The CopyKat - a panorama of disharmony in European buildings?

The Times reports that one of the world's 'most wanted hackers' has been arrested. And who is it? Well it's none other than Fredrik Neij, one of the four men who created The Pirate Bay. Neij was arrested crossing from Laos into Thailand, seemingly by Thai immigration officials responding to an Interpol arrest warrant. Local reports say that whilst living in Laos with his wife, he also had a home on Phuket and had financial assets of £95,000 as a cash balance. He was the last remaining convicted Pirate Bay man at large. He and his co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty of multiuple contributory copyright infringement in the Swedish courts in 2009. After a lengthy appeals process (with Svartholm not even showing up for appeal hearing) all but Carl Lundström - the fourth member - went on the run -  Lundström having negotiated down his sentence to house arrest. Svartholm Warg made it to Cambodia,  but was recently extradited to Denmark on hacking charges (against the Police) and sentenced to three years and a half in prison.  In June Peter Sunde was arrested in southern Sweden. Sunde had been living in Berlin, Germany, seemingly without a problem, but returned to Sweden at times as he had family there. His final appeal against his sentence failed when his request for another appeal was denied by Sweden’s Supreme Court - and ultimately he was sentenced to eight months in prison along with a substantial fine on the copyright infringement charges. And now finally Neij faces his own spell in prison too, although at almost the same time, Peter Sunde was released from jail having (finally) served more than five months for his 2009 conviction.

Several major movie studios and record labels have filed a lawsuit against the Swedish ISP B2, demanding that the company blocks access to The Pirate Bay. The lawsuit, which also calls for a blockade of the streaming site Swefilmer, is the first of its kind in The Pirate Bay's home country.

Our friend Enrico Bonadio at the City Law School is organising a seminar on Wednesday 3rd December 2014, at College Building, Room AG 02 at the City University EC1V 0HB, titled "New media between copyright protection and the access to network conundrum".The speaker is Nicola Lucchi, Associate Professor at the Jönköping International Business School (Sweden) and the seminar examines how regulatory policies for new media are posing barriers to equitable and open access to digital information, and the seminar also discusses and analyses the functional relationship between modern communication technologies and legislative reforms in the area of digital communications that threaten to reduce online freedoms. It's free to attend but you need to register.  More here.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield's "goosebump-inducing" cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity?" which had amassed 23.4 million hits before it was taken down from YouTube is back online after 
Hadfield secured fresh permission from Mr Bowie's representatives to use the extra-planetary recording, which was made aboard the International Space Station at an elevation of 250 miles (400 km), after a five month hiatus. Bowie himself loved it, posting on Facebook that it was "possibly the most poignant version of the song ever created" and an initial one-year agreement which has now been extended after a "careful and exacting" legal process with Hadfield saying "And now, we are so happy to be able to announce that my on-orbit cover of Space Oddity is back up on YouTube. This time we have a new 2-year agreement, and it is there, for free, for everyone. We're proud to have helped bring Bowie's genius from 1969 into space itself in 2013, and now ever-forward. Special thanks to Onward Music Ltd, to the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, to musicians Emm Gryner and Joe Corcoran, to videographer Andrew Tidby, to my son Evan, and mostly to Mr. David Bowie himself. For the countless others who have helped work to bring about a new era of exploration, the art of it sings to us all." More on copyright in space here and here.

Rome - it may have been built in a day -
but surely built some time ago .......

Now then - this is what caught my eye this week. I wasn't aware of this, but it's been suggested that whilst The EU’s 2001 InfoSoc Directive contains a clause that says photos of architectural projects in public spaces can be taken and used free of restriction (with copyright vesting in the photographer) - the so called "freedom of panorama" after the term used in German copyright law, Panoramafreiheit, this is optional and  France, Belgium and Italy decided not to transpose it into national law. Well, that's according to Dimitar Dimitrov, a Wikipedia spokesperson who says “If you take an image of the Atomium and put it on Facebook, that is copyright infringement” - and indeed Belgium's Atomium website does indeed note “any use of the image of the Atomium must be submitted to the organisation before it is published” and "The image of the Atomium is protected and can only be used under certain conditions” and “Prices depend on whether it is to be used for a cultural, educational or commercial purpose.” The Atomium picture on Wikipedia's page is a photo of a model built in Austria. Elsewhere, the images of the monument are usually simply blacked out to respect Belgian rules. Have any of our readers heard of images of modern public buildings in Paris, Brussels or Rome being restricted in any way? Dimitrov suggests that "people can now take photos of the Eiffel tower during the day but not at night. This is because the architect has been dead so long that the copyright rules no longer apply. But they have since installed lights" and “The lightshow is protected by copyright”. The article in the EU Observer suggests "Another oddity is that because the European Parliament does not own the copyright license of its buildings, it cannot legally grant permission for people to take photos of it."  In the UK whilst copyright subsists in architecture as an artistic work by virtue of s4(1)(a) [a work of architecture being a building or a model for a building], section 62 of the CDPA allows photographs (or indeed a film) to be made of a building and provides that “copyright in such a work will not be infringed by (a) making a graphic work representing it, (b) making a photograph or a film of it; or (c) making a broadcast of a visual image of it”. In addition to buildings, section 62 also provides an express exception to copyright infringement in relation to photographs of certain specific works - sculptures, models of buildings and works of artistic craftsmanship - permanently situated in a public. So from a UK perspective there is a rather an unharmonised panorama across the EU - something that surely will be revisited soon.

There seems to be a lot of cyber noise on this - The Eiffel tower gets a lot of attention - more here http://torrentfreak.com/night-time-eiffel-tower-photos-are-a-copyright-violation-141108/  and here http://www.slashgear.com/your-night-time-eiffel-tower-photos-are-copyright-violations-09354716/ and the position on replicating Notre Dame and parts of its architecture and interior in the video game Assassins Creed gets attention here http://www.vg247.com/2014/11/10/assassins-creed-unity-notre-dame-pc-ps4-xbox-one/ with one of the game's senior level artists, Caroline Miousse, saying " There are certain things we were actually unable to directly re-create due to copyright issues. But we chose not to see this as a negative. For example, when I look at the organ in Notre Dame, I think it’s a masterpiece. It’s just so huge and beautiful… and copyrighted. We couldn’t reproduce it exactly, but we could still try to nail the feeling you get when you see it. We kept it very similar in general appearance, and it’s only when you get close to it and really analyze it that you realize it’s not the same exact organ you would see in Notre Dame today."

Yesterday the European Parliament's Legal Affairs and Culture Committees met to discuss the future development of copyright (11 November) with academics, representatives of content creators and distributors and European Commission experts. we will update on this as and when reports come in unless any of our readers watched the live stream of the hearing, and would care to comment. New Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker had announced that within the first six months of his mandate, he will take steps to modernise copyright rules “in the light of the digital revolution and changed consumer behaviour”. The Commission held a public consultation from December 2013 to March 2014, which generated more than 9,500 replies from users, authors, publishers and other stakeholders.

And finally today, a group of 77 prominent computer scientists have filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court urging it to review the controversial ruling that allowed Oracle to claim copyright on APIs - the essential building block for many everyday software operations. The brief, filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, comes in support of Google, which has appealed to the Supreme Court after losing a decision to Oracle in May. That decision, issued by the Federal Circuit appeals court, reversed a California judge’s conclusion that APIs (application programming interfaces) are not subject to copyright because they are simply a process or a method of instructing one computer program to communicate with another — as opposed to source code or literary works, which are considered original works protected by copyright with the Washington appellate court saying "with the court saying "We conclude that a set of commands to instruct a computer to carry out desired operations may contain expression that is eligible for copyright protection". More here.

CopyKat - to the scratching post - and beyond

The CopyKat does love an extra terrestrial copyright conundrum. And indeed whilst man may not have reached Mars quite yet, that has never prevented lawyers at the major record labels from extending their tentacles to reach outside the exosphere - initially by inserting clauses claiming ownership of their artiste's catalogues across the solar system  - then the Galaxy - and now the Universe. Who says the law doesn't keep up with technology? Here it's the other way around!  Now Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development has proposed a new legislative move to protect photographs taken from space - protection by copyright law: “The data from Earth Remote Sensing (ERS) and derivative materials are widely used. They are usually bought for a fee, but there is no clear legal regulation for ERS,” a ministry representative told newspapers. Reports says that Article 1225 of the Civil Code, Protected Results of Intellectual Activity and Means of Identification would be amended to include a new clause protecting “materials and/or data acquired through earth remote sensing.” NASA takes a very different approach saying this "NASA still images; audio files; video; and computer files used in the rendition of 3-dimensional models, such as texture maps and polygon data in any format, generally are not copyrighted. You may use NASA imagery, video, audio, and data files used for the rendition of 3-dimensional models for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits, computer graphical simulations and Internet Web pages. This general permission extends to personal Web pages". To that end the illustration I have used is of the Russian MIR Space station - but from a NASA satellite.

In completely unrelated news - but still with the extra-terrestrial theme, singing astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield's recording of David Bowie's classic Major Tom, made on the International Space Station, has been removed from YouTube as his agreed (earthbound) term of use from Bowie has now expired with Hadfield saying:  "It has been a year since my son and I created and released the Space Oddity video. We have been amazed and delighted that so many people enjoyed it—and maybe saw what spaceflight can really be like. It helped show that humans have left Earth, and that the Space Station is a new stage, for not just science and exploration, but for our art and music too. With exploration comes insight—with perspective comes self-realization.We had permission from David Bowie’s people to post the video on YouTube for a year, and that year is up. We are working on renewing the license for it, but as there are no guarantees when it comes to videos shot in space, we thought you might want to have one last look before we take it down. Thanks for everything. You’ve all been incredible throughout.". More here. 

The UK's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has had infamous sharing website Torrentz.eu's internet domain suspended. Torrentz.eu was already one of 21 websites blocked by UK ISPs last October after a court order directed them to put up a "virtual wall".

In the US, the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) has released its first report on the Copyright Alert System (CAS), the voluntary collaboration between entertainment and technology companies aimed at reducing copyright infringement. For the first time since the system's launch, specific information about the size of the program has been made available: Specifically, the report showed that 1.3 million Alerts were sent out in the initial 10 months of the program, most in the initial educational phases. 265 people challenged the Alerts under an arbitration system and 18 percent of those (47 people) were successful, mostly by showing that someone else had used their account - with no findings of false positives in which the content owner had misidentified the account.  Only three percent, or 37,456 of the accounts, reached level 6, which results in reduced internet speed. 
CCI also noted that the CAS is expected to double in size in the second year of operation, and CCI will begin an online awareness campaign to increase public awareness of the system. Jill Lesser, Executive Director of CCI, said : "We are encouraged by the initial data from the Copyright Alert System's first 10 months suggesting that the program has the potential to move the needle in deterring copyright infringement. Our initial research into consumer attitudes – along with what we have seen in our own data – shows that consumers do respond to this kind of educational system that alerts them to infringing activity on their account and helps them find the content they want easily and legally."  The majority of peer-to-peer copyright infringement is fuelled by a small group of younger, predominately male digital consumers”. More on Digital Journal. 

And there seems ti be LOTS of lobbying going on in the U.S. music industry right now.  A new group  formed from the Nashville music industry hopes to be able to influence ongoing debate on the future role and reform of copyright law. The group, called Interested Parties Advancing Copyright (IPAC), consists of about 50 independent publishers, administrators, business managers and entertainment attorneys.

Elsewhere in the USA, A2IM, the organisation that represents indie record labels have criticised Sony and Universal Music Group in "the fight over digital dollars". The American Association of Independent Music, whose artists include Mumford & Sons, Taylor Swift and Adele, argues that Universal and Sony are in effect a de facto “duopoly”— and use their dominance to grab a disproportionate share of streaming music royalties. Streaming services just have to deal with Sony and UMG, who control well over 50% of the recorded music sector (and yes - EU and US regulators let that happen!). The group, which represents around 325 indie labels in the US, has been lobbying lawmakers to take a fresh look at music licensing and outlined its issues in a filing submitted to the federal Copyright Office: The New York Post say that A2IM contends that the streaming music business "is essentially a zero-sum game: The music majors use their distribution muscle to extract the lion’s share of dollars from services such as Spotify and Pandora, leaving the indie labels to settle for whatever is left".

SoundExchange is making a push to change how pre-1972 recordings are treated is the U.S, The Washington D.C. based collection society for digital performance royalties has launched a multi-pronged campaign called Project72 - aimed at changing the federal law that excludes pre-1972 sound recordings from coverage under statutory licenses used by many digital music services. The campaign features a microsite and an advertisement -  a call to digital radio services to “pay for all the music they play” in the form of an open letter from over 70 artists including B.B. King, the Supremes, members of Steely Dan, the Beach Boys, Roseanne Cash, Martha Reeves, Cyndi Lauper and Al Green. the RESPECT Act was introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. George Holding (R-NC). The bill would place pre-1972 sound recordings under federal law. Conyers stated the bill would give "a fair shake" to legendary artists and their lesser-known backing musicians. SoundExchange President and CEO Mike Huppe told Billboard the issue with pre-1972 royalties amounted to "a real and urgent problem that's happening right now."

And the Recording Industry Association of America has responded to the US Copyright Office's call for comments on a "Music Licensing Study: Notice and Request for Public Comment," by explaining why terrestrial radio should pay more in royalty payments.
Setting the current US system in a historical context (in particular the fact that terrestrial radio stations are exempt from paying royalties for broadcasting sound recordings) the RIAA says "We propose to replace the current overlapping musical work licensing systems with a single, simple and efficient system that incorporates marketplace royalty payments. As described below, such a system would have many potential advantages, including: (1) market rates for publishers and songwriters; (2) more consumer choice through easier funding and development of innovative services; (3) more revenue for services and higher royalties for creators due to savings from simplified licensing procedures; (4) improved accuracy of payments and transparency for publishers and songwriters; and (5) viability for ASCAP and BMI, and the revenue streams they administer."

And on the matter of who gets paid what from any revenues from downloads ..... Universal have now responded to the multiple lawsuits it is facing from its own artists over its controversial policy of treating a download (or even streaming income) as a 'sale' rather than licensing income - attracting the far lower 'per unit' royalty from a sale. The Hollywood Reporter explains that the new motions to dismiss from UMG  "stems from a 2010 appellate ruling in F.B.T. Productions v. Aftermath that suggested that record labels should be treating digital download income off of venues like Apple's iTunes as "licenses" rather than "sales." The difference could mean a lot of money because under typical licensing or leasing provisions of artist-label contracts, about 50 percent of collected revenue gets handed over to artists. Under sales provisions, it's usually not more than 15 percent - if they are lucky." UMG says that the F.B.T precedent is wrong and that a sale on iTunes should be like any other sale of physical product - and that in fact when the this all started UMG were generous to artistes as it waived its 'packaging deduction' for download sales - and that many artists and their representative hailed the new royalties model - albeit one based on the old - as preferable to wholesale piracy. A few artist attorneys are said to have brought forward the argument that these downloads were "licenses," an interpretation which Universal Music rejected. Then came the F.B.T. decision, and subsequently "the firestorm of litigation" with Chuck D. of Public Enemy, Rick James (by way of trust), Dave Mason of Traffic, Whitesnake, Andres Titus of Black Sheep, Ron Tyson of The Temptations and Bo Donaldson all still ready to challenge Universal Music's accounting. UMG have put up numerous other arguments rejecting the claims:  that lawsuits alleging that consumers were hurt by royalty arrangements are invalid because consumers aren't aware of these dealings; that some of the artists suing under Californian law had contracts that were governed by New York law; that 1970s singer Bo Donaldson couldn't sue because of an agreement with his former bandmates that majority participation was required to litigate; and Ron Tyson of The Temptations wasn't party to the crucial contracts because he didn't join the group until 1983. The the article on the Hollywood Reporter is well worth the read. 

And finally, UK Music Industry think tank Music 4.5 is hosting a seminar to examine the future of Intellectual Property (IP) and music licensing in the growing digital marketplace. The event, from 14.00 - 18.00 on the 25th June 2014 will bring together thought leaders, including Raoul Chatterjee (7Digital), Will Page (Spotify), Peter Bradbury (Sky) and Kim Bayley (ERA), to discuss current IP issues facing the music and music technology industries. The seminar will be hosted against a backdrop of change for IP and music licensing, as the European Commission examines the wider EU copyright. More here.