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The battle for creators against copyright infringement and piracy is long and ongoing, and made all the more difficult by the fact that the adversary is forever changing and shifting; no sooner does one site shut down than multiple more pop up to take its place, like the many-headed hydra that vexed Hercules and Captain America alike. Or perhaps in citing actual history, it might be more apt to say that it’s hard to pin down an enemy that can simply slip away once a battle is lost; the operators of a particular site may face their day in court, but users can simply migrate to the replacements that arise.
Continue reading “Jetflicks, iStreamItAll Founders Plead Guilty in Copyright Case”
Culpability has become has become an ever-more-relevant question in cases of copyright violation, with technology making both the dissemination of creative works and the subsequent violation of creators’ rights easier than ever. The ultimate blame in those belongs to those actually perpetrating the acts, but our sense of justice and the system put in place around that notion seeks both to assign some responsibility and punishment to those who might have enabled misdeeds through direct action or negligent inaction. It’s something that we see from large corporations, where inaction is often the norm for a variety of reasons, although in light of one recent case, those same companies might feel compelled to get proactive.
Questions about the future of intellectual property are seemingly tied to the future of creativity as it relates to technology. We’ve already seen the 
Say what you want about American intellectual property law (and I do), but it certainly lets people try their luck at obtaining just about any sort of mark or patent, even if the application is ultimately rejected. It’s undoubtedly someone’s notion of the American ideal that ambition in this arena not be bound by common sense or an actual understanding of the law but solely by their willingness to try and get one over on the governmental bodies in charge of intellectual property rights. It’s the freedom to try anything you want, no matter how stupid or futile it might be, that is fundamentally American, you might argue. It probably won’t work out, but at least you tried.
It’s easy to wonder, given how relatively easy it is to search the respective databases containing registered trademarks, why anyone would thus infringe upon those marks given that they could or should know the error of their ways. One view is that it’s a simple oversight on the part of the offender, an honest mistake, a view that is both accurate and somewhat naive at once. The other interpretation is that there is malice aforethought, that the perpetrator intended to infringe upon the mark because there was gain to be had for them, which is also true and also cynical. Whatever the reason, there is profit to be had in violating someone else’s trademark, otherwise it wouldn’t happen. But the Supreme Court might be looking to change that in the near future.
Wearable tech has been a fairly recent trend, unless you want to count the calculator watch. And preeminent in that trend has been Fitbit, which offers devices that monitor your activity and your health, should you actually want to know about such things. To those of us less technically-inclined, it seems like magic that a small device can determine our daily steps and our heart-rate and any number of other data points by just sitting on our wrists, but indeed there is substantive technology behind the magic, although if a recent complaint is to be believed, it’s not tech that Fitbit has a legal basis for using.
There’s much made of the importance of copyright for creators, and for good reason: without any sort of legal protection or ownership rights, the act of creation itself would be meaningless, with the ultimate profit and benefit for a work ultimately going to whomever has the resources to both exploit it and muscle out the original creator. Why record a song if a more popular artist could simply come along and record their own version or sample your work without permission and reap all the benefits? So goes the thinking for those taking a more strident view about the application and enforcement of copyright, and given how we consider people with a big ideal looking to capitalize on it within the American ethos, there’s probably a fair base of support for that position.
We don’t often talk about trade secrets in this space, because they are by definition secretive and unreported. It’s easy to understand and follow stories about trademarks or patents because we can identify what’s been infringed upon and how it relates to the products we know and consume. Trade secrets, on the other hand, have to stay vague in what we read of them; companies don’t want their proprietary information to disseminate any further than it’s already been. You protect your trademarks and patents by declaring them to the world as yours; you protect your trade secrets by telling no one.
I’ve written before about the problems with both the aggressive assertion of copyright and the inability of online platforms to discern legitimate claims from the misuse of reporting tools on offer, with YouTube as the convergence point of these dual phenomena. Invariably the response from these platforms is that their user base is too large and too spread out to offer any effective administrative policing, so the task falls to users to police one another. The problem with this approach comes from the baseline assumption that users can be trusted with these tools and this power; as we’ve seen in society at large, while the vast majority of people will probably do the right thing, it only takes a few to do wrong and ruin the whole thing for everyone.