Neo-Confucianism and copyright in China

Influences of Neo-Confucianism in the Information Society
The Spreading of China in Internet Mediated Communications
by Aristides Pereira


An essay about Neo-Confucianism and its relations on Chinese policies concerning copyrights and Internet use in the 21st Century.

Australian extradited to US over cracked software

From the Sydney Morning Herald

Aussie software pirate extradited
Kenneth Nguyen
May 7, 2007

BEFORE he was extradited to the United States, Hew Griffiths, from Berkeley Vale in NSW, had never even set foot in America. But he had pirated software produced by American companies.

Now, having been given up to the US by former justice minister Chris Ellison, Griffiths, 44, is in a Virginia cell, facing up to 10 years in an American prison after a guilty plea late last month.

Griffiths' case - involving one of the first extraditions for intellectual property crime - has been a triumph for US authorities, demonstrating their ability to enforce US laws protecting US companies against Australians in Australia, with the co-operation of the Australian Government.

"Our agents and prosecutors are working tirelessly to nab intellectual property thieves, even where their crimes transcend international borders," US Attorney Chuck Rosenberg said.

In some corners of the Australian legal community, however, there is concern about Griffiths' case. In a recent article for the Australian Law Journal, NSW Chief Judge in Equity, Peter Young, wrote: "International copyright violations are a great problem. However, there is also the consideration that a country must protect its nationals from being removed from their homeland to a foreign country merely because the commercial interests of that foreign country are claimed to have been affected by the person's behaviour in Australia and the foreign country can exercise influence over Australia."

Griffiths, a Briton, has lived in Australia since the age of seven. From his home base on the central coast of NSW, he served as the leader of a group named Drink Or Die, which "cracked" copy-protected software and media products and distributed them free of cost. Often seen with long hair and bare feet, Griffiths did not make money from his activities, and lived with his father in a modest house.

But Drink or Die's activities did cost American companies money — an estimated $US50 million ($A60 million), if legal sales were substituted for illegal downloads undertaken through Drink or Die. It also raised the ire of US authorities.

In 2003, the US Department of Justice charged Griffiths with violating the copyright laws of the US, and requested his extradition from Australia. Senator Ellison signed a notice for Griffiths' arrest and Australian Federal Police arrested him at his home.

Griffiths fought the prospect of extradition through the courts for three years, in which time he was denied bail and detained in prison. He indicated that he would be willing to plead guilty to a breach of Australian copyright law, which meant he could serve time in Australia.

Last year, Griffiths ran out of avenues for appeal in Australia. His fate lay in the hands of Senator Ellison, who had the power to refuse Griffiths' extradition. But in December, Senator Ellison issued a warrant for extradition — a decision welcomed by the US Government. Griffiths' extradition in February is believed to be the first out of Australia for a breach of intellectual property law.

"This extradition represents the (US) Department of Justice's commitment to protect intellectual property rights from those who violate our laws from the other side of the globe," US Assistant Attorney-General Alice Fisher said.

But Justice Young described as "bizarre" the fact that "people are being extradited to the US to face criminal charges when they have never been to the US and the alleged act occurred wholly outside the US".

Griffiths appears to have been singled out by US authorities. British-based members of Drink or Die were reportedly tried in Britain. Last month, in news that slipped the local media's radar, Hew Griffiths pleaded guilty in a US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, to criminal copyright infringement offences. According to US authorities, Griffiths admitted to overseeing all the illegal operations of the now-disbanded Drink Or Die.

On top of a possible 10-year jail term, Griffiths could be fined $US500,000. (By way of comparison, the average sentence for rape in Victoria is six years and 10 months.)

Any Australian who has pirated software worth more than $US1000 could be subject to the same extradition process as Griffiths was. "Should not the Commonwealth Parliament do more to protect Australians from this procedure?" Justice Young asked in his article. Others, however, argue that extradition is necessary to prevent internet crimes that transcend borders.

Griffiths will be sentenced on June 22.

Wikipedia entry with links to many newpaper reports here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hew_Raymond_Griffiths

Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange: Copies at Corbis & the Library of Congress

A New York Times story on Corbis was accompanied by a slideshow that included the very famous photo Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange.

A search of the Corbis site finds that the company claims copyright to the image (IH081187|Rights Managed|Image:© CORBIS). (The price charged depends on usage: full page inside an academic journal with 10000 circulation in Australia costs around 280AUD, web use for a year plus archiving is 220AUD.)

But the Library of congress site tells another story.

"There are no known restrictions on the use of Lange's "Migrant Mother" images. A rights statement for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information black-and-white negatives is available online at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/071_fsab.html."

The image that is digitally reproduced above is from a film copy negative (LC-USZ62-95653)--it is not retouched and "This version of the image shows a thumb in the immediate foreground on the right side." The retouched version is also available for download. It's Library of Congress copy looks like this:



To investigate:

What is Corbis claiming a copyright on? Are they claiming a copyright on the specific copy (print) that they own? If so, does their claim effect other copies?

Or, is Corbis charging for the service of clearing the rights which as the LofC warns elsewhere

" researchers should be advised that determining the copyright status of photographs can be problematic because of the lack of pertinent information, and researchers often have to make calculated risk decisions concerning the appropriate use of an image when its copyright status is unknown or ambiguous. Privacy and publicity rights may also apply."

(I've been thinking a lot about photography recently, having picked up my copy of Looking At Photographs: 100 Pictures from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski (MOMA, 1973, 1999))

Tracking video clips online: Vidmeter finds not big media

April 7, 2007
What’s Online
YouTube’s Favorite Clips
By DAN MITCHELL

ON YouTube, copyrighted video clips of movies and TV shows are far less popular compared with noncopyrighted material than previously thought, according to a new study.

On their face, the results could have serious implications for YouTube’s owner, Google, and the media companies, most notably Viacom, with which it has been negotiating. But not everyone agrees.

Vidmeter, which tracks the online video business, determined that the clips that were removed for copyright violations — most of them copyrighted by big media companies — comprise just 9 percent of all videos on the site. Even more surprising, the videos that have been removed make up just 6 percent of the total views (vidmeter.com).

Google is in negotiations with big media companies in hopes of reaching agreements that would allow YouTube to feature clips of movies and television shows. Viacom, owner of MTV Networks, is suing Google over the showing of copyrighted material like clips from “The Daily Show” and “South Park” on the site.

“This finding,” writes Henry Blodget on his Internet Outsider blog, “is the opposite of consensus, which assumes that Big Media videos account for a small percentage of total videos, but a large percentage of views.” It means, he adds, that Google has “a lot more leverage in the YouTube-Big Media negotiations than was commonly thought” (internetoutsider.com).

But the consensus might not have been so far off after all, writes Adario Strange on the Epicenter blog at Wired News (blog.wired.com/business). The study is flawed because it examined only those videos that YouTube removed after receiving a complaint from a copyright holder, he writes. It “fails to take into account the vast number of copyrighted videos that slip under the radar daily, existing on YouTube sometimes for months before any removal request is made.”

How large that number is, however, remains unknown. Far from this giving Google a leg up in its negotiating power, Mr. Strange says just the opposite may occur. “None of this will slow the Viacom lawsuit,” he writes. “In fact, the report’s finding may even bolster the company’s claims. Vidmeter found that Viacom was the leader in terms of pirated content on YouTube.”

Vidmeter explains how they track videos from across the most popular sites:

How Vidmeter Works

Vidmeter gathers data from across the web to provide an accurate representation of the most popular online videos. While it is impossible to tell the exact number of views a given video has received from every website and every download, Vidmeter gathers the reported view count from a large cross-section of web-based video sites, giving a very close indicator to the relative popularity of a video. Vidmeter gathers this data like so:

First, Vidmeter's software automatically records the numbered of views and comments from the top listed videos on Addicting Clips, Atom Films, Break.com, Brightcove, Daily Motion, Google, Grouper, iFilm, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, Veoh, vSocial, Yahoo, and Youtube once per hour.

Second, Vidmeter editors "merge" similar videos on multiple websites. This allows Vidmeter to count the views of a video on all websites as a single video, giving a more accurate ranking of a video's popularity and not just a URL's popularity.

Third, Vidmeter automatically ranks videos for the day by counting the difference between that day's view total and the previous day's view total. The most viewed videos are the most popular and ranked highest. For videos that are new (that do not have a previously recorded view count), the first view count is listed under "before" as we cannot necessarily tell on which day those views occurred. On some days videos will show a negative comment number, this is because some networks allow users to delete comments and thus lower the total comment count.

Fourth, the latest view and comment counts are set as the "all time" counts for the videos and they are ranked accordingly.

Vidmeter's resulting list of video provides a great tool for industry watchers to track trends in online videos, for marketers to see what's hot, for makers and advertisers to track their video's popularity, and for eager video watchers to get their fill of the most poplar entertainment online.

And Vidmeter's response to criticism (plus a link to the full report as a PDF:

Copyright Report
Mar 31, 2007

We have completed a study on the number and popularity of copyrighted videos on YouTube. Download the full PDF report at:

http://www.vidmeter.com/i/vidmeter_copyright_report.pdf

In summary, we found that of the 6,725 most popular videos on YouTube, only 621 had been removed due to copyright requests. Views to the removed videos made up less than 6% of all recorded YouTube views.



Follow Ups (Apr 5, 2007):

With all the controversy surrounding our recent report, we would like to take a minute to respond to some of the comments.

1. Counting only Removed Videos
One of the biggest criticisms directed at the report is that it underreports the number of copyrighted videos on YouTube because it only counts videos that have been removed and does not include copyrighted videos that have not been removed. Our response to this is: yes, as we noted in the report, this is true. However, as it also states in the report, the goal of the document is to provide a “general estimate” which we feel the report does well.

We created this report in response to the question, “Is the majority of traffic on YouTube going to copyrighted videos?” And the study, even being a general estimate, clearly says no. Here’s a bit of math to demonstrate:

We found that slightly less than 6% of the top-video views went to removed videos.

Even if only half of copyrighted clips in our study have been removed, then the total views to copyrighted videos would be approximately 12%.

Even if only one-third of the most popular copyrighted videos have been removed, then the total view count is around 18%. 18% would be a fair chunk of traffic on YouTube, but it’s far from the majority.

2. Skewed to Favor Non-removed Videos
Another point that has been brought up is that non-removed videos are skewed with a higher view count because they are able to keep accumulating views while removed videos stop as soon as they are removed. Again, this is true, but as we stated in the report: this may show that there is a demand for such copyrighted material, but in its current state it does not contribute to a significant portion of YouTube’s traffic.

3. Non-random Sample
The point was made that the report is flawed because the videos sampled in the report were not random, but taken from the most-viewed list. To this we respond that: YouTube’s traffic falls into a long-tail distribution where the most popular videos receive exponentially more traffic than the less popular videos; therefore, in order to get the best idea of YouTube’s traffic, one needs to look at the most-viewed videos. To put this into perspective:

Viacom’s most-viewed removed video was I Write Sin’s No Tragedies with 6.9 million views. That video received over 500 times more traffic than Viacom’s least popular removed video about Sarah Silverman with 12 thousand views.

4. Over-Extrapolating
It’s important for us to stress, as it states in the report, that this report is designed to provide a fact-based estimation. The report should not be taken to say that 6% of all of YouTube’s traffic goes to copyrighted videos. Instead it says that 6% of traffic we’ve monitored in the most-viewed videos has gone to copyrighted videos and our conclusion from the data is that the vast majority of traffic on YouTube goes to legal videos.

Steve Jobs changes tune on DRM

Steve Jobs changes tune on DRM
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6337275.stm

research about mp3 blogs

O'Donnell, Patrick W., The Users and Marketing Efficacy of MP3 Music Blogs
PhD thesis: "This paper examined the users and marketing efficacy of MP3 music blogs. MP3 blogs are a specific type of blog that feature posts about musicians and have sample MP3s available for download. This study found that artists looking to gain access to an early adopter and non-mainstream music audience might find some success approaching blogs as a promotional tool with the hopes that blog chatter would influence a larger, more mainstream music audience, but would not likely generate sales within the core readership by simply making songs available for download. A factor analysis identified four uses for music blogs: free music, learn about a band, be in on the buzz, and library building. Qualitative data added a fifth use, being a part of the blog culture and community. Regression demonstrated that using blogs for the purpose of obtaining free music negatively affected album purchases."


a legal perspective: Goldstone, Andrew, "MP3 Blogs: A Silver Bullet for the Music Industry or a Smoking Gun for Copyright Infringement?" . Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=930270

Australian legal perspective: Fitzgerald, Brian and O'Brien, Damien (2005) Digital Sampling and Culture Jamming in a Remix World: What Does the Law Allow?. Media and Arts Law Review 10(4):pp. 279-298.

DJ Drama drama--collected stories about his arrest for violation of copyright

VH1 reporting:


What's Next For The Mixtape World After DJ Drama Raid?
'The movement is stronger than ever right now,' says DJ Sense, one-third of Drama's embattled Aphilliates crew — but others see tough times ahead.
by Shaheem Reid and Jayson Rodriguez

'Play The Game Fair': Lil Wayne Responds To DJ Drama's Mixtape Bust
Diplomats' DukeDaGod, mixtape DJ also weigh in on the raid's impact.
by Shaheem Reid
-this piece addresses the tension that exists between the street-based DIY culture that the recording industry makes it's money off.
" With us it's a little different; we only do Diplomat mixtapes, we don't promote other artists. But still, I want to know all the guidelines so we don't have to run down this road anymore. We're gonna follow the guidelines and fall back and see what it is. If they had a mixtapes seminar, that would be hot. Have the RIAA come in and say what you can and what you can't do."
Here we have a label afraid to use their own recordings and uttering the most non-street thing I've ever heard. Seminar?


RIAA Speaks On DJ Drama Raid: 'We Enforce Our Rights'
'We don't consider this being against mixtapes,' spokesperson says.
by Jem Aswad, with reporting by Joseph Patel

hip hop mixtapes -MTV 2003 report

In the wake of DJ Drama's arrest I thought I'd collect some of the excellent reporting that exists on the web about hip hop mixtapes.

In 2003, MTV put together this report, Mixtapes: THe Other Music Industry by Shaheem Reid.

Worth noting:

-the existence of mixtapes preceeded rap records. People like Grandmaster Flash and Kool Herc made customised tapes (charging by the minute and adding customised shoutouts) and distributed recordings of their djing performances at parties. A real corner stone of hip hop culture.

-DJ Clue's tapes mark a shift in mixtape culture: his were less about turntable skills and more about finding new talent and new music. Tapes are crucial entry for young talent based entirely on merit. Also mark the continuation of DJs being at the forefront of tastemking

-mixtapes may be outselling official albums. Artists say they like them because they can say and do what they want. They also capture the more collaborative nature of the culture eg arists freestyling over beats they like. The energy is palpable.

-also nice description about how easily and quickly the mixtapes can spread around the world and the animosity about the distribution (it being the crucial element of illegality.)

Michelle Kuo on Invader

Nice piece by Michelle Kuo about Invader in the January 2007 issue of Artforum(See p.57).

Notes:

"Vandalism, then, emerges as a mode of public address--as one of the last remaining collective activitioes taking place in urban space."

"Of course, what could be closer to the pervasive drift of global consumerism than a ubiquitous logo liek Invaders? Graffiti meets branding in a partnership that is by now familiar: Increasingly, urban art's yen for self-multiplication has transitioned from hand painted signage to the easily reproduced stencil or sticker. The collaborative procedures of the postwar avant-garde return as viral marketing."

"Like this absurd sortie [refering to the potentially endless warfare of Space Invaders], Invaders project entails a bombardment without limit, an occupation without real conquest."

"The grids resemble less the gestural script of graf writer than the "monocromes" resulting from police painting over graffiti itself." (Sydney artist, Mickie Quick, worked with this idea directly in his piece at Mays last year.)

Real fakes

"Imagine the consequences if lots of people started creating “fake” art without acknowledging what they were up to?"

Last Chance | Lester Hayes
A Promise That Never Bloomed, a Post-Minimalist You’ve Never Heard Of

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: January 16, 2007
New York Times

collision detection: Why interactive websites can create false memories

Clive Thompson ponders false memories and interactive marketing after reading a paper to be published this month in the Journal of Consumer Research by Ann Schlosser, a business professor at the University of Washington.
collision detection: Why interactive websites can create false memories

No pre-owned games to be allowed for Playstation 3

No pre-owned games to be allowed for Playstation 3

Thought DMCA was bad? Here’s DTCS! | blog.forret.com

Thought DMCA was bad? Here’s DTCS! | blog.forret.com

Court upholds sizable file-swapping fine | CNET News.com

Court upholds sizable file-swapping fine | CNET News.com

net neutrality video

Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

Detritus: Manifesto (Journal of Recycled Culture)

Detritus: Manifesto: "Detritus: the Manifesto

- in nature, detritus is dead plant and animal matter that makes new life possible. The very bottom of the food chain, detritus is the rotting leaves in the forest, the silt on the bottom of the pond, the thick dark mud in the salt marsh. It sticks to your shoes, it smells, but someday it will be food for something else, and that something will be food in turn, on and on up the food chain until you pick it up in the supermarket and put it in your mouth.

Our society spends a lot of time telling us that there is some brand new, fresh cultural produce, generated from thin air and sunshine, slick and clean. They package it with pretty plastic & ribbons and then feed it to us. A lot gets thrown away: the ribbons, the wrapping; culture becomes garbage, or it dies, and rots behind the refrigerator. But the new fluffy shiny stuff still gets churned out, and it gets forced between our teeth. And we are told to swallow it.

We will not swallow. We will chew, and then spit. We will play with our food, and create something new and interesting from it."

India Culture of Copy :: Publics and Music

[Reader-list] Culture of Copy :: Publics and Music: "f the singers and the tunes became secondary and were replaced by the creators of new tunes. Cassettes began to be sold in their name. One of them was ‘Bali Sagu’. It was a new experiment and became popular. It influenced the films after a few years. Whole songs of the films began to be remixed. Some of the films whose remixed songs were like very were ‘Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge’, ‘Taal’, ‘Pardes’, etc. "

U.S. Official Presses China to Punish Piracy - New York Times

U.S. Official Presses China to Punish Piracy - New York Times: "“These are criminal organizations and one of the things they do is run a supply chain for illicit goods, pirated goods,” Mr. Gutierrez said during an interview on the second day of a four-day visit to China at the head of an American business delegation. “This is organized crime. One day it could be T-shirts, the next day it could be watches and the next day it could be medicines.”"

Hmmm...who are the bad guys again?

Piracy Unlimited: Excerpt from the Pirate Party election program

Piracy Unlimited Blog with an excerpt from the Pirate Party election Program

flamingos: real, fake, real fakes, fake fakes, copied no more

Follow the pink flamingos cultural trajectory...

From The New York Times

November 17, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
In the Pink No More
By JENNY PRICE

Los Angeles

ON Nov. 1, just two months shy of its 50th birthday, the plastic pink flamingo went extinct. Or more accurately, it stopped reproducing, when its manufacturer, Union Products, shut down the factory in Leominster, Mass.

That’s sad news, but hardly surprising. The flamingo’s glory days were behind it. Union Products cited the rising cost of plastic resins and of electricity, along with financing woes. Yet while the bird reigned as an icon in the late 20th century, it was bound to succumb to the very different tastes — or the absence thereof — in the 21st.

In 1957, the flamingo that would become lawn-art king was invented by a young Union Products designer with the fitting name of Don Featherstone. Sears sold the bird for $2.76 a pair: “Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape,” the 1957 catalog read. Working-class homeowners readily planted it on their modest lawns — a nod to the marble or bronze sculpture on vaster properties — and art critics promptly pegged it as a prime example of the despicable spread of kitsch. In the 1960s, the suburban lawn flamingo — cheap, mass-produced, artificial and unusually neon pink — was widely reviled as the dregs of bad taste.

Which is exactly what John Waters loved about it. He made his breakout film, “Pink Flamingos,” in 1972, and to his delight the critics were outraged: “It’s like getting a standing ovation,” he said, “if someone vomits watching one of my films.”

In the 1970s, my rebel generation of middle-class baby boomers adopted the plastic bird to challenge the boundaries of high art and good taste. The gay male subculture made it a mascot, and in 1979 the student government at University of Wisconsin planted a thousand flamingos on the lawn outside the dean’s office. The bird had become a signpost for the transgression of social and cultural convention. And Union Products was reaping the rewards.

By the 1980s, flamingo-themed installations were appearing in avant-garde galleries. But the baby boomers were also carrying the flamingo in backpacks across Europe, and kayaking with it through the wilderness. The bird became the ultimate marker for crossing boundaries of every conceivable kind. By the 1990s, it had become a popular housewarming gift. In 1994, the “pink flamingo relay” at the Gay Games in New York featured a swim race and costume pageant. By 1996, you could mark a birthday by hiring the company Flamingo Surprise to plant 30 or 40 flamingos on the celebrant’s lawn the night before. And as Don Featherstone — by this point the president of Union Products — remarked proudly, “I’ve never seen a wedding cake with a duck on it.”

Which is why I’d peg the beginning of the end to the moment in the late 1990s when the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles began selling the Union Products flamingo in its gift shop. Or perhaps to the Sundance Film Festival’s 1997 celebration of the 25th anniversary of “Pink Flamingos.” Or — maybe — to the day in 1987 when Mr. Featherstone inscribed his signature in the original plastic mold, to distinguish the authentic fake flamingo from the knockoffs.

After 30 years of assaults on the cultural barricades, kitsch had become high art, and bad taste had become thoroughly acceptable.

An object that marks the crossing of borders works effectively only when the object transgresses boundaries a majority of people believe should exist. And in 2006, art is pretty much whatever you call art. The boundary of bad taste can be hard to find: decades ago, Variety called “Pink Flamingos” “one of the most vile, stupid and repulsive films ever made,” but film critics now hail the Farrelly brothers as auteurs and find “Jackass” merely annoying. And anyway, who actually knows what’s fake anymore?

The boomers’ children and grandchildren cannot possibly see a plastic flamingo lawn sculpture as outrageously funny or transgressive. My 15-year-old nephew calls it “lame.” My 16-year-old cousin says, “I don’t really think about it one way or the other.” The members of this YouTube generation will find their own conventions to challenge, but they will also have to find their own objects with which to do it.

My generation is beginning to retire, and our plastic flamingo has met its demise — officially the victim of oil prices, but really the inevitable victim of its own legitimacy.

Rest in peace, my pink plastic friend. It was fun while it lasted.

Jenny Price is the author of “Flight Maps: Adventures With Nature in Modern America.”