Oct 22 2012
Monday News: Johnny Depp gets his own imprint; ISPs and Copyright megaliths create their own enforcement center; Apple loses in the UK
Johnny Depp Imprint – I don’t really get the idea behind this but apparently it is believed that if Johnny Depp’s name is on the imprint, then people will buy the books. The first book from the Johnny Depp imprint, a part of HarperCollins, is The Unraveled Tales of Bob Dylan by Douglas Brinkley. Associated Press
Internet providers to begin warning customers who pirate content – AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon will begin to allow copyright owners to alert them of potential illegal downloaders using a service called Mark Monitor. The copyright consortium provides an IP address to the internet service provider. The ISP then matches up the IP address to its customer and sends a warning notice. If the customer feels they have been wrongly accused, you can pay $35 for a review. So essentially big corporations will be meting out punishment outside a court of law. “”The entire system will be overseen by an organization called the Center for Copyright Information, which includes content owners, such as the Motion Picture Association of America and Recording Industry Association of America, as well as individual members including Disney, Sony Pictures, Fox, EMI and Universal.”" CNN
Apple loses tablet copyright appeal against Samsung – Apple won the first round in the US but the appellate courts in the UK don’t agree. “The Court of Appeal upheld a British High Court judgment that despite some similarities, Samsung did not infringe Apple’s design, in part because its products were “not as cool”. Samsung welcomed the decision saying in a statement, “we continue to believe that Apple was not the first to design a tablet with a rectangular shape and rounded corners”.“ Reuters
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Oct 22, 2012 @ 05:43:54
So do you get that $35 reimbursed if they’re wrong about you downloading illegal material online? And how the heck are they going to know? Some people mask their IP addresses and/or use other people’s unsecured wifi to do this.
Oct 22, 2012 @ 09:53:04
@Nadia Lee: For the low, low price of not four payments, not three payments, not even two payments, but JUST ONE PAYMENT of $34.99, we’ll seize every internet-ready device you own, scrutinize every bit of your hard drive’s history, and get back to you with our verdict whenever we feel like it, if we remember. Call within the next four minutes and ask about how you can throw EVEN MORE MONEY at us!
Oct 22, 2012 @ 09:57:13
Per the article you do get the $35 back if you “win the review”. Consider that the decision maker isn’t impartial I wonder what the odds of winning the review are? How could anyone prove that their IP was spoofed? In fact how many people would know that it is possible to spoof IP addresses?
Oct 22, 2012 @ 10:02:58
Wow, I wish there were more competition in cable services.
Yeah, I don’t get the Johnny Depp thing either, but I think my daughters might ;-)
Oct 22, 2012 @ 10:05:20
My husband sent me this link. It is very slow after being slashdotted:
http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/
Oct 22, 2012 @ 10:30:49
@Helen: THAT is why everyone should scrape the DRM off of everything they buy. That’s just horrid.
Oct 22, 2012 @ 10:46:07
What’s funny is that while American companies are waging war on piracy — and obviously not understanding the international arena, the Kindle in Russia is sold as an e-reader where the books are free. (Not, as far as I can tell by Amazon, but by the hordes of people who buy a bunch in the US and sell them in Moscow. Kiosks offering to jailbreak your iPhone were on every corner in Moscow before Apple decided to actually sell the iPhone in Russia. )
There’s a huge market outside the US and companies like Amazon don’t know it and when they do, they can’t appreciate that not only is the rest of the world not like the US, but Moldova, Mongolia and Mozambique are not like Monaco or each other, even if they are in the department you call ROW (rest of world).
The culture and norms of e-books reading are being set in these countries, for the most part without any contribution of the international companies who think they set standards and who will be outraged if their standards and rules are flagrantly flouted by people for who they are bizarre, unbelievable and unfair.
Oct 22, 2012 @ 10:48:06
@Helen: That is one of the reasons why I went through the hassle of learning how to remove DRM and also using more than one back-up system (my PC hard drive, an external hard drive and a “cloud”… and incidentally no one should solely rely on a “cloud” only for back ups).
These news are scaring the heck out of me. I also foresee customer class actions.
M.
Oct 22, 2012 @ 17:08:20
@Helen: Aaaaand now I’m going to download everything in my Kinde archive to my Kindle for PC app, copy the lot to my portable hard drive, and strip the DRM at my leisure.
Oct 22, 2012 @ 18:04:00
Hmm.
Also:
Thanks, Johnny Depp, for saving us from the tedium of reading insufficiently unique works. Or something.
RE Amazon: I’ve just spent most of the last week working on a customer complaint. It was a high-profile one, so I had to compile records for every interaction we’ve ever had with this individual. The customer doesn’t have a case and won’t get what they want, but we put the damn effort into explaining why, dammit! Amazon >:
Oct 23, 2012 @ 00:06:20
The blog about Amazon is rather chilling. I’ve been working the last several months on downloading my ebooks and stripping the DRM, but I think I want to get moving faster on that. I’ve slowed down to sort things into smaller, more manageable libraries by genre. I’ve also been adding info on series, so that I can figure out what I’m missing.
Maybe I just need to download everything and THEN sort. Thank goodness for Calibre!