TPP - yet more internet shackling IP legislation.

[Drex]

more like the who-go awards. the doctor's wife wasn't even that good. U-stream's official response is even worse than the stream takedown though, lol. apparently they basically hand the website's keys to 3rd party vendors when it comes to the banhammer and can't overrule the decisions the bots make? what a stupid way to run a website, regardless of the legal environment.

of course none of that is relevant to "draconian" IP laws or whatever because there was nothing illegal about the stream. it's more like what happens when terrible programmers push out shit code and no one checks to see if it works.

[Cantih]

It keeps happening

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...t-holder.shtml

Here we go again. Less than 24 hours ago, content-protection bots killed a livestream of the Hugo Awards, thanks to the brief appearance of fully approved clips from an episode of Dr. Who. The whole situation was completely absurd to anyone harboring the tiniest vestige of common sense, but IP-protection software isn't built on common sense: it's built on algorithms.

This time, content protection via crawling bots have taken down another approved, perfectly legal stream. The victim this time? The Democratic National Convention's official stream, hosted at YouTube. As Wired reports, if you're looking to catch up on last night's activities, including a speech by Michelle Obama, don't bother:

The video, posted by the official YouTube account for the convention, DemConvention2012, was blocked, according to YouTube, for ostensibly infringing on the copyright of one of many possible suspects:

This video contains content from WMG, SME, Associated Press (AP), UMG, Dow Jones, New York Times Digital, The Harry Fox Agency, Inc. (HFA), Warner Chappell, UMPG Publishing and EMI Music Publishing, one or more of whom have blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.
Sorry about that.

When contacted by Wired for comment, Erica Sackin, an Obama campaign staffer who works on digital outreach, had no knowledge of the outage, asked this reporter for the url and then upon seeing the takedown, said, "I'll have to call you back."

The video has since been updated to state that "This video is private." There's probably quite a bit going on behind the scenes at the moment, but fortunately Wired snagged the complete list of claimants for future reference.

[MaachaQ]

Not exactly related, but since it involves copyrights and possible legal changes, I thought I'd put it here.

http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012...ohn-wiley-sons

Your right to resell your own stuff is in peril
Jennifer Waters's Consumer Confidential
It could become illegal to resell your iPhone 4, car or family antiques
October 04, 2012|Jennifer Waters, MarketWatch

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) — Tucked into the U.S. Supreme Court’s busy agenda this fall is a little-known case that could upend your ability to resell everything from your grandmother’s antique furniture to your iPhone 4.

At issue in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons is the first-sale doctrine in copyright law, which allows you to buy and then sell things like electronics, books, artwork and furniture as well as CDs and DVDs, without getting permission from the copyright holder of those products.

Under the doctrine, which the Supreme Court has recognized since 1908, you can resell your stuff without worry because the copyright holder only had control over the first sale.

Put simply, though Apple has the copyright on the iPhone and Mark Owen does on the book “No Easy Day,” you can still sell your copies to whomever you please whenever you want without retribution.

That’s being challenged now for products that are made abroad and if the Supreme Court upholds an appellate court ruling it would mean that the copyright holders of anything you own that has been made in China, Japan or Europe, for example, would have to give you permission to sell it.

“It means that it’s harder for consumers to buy used products and harder for them to sell them,” said Jonathan Bland, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association for Research Libraries. “This has huge consumer impact on all consumer groups.”

Another likely result is that it would hit you financially because the copyright holder would now want a piece of that sale.

It could be your personal electronic devices or the family jewels that have been passed down from your great-grandparents who immigrated from Spain. It could be a book that was written by an American writer but printed and bound overseas or an Italian painter’s artwork.

It has implications for a variety of wide-ranging U.S. entities including libraries, musicians, museums and even resale juggernauts eBay and Craigslist. U.S. libraries, for example, carry some 200 million books from foreign publishers.

“It would be absurd to say anything manufactured abroad can’t be bought or sold here,” said Marvin Ammori, a First Amendment lawyer and Schwartz Fellow at the New American Foundation who specializes in technology issues.

The case stems from Supap Kirtsaeng’s college experience. A native of Thailand, Kirtsaeng came to the U.S. in 1997 to study at Cornell University. When he discovered that his textbooks, produced by Wiley, were substantially cheaper to buy in Thailand than they were in Ithaca, N.Y., he rallied his Thai relatives to buy the books and ship them to him in the U.S.

He then sold them on eBay, making upwards of $1.2 million, according to court documents.

Wiley, which admitted that it charged less for books sold abroad than it did in the U.S., sued him for copyright infringement. Kirtsaeng countered with the first-sale doctrine.

In August 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a lower court’s ruling that anything that was manufactured overseas is not subject to the first-sale principle. Only American-made products or “copies manufactured domestically” were.

“That’s a non free-market capitalistic idea for something that’s pretty fundamental to our modern economy,” Ammori said.

Both Ammori and Bland worry that a decision in favor of the lower court would lead to some strange, even absurd consequences.

For example, it could become an incentive for manufacturers to have everything produced overseas because they would be able to control every resale.

It could also become a weighty issue for auto trade-ins and resales, considering about 40% of most U.S.-made cars carry technology and parts that were made overseas.

This is a particularly important decision for the likes of eBay and Craigslist, whose very business platform relies on the secondary marketplace. If sellers had to get permission to peddle their wares on the sites, they likely wouldn’t do it.

Moreover, a major manufacturer would likely go to eBay to get it to pull a for-sale item off the site than to the individual seller, Ammori said.

In its friend-of-the-court brief, eBay noted that the Second Circuit’s rule “affords copyright owners the ability to control the downstream sales of goods for which they have already been paid.” What’s more, it “allows for significant adverse consequences for trade, e-commerce, secondary markets, small businesses, consumers and jobs in the United States.”

Ammori, for one, wonders what the impact would be to individual Supreme Court justices who may buy and sell things of their own.

“Sometimes it’s impossible to tell where things have been manufactured,” said Ammori, who once bought an antique desk from a Supreme Court justice. “Who doesn’t buy and sell things? Millions of Americans would be affected by this.”

If the Supreme Court does rule with the appellate court, it’s likely the matter would be brought to Congress to force a change in law. Until then, however, consumers would be stuck between a rock and a hard place when trying to resell their stuff.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on the case on Oct. 29.

[archibaldcrane]

It should be 100% legal to crack open anything you own and modify the piss out of it. You bought it, you own it. Whether or not you'll get support for warranty service is a completely different scenario. But the point stands: if I wanted to turn my PS3 into a Pop-Tart toaster oven, fuck Sony right in their neck... I'll have some goddamn hot Pop-Tarts shooting out of my PS3 and Sony can suck my balls if they don't like it.

Felt this was appropriate.

[kuronosan]

Seriously, how the fuck did our country go from consumer driven to company driven?

[ronin sparthos]

Just wanna point out that the law pertains to products bought outside the US and resold here.

Not that it changes anything or diminishes the reality that companies are slowly marching towards an ideal in which everything you purchase forever ties you to the organization legally but it's still a distinction worth mentioning.

[archibaldcrane]

I don't understand the justification for that distinction.

[Salodin]

Slippery slope? Can't resell imported items, why not ban reselling items bought here?

Or their will be a loophole that if the company operates outside the country as well as inside, that it bans reselling items from that company as well.

[Dimmauk]

Wait a sec, don't companies buy shit overseas, and re-sell them to us? WTF?!

[Acevalefor]

This won't happen. All it will do is create the biggest black market since 1989. The real story is that this company is mad that a college guy figured out how to buy low and sell high; effectively beating the company at their own game.

The spirit of the law is to stop people from buying items from American companies from foreign countries then reselling them here in America at a profit. What the law really does is stop anybody and everybody from selling their used stuff legally. It gives corporations free reign to decide what happens to their products and the people who buy them long after that first sale.

I wonder how I am supposed to sell that 200 year-old grandfather clock whose maker has long since gone out of business....

[ronin sparthos]

I don't understand the justification for that distinction.

Because people are freaking out thinking it applies to domestic resales likr flipping ipads or copies of games throught outlets like amazon or ebay.

Like I said before its an overreach by companies that support it but lets at least get the facts straight.

[kuronosan]

Because people are freaking out thinking it applies to domestic resales likr flipping ipads or copies of games throught outlets like amazon or ebay.

Like I said before its an overreach by companies that support it but lets at least get the facts straight.

If you really think this won't affect the little guy you're naive.

[BaneTheBrawler]

Because corporations have shown so much restraint when it comes to taking advantage of questionable laws like this.

[Restrat]

Also for the law, big companies wouldn't have a problem getting permission from the copyright owners for resale

[ronin sparthos]

If you really think this won't affect the little guy you're naive.

All I was doing was pointing out the fact. We're free to make assumptions and I have my own suspicions but that isn't relevant to the facts of the case.

For the record, I do think it'll affect the little guy as it's a slow march towards a goal of control over products we "buy" from organizations. You own nothing, they own everything.

[BaneTheBrawler]

16 tons, etc

[The Stig]

On the subject of buying/reselling, something recently happened in Europe between Oracle and UsedSoft GmbH ... the press document is as follows. I don't think it was mentioned here at all:

http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/d...cp120094en.pdf

tl;dr: company buys an app from Oracle with 25 licenses. company sells unused licenses. oracle gets pissy and takes them to court. oracle loses.

To quote, pasting from a PDF, quite messy:

An author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licences allowing the
use of his programs downloaded from the internet
The exclusive right of distribution of a copy of a computer program covered by such a licence is
exhausted on its first sale
Oracle develops and distributes, in particular by downloading from the internet, computer programs
functioning as ‘client-server software’. The customer downloads a copy of the program directly onto
his computer from Oracle’s website. The user right for such a program, which is granted by a
licence agreement, includes the right to store a copy of the program permanently on a server and
to allow up to 25 users to access it by downloading it to the main memory of their work-station
computers. The licence agreement gives the customer a non-transferable user right for an
unlimited period, exclusively for his internal business purposes. On the basis of a maintenance
agreement, updated versions of the software (updates) and programs for correcting faults
(patches) can also be downloaded from Oracle’s website.

UsedSoft is a German undertaking which markets licences acquired from customers of Oracle.
Customers of UsedSoft who are not yet in possession of the software download it directly from
Oracle’s website after acquiring a ‘used’ licence. Customers who already have that software can
purchase a further licence or part of a licence for additional users. In that case they download the
software to the main memory of the work stations of those other users.
Oracle brought proceedings against UsedSoft in the German courts, seeking an order for it to
cease those practices. The Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice, Germany), which has to
rule on the dispute as court of final instance, made a reference to the Court of Justice for it to
interpret, in this context, the directive on the legal protection of computer programs


Under that directive, the first sale in the EU of a copy of a computer program by the copyright
holder or with his consent exhausts the right of distribution of that copy in the EU. A rightholder
who has marketed a copy in the territory of a Member State of the EU thus loses the right to rely on
his monopoly of exploitation in order to oppose the resale of that copy. In the present case, Oracle
claims that the principle of exhaustion laid down by the directive does not apply to user licences for
computer programs downloaded from the internet.
By its judgment delivered today, the Court explains that the principle of exhaustion of the
distribution right applies not only where the copyright holder markets copies of his
software on a material medium (CD-ROM or DVD) but also where he distributes them by
means of downloads from his website.

[thetruepandagod]

http://www.finance.senate.gov/newsro...6-3fc139121ca9

Trans Pacific Partnership fast track has been introduced to the senate.