I did not read his books but …
Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of “The Alchemist”, is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. His publishers weren’t too keen on giving away free copies of his books, so he’s taken matters into his own hands.
More details about this issue in the article available at www.torrentfreak.com website.
Pirates are innovators, they signal market problems and lead the way to new business models. Nevertheless, they are tagged as thieves by many. We invited Matt Mason, author of the book “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism”, to write an article on the “pirate’s dilemma” for TorrentFreak.
This article is available at www.torrentfreak.com webiste. I like the conclusion.
Matt’s book: “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism” is out now through Free Press, and probably soon on a BitTorrent tracker near you ;).
A lot of websites posted news about a suit in the case Eros, LLC v. Doe, No. 8:07CV01158 (M.D Fla. Jul. 03, 2007), which basically concerns copyright and trademark infringement of virtual goods (sex toys). I will not write too much about that. Just check the article at www.reuters.com website. You’ll find there attached documents of the suit and more comments. But, did anyone of you know about a vritual product that became sold as real? Quafe is both the name of a popular drink in EVE (which is MMOG - Massively Multiplayer Online Game) and the name of the corporation which produces it. On October 22, 2004, Crowd Control Productions, the owner of EVE, launched the virtual drink for sale in the real world. CCP sold the drink from their website - www.ccpgames.com, for $1.50 (USD) for a single bottle, or $15.10 for a multi-pack, but sadly to say, sales of this drink have since ceased. Quafe has a distinct lemon-lime taste.
As usually, if you are looking for more legal materials about mentioned issue, please refer to www.ssrn.com.
Ailin Graef is Anshe Chung - owner of the Anshe Chung Studios in the Second Life game. For all of you are not into such issues I recommend to read a brief description at www.wikipedia.org website. Regarding her claim that this game made her millionaire (a real one not virtual) www.cnet.com magazine decided to carry out an interview about this story During the interview which was held in the game’s world, Ailin Graef’s avatar was attacked by a bunch of flying pennises. It was a result of an action done by so-called griefers which are malicious gamers, who per analogiam act like spammers. Some websites published articles about this event, amongst them was also www.boingboing.net. Meanwile Ailin Graef’s husband decided to persuade such websites to remove pictures of this incident. He based their claims on copyright to virtual figure. More details at Steve O’Hear’s blog and in the article at www.news.com website.
Numly Copyright + Web 2.0 = Copyright 2.0. This phrase is taken from the title of www.numly.com website. What’s hidden behind?. Let me cite from the mentioned website. Numly assigns Numly Numbers (Electronic Serial Numbers / ESNs) for all things digital. These unique identifiers enable rights statements to be associated with digital content as well as third-party, non-repudiation measures for proof of copyright via real-time verifications.
As you can read in the article at www.arstechnica.com website, EMI, the music gigant is experimenting on selling music in MP3 file format, without so-called “DRMs” (the proper term should be rights-management information systems but as you can see it is really hard to say for the average man in the street). I wonder if it is a sign of change of views? What about the “legal trash” as article 7 of the Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (Official Journal L 167 , 22/06/2001 P. 0010 - 0019)? We will see.
In passing, I would like to invite those readers who will be around to my lecture titled “Legal aspects of FLOSS licences”. The lecture is arranged by the Koło Naukowe Prawa Własności Intelektualnej UG. It is scheduled on December 8, ETA 3PM, room no 1039 at the Faculty of Law and Administration, University of Gdansk.
It was easy to rule in the case of banning a technology of which its authors induced to commit crimes connected with illegal distrubiuton of copyrighted works, vide a judgment in the case MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. 545 U.S. 913 (2005). Yet such case is more complicated for lawyers if a technology creator, in this example BitTorrent, clearly states that it is only designed as a tool for exchanging any kind of digital materials. Obviously also big media companies (as it goes in such big corporations) very slowly react with market changes and with new business models. Today, BitTorrent Inc announced that they have teamed up with many big players like 20th Century Fox, G4, Kadokawa Pictures USA, Lionsgate, MTV Networks (including COMEDY CENTRAL, Logo, MTV: Music Television, MTV2, Nickelodeon, Nicktoons Network, SpikeTV, The N, TV Land and VH1), Palm Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Starz Media. They will publish movies and TV shows at www.BitTorrent.com. More details in the press release at www.businesswire.com website.
I do not have enough free time lately but I read very interesting article at www.wired.com website couple of minutes ago and decided to mention about that. Linden Labs - creators of the virtual world called Second Life found a solution for a problem that was destroying the economy of that game since some time. I mean the Copybot program which was used by some players to duplicate items, goods, inside the virtual world. Not only they will block accounts of users who apply this kind of software but also there will be introduced regulations (I wanted to write law or legal) that will allow to enforce copyrights to textures and stuff inside this game. The article courtesy of Bruno Giussani explaining shortly most things about Second Life and at the end of this post a movie as an illustration how Copybot works.
Yet another example that you can earn “real” money on digital stuff. Now it is all about cars and tracks for the game “Gran Turismo HD”. Check the article at www.1up.com website. There is another article about micropaymenents and comics at www.henryjenkins.org website.