VIDEO: FCC Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate at Penn Law

In December, FCC Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate gave a presentation entitled "From the Boardroom to the Classroom: Piracy Impacts and Solutions." Her talk was sponsored by Penn Intellectual Property Group and the Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition.

Commissioner Tate focused on industry innovations to guard against piracy, explained the effect of "net neutrality" on those efforts, and defined what the government's role should be in ensuring that intellectual property rights are not infringed upon in the digital communications age.

Video of Commissioner Tate's presentation is available here.

It's All About Change: Fairey v. AP

Did Shepard Fairey, creator of the ubiquitous images that formed a central part of the Obama campaign, change a photograph by an Associate Press photographer enough to qualify for a fair use defense?

A federal judge in Manhattan will ultimately decide the issue, but both images are posted here so that you can draw your own conclusions (courtesy of the NY Times). Fairey has asked the court to grant a declaratory judgment against any potential copyright infringement claims advanced by the AP.

More about the case can be found via the New York Times, WSJ's Law Blog, and Am Law Daily.

International: Software Pirates - where do they all come from?

The Pirate Bay has just released a Google-powered map that tracks the number of IP-infringing connections per country.

The TorrentFreak's "pirate bay map" records bittorrent communication, logging the locations to and from which its trackers are transferred. The map indicates the origin of the users who are connecting to its trackers, and it updates in real time.

According to the map at the time of this posting, the leader in traffic is China. The map indicates that 33% of all connections to the trackers originate from the .cn domain, which equals about 7 million peers. Considering that the site is officially blocked in China, these numbers are even more impressive.

Other Asian locations host massive amount of users as well, with 5.9% of connections coming from Taiwan and 4.2% from Japan.

The United States is a home to 8% of the users, and Sweden - the home of the Pirate Bay - hosted over 1% of them. Sweden had about 250,000 peers, which--out of a population of nine million --is not nearly as bad as some of the other countries.

In Europe, Spain has been the leading country, owning a little less that 5% of the connections.

The map is arguably only the beginning of a larger project to provide detailed statistics on the tracker’s users.

Read more here and here.

International: Pirates in Britain will not be disconnected from the internet

One of the new strategies of the music industry internationally is to find new policemen to enforce its rights in the digital world.

ISPs are extremely appealing candidates in this regard, since they can disconnect users from the Internet. Using ISPs can prevent repeated infringements and deter new ones. The music industry lobbied aggressively in various countries to enact a law that will force ISPs to disconnect repeated infringers from the Internet. The BRI, which represents the British record industry, has almost succeeded in passing such legislation in Britain, as the British government had seriously intended to compel internet companies to cut off customers who ignore warnings not to download music and video files illegally.

However, an interview with The Times with Mr. David Lammy, the British Intellectual Property Minister, revealed that the Government had ruled out creating a law. He questioned whether such a law can actually be possible.

While the music industry expressed disappointment of the reverse turn, ISPs--who consistently objected the heavy hand of the legislator being involved in their business--expressed satisfaction, saying that it is impossible to attract people to use the Internet and at the same time to scare them away.

Seven million British share files illegally every year, and the damage to the industry is said by the industry to amount to £180million a year.

Apple is sued over the search technology of the IPhone

EMG Technology LLC, a one-man's company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit on Monday against Apple in the US District Court in Tyler, Texas.

The suit alleges that the navigation and display technology used for mobile websites by the IPhone infringes a patent that was obtained last month by EMG's founder and two co-inventors and assigned to EMG.

Mobile websites are modified versions of regular websites, designed for display on small screens.

The complaint is available here.

HLS Professor Challenges the Constitutionality of RIAA File-sharing Lawsuits

Joel Tenenbaum, a graduate student from Harvard, is just one of the random assortment of individuals being sued for sharing music via peer-to-peer application.

For Harvard professor Charles Nesson this lawsuit was the last straw. He is defending Tenenbaum, and has filed a counterclaim against the specific plaintiff and against the RIAA, challenging the constitutionality of the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999, upon which the suit was filed.

This act is one of several legslative initiatives designed to provide a stronger protection to copyright owners in the digital age. Nesson claims the act has basically made the courts “a low-grade collection agency” for the RIAA. Suits are being brought randomly, singling out few out of the many Americans who use peer-to-peer networks, and seeking to punish them beyond any relation to the damage that they have allegedly caused. Many of these suits lead in fact to significant results for the RIAA in outside the court settlements, only because their targets do not have the resources to defend themselves in court.

Prof. Nesson’s ultimate goal is to drive the music industry to find new ways of distributing music in the digital age and encourage the legalization of the phenomenon of sharing of music on-line.

This is not the first attempt to render copyright legislation excessive and unconstitutional, so expectations should be reduced for Prof. Nesson. However, questioning the RIAA strategy may have the power to drive a change in the arena of on-line music consumption.

Read more:
Eon (Charles Nesson’s blog): The Copyright Theft Deterrance Act of 1999
Computerworld: Harvard professor offers new challenge to RIAA antipiracy campaign

Is the Poor Economy Affecting Patent Filings?

It is commonly accepted wisdom that patent lawyers will be in demand no matter how badly the market is faring. However, a recent Patently-O post, courtesy of Paul Janicke at the University of Houston Law Center, now casts doubt on that belief.

Since the economy tanked in September, Prof. Janicke has found that patent filings are down by 20%. In September and October of 2007, 513 patent suits were filed; during that same period in 2008, there were only 409 filings.

Could the decrease be due to the fact that there are fewer deep pockets to sue? As one Patently-O commentator put it, "When the host dies, the parasites die with it. With fewer profitable companies to leach off it is inevitable that there are fewer leaches."