BSA Caught Using Infringing Image For Its 'Snitch' On Your Colleagues Anti-Piracy Campaign

from the hypocrites dept

For many years, we've written about the Business Software Alliance's (BSA) ridiculous snitch program. This is where the organization (which represents a bunch of software companies, but more or less takes its orders from Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and Autodesk) promises to give people large cash rewards for snitching on friends and colleagues who happen to be using unlicensed software. The BSA insists that this is one of their best tools -- which they then use to raid small companies for questionable "audits" that often completely destroy those businesses. The BSA forces those companies to pay huge sums of money -- all of which the BSA keeps. As for the claims of big rewards for snitches, the BSA is incredibly misleading on that front. A few years back, they started promising "up to $1 million" for snitching. In exchange, we promised "up to $1 million" if anyone could show the BSA actually paying out $1 million. Someone looking into the BSA's payments found that the highest they'd paid out to snitches at the time was around $5,000 with many getting less than that. In other words, the BSA has never had much of a reputation for intellectual honesty.

The good folks over at TorrentFreak have now also found that the BSA also appears to be a bunch of hypocrites as well. Having launched a new "snitch" campaign on St. Patrick's day, it appears that the organization failed to license the photo of the "pot of gold" it used on Facebook. Yes, that's right, on the very campaign where the BSA is asking people to snitch on unlicensed software, it appears to have used an unlicensed photo. The image appears to have come from CakeCentral. When Torrentfreak reached out to the BSA about the licensing of the photo, suddenly the image disappeared from the BSA's Facebook page replaced by an image of an obviously fake pile of money. That seems fitting, given that their promises of giving people lots of money is equally bogus. Either way, the BSA is lucky that photographers don't have an equivalent organization that busts down doors and suddenly demands huge payouts. I'm sure it was just an oversight by the BSA and that some intern or someone failed to get the license. But, the BSA itself never forgives such minor "oversights" by the small businesses it destroys with its snitch campaign.

Filed Under: copyright, hyprocrites, licensing, photographs, snitch
Companies: bsa

German Court Tells YouTube To Change 'Content Blocked' Notice After GEMA Complains About Its Hurt Feelings

from the oh,-so-you're-a-'crying-on-the-inside'-sort-of-thug dept

German YouTube users get to see a whole lot of the following rather than actual videos, thanks to the world's most aggressive PRO (performance rights organization).

GEMA, which has been engaged in litigation against YouTube for several years now in hopes of "negotiating" higher fees, has just secured a ridiculous decision in its favor from a German court that specifically targets the wording used in the "sorry 'bout that, Germans" message.

Time and again, users are informed that videos are blocked due to GEMA not granting the necessary music rights. As a result, GEMA has become very unpopular indeed.

Trying to remedy the situation, GEMA applied for an injunction to force YouTube to change the messages, claiming that they misrepresent the situation and damage GEMA’s reputation. YouTube alone is responsible for blocking the videos, claiming otherwise is simply false, GEMA argued.

Yesterday the District Court of Munich agreed with the music group and issued an injunction to force YouTube to comply, stating that the notices “denigrate” GEMA with a “totally distorted representation of the legal dispute between the parties.” Changing the message to state that videos are not available due to a lack of a licensing agreement between YouTube and GEMA would be more appropriate, the Court said.

Poor sweet, sensitive GEMA. It can't handle German users being told that the PRO has yet to grant the rights. Instead, it wants to make it look as though it's entirely YouTube's fault. It wants to pretend it hasn't spent a majority of the last half-decade battling and suing YouTube, the end result of which has been massive amounts of videos being blocked in Germany.

GEMA's complaint is every bit as ridiculous as that of an artist in a story we covered back in 2012, who claimed that YouTube's "content removed" notices somehow made the artists looks like the "bad guys" by listing the party responsible for the takedown in the message. In that case, this artist was upset that YouTube was doing exactly what he asked it to do: take down infringing content and notify the infringer that the content had been removed.

The same thing applies here. GEMA hasn't granted the rights to use this content, therefore it's blocked in Germany. But that heaps too much of the blame on GEMA's tiny shoulders, a burden GEMA (and now a German court) feels should be transferred to YouTube. This despite the fact that GEMA could have an agreement with YouTube, but because it's asking for $0.17 a stream (as compared to say, PRS, which receives $0.0034 per view), there's very little chance of it ever obtaining one. In the meantime, Germans will continue to see quizzically apologetic faces and court-ordered wording instead of videos. This ultimately has nothing to do with GEMA's faux concern for its stable of artists (don't forget: GEMA is opt-out, not opt-in, like other PROs) and everything to do with its public image.

GEMA's reputation isn't something it can salvage at this point and no amount of wording is going to change the fact that it's its own worst enemy, and pretty much the worst thing that has happened to 95% of its roster (the top 5% or so will continue to rake in cash -- as with every collection agency anywhere). That a PRO with this much power has the audacity to complain to the courts about its self-inflicted wounds shows it still holds very tightly to its outsized sense of entitlement. That a German court would oblige is unfortunate, but not really all that surprising.

No matter what the final wording reads, German artists and fans won't forget who's the real problem here.

Filed Under: gema, germany, licensing, pro
Companies: youtube

US Copyright Lobbyists Equate Fair Dealing To Piracy And Copyright Infringement

from the also:-our-jacked-up-rates-no-longer-as-lucrative-as-they-used-to-be dept

Access Copyright, the Canadian collection society that licenses publications for use in Canadian educational institutions, increased its per student rates 1,300% back in 2010. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the term "pricing yourself out of the market" could have predicted the inevitable outcome. Faced with suddenly exorbitant fees (that even covered stuff nominally outside of AC's purview -- like hyperlinks), Canadian universities dropped Access Copyright and began working to license educational materials without AC's assistance.

Access Copyright thought being the "only game in town" would prevent a mass exodus, but it soon became clear universities would be more than happy to deal with the complexities of direct licensing rather than take the easy route and be gouged by AC. (Fun fact: rates jumped 1,300% but less than 10% of these fees make their way back to the actual authors.) 14 of Canada's top 25 universities had dropped Access Copyright by the middle of 2011.

US publishers aren't happy with the outcome of Access Copyright's rate hike, which has resulted in a considerable revenue drop. Of course, they don't blame Access Copyright. In its submission for the 2014 Special 301 report (the report that serves as the copyright industries' naughty/nice list), IIPA (the uber trade group representing all of the other copyright maximalist trade groups) blames everyone and everything but Access Copyright.

As the Canadian education community continues to shift away from the Access Copyright licence, relying instead on a combination of site licenses for materials, open access, fair dealing, and individual transactional licences, U.S. publishers are now urging the U.S. government to pressure the Canadian government to take action.

Yep, the problem here is fair dealing (the Canadian version of fair use), open access and the universities' willingness to swim in the convoluted waters of individual licensing rather than be extorted by Access Copyright. A few long paragraphs from the submission detail US publishers' unhappiness with the current situation and their expectation that the US government will "do something" to restore its access to exorbitant licensing fees.

U.S. publishers serving the educational market with textbooks, journals and other materials are currently facing a comprehensive collapse of an important element of their Canadian market: licensing revenue for permission to copy works for educational uses. Well-established collective licensing mechanisms for administering such permissions are reeling under the combined impact of adverse judicial decisions and drastic legislative changes.

Interrupted here to note that US publishers do not consider a steep rate hike to be the problem. Instead they call out "judicial decisions" and "drastic legislative changes," ignoring the economic reality that if you suddenly jack up prices, customers tend to flee.

The Copyright Modernization Act added “education” to the list of purposes (such as research and private study) that qualify for the fair dealing exception. Because “education” is not defined, the amendment creates an obvious risk of unpredictable impacts extending far beyond teaching in bona fide educational institutions (and far beyond materials created specifically for use by such institutions).

Entities heavily vested in copyright protection hate exceptions…

Even before the fair dealing amendment came into force, some of the decisions in the “pentalogy” of copyright decisions issued by Canada’s Supreme Court in July 2012 posed a direct threat to the educational licensing market. These decisions underscored, among other things, that Canadian courts are to treat fair dealing, not as an exception, but as a “user’s right,” subject to a “large and liberal interpretation”; that the purposes of the putative user, not those of a commercial or non-commercial intermediary that actually makes the copy and supplies it to the user, are of primary relevance in determining whether a dealing is fair; and, that factors such as the availability of a license to make the use, and even the overall impact of widespread unlicensed use on the actual or potential markets for the work, carry much less weight in Canadian law than they do in U.S. fair use jurisprudence.

Canada has gone considerably farther than the US, viewing fair dealing both as a right and something subject to "liberal interpretation." The complaint here boils down to that last sentence: Canada's law isn't as restrictive as the US's and, therefore, must be forced into compliance by the US government.

Although the Alberta Education v. Access Copyright case in the Supreme Court’s pentalogy directly affected only a marginal aspect of the educational copying collective licenses — reprographic copying of a few pages per student per year of short excerpts of already purchased supplemental texts by K-12 teachers for use in class instruction — its ultimate impact has been much more destructive.

Only in the fevered mind of a maximalist is expanding fair use exceptions considered "destructive." Keep in mind that this is an industry that is actively begging its respective governments to help it make it more expensive to educate students.

Lawyers for primary and secondary school systems across Canada, giving both the precedents and the new fair dealing amendment the “large and liberal” reading that the pentalogy decisions encouraged, concluded that fair dealing now eliminates the need for them to obtain any license from a collecting society such as Access Copyright, including for uses such as copying of primary textbooks or of newspaper articles, course packs, digital copying (including digital storage and distribution through learning management systems), and copying for uses outside the classroom. Consequently, as soon as the new Act came into force, virtually all K-12 school boards across Canada cancelled their licenses with Access Copyright.

The publishers once again fail to consider the possibility that lower rates might have helped it retain more licensees. This isn't just because of legislation and court decisions. This is also the bleeding that normally results from an enormous, self-inflicted wound.

Anticipated 2013 annual licensing revenue of at least C$12 million to right holders and authors — much of it destined for U.S. publishers, which enjoy a large market share in the educational sector – evaporated. Similar legal advice was provided to post-secondary institutions, and many of them have declined to renew their Access Copyright licenses as they expire. Access Copyright negotiations with two of Canada’s largest universities — the University of Toronto and Western University – collapsed in recent weeks over this issue. The licensing revenue stream from higher education – historically larger than the K-12 revenue – is thus in immediate jeopardy...

Just in case anyone reading the submission might be unsure of whose interests are being protected, the publishers spell it out in black and white.

After stating its case against fair dealing, the publishers move on to their demands for government intervention.

Publishers are already re-assessing their planned investments in new materials for this core market. We urge the U.S. government to engage with Canadian authorities to ameliorate this threat to the entire educational publishing market in Canada, which is already having deleterious impacts on publishing revenue, investments and jobs on both sides of the border.

In other words, punish the Canadian government for Access Copyright's sins.

But all of this above isn't even the best/worst aspect of this submission. This long complaint about the whirlwind Access Copyright reaped after its 1,300% fee increase makes up the bulk of a subsection in the IIPA's submission. Guess what subheading the US publishers chose to place their attack on fair dealing under.

The Piracy and Infringement Situation in Canada – Offline

That's right. US publishers feel fair dealing exceptions are inseparable from piracy and infringement. Legal exceptions also known as the rights of users, backed by Canadian legislation and judicial decisions, are discussed (well, complained about) in a subsection supposedly dealing with infringing activity. By the time the US publishers have finished griping about fair dealing, there's hardly any room left to discuss actual infringement or piracy. But if you have any doubts about the mindset of US publishers when it comes to fair use exceptions, check this out. This is the last sentence of the last paragraph dealing with Access Copyright and fair dealing.

Even if some expanded uses are permitted, the appropriate balance must still be struck so that educational publishers are duly compensated for their works, thus ensuring a viable domestic \ marketplace for commercially-published educational materials.

This is the first sentence of the immediately following paragraph.

Serious piracy problems persist in Canada’s offline marketplace as well.

The annual Special 301 reports have always been a joke -- albeit an in-joke created by lobbyists and subservient government officials. If there was ever any doubt US copyright industries are lobbying hard for the US government to remake the world's IP laws in its own image, this long complaint about the "unfairness" of another country's fair dealing laws completely erases it.

Filed Under: canada, education, fair dealing, fair use, licensing, publishers, special 301 report, ustr
Companies: access copyright, iipa

Copyright, Invented To Combat Commercial Abuse, Has Become A Means Of Commercial Abuse

from the say-that-again dept

This post is from Jan Velterop, a long-time science publisher, who is one of earliest proponents of "open access" publishing. The following is actually a message he posted to an open access mailing list, which Mike Taylor republished. We asked if we, too, could republish it, and Velterop told us (as we tell people who ask us) that the work should be considered in the public domain, and to do what we want with it.

I've been following this discussion with increasing bemusement. Frankly, it's getting ridiculous, at least in my humble opinion. A discussion such as this one about licensing and copyright only serves to demonstrate that copyright, once conceived as a way to stimulate and enable science and the arts, has degenerated into a way to frustrate, derange and debilitate knowledge exchange.

I'm not the first one to point out that absolutely anything, under any copyright license or none, could be abused for evil purposes or, in more mild circumstances, lead to misunderstandings and accidental abuse. I agree with all those who said it.

The issue here is what science and scientific results stand for. Their purpose is emphatically not "to be copyrightable items." Copyright, invented to combat commercial abuse, has become a means of commercial abuse. The purpose of science and scientific results is to enrich the world's knowledge. Any commercial advantage – appropriate for industrially funded research – can be had by 1) keeping results secret (i.e. not publishing them), or 2) getting a patent. Science, particularly modern science, is nothing without a liberal exchange of ideas and information.

Ideally, scientific publications are not copyrightable at all, and community standards take care of proper acknowledgement. We don't live in an ideal world, so we have to get as close as we can to that ideal, and that is by ameliorating the insidious pernicious effects of copyright with CC-Zero and CC-BY licences.

The existence of the NC rider or stipulation for CC licences is unfortunate and quite damaging. Mainly because of the vagueness and ambiguity of what "commercial use" means. Ideas in published articles can be freely used for commercial purposes of any kind, as ideas are not copyrightable. Only "the way the ideas have been formulated" is covered by copyright, and thus by the NC clause in copyright licenses. In my interpretation, that means that most usage of published material that is not a straightforward selling of text or images can be freely done. But that's my interpretation. And that's exactly where it rubs, because all the NC clause does is introduce hypothetical difficulties and liabilities. As a result of which, NC practically means: "stay away from using this material, because you never know with all those predatory legal eagles around." In other words, it's virtually useless for modern, sophisticated scientific knowledge discovery, which doesn't just consist of reading papers any longer, but increasingly relies on the ability to machine-process large amounts of relevant information, as human ocular reading of even a fraction of the information is not possible anymore. At least not in most fast-moving areas of the sciences. Read this article, or similar ones, if you want to be convinced: "On the impossibility of being expert" BMJ 2010; 341 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c6815 (Published 14 December 2010 – unfortunately behind a paywall).

The taxpayer angle ("must be open because the taxpayer paid for it"), leading to Kent Andersonian notions of knowledge protectionism ("results of research paid by US taxpayers should not be available to non-US citizens unless they pay for it"), is a most unfortunate, visceral and primitive reaction and a complete red herring. For many reasons, not least because the taxpayer, or vicariously the taxman, isn't the party that pockets any money paid for paywalled information. Besides, how far do you go? Americans not being allowed to stay alive due to a cure that was developed with public money in Switzerland unless they pay through the nose for it to the Swiss tax authorities? The "as-long-as-I-am-well-the-rest-of-you-can-go-to-hell" personality disorder. The whole idea is so against the ethos of science that those even thinking in that direction must be taken to be utterly and entirely unsuitable to any role in the scientific community.

Access control and restriction via copyright was at best a necessary evil in the print era; the "necessary," though, has disappeared in the web environment.

Filed Under: copyright, creative commons, knowledge, licensing, open access, science

You Don't Own What You 'Bought': Disney And Amazon Play The Role Of The Grinch In Taking Back Purchased Film

from the ownership...-wazzat? dept

We've discussed many times before how, in the digital age, you no longer really seem to own what you've "bought." Instead, you're getting a temporary license, and at times that means that the copyright holder and partners can remove it. In a story making the rounds this week, it appears that Amazon pulled the film Prep and Landing 2 just in time for Christmas! The issue came up when Bill Jackson settled down to watch the video -- which he "bought" last year -- with his two kids, aged two and eight. It didn't work and he contacted Amazon to find out what was up. Despite the fact that when he paid the $3, he was told it was to allow him to "watch and re-watch as often as you like" Amazon told him that Disney had asked them to pull it, and they did so:

Amazon has explained to me that Disney can pull their content at any time and 'at this time they've pulled that show for exclusivity on their own channel.' In other words, Amazon sold me a Christmas special my kids can't watch during the run up to Christmas. It'll be available in July though!"

Amazon did give him a $25 credit as an apology, and then when the story started making news, Amazon changed its story claiming it was something else:

Amazon blamed the removal on "a temporary issue with some of our catalog data" which it says has been fixed, adding that "customers should never lose access to their Amazon Instant Video purchases."

"Should" never lose access is quite different from "will" never lose access. Just the fact that Amazon has the power to take back what you've bought should be a pretty big concern for those who think that they're actually buying what they've been told. As some have noted, Amazon's terms of service appear to give it the right to do exactly what the original version described:

Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions and for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming.

While it is true that buyers can download copies and this only impacted the streaming versions, it still seems rather troubling that people who thought they were buying something found out that they weren't. This is one of the many reasons why people are so concerned about these kinds of offerings. They know that you're no longer really "buying" anything, but getting a (very) limited license.

Filed Under: buying, copyright, licensing, movies, prep and landing 2, streaming
Companies: amazon, disney

YouTube Fails In Explaining Flood Of Takedowns For Let's Play Videos

from the not-how-to-do-this dept

Last week, there had been some rumors that YouTube was changing its policies around so-called "let's play" videos, with some arguing that "Google was implementing SOPA" when it came to let's play videos -- and that all videos would have to be previewed first to make sure there was no use of copyright-covered content. That seemed like a clear exaggeration, but over the past few days there have been numerous reports from a variety of different sources about how many of the biggest video game channels on YouTube were suddenly getting inundated with copyright claims, many of which people felt were bogus.

So what's happened? Well, it's not that YouTube "implemented SOPA." Rather it appears to be a combination of pushing out its ContentID "scanning" program to channels that are listed as affiliates to so-called "MCNs" (Multi-channel Networks). MCNs are effectively "collections" of independent YouTube channels, banding together for certain advantages, such as cross-promotion and ad sales across all videos. While most people are familiar with ContentID, as far as I can tell (and despite repeated attempts to speak to multiple people, no one seems interested in explaining the details), it appears that ContentID generally works on newly uploaded videos, whereas going back and scanning existing videos is more targeted. And, it's that back scanning that has been "enabled" here. In other words, if those videos had been uploaded very recently, they might have been hit with the same ContentID claim, but these were "back catalog" videos in many cases, which sort of grandfathered them in. That explains the sudden influx. Going back over all those old videos has turned up a bunch of matches.

Then there's a separate issue: which is that many people claim that the claims are completely bogus. Even though they're on let's play videos, they're not coming from the video game companies, but other third parties. In fact, the big video game companies, like Ubisoft, Capcom and Blizzard say they have no problem with let's play videos and are actually trying to help those impacted in figuring out what to do.

This move is almost certainly a result of the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) suing Fullscreen, a big MCN, claiming copyright infringement. There are some generally interesting legal questions about whether or not an MCN is actually liable for any infringement by an independent YouTube producer, but some of these MCNs have grown to be quite large, and the publishers want money. YouTube is likely trying to clean up the videos associated with MCNs in one big move to avoid any future issues.

What that means, however, is that it's likely one of the reasons that people aren't recognizing the names making the copyright claims is that the matches aren't on the game play, but rather the music either in the video games themselves (likely in many cases) or that video makers add to their videos in general. To their credit, it appears that many of the gaming companies are actually helping video creators clear that music.

The whole thing is a bit of a mess, but not as crazy as it first appeared. And it's certainly not a case of "SOPAfying" YouTube videos. It's just extending the ContentID scanning to those channels to try to clean out problems and, hopefully, avoid future lawsuits against those MCNs.

That said, YouTube's communications over this have been dismal and have greatly contributed to the problem. The company has put out the identical statement to everyone who's asked (including us):

We recently enabled Content ID scanning on channels identified as affiliates of MCNs. This has resulted in new copyright claims for some users, based on policies set by the relevant content owners. As ever, channel owners can easily dispute Content ID claims if they believe those claims are invalid.

That's... somewhat useless. It doesn't address the reasons or the concerns of the video makers, and has many scared. That is not the best way to explain the situation, and only lends credence to the exaggerated claims that YouTube is helping to kill off let's play videos, when that's not the case at all. It also presupposes an extraordinary level of knowledge that most people don't have of Content ID, copyright, MCNs, licensing, publishing and more. It's basically the opposite of providing the information that video makers actually need -- leaving them freaked out about a massive influx in copyright claims they don't understand. Without a better, more honest and clear explanation, most users are blaming the most obvious party: YouTube.

It appears that YouTube briefed some MCNs on the basics of this change, which is why those rumors came out last week, as the MCNs tried to explain the issue to the affiliates -- but generally did so badly, because this stuff is complicated enough as is, and then you add a game of legal telephone where the people passing on the details don't really understand the issues either. YouTube could have done a much, much, much better job laying out the details of what it was doing and why (and even how that actually should help MCNs by avoiding lawsuits like the NMPA's. But instead, it's got a ton of people freaked out and its communications to those people are almost non-existent other than the cryptic statement which, while accurate, fails to portray the full situation.

Filed Under: contentid, copyright, flagging, licensing, mcn, takedowns, youtube
Companies: google, nmpa, youtube

Patenting University Research Has Been A Dismal Failure, Enabling Patent Trolling. It's Time To Stop

from the fix-this dept

For many years we've been incredibly critical of the famous Bayh-Dole Act, which was passed in 1980 with the idea that it would encourage greater innovation by pushing universities to patent the research they were doing. The theory -- based on a rather ignorant view of innovation and research -- was that patents would create a market, which, in turn, would enable easier knowledge transfer from academia to industry, leading to a research boom. The actual results have been a near total disaster. What's actually happened are two very bad things. First, it's seriously harmed university research, by guaranteeing much less information sharing between researchers. And, it turns out, that information sharing is a big part of how innovation and big scientific breakthroughs occur. Not surprisingly (if you understand basic economics), when you try to lock up each idea with a patent, researchers (and, more importantly, their administrator bosses), suddenly don't want to share any more. The end result? Lots of important research stifled. What a shame.

The second massive problem in the wake of the Bayh-Dole Act was that every university stupidly thought that it would help make them rich. They bought into the myth of patents and this idea of "tech transfer," and pretty much every research university set up a "tech transfer" office, whose main job was to try to "license" those patents for as much money as possible. University administrators started licking their chops at this potential profit center. But, over the past couple decades, reality has set in. As we've noted for years, ideas are a very, very small piece of the puzzle for innovation. It's the execution that matters. But the folks working in tech transfer offices never understood that and have tried to put ridiculously high prices on their patents, in an attempt to justify their own existence. End result? The exact opposite of the stated goal of the Bayh-Dole Act: less research got transfered into industry, because various tech transfer offices priced it out of the market.

We've pointed out in the past that this expected "profit center" has been a disaster for nearly every university that tried it. With only a handful of exceptions (Stanford, MIT, etc.) tech transfer offices have cost more than they've ever made... while serving to lock up important research, limit collaboration and generally cost the university money that could have gone elsewhere. Oh, and then the trolls came in. We've discussed plenty of times in the past how Intellectual Ventures is the world's largest patent troll, but what few people pay attention to is how it got its patents. That's the nasty secret. The crew at IV saw all the problems with tech transfer offices and saw an opportunity: IV went around from university to university and offered to buy patents in bulk. Desperate tech transfer offices, needing to show some revenue coming in gobbled up the offers, and voila, a giant massive patent troll with tens of thousands of patents was born -- often based on research that was funded by taxpayer dollars.

This appears to be a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to billionaire Nathan Myhrvold, thanks to a bad law that has harmed research, damaged the advance of science and knowledge, harmed university finances and decreased actual innovation. Remember, IV has never produced a single product and brought it to market.

And, tragically, almost no one is talking about all of this, even with patent reform being considered. Hopefully that will start to change. A new report from the Brookings Institution doesn't go into all of this background, but does highlight what a complete and utter failure university tech transfer offices have been.

Using tech transfer office expenses information, Valdivia estimates that 130 universities did not generate enough licensing income in 2012 to cover the wages of their technology transfer staff and the legal costs for the patents they file. What is more, with 84% universities operating technology transfer in the red, 2012 was a good year because over the last 20 years, on average, 87% did not break even.

In fact, the report notes that just 8 universities made up 50% of the licensing revenue. Basically, you've got a huge number of universities that are a giant cost center whose only job is to hold up innovation.

The report has some suggestions as to how this should change, noting that universities, rather than focusing on patents, should instead focus on helping spin out actual startups. On top of that, Congress should change the law to allow for, at the very least, an exemption for non-profit research or experimentation. Those aren't bad recommendations, but it seems like Congress could and should go much, much further.

Either way, it should be recognized what a complete disaster Bayh-Dole has been for basic research, and how it, indirectly, helped create a massive patent troll. Hopefully Congress will finally wake up to its mistake and fix this.

Filed Under: bayh-dole, licensing, patent trolls, patents, research, tech transfer, universities
Companies: intellectual ventures

What's Left Of Nokia Poised To Become A Giant Patent Troll

from the that's-not-a-good-thing dept

One of the more glossed over parts of Microsoft buying large parts of Nokia was that it was actually a two-part transaction. It spent $5 billion on Nokia's mobile phones unit and then another $2.18 billion to license Nokia's patent portfolio. Many reports just summarized this as Microsoft spending $7.2 billion to buy Nokia. But the licensing tidbit is interesting -- and potentially concerning, as it leads to quite reasonable speculation that the emptied shell of Nokia is about to become a massive, annoying patent troll.

There's no doubt that the company has a variety of important mobile device and mobile data patents. The license with Microsoft lasts for ten years, but there's nothing stopping Nokia from going after others. Yes, many key players already have licensing deals in place, but there are always more targets to go after, especially in such a dynamic and innovative arena. And, without having to worry about patent nuclear war being pointed back at Nokia, potentially harming its own phone business, you'd have to imagine that the company will be more willing than ever to aggressively try to squeeze money out of others.

Nokia has been deterred from asserting its patents too aggressively by the risk of retaliation by competitors. Nokia’s rivals have patents of their own, and if they felt the Finnish company was making unreasonable demands, they could have filed patent infringement lawsuits themselves.

Without that deterrent, Nokia has plenty of incentives to become an incredibly annoying and disruptive patent troll.

Filed Under: licensing, patent troll, patents
Companies: microsoft, nokia

Undownloading: Further Proof Those eBooks You Paid For Really Aren't Yours

from the upsub dept

Over the years Techdirt has run a number of stories that make it abundantly clear that you don't own those ebooks you paid for. But in case you were still clinging to some faint hope to the contrary, here's a cautionary tale from Jim O'Donnell, a classics professor at Georgetown University. He is currently attending the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Singapore, and naturally wanted to bring along some serious reading material; ebooks on an iPad seemed the perfect way to do that. As O'Donnell explains:

when I got here, I noticed that several of my iPad apps had updates on offer, so I clicked and approved. One of them was Google Play. When it finished and I went to open the app, it told me that it needed to update my book files and this might take several minutes.

Pretty standard stuff. But then something unexpected happened:

all of my books had un-downloaded and needed to be downloaded again. The app is an inefficient downloader, almost as bad as the New Yorker app, so I dreaded this, but clicked on the two I needed most at once. (I checked the amount of storage used, and indeed the files really have gone off my tablet.)

And it balked. It turns out that because I am not in a country where Google Books is an approved enterprise (which encompasses most of the countries on the planet), I cannot download. Local wisdom among the wizards here speculates that the undownloading occurred when the update noted that I was outside the US borders and so intervened.

So, it seems that ebook users need to add a new word to their vocabulary: "undownloading" -- what happens when you leave the authorized zone in which you may read the ebooks you paid for, and cross into the digital badlands where they are taken away like illicit items at customs. If you are lucky, you will get them back when you return to your home patch -- by un-undownloading them.

What makes this tale particularly noteworthy is the way it brings together a host of really bad ideas that the publishing and distribution industries insist on deploying. There's DRM that means you can't make backups; there's the country-specific usage that tries to impose physical geography on your digital ebooks; and there's the update that spies on you and your system before deciding unilaterally to take away functionality by "undownloading" your ebooks. And copyright maximalists wonder why people turn to unauthorized downloads....

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Filed Under: copyright, drm, ebooks, licensing, ownership, regional restrictions

Fed Up Germans Are Trying To Crowdfund A GEMA Alternative That Isn't Evil

from the about-time dept

We've had many stories over the years about just how evil and awful the German music collection society GEMA can be. I've been to Germany a few times over the past few years, and have spoken to musicians who tell me horrifying stories about how you basically have to sign up with GEMA, and then GEMA controls what you can do with your music. For example, I met a band that wanted to license its music under a Creative Commons license, but GEMA doesn't like to recognize such licenses. Another band showed me its "official" website, which it told GEMA about, and then its "real" website, which it told its fans about, where the band could actually put up their own music for free. GEMA is basically controlled by the legacy interests and only pays attention to a small group of very successful musicians. Everyone else is left out in the cold. There's a reason why GEMA is the only major collection society that still hasn't worked out a deal with YouTube.

Last year we wrote about some folks in Germany who were trying to do something about this, starting a competing collection society that understood that "free" wasn't necessarily a bad thing, and which actually respected its members and the new opportunities presented by the internet, beyond looking at them all as a cash register to shake as much money as possible out of. This organization, called C3S or the Cultural Commons Collecting Society is finally getting off the ground, and wouldn't you know it, they're turning to crowdfunding to make it work. Within a very short period of time, they've raised over €34,000 of the €50,000 target -- though they are really aiming for €200,000.

They point out that they're not against traditional licensing at all, but think there's room for a more forward looking organization that recognizes both traditional licensing and more modern options that many musicians want. Furthermore, unlike GEMA, C3S is designed to be open, social and democratic. This should be an interesting project, worth following.

Filed Under: collection society, creative commons, crowdfunding, germany, licensing
Companies: c3s, gema