Today at 9pm PST, QTrax beta will be available for download.
According to the Time’s Online, QTrax is supported by all major record labels and would allow users legally to download some 25 million songs. According to reports, users would also be able to transfer songs to mp3 players, burn CDs, and rip CDs to the QTrax player. According to QTrax’s website, the QTrax application is the world’s first, 100% legal and free peer-2-peer music application. However, a number of record labels are reporting that they have not entered into a license agreement with QTrax.
Napster and Rhapsody already have plans where users can listen to unlimited songs over the Internet, but both require fees for the service, which then allow you to transfer tracks to digital music devices. These plans have monthly fees ranging from free to listen to $14.99 for music “to go”. iTunes, requires you to buy each song and works only with iPod digital music players.
QTrax will be supported by ad revenue and will pay license fees directly to the record labels for use of their content. End users will pay nothing.
In a subject near and dear to my heart, Diane Von Furstenberg Studio LP (”DVF“) filed a copyright infringement suit against Target Corporation. The case is not yet available online, but was reportedly filed on Thursday in Manhattan in the Federal District Court, for the Southern District of New York.
The basis of the suit is that Target copied DVF’s “spotted frog” print and is selling a dress under its Merona label with an identical design. DVF registered the “Spotted Frog” design with the Library of Congress in 2006, which gives DVF the presumption of ownership, the potential to force Target to pay up to $30,000 per act of infringement, and the ability to have Target pay DVF’s attorneys fees. Had DVF failed to register its copyright none of these fun (for DVF) remedies would be available. Well done DVF.
(Check out the article, “Always Register Copyright” in the Winter 2008 Issue of The AXIOM for more information on the benefits of registering copyright in the U.S. )
The issue of protecting the work of fashion designers has always been a tricky. Copyright does not protect “useful articles.” Which generally means that dresses, hats, bags and the like cannot be protected under copyright law; however, prints, and patterns (such as “Spotted Frog”) are protectable because of their artistic value.
Some useful articles may be protected using design patents, which protect novel designs. However, design patents are slow to issue and fashion may have moved on three or four seasons before a designer obtains an enforceable design patent registration. Great if you are designing an iconic piece that will be sold for years, but of more limited value if you retire a look at the end of a season.
Additionally, if a design is unique enough to tell to consumers that the design comes from a particular source (i.e. “that is a DVF dress”), it may be protected under trademark law. However, it’s a difficult task for the designer to prove to a court that a design is so iconic and so tightly associated by the public with a particular designer that it should be protected.
The Design Piracy Prohibition Act (which died in committee in mid-2007) would have amended the Copyright Act to allow a fashion design protection for three years from the first day a design was revealed to the public. Its unclear whether the bill will be reintroduced in the future.
In the meantime, fashion designers have a mishmash of intellectual property laws to use to try to protect their work, with mixed results.
ChinaDaily.com reports that prosecution for online copyright infringement reached record levels in China last year. However, Yan Xiaohong, vice-minister of the National Copyright Administration (NCA), at a press conference held by the State Council Information Office stated that “Internet copyright infringement is still very prevalent in the country.” Yan called for tougher legislation. “Fines and sentences meted out have not been enough,” he said. “We must make offenders realize the costs of violation are too high for them to continue.”
Washington Post writer, Monica Hesse, notes that the incidence of large corporations infringing the copyrights of individuals is soaring. (Unlike Canada, in the U.S. one must register copyright in order to have any enforceable rights–seldom done by authors of user-generated content.) Ms. Hess goes on to comment that “in an increasingly user-generated world where the public is the artist, sometimes it’s the big boys who get grabby. And the questions that arise are about ownership, but they are also about fairness, and changing culture, and ultimately, the search for authenticity.”
As our norms are changing and user-generated content is rapidly overtaking studio content, does it still make sense that our governments are focusing on protecting large content owners? More importantly, is China, Canada, or the United States ready for a conversation about this.
Another country, and a vastly different response to the issue of file-sharing. Where U.S. members of congress are trying to increase drastically the penalties for file sharing, six members of the Swedish Parliament have published a paper calling for the complete decriminalization of file-sharing.
“Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet.”
Food for thought.
Should non-commercial file sharing be incorporated into the doctrine of fair use in the United States? Should we move our legal system in a direction that more closely matches our norms in the area of content use? Professor John Tehranian points out in Infringement Nation that the average American violates copyright almost constantly. So why then, do we permit our record labels and our movie studies such enormous freedom to sue even the most casual of infringers? Many of whom believe that what they are doing is perfectly OK.
In Free Culture-How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Lawrence Lessig posits that infringement was the beginning of the entertainment industry in the U.S. However, as more and more power has been concentrated in the media establishment, the pirates have now become the profiteers.
At some point, we as a society have to deal with the ease of content distribution through the Internet. Pirates should be stopped, but my 16-year old cousin should not do jail time for sharing an Alicia Keys track. Let’s start from there.
“Today, fair use is the major way that new makers can get unlicensed access to the cultural production of their own society. The culture that is emerging can be channeled, encouraged, even deformed, but it cannot be cut off.”
The Center for Social Media enters the discussion on User-Generated Video Content in its new report: Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video Content. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the report examines the explosive growth of transformative works on the Internet. From parody to pastiche, Recut looks at trends in User-Generated Video Content, how it fits into the current framework of fair use law, and how we as a society depend on fair use to enrich our cultural heritage. Even if its just for a laugh.
“Fair use is a right to reuse copyrighted works…when the value to society is greater than the value to the copyright owner. This feature of the law is grounded in the purpose of copyright itself in U.S. law: to encourage the production of culture.”
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