Earlier this year Paramount Pictures and CBS Studios filed a lawsuit against the makers of the Star Trek inspired fan film, accusing them of copyright infringement.

The dispute centers around the well-received short film Star Trek: Prelude to Axanar and the planned follow-up feature film Anaxar.

Among other things, the Star Trek rightsholders claim ownership over various Star Trek related settings, characters, species, clothing, colors, shapes, words, short phrases and even the Klingon language.

Axanar productions and Alec Peters, the makers of the fan-spinoff, responded to several of the allegations last month arguing that several of the allegedly “infringing elements” are not protected by copyright at all.

They argued that the Klingon language is not copyrightable because it’s not more than an idea or a system. They therefore asked the court to dismiss or strike the copyright claims in question.

However, Paramount and CBS disagree (bIlughbe’*). In their reply the rightsholders call the argument absurd and among other things, they point out that the language system is not very useful if there are no real Klingons to communicate with.

“This argument is absurd, since a language is only useful if it can be used to communicate with people, and there are no Klingons with whom to communicate,” they write (full filing: pdf).

“Defendants’ use of the Klingon language in their works is simply further evidence of their infringement of Plaintiffs’ characters, since speaking this fictitious language is an aspect of their characters.”

Klingon alphabet (image: wiki)

In any case, the court should not rule on the matter prematurely, the rightsholders note. The question to what degree various elements are copyright infringing should be decided in future hearings where the issues can be properly addressed.

The same applies to other elements, including spaceships. Axanar productions argues that these general concepts can’t be copyrighted, but Paramount and CBS point out that their specific expression of Klingon warships is.

Klingon ships

“Plaintiffs have not merely alleged that the general concepts of a ‘spaceship’ or a ‘spacedock’ have been appropriated – the Complaint’s allegations show that Defendants have misappropriated the expression of these concepts,” the movie studios inform the court.

Citing relevant case law, they argue that Star Trek starships deserve the same protection as the Batmobile.

“Even assuming that Defendants are properly dissecting the elements of the Star Trek Copyrighted Works (and they are not), courts have held that vehicles like the Batmobile are copyrightable as characters, and therefore, specific Star Trek starships are also copyrightable.”

Summing up, Paramount and CBS argue that the infringing status of the various elements should be considered in substantial similarity analysis during the lawsuit. They therefore ask the court to deny Axanar’s motion to dismiss or strike their claims.

—

*bIlughbe’ means you are wrong, in Klingon

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Over the past weeks dozens of companies and organizations have shared their concerns regarding the current state of the DMCA copyright law.

The responses are part of a consultation launched by the U.S. Copyright Office. Most focus on the effectiveness of the notice and takedown model, and the response of anti-piracy firm CEG TEK International zooms in on how ISPs handle these notices.

The company is well-known for its collaboration with adult video companies, for which it targets individual Internet subscribers with settlement requests. These requests are sent through DMCA notifications, commonly demanding a few hundred dollars.

Some ISPs forward these requests but most large providers have chosen not to do so. This is problematic for CEG TEK as it hurts their business model.

“The problem is the roadblocks to enforcement of copyrights that are put up by online service providers to protect their relationships with their infringing customers,” CEG TEK’s attorney writes.

The anti-piracy outfit points out that they, and others, can easily track the IP-addresses of pirates. But, without cooperation from ISPs this information isn’t very helpful.

“Unfortunately, the ISPs, who rake in millions, and probably billions, of dollars from their infringing customers, do not voluntarily disclose the infringer’s identities,” CEG TEK notes.

Under the DMCA, Internet providers are not required to forward all notices of claimed copyright infringement. CEG TEK recommends changing towards Canada’s model instead, where subscribers must be notified.

“Canada’s ISPs forward such notices at no charge to copyright owners. Setting up forwarding systems is relatively easy and inexpensive, and is similar to ISPs normal bill-forwarding systems,” the company notes .

In this case, CEG TEK would like U.S. ISPs to forward their “bills,” but there is more.

In addition to a forwarding requirement the anti-piracy firm also suggests the introduction of statutory damages for Internet providers, requiring them to pay $30 each time a subscriber doesn’t stop sharing pirated content.

“By statute require ISPs to pay copyright owners $30 for each notice of claimed infringement sent with respect to an Internet account having repeat infringements,” the suggestion reads.

“Do this, and ISPs would actually enforce their own Terms of Use that currently give lip service to the concept that customers are forbidden from engaging in copyright infringement,” CEG TEK adds between brackets.

The submission is written by CEG TEK attorney Ira Siegel, who also represented several rightsholders in various lawsuits against “John Doe” BitTorrent users, as copyright troll watcher FCT points out.

Siegel’s “trolling” connection is relevant as he also proposes several changes to the DMCA in order to make it easier to identify pirates through courts. Among other things, CEG TEK suggests allowing mass-BitTorrent lawsuits, in which tens of thousands of IP-addresses can be grouped (joined) in one complaint.

Such a change would make it cheaper to uncover the identity of alleged infringers, as rightsholders would only have to pay a single filing fee.

The proposals put forward by CEG TEK are among the most far-reaching we’ve seen thus far. They also directly oppose comments made by the U.S. broadband association USTelecom, which asked the copyright office to stop “abusive” notices that include settlement demands.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

MPAA chairman and CEO Chris Dodd made his fifth keynote speech at CinemaCon yesterday, pouring buckets of cold water on the idea that piracy is somehow threatening the very existence of the movie industry.

“I’m proud to say that the state of our industry has never been stronger,” the former U.S. senator said.

Indeed. Yesterday the MPAA released its latest Theatrical Market Statistics Report which revealed that global box office revenues reached $38.3 billion in 2015, up 5% on 2014’s total. The United States and Canada turned in $11.1 billion with international box office revenues hitting $27.2 billion.

“To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the movies has been greatly exaggerated,” Dodd said.

Exaggeration was the name of the game four years ago during the SOPA debate, when one might have been forgiven for believing that Hollywood’s very existence was hanging by a thread. But now, according to the MPAA itself, things could hardly be better, with 708 films released in 2015 and those released by MPAA members up 8% on the previous year.

Almost 70% of the U.S./Canada population (235.3 million people) went to the cinema at least once in 2015, a 2% increase over 2014. Frequent movie goers who attended at least once a month accounted for 49% of all tickets sold in the same region. Indeed, the number of tickets purchased by everyone from hardcore fans to the very casual viewer increased last year.

But despite the impressive numbers (full report – pdf), the MPAA insists that piracy is still a problem. According to Dodd the box office would be more healthy to the tune of $1.5 billion if piracy could be brought under control.

There are plenty of theories on how that can be achieved, including making content more readily available to the consumer. The plan currently making the most noise along those lines is being touted by Napster co-founder Sean Parker, whose Screening Room project hopes to bring first-run movies into the home via a set-top box.

While at first this might sound like a recipe for spoiling record box office revenues, Screening Room has a trick up its sleeve. Customers prepared to pay the required $50 to watch at home would get two tickets to watch the movie in the cinema, which could either boost or at least maintain box office attendance.

Nevertheless, those in the movie screening business are less optimistic. Last month The Art House Convergence (AHC), a cinema group representing 600 theaters, said it “strongly opposes” the plan and warned that it would only fuel torrent sites and piracy.

Interestingly, however, Chris Dodd told reporters yesterday that the MPAA would meet with the people behind Screening Room.

“I want to hear what they have to say,” Dodd said.

Reading between the lines though, it seems unlikely that the MPAA is seriously thinking of signing on the dotted line. In his speech yesterday Dodd repeatedly underlined the unique experience offered by a theatrical screening.

“Despite the noisy suggestions otherwise, the cinema provides a unique and powerful experience that just cannot be re-created,” he said. One of his colleagues made things even more clear.

“I assure you, we are not going to let a third party or middleman come between [the studio and the cinema owners],” Warner Bros. Entertainment Chief Executive Kevin Tsujihara said during his presentation.

And those cinema owners have been vocal too. As reported by the LA Times, National Assn. of Theatre Owners chief John Fithian yesterday described Screening Room as a “big distraction” from the great results published by the MPAA, noting that “it’s up to the exhibitors and the distributors to decide the future of [release] windows.”

Interestingly, however, Fithian acknowledged that there may be some room for change.

“More sophisticated window modeling may be needed for the growing success of a modern movie industry,” he said.

Parker, standing by.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

YouTube has grown into the world’s leading video and music service and has partnerships with thousands of artists and other publishers around the globe. While many are happy with the revenue they’re generating from the Google-owned platform, others are not.

According to various sources, Universal’s deal with YouTube has already expired and deals in place with the likes of Sony and Warner will time out later this year. As a result the major recording labels are in negotiations with YouTube and are demanding better rates than the ones they currently describe in disparaging terms.

So if the RIAA can negotiate decent deals with the likes of Apple Music and TIDAL, why does it continue to have problems with Google’s YouTube? To put it bluntly the labels believe that YouTube is gaming the system and unsurprisingly it all comes down to the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA.

While YouTube quickly responds to takedown notices sent by the labels, the RIAA says the platform is laden with unlicensed music uploaded users and as the law currently stands all it can do is keep taking it down. That’s something they do through gritted teeth.

In an interview with Recode, RIAA chief Cary Sherman was asked why following the Viacom case the labels don’t accept the current legal position. He pulls no punches.

“We accept the inevitability of death. It doesn’t mean we have to like it,” he says.

Describing the DMCA as “dysfunctional”, Sherman says that the Copyright Office’s consultation on the effectiveness of the DMCA is allowing stakeholders to have their say but in the meantime YouTube is bullying negotiations by utilizing the shield of safe harbor.

“When you compare what we get when we get to freely negotiate, with a company like Spotify, vs. what we get when we are under the burden of an expansively interpreted ‘safe harbor,’ when you’re negotiating with somebody like YouTube, you can see that you’re not getting the value across the platforms that you should,” Sherman says.

According to the RIAA chief the solution is for the current notice-and-takedown system to become notice-and-staydown, so that when one unlicensed copy of a song is removed from YouTube all other uploads of the same content are permanently barred from the system.

“If we had a system where once a song was taken down, you had a filtering system that prevented it from going back up, we wouldn’t have to be sending hundreds of millions of notices on the same content over and over again,” Sherman notes.

So the RIAA says its stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand they want their properly licensed music on YouTube but in return they want all unlicensed copies of the same removed from YouTube on a permanent basis. Sherman says without that kind of agreement the one-sided negotiation process with the company goes something like this.

Look. This is all we [YouTube] can afford to pay you. We hope that you’ll find that reasonable. But that’s the best we can do. And if you don’t want to give us a license, okay. You know that your music is still going to be up on the service anyway. So send us notices, and we’ll take ’em down as fast we can, and we know they’ll keep coming back up.

“That’s not a real negotiation. That’s like saying, ‘That’s a real nice song you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it’,” Sherman says.

In effect, Sherman accuses Google-owned YouTube of running a DMCA-protected protection racket, with music possibly being offered freely to the masses in the same manner that bars might get inexplicably fire-bombed in Chicago during the night. While Google hasn’t responded to Sherman’s comments directly, a submission it has made to the Copyright Office pours cold water on the flames.

“Some in the recording industry have suggested that the safe harbors somehow diminish the value of sound recordings, pointing to YouTube and blaming the DMCA for creating a so-called ‘value grab.’ This claim is not supported by the facts,” the company writes.

Noting that YouTube has had licensing agreements in place with the record labels for many years, Google says it is simply incorrect that it relies on the DMCA instead of licensing content. Furthermore, Google says that those who claim that royalty rates are too low because of the DMCA notice-and-takedown process are forgetting the tools already provided by YouTube.

“This claim…ignores Content ID, which has been in existence since 2008 and which record labels (and many other copyright owners) use every day to monetize their works on YouTube. Thanks to Content ID, record labels do not have to rely
solely on the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown process on YouTube — they can remove any or all user uploads of their works from the platform on an automated and ongoing basis,” Google writes.

“Indeed, since January 2014, over 98% of all YouTube copyright removal claims have come through Content ID. Although business partners can be expected to disagree from time to time about the price of a license, any claim that the DMCA safe harbors are responsible for a ‘value gap’ for music on YouTube is simply false.”

With this war of words set to rage on, RIAA chief Cary Sherman says that he hopes for a future in which the DMCA has been fixed and the balance of power shifts back to the labels.

“I think the record companies would like to be partners with YouTube. But it’s a little hard to call it a partnership when it’s so one-sided in terms of the negotiating leverage,” he says.

Notice-and-staydown certainly has the potential to push the point of leverage back into the labels’ favor, but there’s a long way to go yet. Content ID aside, it doesn’t look like Google wants to play ball either.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

“What if you had an unlimited access to the LARGEST ONLINE MOVIE LIBRARY EVER? A community based library, where you could watch any movie online. A library where you could swap films with contributors all over the world and discover an infinite number of stories.

This is the revolutionary idea behind MovieSwap,” the service’s Kickstarter teased last month. The proposition did indeed sound attractive and how it would be achieved somewhat intriguing.

The team behind MovieSwap said they would take the idea of swapping a physical DVD with friends to its Internet-powered conclusion. After collecting millions of genuine DVDs from all over the world, ripping them and storing them in the cloud, the service would allow members to play them on any device, anywhere.

MovieSwap?

“Then, just like you can legally lend, swap, or offer a DVD to a friend, MovieSwap works in the same way, but on a much larger scale thanks to its remote playback technology,” the team said.

MovieSwap’s Kickstarter began with a modest target of just 37,000 euros, a target that was easily surpassed with more than 87,000 euros in the pot by the time the fundraiser ended. Now, however, the dream is over.

“The MovieSwap campaign almost reached its end. However, despite its incredible success, we, unfortunately, need to announce that we have made the difficult decision to cancel it,” backers were told this afternoon.

According to the MovieSwap team the project netted almost 5,000 supporters, which places it in the top 400 of almost 100,000 Kickstarter campaigns. But despite raising more than enough money, 4,829 backers simply wasn’t enough. Behind the scenes it appears there was an undisclosed 10,000 backer threshold, under which other investors would decline to finance the project.

“Our investors were expecting more, and we cannot launch MovieSwap without their full support, despite your mobilization. To start this crazy adventure and launch MovieSwap globally, we need to invest a few millions,” the team say.

“Under the symbolic 10,000 backers barrier, our investors consider it would be too risky to bet on our project. Without funding, we cannot guarantee MovieSwap will be available in the expected time. That’s why we prefer canceling our project and have your money refunded.”

The news has enjoyed a mixed reception among those who backed the Kickstarter.

“I’m upset. I would have tried to garner more support if you had a magic number. Hiding that information from your Kickstarter supporters is just bad form,” one said.

“A huge disappointment,” said another. “I imagine that this decision was carefully considered and not made with a light heart. Know that we will be there to support you and provide investors the necessary proof of our passion!”

What is slightly surprising is that just a week ago TorrentFreak was discussing the future of the project with the MovieSwap team after it had reached its funding target. There was no mention whatsoever of any 10,000 backer limit. We did, however, discuss the legality of the service.

In our original article I referred to the project as brilliantly innovative, but I doubted that Hollywood would allow MovieSwap to thrive. Hollywood has a history of hostility towards third-parties wading into ‘their’ market without licensing discussions and I wondered how MovieSwap would fare.

To that end I asked some pretty probing questions, all of which centered on how MovieSwap would be able to operate legally in several key market areas. A response to that wasn’t forthcoming and then came today’s news.

“Honestly, we’re pretty disappointed, as the campaign began very well, and all our team was deeply involved in the project,” MovieSwap CEO Cyril Barthet informs TorrentFreak.

“But as everyone knows, such projects need a substantial investment to get off the ground and deploy worldwide. The level we reached did not convince our current round enough – very ambitious and risky model indeed.”

But despite the setbacks and risks, the team remains optimistic.

“As Bruce Wayne’s father said: ‘Why do we fall ? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up’,” Barthet says.

“It’s quite the same for lean start-ups. So, as we already run a disc-to-digital and streaming platform in France (‘Vodkaster‘), we will focus on it with a step-by-step approach to make it grow locally then globally,” he concludes.

So at least for now it appears that MovieSwap won’t see the light of day, nor will we see Hollywood’s response to it. That’s a shame, but not even millions of dollars would be enough to pacify the studios if the service had truly delivered on its promises. And they were pretty exciting.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.