what happens on appeal as it could have rather far-reaching implications – at least in Belgium.

RIAA to AllOfMP3: Show Me the Money!!

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Interesting article in TechCrunch about how AllOfMP3 told the RIAA to get lost when it filed its $1,650,000,000,000 (yes, you did read that figure right – its in the trillions) claim in New York against AllOfMP3, even though AllOfMP3 operates out of Russia. From a legal perspective one would typically launch into the complexities of jurisdiction, judicial comity, real and substantial connection, forum non conveniens, blah, blah, blah.

But since this is a personal blog, let’s focus on the fun part, shall we? Let’s focus on the CASH. Woohoo! Fun with numbers. OK, so, let’s see. Accordingly to the CIA World Factbook, the current population of the world is 6,525,170,264. So, if the the damages sought by the RIAA were evenly divided amongst every man, woman and child, each one of them could go out and buy, oh, about twenty CDs, give or take. Wow. That’s a lot of CDs.

Another way to look at it? Its bigger than the GDP of every country in the world except for roughly the top ten. Yes yes, figures are few years old. Fine. Call it 15. You get the point. In any event, around the ballpark GDP for all of Russia. Yes, including the little nesting doll thingies.
From a more personal perspective, the interest on that amount, calculated at the low, low US fed rate for the shockingly painful period of time of two minutes is quite just a bit more than the combined annual incomes of me, my wife, my mom, stepmom, dad, sister, and her husband make in a year.
The point? Just that its a lot of money. A LOT of money. Not exactly googol or a googolplex

(which, as you probably know, is how Google got its name:

The Internet search engine Google was named after this number. Larry Page, one of the founders, was fascinated with mathematics and ‘Googol’, even during high school. They ended up with ‘Google’ due to a spelling mistake on a cheque that investors wrote to the founders.

(from Wikipedia)) but still a lot of money.

Update:  Further news from the INQ – apparently they calcuated damages at US$150,000 per song. Though the INQ correctly observes that AllOfMP3 hasn’t made that much money, damages could also be measured not by what an infringer has made (or an “accounting of profits”) but also the harm that they’ve cost you – so if AllOfMP3 sold each song for a penny, while the RIAA members would have otherwise sold the same song for a buck, multiply that by 150,000 downloads and you have your damages, as that is what they’ve lost out.