Friday, June 11, 2010 1:55 pm | By Anthony Lizan
Ottawa’s Bill C-32 , the Copyright Modernization Act, is currently making its way through the Canadian Parliament. If it passes, it will bar Canadians from breaking digital locks on entertainment products—including music and movies—to duplicate the content. The bill also includes a “notice-to-notice” provision that allows copyright holders to warn internet service providers of suspected piracy. The service providers are then obliged to tell their customers that they are breaking the law. The bill is Canada’s attempt to comply with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s treaty that it signed in 1997.
Manga Publishers Fight Online Piracy
Thursday, June 10, 2010 4:35 pm | By Kelsey Zahourek
The battle continues to wage on between content creators and for-profit websites that host countless amounts of pirated music, movies, and books. A coalition of Japanese and American manga publishers have come together to fight what they see as rampant piracy of their comics over the internet. According to Publishers Weekly, the 36-member group came together in response to the transformation of what was once a fan based movement to swap the Japanese comics among friends to the growth of “heavily trafficked, for-profit Web sites that host thousands of pirated manga editions and offer them for free to readers.”
After years of declining revenue sales due to the growth of the scanlation sites, the comic publishers are finally taking steps to combat the illegal sites and they are well within their right to do so. Like many battles dealing with online infringement, this goes far beyond the notion of a comic fan simply sharing a copy of a comic to a friend who may not have access to it. These aggregator websites, visited by millions of people, operate with an entire business model based on advertisement revenue and membership dues, profiting off the creation of others without due compensation to those rights holders. This not only harms the creative industries economically but also the incentive to create the comics or music, or movies we have grown to value. When creators and innovators face the risk of having their property effectively expropriated, nobody wins.
This news comes on the heels of the Limewire decision, where U.S. District Judge Kimba Woods ruled that the website could be held liable for copyright infringement. As a result of that decision, Limewire could be held liable for hundreds of millions to a billion dollars in damages.
For further reading on the manga issue, Patrick Ross at the Copyright Alliance has a great blog post on the move by manga publishers, breaking down how this latest push by copyright holders is another swipe at the arguments of the “free culture” movement and specifically, Lawrence Lessig, who used in his book, “Free Culture,” the manga publishers previous lack of aggressive pursuit of copyright violators as an example of copyright theft being accepted.
Property Owners Victorious in New York Eminent Domain Case
Friday, May 21, 2010 12:00 pm | By Robert Kramer
This Wednesday there was a celebration in Auburn, N.Y. when the Auburn Industrial Development Agency voted unanimously against the use of eminent domain on the part of Pioneer Companies, who wished to build a Hilton Garden Inn on a plot of land currently occupied by several private residences.
The project is a recent example of an attempt at using eminent domain for the benefit of a private party, rather than public use. Mayor Michael Quill argued that the project would yield $160,000 in tax revenue for the city, at what he perceived is the relatively small cost of removing several families from their homes. Community support for the soon-to-be displaced families grew as negotiations were drawn out between the two parties. In the end, the public pressure proved too much, and the Auburn Industrial Development Agency ruled that eminent domain use was out of the question.
The victory should stand as a case of legal precedence to be followed for eminent domain use, one where its use is reserved for truly public projects and isn't subject to the political connections of private industry. For now, the people of Auburn can sleep easy and carry on with the lives they've fought hard to preserve.
