NEWS
Book publisher demands BitTorrent jury trial individual file-sharers.
A global book publisher has demanded that four people face piracy charges for allegedly using peer-to-peer network BitTorrent to share its titles online.
John Wiley & Sons, one of the world’s biggest book publishers, has filed papers in the US District Court for the Southern district of New York. Two of the digital titles are WordPress for Dummies and Hacking for Dummies. Another title, priced at £28, has been downloaded 74,000 times in a 16-month period.
Wiley’s action follows 15 lawsuits it has initiated since October 2011 to obtain the identities of about 200 accused Internet pirates; four of these people are named as defendants. It said it has tried to settle the cases out of court to stop the alleged illegal downloading.
Te company’s lawyer, William Dunnegan, said many of the 200 people have owned up and have paid damages under the US Copyright Act. But he said the four named defendants, all residents of New York, have not complied.
Te music and film industries have typically taken a different approach to piracy, pursuing Internet service providers (ISPs) instead of
Twitter to hand patents to inventors
Micro-blogging website Twitter plans to hand more control of its patents to the designers and engineers behind the innovations, rather than the company as a whole.
Te plans in the draſt Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA) would apply to both past and current employees. Twitter said it could take legal action to protect its patents only if the employees permitted it.
But it reserved the right to use patents without permission for “defensive purposes”, according to a blog post by the company’s Adam Messinger.
“Tis is a significant departure from the current state of affairs in the industry,” he said. Typically, engineers and designers agree to hand over any ownership rights to their employers, and the company can use the patents however they want, he added. “With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used as a shield, rather than as a weapon.”
Jonathan Radcliffe, a partner at Mayer Brown LLP in London, said giving individual employees control over patents “drove a coach and horses through all norms of corporate decision making and responsibility”. “Shareholders won’t like
10 Trademarks Brands and the Internet Volume 1, Issue 2
www.worldipreview.com
it, and because these rights are intended to be contractually enforceable it would significantly deter those wanting to buy or license the underlying patents or business in the future.”
Radcliffe said allowing employees to decide when to take offensive action to protect patents gave them more control over wider strategic decisions. “Tat risk makes the company look weak, which heightens the chances that competitors will deliberately encroach on the company’s technology.”
But Professor Ted Sichelman, of the University of San Diego’s School of Law, said that because
Twitter is a “natural monopoly” to a large degree, and a company that is, typically, sued by non- practising entities, the IPA would be unlikely to affect the overall offensive strategy.
He added: “To the extent the policy assuages the discontent of its employees who tend to hold anti- patent sentiments, then I think it’s very sensible.”
Twitter’s Messinger said that although the IPA was in its first draſt, Twitter plans to implement it later this year. Twitter may also contact other companies to see whether they would be interested in implementing similar proposals, he said.
One benefit of taking direct action against end users in the US, rather than the UK, is the higher damages available. Under the US Copyright Act, courts can impose fines of up to $150,000 per infringement. In the UK, the maximum fine is £5,000 ($8,100).
Rebecca Swindells, a partner at Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP in London, said rights owners and courts are shiſting from targeting ISPs to targeting end users, in order to tackle illegal file-sharing at its source. She added, though, that some of the most “significant” EU cases
covering online piracy, such as that involving Newzbin, showed that brands can have success against ISPs.
Swindells said taking direct action against
consumers could deter those who are “minor infringers”. But the more committed infringers, who download on “a massive scale”, will be less likely to willing to pay for what they use.
She added: “All around the world, governments, courts, legislators and industry bodies are trying to work out the most effective methods to counter illegal file sharing and downloading, but we are still no closer to finding the best
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68