A blizzard of court papers blew out of the entertainment industry yesterday in anticipation of peer-to-peer file sharing’s big day in court. Shouts of “piracy!” and “stop thief!” were common themes in this choir of outrage, whose ranks ranged across the legal, political and entertainment worlds, from Kenneth Starr to Orrin Hatch to Avril Lavigne. The Supreme Court is set to begin hearing oral arguments on March 29 in the case that pits Grokster and StreamCast against such industry heavyweights as the RIAA and MPAA.
What’s needed at such a critical junture is an extended, nuanced discussion on the nature of intellectual property in the digital age, and on how these powerful new sharing technologies can be reasonably tempered to ensure that artists receive compensation for their work while preserving the dynamic modes of exchange. But what seems more likely is a big judicial slugfest.. brace yourself for a bloody spring.

Great piece in this week’s Context, the weekly arts and ideas section of The Moscow Times, about the first history yet written about the Russian web. Feeling the Elephant (Oshchupyvaya Slona), by writer, journalist, and core member of Russia’s online literati Sergei Kuznetsov, was published late last year and has already engendered a small storm of controversy for alleged omissions, mischaracterizations and the like. But Kuznetsov says he never set out to write a “proper” history, simply an insider’s account – bias, warp and all – of the literary web he played a central role in creating. This lack of propriety is not altogether unfitting since there’s much in Russia’s neck of the web that, according to our stricter standards, isn’t at all proper, and this goes beyond mail order brides.. Intellectual property is only a fledgling idea there, and you can easily find practically any text online, from Pushkin to Pelevin, including fresh-off-the-press, protected material. The most popular of these literary indexes is Maxim Moshkov’s Lib.ru.
This loose, free-wheeling web culture has been both a boon and a curse to Russia’s writers and readers. On the one hand, it is easy and free to publish, and likewise easy and free to read. But with the exception of the most popular authors – the churners out of mysteries and bodice rippers – it’s damn hard to make a living writing in Russia (much harder than in the West, which is tough enough), and all this free literary trafficking, while rousing and diverse, bitterly emphasizes the underlying poverty. This begs the question, just as relevant here as anywhere else.. how can writers continue to make the web richer without becoming impoverished themselves?
(photo: Vladimir Filonov / Moscow Times)

Germany’s national library, Deutsche Bibliothek, has been made exempt from key provisions of the European Union Copright Directive, giving it the exclusive right “to crack and duplicate DRM-protected e-books and other digital media such as CD-Audio and CD-Roms” (check out post on mobileread).
Further in mobileread: “The Deutsche Bibliothek achieved an agreement with the German Federation of the Phonographic Industry and the German Booksellers and Publishers Association after it became obvious that copy protections would not only annoy teenage school boys, but also prohibit the library from fulfilling its legal mandate to collect, process and bibliographic index important German and German-language based works.”
Heartening to see a top-down hack like this.
see also threads on BoingBoing (German libraries can circumvent DRM) and Slashdot

excellent article in the Toronto Globe and Mail today about the chilling effect of copyright law on documentary films. initial subject is Eyes on the Prize, the superb documentary of the civil war struggle in the U.S., which is no longer shown on TV or distributed because the rights to the historic footage have run out and the producer’s cannot afford to re-purchase them in today’s hyper-inflated rights market.

The Washington Post reports that mashboxx, the latest venture of Grokster president Wayne Rosso, intends to “clean up and legitimize” peer-to-peer music file sharing on the Internet, and to give record companies a piece of the pie (in spite of Rosso’s past demonization of said companies). Mashboxx will employ SnoCap – a “copyright management interface” technology developed by Napster creator Shawn Fanning, enabling copyright owners to trace the movement of files containing their content, and to extract fees from the people sharing them. SnoCap essentially “fingerprints” files so that content owners can keep track of them and set the rules and rates of their trading.
I suspect that the rates will be too high, of the dollar-a-song variety, which seems downright exploitative given the ease and inherent cheapness of p2p networks. While I’m cautiously optimistic that the mashboxx move presages an eventual overhaul of the music industry, and may be a small step toward reconciling copyright concerns with networked free culture, this seems more like a hostile move to squeeze music sharers. Given the scale of the p2p phenomenon, a nickel-a-song could amount to sizeable profits. Remember: it’s no longer about a single point of sale, but multiple points of exchange. But the recording industry is a rapacious animal, and is loathe to believe that it can actually make profit without extortion. Remember the long tail…
And this issue doesn’t just pertain to music sharing. As ebooks become a more frequently trafficked commodity on p2p networks, we will see the same struggle arise. Already, questions abound about Google’s library initiative and readers’ access to copyrighted texts. And the New York Public Library seems to think that ebooks are a threat that must be subdued before all hell breaks loose.
Technology News: Technology: Fanning’s Snocap Builds Bridge Between Labels and P2P