IP Notes

Broadcasting & Cable: The Business of Television: "If the court agrees with the studios that Grokster and similar software does violate copyright, it will slow, but not stop, the movement toward new tech TV content sharing, says Wieser, and 'push P2P file trading further underground toward services that are literally and figuratively beyond the reach of the law,' says the report.

If the court agrees with Grokster, P2P could become a distribution mechanism to rival other broadband entrants, like Verizon's VCast wireless mobile network or online media portals like Yahoo, says Weiser.

Either way, he says, marketers need to start planning for the 'contextual' advertising--think product placement and integrated marketing--and direct response models, to reach the younger audience that will migrate to new tech TV.

As an example of how not making video content available online for fear of pirating is a losing strategy in the face of a growing desire for online access to TV, Weiser points to a report from UK P2P tracker Envisional that downloads of the UK's most-downloaded U.S. show, Fox's 24, went from an average of 35,000 for per episode in 2003-2004 to 95,000 for this season."

Boing Boing

Online anonymity By Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow: My cow-orker Fred von Lohmann's latest Law.com column is a stirring call-to-arms in defense of online anonymity: "...your Internet Service Provider knows you're not a dog. And it knows your name, address and telephone number." In one recent case, the lawsuit and subpoena were issued in response to someone opining on an online message board that the president of a corporation had "a Napoleon complex." In another, the lawsuit was based on a statement that the company's executives were getting rich while the stock price was in free fall. Each of these suits was dropped once it became clear that the anonymous speaker was going to court to protect his identity, suggesting that the real purpose of the litigation was to discover whether the statements were made by employees so that the company could retaliate against them. The lawsuit was mere pretext for extra-judicial punishment. Though these two suits were dropped, there was a sad postscript: postings to both of the message boards involved dropped off dramatically once word of the lawsuit got out, and still haven't returned to their previous levels. Courts across the country are beginning to develop some basic rules about when the anonymity of an online speaker should be protected and when it should be breached. Specifically, the emerging test, best articulated in a New Jersey appellate decision called Dendrite, holds that when a court is faced with a subpoena aimed at identifying an anonymous speaker, the court should (1) provide notice to the potential defendant and an opportunity to defend his anonymity via a motion to quash; (2) require the plaintiff to specify the statements that allegedly violate its rights; (3) review the complaint to ensure that it states a cause of action based on each statement and against each defendant; (4) require the plaintiff to produce evidence supporting each element of its claims, and (5) balance the equities, weighing the strength of plaintiff's evidence and the potential harm to the plaintiff if the subpoena is quashed against the harm to the defendant from losing his right to remain anonymous. Link (via Copyfight)

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Slashdot | Hollywood Looks to BitTorrent for Distribution: "'Vinton Cerf, who wrote the original TCP/IP protocol and is currently chairman of ICANN, said this week he had recently discussed BitTorrent with at least two interested movie producers. '"

The countdown for the extinction of CDs is about to begin - Blog Maverick - www.blogmaverick.com _

John Battelle's Searchblog: Yow.: "Revenue for newspaper websites, year 2004, aggregate:

$1.19 billion, with nearly half that amount coming from classifieds.

Revenue for google adwords, year 2004:

$3.143 billion;roughly half that amount on google, the other half on third-party websites (the adsense program)."

"Imagine an encyclopedia," wrote blogger Joe Gratz, "that had someone’s death noted in their biography before the first major news outlet had even published an obituary." The death was that of feminist writer and campaigner Andrea Dworkin, the encyclopedia Wikipedia, and Gratz was imagining nothing.

Guardian Unlimited reported Dworkin's death, confirmed by her agent, shortly before 1800 GMT yesterday, the first major news outlet to do so, though the correct date of her death was posted at the top of her Wikipedia biography at least 24 hours earlier.

Wikipedia's discussion page explains how it happened. The news was circulating on feminist mailing lists shortly after Dworkin died in her sleep on Saturday, and from there it found its way to the encyclopedia and some blogs. But a lack of corroboration from the press and certainty over the source - again gone over on the discussion page - meant the Wikipedia writers and some of their readers could not decide if it was true. The correct date was taken down at least once, and the item hardly pushed.

Studios Go After Students Who Use 'i2hub'

RIAA fear corruption of Internet2 by file-swappers

Boing Boing: Valenti signs Betamax tape for fan at Grokster hearing

Smart Mobs: Clay Shirky blocked from posting his own talk by DVD DRM

Bloglines user jbracken (jbracken@macfound.org) has sent this item to you.

Boing Boing

Ten million CC licenses in a pie chart By Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow: Creative Commons has published a fascinating pie-chart showing the frequency with which each CC license appears appears in the wild, drawing on 10,000,000 CC licenses that are discoverable with Yahoo. Link

http://www.hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/84/

March 1 - May 29, 2005
Fair Use features works by Candice Breitz, Omer Fast, Christian Jankowski, Les LeVeque, Matthias Müller, and Eddo Stern on video monitors in the Hammer Museum's lobby gallery. Presenting varied strategies of appropriation and sampling in film and video from the last decade, Fair Use explores the exceedingly prevalent redirection and alteration of existing media. These processes resonate in work by artists who treat media as raw material and who turn the tools and products of information distribution against itself.