According to RIAA President Cary Sherman, the DMCA doesn’t work for the content industry because it doesn’t make service providers responsible for policing copyright infringement.
In statements made as part of a panel discussion at an event hosted by the Technology Policy Institute, Sherman said, “the DMCA isn’t working for content people at all.”
He went on to explain, “You basically cannot monitor all the infringements on the internet,” later adding, “everybody has to do something about piracy.”
This line of reasoning is nothing new for the RIAA, but it remains as flawed as ever. It requires that you accept a number of assumptions which simply don’t hold up to any real scrutiny.
The most obvious is that there’s any way to stop piracy. It’s easy to say somebody has to do it, but there’s no evidence anyone actually can.
According to the Sherman the solution is for everyone from ISPs on up to do get involved. But this creates some significant legal problems.
How does an ISP monitor the content of on their network without violating federal wiretapping law?
And that’s without considering that figuring out whether fair use is involved requires human intervention, which would automatically disqualify the provider from DMCA safe harbor protection.
So if ISPs can’t find infringement what about services like RapidShare? Sure they could use a filtering system like YouTube has implemented, but what’s to stop people from switching to a new service with no such arrangement in place?
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Result for: internet
Intel has announced today that a dozen new netbooks will be released this week using the company’s new dual-core Atom processors, the fastest CPUs available for netbooks.
Netbooks are hitting stores from Acer, ASUS, Fujitsu, Lenovo, LG, Samsung, MSI, and Toshiba.
“Acer strives to continually improve on our customers’ total mobile experience, whether it is increased responsiveness or extended Internet interactivity through longer battery life,” added David Lee, associate vice president of Acer’s Mobile Computing Business Unit. “We are pleased to select dual-core Intel Atom processors for Acer netbooks, helping to empower netbook users achieve even more – both at work and at leisure.”
The new powerful processors will give netbook owners better support for gaming, at the very least.
Each netbook uses the Intel Atom processor N550, which also adds DDR3 RAM support with the same battery life as the single-core N450 Atom.
“In their short history, the netbook category has experienced impressive growth,” says Erik Reid, director of marketing for mobile platforms at Intel. “Having shipped about 70 million Intel Atom chips for netbooks since our launch of the category in 2008, there is obviously a great market for these devices around the world.”
Result for: internet
Hulu, the United States’ long-time second most popular streaming video site saw its viewership nosedive for the month ended June 30th, after comScore changed their measurement methods.
In May, the site had an estimated 44 million viewers, says comScore, with that number falling to 24 million in June.
The giant drop was the largest of any of the top Internet video sites, dropping the site from second to tenth, in terms of online video traffic in the U.S.
While the number drop seems huge, the new numbers mainly underscore a different and lingering problem; the fact that measuring online audiences remains unreliable.
Three companies, ComScore, Nielsen and Quantcast, each measure differently, so numbers may be similar but never equal.
Says one digital media strategist of the difference in numbers, and the overall problem of unreliability: “You would think 15 years on, we would be in a better place. But we’re still talking about fundamental discrepancies in things like page counts.”
