At a symposium today, a relatively new group called the Copyright Alliance is offering to help professors get a sense of which movies they can show in class without getting in trouble for copyright infringement.

The only problem with the idea is that, as long as the copy is obtained legally (e.g., bought, borrowed, or taped off of Channel 5), it is not an infringement to play a copyrighted work in the context of classroom instruction at a nonprofit educational institution. You can play 3 songs from a CD, a whole movie, or the last drive from tonight’s football game, and it’s 100% legal.

As Section 110 of the Copyright Act(FN4) states:

Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:

(1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction…

Despite this unusually clear statute, Copyright Alliance chief (and former PFF man Patrick Ross proposes a wiki where professors could see which movies and other copyrighted works have been cleared for use in other classrooms. He envisions Professor A deciding to use a movie, asking for permission to play it in the classroom, getting it, describing this experience on the wiki, and then Professors B and C feeling safe in using the same movie in their classes.

In short, he tells professors: Ignore the rights you already have, and come ask us for permission instead. When we give it to you drip by drip, you can shout gleefully on our wiki.

Then, Ross has the chutzpah to say, “There’s going to have to be trust won on both sides, I think, for this to succeed.”

Can’t you feel the trust building already?

Lok just emailed me Wellington Grey’s hilarious DMCA slideshow. It’s positively hi-larious.

Internet users in France who use their connections to violate copyright law may lose their connections under a new policy announced this week.

In a three-way deal between internet service providers, the French government, and copyright holders, those accused of infringement will receive warnings from their ISPs. If they are identified as continuing to download infringing files, they will be cut off. Reports are vague about the means by which specific users will be identified as regular infringers.

As CNet reports, “The deal also creates obligations for film and music companies, who pledge to make their works available online more quickly and to remove technical barriers such as those that make music tracks unreadable on certain platforms.” This promise to drop proprietary DRM is nice, but if it happens at all, I doubt it will be before users start losing access.

The parties negotiating the deal did not include any civil society groups who could speak on behalf of user-citizens, and unsurprisingly, those groups are angry at the outcome. CNet continues, “Consumer group UFC Que Choisir said in a statement that the deal was ‘very tough, potentially destructive of freedom, anti-economic and against digital history,’ arguing that tough antipiracy penalties are already in place.”

While I find this deal objectionable, I am curious to see how it plays out.

In a speech to the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, Warner Music chief Edgar Bronfman warned the mobile industry not to make the music industry’s mistakes in failing to satisfy consumer wishes:

“We used to fool ourselves,’ he said. “We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”

While “Don’t do as we’ve done” is a valid lesson and a newsworthy public admission, industry critics like Howard Knopf are quick to point out that Bronfman evades his industry’s inescapable responsibility for their fate:

Considering all the litigation, lobbying, legislation and treaties that we have seen in the past two decades, “inadvertently” is a strange choice of wording. But let’s take our apologies and conversions where we can get them.

As others have pointed out on the listservs, this is not to say the music industry will stop its scorched-earth litigation. Quite the contrary, they’ve been suing every startup and only settling once they have some equity in the company, using copyright to leverage their way into the successes of the future.

As we reported earlier, Section 494 of the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 (pdf) would turn colleges into copyright cops. Now, the bill is in front of the full House thanks to a unanimous committee vote in its favor.

The section (on pp. 411-413 of the draft above) requires schools to buy some sort of “alternative” to infringing peer-to-peer downloading and implement digital rights management technologies on their networks.

This is the worst idea since Title I of the DMCA.

Two Democratic chairs of key House committees introduced a bill yesterday that would require colleges to police copyright and pay off the entertainment industry.

Buried on pages 411 and 412 of the 747-page bill, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 (pdf), is the following:

Each eligible institution participating in any program under this title shall to the extent practicable—
(1) make publicly available to their students and employees, the policies and procedures related to the illegal downloading and distribution of copyrighted materials required to be disclosed under section 485(a)(1)(P); and
(2) develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.

In other words, if a university does not offer some sort of “alternative” (read: paid subscription) to students and move toward actively filtering copyrighted content, all students would lose federal student aid.

This bill is sponsored by George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, and Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX), chairman of the Subcommittee on Higher Education, Lifelong Learning, and Competitiveness. These are the representatives who are, in principle, supposed to stand up on behalf of universities.

The entertainment industry will never be satisfied until colleges actively:

1. Actively pay the entertainment industry via some form of subscription service, e.g. the new Napster, and
2. Block or monitor all other peer-to-peer traffic.

I’ve been trying to tone down my blogging rhetoric, but I’ll make an exception here: This disgusts me. The bill doesn’t even have a number yet, and Miller’s already promising a markup next week. What representative even has time to read this tome by then?

Nobody in Congress bats an eye that Verizon enables enormous amounts of infringment on their networks, but every college and university in the country is now under the gun to amend a juggernaut act despite the express-lane push from the chairmen-authors.

Miller and Hinojosa are happy to throw academic values like the free circulation of ideas, not to mention the scarce resources of educational institutions, in the toilet. Even worse, they’re railroading it through. Shame on them.

Earlier this month, the Oregon State Attorney General, on behalf of the University of Orgegon, filed to quash an RIAA subpoena seeking the names of 17 users accused of copyright infringement.

Oregon argues the subpoena represents an undue burden on the school. The RIAA only knows IP addresses, and making the school connect those to specific students–who share dorm rooms, computers, passwords, and the like–would force them to conduct investigative work. The school also makes an appeal to student privacy.

Read more from Wendy Seltzer and Ray Beckerman; thanks to the Berkman Buzz email list for the tip. I know this is hardly the freshest news, but I’m dissertating (and watching our Technorati authority slip by roughly 75%), and it’s the biggest story of the month so far.

The Canadian government commissioned a study of the effects of peer-to-peer MP3 trading on music sales, and it found downloading to be slightly correlated with buying more music.

From my very limited reading, the effect size was small and did not hold for those aged 15 and older. This study is news, though, because it contradicts the industry’s mantra–and findings of some, but not all, of the other studies on this issue–that downloading hurts sales. This study clearly suggests the practice is at least less than damaging.

Read the full report here: The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada. UPDATE: Link credit goes to Excess Copyright, the personal blog of Canadian attorney Howard Knopf.

If you’ve ever tried to systematically study Google search results, you’ve probably grown frustrated with the lack of choices for customizing Google using the site’s preferences. I just discovered two tools that make these results eminently more usable.

Both tools are scripts for Greasemonkey, a plugin that lets you deploy small Java scripts in Firefox. This all sounds very imposing, but Firefox and Greasemonkey developers have made all this very painless.

First, I’ve spent the last several months annotating PDFs (using the Mac’s default application for reading PDFs, Preview) with search ranks. Now, thanks to Results Numbers, these numbers are automatically listed alongside each document.

Second, I installed the (underwhelming) Google Toolbar in order to be able to see a page’s Google PageRank without navigating to a separate page. The design of that feature of the toolbar is particularly infuriating; it shows a more-or-less-full green bar, but not the 0-to-10 number (which would actually be easier to render), forcing one to hover the mouse pointer over the bar until the number shows up in a little helper popup. Now, thanks to the Google PageRank script, PageRank is also listed next to every website in search results.

Firefox and Greasemonkey are excellent illustrations of decentralized, gift economy creativity. For academic researchers who use, let alone study, the internet, I suspect there is a gold mine of plugins and Greasemonkey scripts still to be discovered–or written.

Here’s the other big copyright story of the day: Apple Cuts Price on DRM-Free Music to 99 Cents.

This race to disarm is reminiscent of the 1980s, when the software industry flirted with command-and-control digital rights management technologies, only to realize they were punishing customers and therefore losing more business than they were protecting.