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Tipp Sheet 1.3
Volume 1 Issue 3 April 2014
FBI kicks appbucket in hopes of stamping out mobile app piracy
The FBI has successfully convicted the masterminds behind Appbucket, an Android free mobile app distribution application. As a relatively new arena for intellectual property, the mobile app market is still young and impressionable. Having been conceived fully in the digital age, there was no awkward period for mobile applications transitioning in from the physical world. Thus, given that the mobile app market naturally contains a mixture of free and paid apps, many consumers will take paid app illegally without a second thought. This makes the fight against mobile app piracy especially challenging.
While the Appbucket conviction and a few others like it (the FBI has also shut down SnappzMarket and recently charged four other similar pirate markets) are just small fish in the big IP crime pond, they are nonetheless important steps in the right direction as the Department of Justice continues to combat intellectual property crimes as a top priority.
Source: Mashable
DMCA: a weapon of wrongful destruction
Although enacted to create a self-policing mechanism for the use of copyrighted material online, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has since become a nuisance for copyright holders and site operators. With its very lax notice and takedown provisions, Internet users can easily use these mechanisms to “exact revenge” on their online nemeses. One user bragged about getting Facebook to take down a page through a “well written and thought out mail,” without any proof of authority for requesting the takedown. In contrast, another user discussed the hoops through which she had to jump in order to get her website back up and running after one simple false report caused it to be removed for no reason.
As the provisions stand, on the front end, a user must simply allege that a site contains infringing content, and the site operator, the Facebooks and Youtubes of the digisphere, is required to take it down immediately without further investigation. But someone who wants their wrongfully removed webpage restored either must show proof that the site does not contain infringing content, or even worse, receive approval from the person that requested the takedown. The great minds in the tech world are currently debating how to come up with a better system, but until then, the DMCA remains a weapon of wrongful destruction.
Source: Torrent Freak
California fights back against Facebook
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and California Attorney General filed arguments against a court-approved settlement that allows Facebook to post teenagers’ names and photos on products and companies that they have “liked” without explicit permission from their parents. The resolution of these arguments will determine whether the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the federal privacy law that protects children under 13, precludes states from enacting legislation to protect teenagers in a similar fashion. The FTC and California Attorney General argue that both may mutually coexist without violating congressional intent, while Facebook contends that the law inherently preempts states from taking such action.
Source: Silicon Beat
State courts to cops: “hands off cell phones!”
In recent state court opinions in Washington and Texas, judges ruled against law enforcement agents who had searched through suspects’ cell phones without a warrant, showing that privacy laws are adapting to account for newer technologies. In Washington, the cases of State v. Hinton and State v. Roden, in which police apprehended a suspect’s cellphone and sent messages to both defendants arranging drug deals, demonstrated that a person’s text messages are entitled to privacy, just like written letters. The added mobility of a cell phone does not deny the expectation of privacy of one’s text messages, whether sent or received.
In Texas, the court held in State v. Granville that because mobile phones have extensive data storage capabilities, their contents to not lose their expectations of privacy, even after coming into control of law enforcement. Although a cell phone is usually on a person’s body when confiscated, it is still “not like a pair of pants or a shoe.”
Later this April, The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear two cases, Riley v. California and United States v. Wurie, on the same issue of cell phone privacy in a law enforcement context. It will also consider whether the Fourth Amendment protects against such unlawful searches.
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
Intellectual property reigns supreme in the highest court
Intellectual Property claims have hit a high water mark at the U.S. Supreme Court; this cycle, six patent and two copyright cases are on the docket. The biggest case, Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, will address when software can be patented. Software code is copyrighted material, forbidding anyone from directly taking and using the code in their own work without first compensating the original author. Software patents, on the other hand, have the potential to legally protect software on the mere basis of function. Alice Corp. will decide the breadth of function-based patent protection, and as a result, could have a dramatic impact on the software industry as a whole.
The Court will also decide American Broadcasting Companies v. Aereo. Aereo aggregates over-the-air
television broadcasts, and freely offers them through an online streaming service to anyone that has an antenna to receive them. Traditional, ad revenue-based broadcast television companies are unlikely to experience any direct loss, as long as internet viewership statistics can be compiled into data and incorporated into ad rates. Yet broadcasters, who increasingly depend on cable company fees to stay afloat, are fearful of the implication such a service would have on their bottom line. The Court will therefore determine whether the Aereo service re-broadcast of once freely broadcasted content constitutes a copyright violation.
Source: Reuters
Top universities claim media in the fight for rights to online course materials
As prerecorded online college courses gain in popularity, an open question lingers over the fate of materials produced by faculty members that later leave their institutions. Historically, the course “traveled with the professor.” For a class based on a syllabus, textbook choice, and professor’s ability to engage a lecture hall, the idea that the course left with them was seen as a natural result of circumstances. But as online courses become more prevalent, debate has surrounded universities’ resistance to relinquish their rights to online presentations that were painstakingly created with their resources. A recorded course can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars produce and, in addition to the professor, involves the contributions of sound, still graphic, and video editors.
Hosting services for online courses have formally bowed out of the debate, leaving the universities themselves to frame the issue using their own official faculty policies. MIT fired the first anti-faculty volley in March. It announced that while the university will honor professors’ rights to continue teaching their courses at different institutions, any intellectual property created “with the significant use of funds or facilities administered by MIT” will remain the university’s. Harvard has echoed these principles, though without enumerating a formal policy. Other universities, notably Princeton and Duke, hold that these course materials belong exclusively to the faculty who produced their content.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Consumers continue to pay the blank media piper
In the U.S., Copyright levies, also known as the Blank Media Tax, were originally enacted as protective legislation for the recording industry. Fearful that cheap, readily available blank cassette tapes would cause a spike in the illicit home
recording of copyrighted materials, an impost on blank recordables was created to preemptively compensate content providers for presumed future thefts. The practice continues today on the sale of blank CDs, even though most are used for digital file storage or software.
In the E.U., the tax has expanded to include smartphones, MP3 players, tablets, and USB flash drives. Consumer advocates have argued that this extension serves only to provide a wasteful subsidy to an undeserving industry. In some circumstances, consumers pay the levy multiple times in order to access the same copyrighted material. For
example, when someone legally purchases a music CD and then an MP3 player, they pay the levy twice in order to (1) simply have the CD, and (2) listen to its contents.
The E.U. tax may expand even further. On February 27, the E.U. Parliament voted 252-122 to apply copyright levies to cloud computing. The matter is not yet resolved, as EU member states must consent to implementation. Resistance is expected, especially in the UK, where copyright levies do not currently exist in any form. Enforcement and fairness concerns have also been raised.
Source: Computer World