06.07.11
Today’s laugher on copyright infringement
From the Los Angeles Times, the unintentionally hilarious lead:
Hollywood studios, record labels and other U.S. copyright and trademark owners are pushing Congress to give them more protection against parasitical foreign websites that are profiting from counterfeit or bootlegged goods. The Senate Judiciary Committee has responded with a bill (S 968) that would force online advertising networks, credit card companies and search engines to cut off support for any site found by the courts to be “dedicated” to copyright or trademark infringement. It’s goals are laudable, but its details are problematic.
The global nature of the Internet has spawned a profusion of websites in countries that can’t or won’t enforce intellectual property law. Under S 968, if a website were deemed by a court to be dedicated to infringing activities, federal agents could then tell the U.S. companies that direct traffic, process payments, serve advertisements and locate information online to end their support for the site in question. Copyright and trademark owners would be able to follow up those court orders by seeking injunctions against payment processors and advertising networks that do not comply.
Cutting off the financial lifeblood of companies dedicated to piracy and counterfeiting makes sense …
Only to the powdered special people writing editorials at the Los Angeles Times.
Oops, here’s the entire new JaneDear Girls pirated on YouTube, a Google property. (Just download all the submissions by “kingdrew” on the side of the page with YouTube Downloader.)
Tee-hee, here’s country artist Colt Ford’s entire new album, Every Chance I Get, pirated illegally to YouTube. Just download all the songs on the right, conveniently arrayed by the search engine.
Arf! Arf! Here’s Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain album, in what looks like its entirety, to the right. In fact, if you dig around a bit you find what seems like the whole catalog. On YouTube!
And — ho-ho — here are Donovan’s single hits from the Sixties — all pirated to, can you guess? You know what to do! Just look to the right and use YouTube Downloader!
“Once a court determines that a site is dedicated to infringing, the measure would require the companies that operate domain-name servers to steer Internet users away from it,” explains the Times.
A real rib-tickler, that one.
Those who use YouTube a lot know the site provides loads of baldly infringing content. Part of its business model of bringing in eyes and ears depends upon it.
The real impetus here is to get those dirty not-US infringers off the playing field.
João said,
June 7, 2011 at 10:32 am
…“Once a court determines that a site is dedicated to infringing, the measure would require the companies that operate domain-name servers to steer Internet users away from it???…
Wasn’t that already done in Turkey for example, were youtube was simply blocked because of “attacks” to the image of Kemal Atatürk?
Lol, some day, for some reason or other youtube will be blocked i every country in the world.
cheers
J.
Chuck said,
June 7, 2011 at 4:29 pm
The next logical step, obviously, is to direct the US military to bomb the servers with the infringing content. Since copyright (but apparently not patent) infringement is a felony under Federal law, the folks who run the servers hosting infringing content are guilty of economic terrorism against the US oligarchy.
Obviously the issue of differing copyright terms hasn’t yet occurred to anyone. So our boys in blue could drop some cluster bombs on Sydney for hosting only-in-America the pirated text of “1984”. Or Moscow for carrying MP3s of 1980’s recordings of Shostakovich.