The news came in a letter from Rösslitor, St. Gallen’s biggest bookstore, which had been taken over by one of the country’s biggest book retailers a couple of years ago.

The letter started with a hymn to the importance and societal functions of public libraries and school libraries, follwed by a slightly more modest description of the bookstore’s achievments.

The important thing is that Rösslitor will allow all public libraries and school libraries a 10 % discount on all books and other media, and it will ship them for free.  The discount would not have been possible under the old regime of book price fixing.

Ten per cent isn’t a lot, given that libraries are likely the bookstore’s best customers.  But it’s a sign that the market is moving, and I’m pretty sure that competitors will follow.  Thus, the libraries’ consumer rents will increase (and hopefully politicians will allow them to spend the money thus saved to enhance their services otherwise).

P.S. for those who think I’ve been taken in by a PR stunt, please consider the following: My hope is that if book retailers see that customers are aware of the new competition in the book market, they will be more ready to toughen the competition.

A French consumer association sued the producers of Mulholland Drive because their DVDs were copy-protected and because there was no appropriate notice on the wrapping.

[T]he Court … decided on 4 April 2007 that the private copy of a certain work is not a right but “a legal exception to the principle of copying the entire work without the consent of the copyright holder”. Therefore a private copy is not a right, but an exception and no one can start a legal action based on an exception.

In Hohfeldian terms, private coyping is a privilege for consumers, not a right that would be associated with a duty on the part of rightsholders.

The decision doesn’t come as a big surprise, although many European scholars have put forward the argument–or at least examined it at great length–that private copying could actually be more than a privilege.

The report goes on:

However, the Court of Appeal indicated that this exception can be used as a reasonable defence in the case of alleged counterfeit, if the other legal conditions are fulfilled.

From the perspective of law enforcement, the “right” to make private copies confers subjects immunity from liability for counterfeit.

By the way: The opt-in private copy exception to DRM protection under the EUCD (Art. 6(4)2) doesn’t make the privilege a right, but rather limits consumers’ liability for DRM circumvention.

In Switzerland, copyright expires 70 years after the known author’s death (50 years with respect to software), respectively 70 years after publication if the author is unknown throughout that period. The duration was 50 years (according to the 1922 Copyright Act) for authors who died before January 1st, 1943. No renewal, no formalities, no dividend.

Certainly, the appropriateness of the coyright terms’ length can be disputed under both legal regimes. And certainly, a U.S. lawyer or policymaker would find the Swiss solution utterly crude. On the other hand, I strongly believe that statutes may reach levels of sophistication that entail disproportionate costs to society. Just think of all the law students who have to learn the rules and of all the practitioners who have to apply them. Yet, in my view the worst thing is the legal uncertainty for non-professionals such sophistication creates:

High school student Barney, for instance, has become a big fan of Hemingway’s short stories and wants to put the ones he likes best online to share them with his Facebook buddies. He heard about copyright and that copyright has a limited term, so he googles for more information. But alas, if Tim Armstrong’s flowchart doesn’t appear as one of the top results, it’s very likely that Barney is discouraged and abandons his plan. Or he posts the stories anyway, despite being worried about media reports of students who have to pay high sums for copyright infringement.

In either case, Barney is the victim of legal rules too complicated to be practical, and he feels bad.

Or, to say this rather pathetically: The law should cause grief only to the bad and guilty, and certainly not to those who want to obey the rules.

The article also mentions that Steve Jobs has recently blamed the major labels for obliging Apple to impose DRM protection on iTunes, and that he would be happy to sell non-DRM’ed music.  EFF’s Jason Shultz doubts that this statement could be taken at face value.

At the current state of play it doesn’t seem to make much business sense to try to bind consumers to iPods through iTunes:  First, the vast majority of songs played on iPods is not DRMed, and–as anti-DRM activists rightly claim–it is logically impossible to prevent the use of non-DRMed music by selling DRMed music.  Second, iPods somehow appear to be cooler than a) iTunes files and b) MP3 players of Apple’s competitors, and they’re expensive:  If a consumer wants to replace her iPod, I surmise that it would be cheaper in most cases to replace it by a no-name player and either burn-and-rip her iTunes or buy the respective songs at another online music store, than buying a new iPod.

My take on the story is that Steve Jobs’ statement is compatible with Apple’s business interests–at least in the short or mid-term.  The situation would only be different if a) the next generation of iPods is a flop or if b) non-DRMed music were not available anymore.

1. Jim Moore’s video on YouTube.
2. 10,000+ articles/posts on the story that will eventually go the way of everything on the web–to the Internet Archive.
3. A loss of reputation on the part of Viacom (allbeit certainly limited both in terms of time and audience).

I’m not quite sure whether Viacom was aware of this reputation risk when it decided to send cease-and-desist letters to Youtube. But the big echo this case has caused hopefully will change that and thus lead to a more targeted use of cease-and-desist letters under the DMCA. And the risk isn’t likely to decrease in the future, as the community is organizing around takedowns.

By the way, it would be interesting to know which risk a corporate compliance risk manager would quantify as higher: the risk of having to pay compensation under DMCA § 512(f) (see latter part of this post by J.P.) or the reputation risk associated with sending unjustified cease-and-desist letters.

The judgment (no English translation available anymore), which is summarized here, essentially declared illegal the seizure of Sony Playstation consoles that use modified chips to permit uses of the console not authorized by Sony, e.g. playing disks with a different regional code.

Delivering one of the most consumer-friendly decisions in Europe in the realm of digital copyright and anti-circumvention laws, Judge Edoardo Mori made a hilarious metaphor worth keeping in mind. He wrote:

Sarebbe un po’ come se la Fiat vendesse un’auto con il divieto di uso per extracomunitari e per strade extraurbane.

which can be translated as:

This would be a bit as if Fiat* sold a car, but prohibited its use by non E.U. residents and on highways.

Indeed, GPS might make it possible to design such a technical protection measure. The legal problem in this scenario would be, however, that nothing on a Fiat car seems original enough to be copyrightable subject-matter …

*) Fiat is the Italian equivalent to a Chevy, just smaller.

“Karen McCullagh, PhD student at the Cathie March Center for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester, is doing a survey on privacy attitudes and behavior of bloggers. Besides, some of the questions also deal with copyright issues.

This empirical work is very important because it will enable me to critically assess whether I’m on the right track with privacy legislation, especially in Europe!

So please take the survey if you have your own blog.

Thanks,

The Law.”

“One might imagine a process by which citizens who create user-generated content (think of a single YouTube video file or a syndicated vlog series, a podcast audio file or series of podcasts, a single online essay or a syndicated blog, a photo covering the perfectly captures a breaking news story or a series of evocative images, and so forth) might consistently adopt a default license (one of the CC licenses [...]) for all content that they create, with the ability also to adopt a separate license for an individual work that they may create in the future.

In addition to choosing this license (or these licenses) for their work, these users registered this work or these works, with licenses attached, in a central repository. Those who wished to reproduce these works would be on notice to check this repository, ideally through a very simple interface (possibly “machine-readable” as well as “human-readable” and “lawyer-readable,” to use the CC language), to determine the terms on which the creator is willing to enable the work to be reproduced (though not affecting in any way the fair use, implied license, or other grounds via which the works might otherwise be reproduced).

Some benefits of such a system:

- It would not affect the existing rights of copyright holders (or the public, for that matter, on the other side of the copyright bargain), but rather ride on top of that system (which might have the ancillary benefit of eventually permitting a global market to emerge, if licenses can be transposed effectively);

- It would allow those who wish to clarify the terms on which they are willing to have their works reproduced to do so in a default manner (i.e., “unless I say otherwise, it’s BY-SA”) but also to carve out some specific works for separate treatment (i.e., “… but for this picture, I am retaining all rights”);

- It might provide a mechanism, supplemental to CC licenses, for handshakes to take place online without lawyers involved;

- It might be coupled with a marketplace for automated licensing — and possibly clearance services — from creators to those who wish to reproduce the works;

- It could be adopted on top of (and in a complementary manner with respect to) other systems, not just the copyright system at large as well as worthy services/aggregators of web 2.0 content, ranging from YouTube, software providers like SixApart, FeedBurner, Federated Media, Brad Feld’s posse of VCs, and so forth; and,

- It would represent a community-oriented creation of a market, which ultimately could support the development of a global market for both sharing and selling of user-generated content.”

John concludes:

“This system would not have much bearing on the Google/YouTube situation, but it might serve a key role in the development of web 2.0, or of user-generated content in general, and to help avoid a copyright trainwreck.”

I think, the main strength of this approach is — besides transparency and legal certainty — its potential for automatization of licensing. “Traditional” rightsholders as well as potentially liable intermediaries might be well advised to foster creating this system, as they could benefit from it themselves:

• Rightsholders could benefit in three ways: First, they could signal that they don’t want people to use their works for certain purposes, and that their works are n o t CC-licensed. Second, they could use the system to license their works for a fee.
• Intermediaries could prevent abuses of their notice-and-takedown mechanisms, for instance requiring that a work be listed in one of the central repositories/clearinghouses and that the rightsholder argue that the use of the work he or she wants to be taken down violates the terms of the machine-readable license.

More theoretically, it would be interesting to see if we can design a rights management layer to the internet whose default rule is on “open”, in contrast to the “closed” default rule of DRM protected works their protection by hardware.

In this way, John’s system could be very meaningful for Google, YouTube & Co. I hope that not only the intermediaries, but also the “copyright industry” have learned the copyright industry’s lesson of the late 90s/early 2000s, and that they will proactively help users in shaping copyright’s digital future.

• The mildly retarded consultant said once to Dilbert something along the lines that too much unstructured information is absolutely useless. (Falling in the category “how to hide things with words”.)
• The French (but not the Walloons, of course) say “c’est belge” if they find something not to be too intelligent.
• Another one of my favorite cartoon characters, Obelix (who is also French, like Jean Baptiste), would say instead: “Ils sont fous, les Belges”.

What I do like about the court order, though, is its symbolism: Like no other company, Google takes pride in its minimalistic front page design. Overloading that page with information 99.99 % of users don’t care about (i.e. all but the litigating parties and some information lawyers) is thus a very subtle way for a national court to demonstrate its power over a global company that has the ambition of making any information that is available, be it on the internet or in libraries, searchable and useful.

Sometimes, there is a fine line between obvious stupidity and subtle irony …

Since the post will be gone soon, here’s a screenshot of its upper half: