Tag: copyright

Copyright Maths – How do you analyse the numbers?

Saturday, November 3rd, 2012

As Dan Bull once pointed out:

People born in the late 80s have now lived more of their lives in the 21st century than the 20th century. A new generation has arrived for whom sharing information online is as easy and reflexive as breathing.

As child of the internet age, reaching for my calculator is only a few taps away – and as we hear news today of a man in the US, ordered to pay $1.5 Million in damages for sharing 10 movies, I can’t quite help but wonder when we lost all perspective.

But I’m not alone, Rob Reid, the creator of the Rhapsody music subscription service, also was a bit confused.

Fortunately for him, he “has excel” and was able to figure it all out:

Rob Reid: The $8 billion iPod

Dan Bull :: Death of ACTA

Saturday, February 11th, 2012

It’s ACTA day. ACTA protests are happening across the country. Just yesterday it was announced that European superpower, Germany, would not be signing ACTA following widespread protests across Europe.

Bull :: Death of ACTA

I would tell you that you could download the video “here” but the link Dan has on his Youtube page is to Megaupload. As I don’t want to give you a broken link to a rude page, here is a link the internet found. :P

Now go kill ACTA!

Megaupload vs the world

Saturday, December 10th, 2011

For those of you that don’t know, Megaupload is an American web service that lets you send large files across the internet

Why do these services exist? XKCD explains:

Every time you email a file to yourself so you can pull it up on your friend's laptop, Tim Berners-Lee sheds a single tear.

File Transfer © XKCD

Sadly, but not unusually, XKCD is spot on – and that’s the reason that over the past few years Megaupload has gained a large following – racking up more registered users than the population of Russia.

Recently, in the United States, big media lobbying organisations have been trying to paint the company in a bad light; the company is frequently vilified by the RIAA and MPAA as a rogue site “dedicated to destroying their business models”.

It was therefore an incredibly PR coup for Megaupload when they released a track last night where P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Kanye West sang their support to the site – #megaupload was even trending on twitter for a while.

Now you might have thought this blog post would end here. Megaupload score massive PR coup. Lobbying organisations back down briefly, and then continued sustained attack. But no, it was much more entertaining.

In response to the video, Universal Music Group (UMG) issued a DMCA Takedown request to Youtubeclaiming the video contained copyrighted content that they owned.

Megaupload has filed a counterclaim with Youtube pointing out they “own everything in this video. And we have signed agreements with every featured artist for this campaign”, but the video still remains offline and Megaupload accuses the lobbyists of using “dirty tricks”.

Several things are certainly clear:

  • Megaupload have scored a PR Coup
  • UMG have secured the campaigns success by invoking the Streisand effect
  • I suspect the story will not end here

Anyhow, what is this video that’s causing all the controversy?

Here it is: