The Entertainment Software Assn. (ESA) and Entertainment Merchants Assn. (EMA) sued Tues. seeking to void a new game law in Minn. The trade groups called the law -- which would make it illegal for kids under 17 to buy or rent an -- or AO- rated game -- “unconstitutional” and “unenforceable.”
News is news, a Cal. appeals court ruled, backing online journalists under fire from Apple for publishing what the firm called trade secrets regarding “Asteroid,” the code name Apple gave a sound-recording device in development. The 69- page Cal. Appeals Court decision scotched every argument Apple made for subpoenaing the website publishers and one defendant’s e-mail service provider, citing both federal and state law.
The MPAA hired a hacker to steal data from a firm it had accused of aiding copyright violators, according to a suit filed Wed. Valence Media, parent of Torrentspy.com, said in its suit that the company was approached by a man claiming an MPAA executive paid him to retrieve private data on the firm. The suit, filed in U.S. Dist. Court, Central District of Cal., doesn’t name the executive, but said the man was asked to find private information on Torrentspy.com, a Bit Torrent indexing site. “We find it very ironic that the MPAA, an organization that is supposed to fight piracy, is involved in piracy in trying to contain alleged unauthorized users,” said Ira Rothken, Torrentspy’s attorney. The MPAA allegedly paid the man $15,000 to steal e-mails and trade secrets, Torrentspy’s complaint said. The man admitted his role and is cooperating with Torrentspy, it said. The suit said the man stole data on Torrentspy income and expenses, Torrentspy employees’ private e-mails, information on its servers and billing information. “[Torrentspy] facilitates piracy,” a spokeswoman for the MPAA said: “They know the law is not on their side and they are responding with a baseless claim.” In February, MPAA sued Torrentspy and other search engines, alleging they aid in the flow of unauthorized content over the Internet. The movie industry claims Torrentspy’s main function was to facilitate copyright infringement (WID March 29 p10). Torrentspy has said the 2 cases are unrelated. “It will be interesting to see if the MPAA wants to hide behind general denial or wants to admit they paid someone,” Rothken said: “If they are not going to answer that question it would be quite telling.” Torrentspy has asked for unspecified damages and a jury title.
DoJ entered another file-sharing suit to restate its view that the Copyright Act’s distribution right covers Internet transmission, leading a prominent file-sharing defense lawyer to accuse the agency of “working together” with RIAA -- a charge denied by the industry group. DoJ also asked the U.S. Dist. Court, Abilene, Tex., if it could weigh in on the “making available” issue in file-sharing, if the court addresses the subject in Fonovisa v. Alvarez. DoJ made the same points in a recent file-sharing case, Elektra v. Barker in U.S. Dist. Court, N.Y., in that case filing only after an amicus brief contested the validity of applying the distribution right to digital files as opposed to physical media. The provision is crucial to DoJ criminal cases (WID April 25 p3). DoJ said the Act’s “material object” language meant to set the “intangible legal right in the copyright itself” apart from the “physical embodiment of that work” in various media; common law links the concepts, DoJ said. The “making available” argument -- which says copyrighted files’ presence in a shared folder is infringement -- implicates World Intellectual Property Organization treaties and a free trade agreement, DoJ said. Ray Beckerman of blog Recording Industry vs. the People said it seems in Fonovisa that “RIAA and the DoJ are working together.” Elektra, in which the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed the precipitating amicus brief, had a far higher profile than Fonovisa, Beckerman said. “How would the DoJ have even known of the existence of the [Fonovisa] case” without an RIAA tip? he said in an interview. DoJ usually files statements of interest when a court tells it a party has challenged a law’s constitutionality, and DoJ has a “strong opinion” that the law is constitutional, Beckerman said. The agency doesn’t intervene in civil cases involving private litigants when a civil statute’s meaning, rather than its constitutionality, is in question, he added. A DoJ spokesman told us the agency would have no comment beyond its filing in Fonovisa. An RIAA spokeswoman told us DoJ intervened in Fonovisa “without any suggestion or communication from us that it was in the interest of the United States to file a brief.”
A virtual land deal gone awry has led to a real world court battle pitting a Web-savvy attorney against Second Life, a 3-dimensional Internet world game created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab. The lawsuit, perhaps the first of its kind, was filed in W. Chester, Pa., small claims court. It seeks $8,000 in financial damages, in part for a breach of a virtual land auction contract and for violation of the state’s Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has issued revised guidance on the classification of festive articles due to its recent decision to limit the court decisions in the case Park B. Smith, Ltd., vs. U.S.(Park) to the litigated entries only, i.e., the specific cotton woven table linen and cotton woven dhurry rug entries before the courts in that litigation.
The Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) has begun proceedings to revoke the ocean transportation intermediary (OTI) licenses of 8 entities as a result of their failure to replace their OTI surety bonds with a valid bond issued by a surety company currently certified by the Treasury Department (Treasury).
China has shut down 76 websites in a 4-month operation against online piracy, National Copyright Administration Deputy Dir. Yan Xiaohong said Wed., Reuters reported. Fourteen of the 172 cases investigated were prompted by requests from non-Chinese companies and groups, including the MPAA, which said a Beijing company was offering American movies like The Pacifier for unauthorized download, AFP reported. That company was filed about $11,100, Yan said. “What we've investigated may be a very small portion of the problem,” but China “will have better cooperation and exchanges with international organizations so as to enhance our capability to better fight Internet piracy,” Yan said. Both online and hard piracy are common in China because of high prices for authorized copies and govt. restrictions on cultural imports, with several Western movies not officially available. China is also weighing whether to sign 2 international treaties that take aim at online piracy, and has come under pressure to do so by the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), which issued a report on U.S.-China trade relations this week. The report called intellectual property rights (IPR) enforcement “one of China’s greatest shortcomings.” China “still plays a modest role relative to its economic and political heft” in international “trade- enhancing” institutions like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and isn’t even part of WIPO’s Internet treaties, the report said. It has also participated only “on a limited basis” in the International Telecom Union. But the report said headway was being made from U.S. pressure, with China agreeing to increase IPR prosecutions and fight hard and online piracy of movies, audio products and software. USTR Rob Portman briefly addressed China and the Internet in a Tues. news conference on the report. He said U.S. comparative advantage over China “includes high technology, it includes some of these Internet services” and “knowledge- based exports,” and the U.S. is “disproportionately impacted” by piracy because of its world primacy in software exports and entertainment products. He declined to comment on Hill proposals to prevent U.S. companies from locating servers on Chinese soil, saying he hadn’t seen them yet.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has again revised its Trade Update for Hurricane Katrina. Among other things, CBP's new Trade Update provides new contact information for certain CBP offices and employees and also contains new information concerning entry summary filing.