Shifting from Downloads to Streaming

Apple in advanced talks to buy Beats Music

Apple has established itself as the most profitable digital music downloads seller for most of the world over the course of just 10 years. Recently, the trend has shifted from downloading to streaming of music according to IFPI, the recording industry trade group. IFPI data indicated the streaming revenue has reached more than $1 billion and has tripled since 2010. 

As always, Apple will try to outpace competitors, this time Apple is in advanced talks with Beats Electronics to acquire the headphone maker and streaming-music service for $3.2 billion. Beats Music app is just a few months old and only available in US. The app, which lets subscribers stream more than 20 million tracks. Beats Music recently placed an ad on Super Bowl.

Comments:

This seems like a ever changing industry, particularly in entertainment industry. Online streaming is getting popular and it is replacing downloading (legal and illegally) fast. What are the impacts on copyrights protection law? The question of the legality of streaming films or musics online. Beats Music demonstrated how to do it legally for digital streaming service. Beats music has deals with all major record companies, thus they charge the user by on-demand streaming. Users downloads songs and play songs locally on their own devices. Due to Digital rights management (DRM), the songs will not playable after expiration of the subscription.  This is all according to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to impose criminal penalties on those who make available technologies to circular copyright contents digitally. So, it is still illegal for you to upload copyrighted movies or songs for streaming; And to be prosecuted by doing that, you have to be big! At least that is what has happened in U.S.

Sources:
1. www.forbes.com/sites
2. 9to5mac.com/sites
3. www.ifpi.org/digital-music-report.php
4. Ellen Reveals Her Beats Music Super Bowl Commercial

“Happy Birthday” song was copyrighted!

Do you know that “Happy Birthday” song was copyrighted?

Apparently, the song copyright is owned by Warner/ Chappell Music. Based on the 1935 copyright registration, the copyright will not expire until 2030 in the United Stated. In United States, if all the necessary documentations of the copyright  papers appeared upon publication and proper renewal was filed, the duration of copyright is tied together with the publication date. Thus the song will pass into the public domain only after the end of 2030. Until then, that means that you need to pay royalties to Warner Music if you intended to play the song publicly, such as playing the song at the restaurant. though the validity of the copyright of the song have been questions and some even challenged it in court, up until now, it has proven more cost effective to just pay Warner Music to use the song than take the case to court. 

Pertaining to cyberspace law:

In US, The copyright protection law is under the Copyright Act 1976 and the Congress there passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) in 1998 to cater issue of copyright pertaining to cyberspace, notably in music industry where the fear of the loss of sales due to file sharing in internet. In Malaysia, the legal provisions for cyberspace copyright issues, including copyright infringement, are dealt under the Copyright Act 1987 (CA 1987). Copyright infringement occurs when one copies the original work as a whole or substantially. Section 3 of CA 1987 defines copyright infringement as reproducing of any work eligible for copyright without consent from the copyright holder. However, under the concept of fair dealing there is this exemption for others to use the work without obtaining consent from the copyright holder, e.g. for the purposes of private study, non-profit research , criticism, review, or the reporting of current events. But if such uses are for public benefit, the work must be accompanied by an acknowledgment of the title of the work and its authorship (Section 13(2)(a) of CA 1987) will be sufficient. The Copyright Act (Amendment) 1997 is the expansion on the CA 1987 to expand the scope of copyright over the internet.

Link:
http://www.myipo.gov.my/hakcipta-akta

Righthaven LL vs Jama ( April 2011)

A non profit organization posted a newspaper article about police discrimination on its website. The newspaper assigned its right in the article to a third party, Righthaven, who filed the lawsuit.

Reasonings:

Righthaven had acquired the copyright and was not in the newspaper business ( it appeared to be in the litigation business).

Court points out that the nonprofit's use was transformative because its purpose was to educate the public about immigration issues, whereas Righthaven had no such purpose for the article because it was not in the news business.

Since Righthaven was not in the news business, it could show no harm from the defendant's dissemination of the article.


Own Opinion 

This will be a case of fair use. since there is no profit gain from posting the article and by doing so , does not affect the effect the future of the newspaper since the plaintiff and defendant are not from safe field.

Google Settles Youtube Copyright Lawsuit With Viacom

NEW York: Google has settled a landmark copyright lawsuit in which Viacom accused the internet search company of posting its programmes on YouTube without permission.

The settlement was announced 11 months after US district judge Louis Stanton in Manhattan rejected Viacom's damages claims over Google's alleged posting of clips from 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart', ' South Park', SpongeBob SquarePants' and other programmes that viewer had uploaded to Youtube.

Viacom, a global mass media company, had been appealing that decision to the 2nd US circuit Court of Appeals in New York. Oral argument had been scheduled for March 24, according to court records.

Viacom had originally filed a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube and others in 2007, accusing YouTube of broadcasting 79,000 copyrighted videos on its website between 2005 and 2008.

The case tested the reach of federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) law that made it illegal to produce technology to circumvent anti-piracy measured, but limited liability of online service providers for copyright infringement by users.

In ruling against Viacom for the second time in three years, Stanton had concluded in his April 2013 decision that Google and YouTube had been protected from Viacom's copyright claim by "Safe Labour" provisions in the law.

Own Opinion

YouTube is the world's top 1 video sharing site, hence cases such as video copyright infringement is a norm that happens almost everyday. Such video sharing sites does not have perfect methods to detect infringement hence we can expect some exemption with terms such as the "safe harbour provision for online storage". 

However the copyright owner should inform the OSPs once He/She noticed infringement happened on their intellectual property and request the OSPs to take down the material shall there is no consent from the owner for such distribution. 

Source: Indiatimes - Google Settles Youtube Copyright Lawsuit With Viacom

Links : Wikipedia : DMCA (Safe Harbor)

Rogers Vs. Koons

Art Rogers, Puppies (left) , Jeff Koons, String of Puppies (right)

Photographer Art Rogers shot a photo of a couple holding a line of puppies in a row and sold it for use in greeting cards and other similar products. Jeff Koons who are renowned artist internationally ran across Rogers photograph when he is in the process of creating an exhibit on the banality of everyday items. Koons used Rogers photo and created several statues based on the image and managed to sold it for a large profit. Upon the discovery of the copy, Rogers filed a suit against Koons for copyright infringement dated October 1991. Koon defend himself by claiming fair use by parody.

Outcome

The court Found substantial similarity and that koons had access to the picture. The similarity was so close that the average lay person would recognize the copying, a measure of evaluation. Thus the sculpture was found to be a copy of the work of Rogers.

On the issue of fair use, the court rejected the parody argument, as Koons could have constructed his parody of that general type of art without copying Rogers specific work. That is, Koons was no commenting on Rogers' work specifically, and so his copying of that work did not fall under the fair use exception.

Discussion

Can you use other's photography for own use ? 

With the rapid development of search engines such as google , yahoo, bing, etc... we can get a hold of tons of photographs on internet that taken by professional photographer and normal netizen easily. The questions is " can we use the photograph we download from internet for purposes such as presentation , online advertising , art creation , etc ?"

We could have violate copyright laws if we used the photos without any consent and complying to the fair use terms as stated in the copyright law. 

Personal Comment

My opinion is , it is hard for us to determine whether we are violating copyright law when we copying photos from internet due to insufficient knowledge in law, So it is important for us to check the source of the photo and make sure there is a correct citation and credit for the original creator to be include in the assignments, presentation, works. Of cause, the best way to avoid copyright infringement is to create your own original art !

Source : Rogers. Vs Koons - Wikipedia

A&M Records,Inc. Vs Napster, Inc.

On 2nd October 2000, A list of plaintiffs including 18 records companies which also the members of Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a lawsuit against Napster, Inc. for contributory infringement and vicarious infringement of the plaintiff's copyrights. A&M Records, Inc. was listed as the main plaintiff in this case. This became a landmark intellectual property case when the court ruled against Napster, Inc and napster was ordered to shut down in July 2001 in order to comply with the injunction.

Case Background

Napster was founded as pioneer in peer-to-peer file sharing internet service that gain massive popularity as a way to sharing audio files, typically musics in MP3 format. The popularity of napster and its nature of business by sharing copyrighted musics has raise the ire of Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) who took issue with the large-scale distribution of their copyrighted music and sued Napster, Inc. for direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement of copyright in order to protect their intellectual property.

Outcomes

The court ruled against Napster as mentioned earlier.

Defence

Fair Use - is a defence to infringement codified at 17 U.S.C. § 107 which mentioned that infringing activities are permitted if pursued for purposes such as education, research, news reporting, comment, scholarship, etc..... The courts is to consider the following factors when determining whether the defence is met in a particular case:-

1. The purpose and character of the use, whether it is use for a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purpose;
2. The nature of copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in the relation of the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Reasoning

• Napster platform allows repeated and exploitative copying activites but no sales or any profit was gained for doing so , hence the first factor was on the favourite side.
• The material copied on napster's website were songs that is close to the core of creative works type which meant to be protected by copyright and the entire songs were downloaded which makes the factor 2 and 3 in against Napster.
• The music download activities produce harms to album sales, which surely in favourite of the plaintiff's position. and nailed the defeat of Napster in this case.

As result , Napster was ordered an injunction and commanded Napster to keep track and control of future infringing activities which Napster failed to comply and thus had to close down its service in July 2001.

Personal Opinion

The A&M Vs Napster Case had defined a rules of online, peer to peer file sharing networks which witness few other famous cases involving companies that conduct same nature of business as Napster such as Grokster, LimeWire, Morpheus, and KaZaA. However there are still some flaw in the intellectual property law as we can see there are still many more online p2p Sharing surviving legal suit battle. Among all , Pirate Bay is one of the famous company that are continuing battle for the future of internet file sharing.

Much more improvement on the IP laws have to be done to further improve the enforcement of Copyright Laws and uphold the future of music industry.

Perodua Filed Trademark "Axia" with MyIPO

Paul Tan's blog revealed the new Produa car's name as AXIS. The current No#1 National sedan car manufacturer Perodua has filed for the trademark "Axia" with the Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia (MyIPO). The application IP under class 12 suggested it is a car related registration.

Source:
Paul Tan Auto Blog- Perodua Axis