Digital Discourse / Policy / Policy - Intellectual Property

This Week in IP Enforcement

February 27, 2013 By

Copyright Alert System Goes Into Effect (The Washington Post)
The Center for Copyright Information launched the Copyright Alert System this week, with the cooperation of five major Internet service providers, in an attempt to curb copyright infringement online by going after consumers instead of pirates.

Software Firms Go to Washington to Defend Patents (CIO)
Representatives from various software companies said in a Capitol Hill briefing that lawmakers and judges shouldn’t solve current controversies by eliminating software patents altogether, but instead look at ways to improve patent quality, make it tougher for patent licensing firms to file infringement lawsuits and require companies to be transparent about the patents they hold.

New Internet Domains to Start Rolling Out in Mid-2013 (PCMagazine)
ICANN, the Web’s governing body, will open a trademark clearinghouse starting March 26 in an effort to resolve any trademark disputes when new generic top-level domains (gTLD) are rolled out mid-2013.

Indie Bookstores Sue Amazon, Big-6 Publishers for Using DRM on Ebooks (paidContent)
Three independent bookstores have filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon and the big-six publishers, alleging that the proprietary DRM Amazon uses on ebooks creates a monopoly.

RIAA Not Impressed With Google’s Anti-Piracy Efforts (PCMagazine)
The RIIA says it has found no evidence that Google has followed through with a plan to demote sites with pirated content, despite millions of copyright removal requests over the last six months.

Keith Kupferschmid is General Counsel and SVP, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Anti-Piracy, Policy - Intellectual Property

Reps. Schiff & Goodlatte: Thanks for the IP Protection Shout Out

February 25, 2013 By

SIIA thanks Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) for urging Congress to help protect IP. Last week, they sent a letter to fellow representatives that highlighted the economic impact of copyright theft, and asked for participation in the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus. Schiff said in a statement to POLITICO that the caucus will continue working to cut the cash flow for pirating websites.

SIIA looks forward to working with administration and congressional leaders to fight intellectual property theft and protect American businesses, exports, and jobs.

Laura Greenback is Communications Director at SIIA. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team at @SIIAPolicy.

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This Week in IP Enforcement

February 20, 2013 By

Expert Working Group on gTLD Directory Services Members Selected (AG-IP-News)
Members for ICANN’s Expert Working Group on gTLD Directory Services have been selected, and the group will begin work immediately to help redefine the purpose and provision of gTLD registration data.

Anti-Piracy Group Welcomes Pirate Bay Lawsuit (Wired)
The Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC), an anti-piracy group accused of infringing The Pirate Bay’s copyright, has said that a lawsuit from The Pirate Bay could benefit anti-piracy campaigners by forcing the site’s anonymous operators to identify themselves by name.

In Lawsuit With Publishers, Open Textbook Startup Boundless Hits Back (paidContent)
Facing a lawsuit alleging such violations as copyright infringement, unfair competition and false advertising from publishers Pearson, Cengage and Macmillan, open textbook startup Boundless has requested a trial by jury after a judge denied its motion to dismiss.

EA and Zynga Quietly Resolve Copyright Dispute Out of Court (All Things D)
In federal court, all lawsuits related to Electronic Arts’ claim that Zynga copied one of its Facebook games were dismissed. EA filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Zynga in August, charging that Zynga’s social game called The Ville was an “unmistakable copy” of EA’s The Sims Social.

As 3-D Printing Becomes More Accessible, Copyright Questions Arise (NPR)
As 3-D printers and 3-D scanners get cheaper and become more available, this nascent industry could be roiled by battles over intellectual property.

USC Report Finds a Shift in Advertiser-Supported Piracy (Los Angeles Times)
In the latest reports on advertising-supported online piracy, USC says two major distributors of ads online – Google and OpenX – have “significantly reduced the number of infringing sites they are placing ads on,” but that smaller ad networks have rushed in to fill the gap.

Keith Kupferschmid is General Counsel and SVP, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Anti-Piracy, Policy - Intellectual Property

Obama on Patent Reform: We’re Not Done Yet, Patent Trolls Need to be Reined In

February 15, 2013 By

SIIA thanks President Obama for taking on patent trolls in yesterday’s Google+ Hangout. Obama said that patent reform was only a partial fix to the patent troll problem, and argued that more needs to be done to stop these abusive patent lawsuits. He said:

“[Patent trolls] don’t actually produce anything themselves. They’re just trying to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.”

Though the passage of the America Invents Act in 2011 was an effective first step in addressing the problem of abusive patent litigation by trolls, we agree with Obama that more must be done. Patent trolls continue to damage the economy, hurt America’s tech industry, and threaten innovation. Obama continued:

“There’s a delicate balance between protecting intellectual property and making sure people aren’t ruined financially by patent trolls. What we need to do is pull together additional stakeholders and see if we can build some additional consensus on smarter patent laws.”

In December, SIIA joined with several other trade associations in issuing a call for action against abusive patent lawsuits, in a letter to the Congressional leaders who led the passage of patent reform in 2011. We welcome any opportunity to build consensus on this vital issue.

Watch the full Hangout:

Laura Greenback is Communications Director at SIIA. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team at @SIIAPolicy.

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This Week in IP Enforcement

February 13, 2013 By

Google Must Extend Payments Across Europe for Use of Content (Reuters)
The head of the European Publishers Council says Google must extend its offer to pay French publishers for use of their content to all media companies across Europe.

Feds Urge Supreme Court to Let Stand $222K Landmark File-Sharing Verdict (Wired)
The Obama administration urged the Supreme Court to let stand a $222,000 jury verdict levied against Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a Minnesota woman who downloaded and shared two dozen copyrighted songs on the now-defunct file-sharing site Kazaa.

Google Joins JPMorgan in Seeking Software Patent Limits (Bloomberg)
A U.S. appeals court specializing in patent law heard arguments about how to distinguish software innovations from programs that computerize unpatentable ideas. Companies including Google, Facebook, and JPMorgan Chase say patent standards for software are too lax and lead to expensive litigation.

Maryland Proposal to Claim Copyright on Students’ Work Prompts Backlash, Legal Review (Fox News)
A recent proposal by a Maryland county’s school board would give them the copyright to anything created by teachers, students and employees before, during and after school hours. The draft policy prompted a backlash from teachers and education activists, causing the board to put the policy on hold pending a more thorough legal review.

Oracle vs Google Legal War Begins a New Chapter (Thomson Reuters)
Oracle says a U.S. judge erred when he threw out its billion-dollar copyright claim against Google over parts of the Java programming language that Google incorporated into the Android mobile platform.

IIPA Recommends Designation of Ukraine as Priority Country in Copyright Piracy (Kyiv Post)
The International Intellectual Property Alliance recommended that USTR designate Ukraine as a Priority Foreign Country as a result of severe legal and copyright enforcement problems.

Keith Kupferschmid is General Counsel and SVP, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Anti-Piracy, Policy - Intellectual Property

This Week in IP Enforcement

February 6, 2013 By

SIIA Comments to the US Copyright Office on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization (PDF)

SIIA on First Sale at the State of the Net Conference: AUDIO (SIIA Digital Discourse)

Google Settles French Copyright Complaint (CNET)
To resolve a copyright dispute with French news publishers over the news snippets that appear in its search results, Google has agreed to dump 60 million euros into a digital publishing innovation fund and help the publishers increase revenue through online ads.

Amazon Wins Broad Patent to Create Marketplace for Used Digital Content (paidContent)
Amazon has won a patent for an electronic marketplace where users can resell digital content, but it is unclear whether such a marketplace would be legal under current copyright law.

“Six Strikes” Boss Insists New System Won’t Harm Public Wi-Fi (Ars Technica)
As the launch of the “six strikes” copyright alert system nears, the group in charge of the effort, the Center for Copyright Information, has had to respond to reports that the system could hurt small businesses by throttling the speed of their Wi-Fi connections. CCI insists that the new alert system will not harm public Wi-Fi.

Anti-Piracy Site Claims Small, 40 Percent Victory in Anti-Mega Campaign (Ars Technica)
StopFileLockers.com, an anti-piracy group that attempts to take down file-hosting services by attacking their finances, says it has already made progress in its campaign to have the payment processing of all Mega resellers terminated.

Keith Kupferschmid is General Counsel and SVP, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Anti-Piracy, Policy - Intellectual Property

Text Mining Revolutionizes Academic Research

February 4, 2013 By

The benefits of big data analytics extend well beyond the uses by businesses and governments.  As the following examples illustrate, the version of data analytics known as text mining is an essential part of how the scholarly and scientific community does its research.

A well-known research finding, cited in the recent Hathitrust decision, illustrates the benefits of text mining in literary and historical research.  By comparing the frequency with which authors used “is” to refer to the United States rather than “are” researchers were able to conclude that it was only in the second half of the 19th Century that we began to think of our nation as a single, indivisible entity.

A recent New York Times piece highlighted further examples of how big data analytics can be used to ferret out hidden patterns in literary works.  One study by Matthew Jockers found that Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scot had the greatest effect on other 19th Century authors in terms of writing style and themes.  This conclusion was based on an analysis of 3,592 works published from 1780 to 1900.  Professor Jockers also identified the dominant themes in The Last of the Mohicans and Moby Dick, and compared them with themes in all 10,000 novels published in the 19th century. He documents this  fascinating style of literary detective work in his forthcoming book Macroanalysis: Methods for Digital Literary History.

Now Professor Jockers and other researchers could have read all those works and used the subtle skills of traditional literary criticism to detect the commonalities among the authors.  But the volume of text material is simply too large for these traditional skills. As a practical matter, this kind of analysis would never happen without reliance on text mining.

Text mining is different from data mining in that it works with unstructured data.  Data mining can uncover interesting patterns in data bases where information is uniformly formatted.  It can be used, for example, to discover fraud patterns in credit card data, or detect what purchases typically go together (a flashlight and batteries, for example).  Text mining works with unstructured natural language text (which comprises about 80% of the data on the Internet) and extracts useful information and insights that can be used for a wide variety of purposes in business, government and university research. A further example of the use of this technique in the research context is the text mining of scientific journals that has allowed scientists to hypothesize causes of rare diseases by looking for indirect links in different subsets of the bioscience literature.

What are the implications for public policy?  One question is whether companies and researchers are getting access to text for legitimate analytical purposes. Are there roadblocks that need to be overcome? Some have suggested exceptions to copyright law in some cases to enable text and data mining. There was a hint of this idea in the European Commission’s recent announcement of its copyright reform initiative.

Market place participants –researchers, publishers, data aggregators and analytics companies – are well positioned to work out satisfactory arrangements to assure the flow of text to important analytical uses.  In principle, these voluntary arrangements should satisfy all parties and assure the discipline of market mechanisms in making sure that text is put to its best uses.  And the marketplace is well on its way toward allowing parties to reach satisfactory arrangements.  According to the U.K. Publishers Association, for example, over 90% of publishers already grant mining requests based on research across academic and professional publications and a third already allow any kind of mining of their content without restrictions.

Governments should not override these voluntary market mechanisms that seem to be working to provide the access to text information needed by researchers and other organizations.

Mark MacCarthy, Vice President, Public Policy at SIIA, directs SIIA’s public policy initiatives in the areas of intellectual property enforcement, information privacy, cybersecurity, cloud computing and the promotion of educational technology. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team on Twitter at @SIIAPolicy

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Filed Under: Policy, Policy - Intellectual Property
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