Authors Guild takes on Piracy/Copyright Law and eBook Royalties

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by crane3

The patent office allows patents of items without any workable items, including apple's patent for the work "retina" when used with computers.

I think you might be confusing patents and trademarks.

[fjtorres]

Most criminal activity online takes place on the private, encrypted, darknets (like Silk Road) accessible mostly to, duh, criminals connected to other criminals.
As for the casual piracy that obsesses the multinationals most of *that* is penny ante friends and neighbors word of mouth stuff.

The middle ground, commercial pirate websites, make their money off eyeballs and malware. Takedown notices don't faze them. Stay down notices will simple make them move around a bit more often than they already do. Already factored in because repeat business isn't something they need.

The AG carrying water for the multinationals on this isn't just futile, it actually will help the scammers running the fake takedown notice rackets. It will make things worse, not better.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

ISP's? I think we are talking about public internet file hosting sites, not ISP's.

Most ISP's host news (NNTP) servers in their facilities or hire them as a service for their clients.
NNTP Service companies Like Giganews, Easynews, Supernews ... Host server farms and provide customized hosting for their (ISP) clients. (Not all ISP's offer Binary groups)

Access to these may require various conditions be met (even if you are a client with a logon). Eg. Earthlink also required access only via their network ports (EL DSL, Dial-up)

News servers get 'feeds' from other servers in the mesh. A message COPY propagates to other servers. A originating user 'Cancel' message, message may take time to propagate, and then it may be honored because of spoofing the originators credentials.

OTOH e-mail is a Store and Forward. Once passed on to the destination, the mail may no longer exist at the originating end (POP3) server.


To avoid fraudulent 'Take downs' (Just imagine trying to distribute a free Teaser chapter and your competitor keeps issuing a 'Take Down'),

A secure authentication and Copyright ownership/rights registry is needed.
Authors register ownership, then issue 'Rights' to Publish (includes expiration date).
'Rights' holders could then Register for a 'PIN' (if they did not already have one).

ISPS's/hosting would be required to immediately 'take down' content that matches the 'registered rights holder' list from any authenticated (PIN) Rights holder/Agent
To me, this is what the Copyright Office' should provide (not totally for free) as part of their service

[frahse]

Doesn't this all remind you of the "old music" problem?
Metallica, RIAA, Napster, DMCA, limewire, etc.?

How did that all work out?

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by theducks

Most ISP's host news (NNTP) servers in their facilities or hire them as a service for their clients.

Where I live, almost everyone who has non-dialup web access is using either Verizon or Comcast as their ISP. They stopped hosting NNTP years ago. If most ISP's host newsgroups offering pirated books, these must be tiny ISP's in the dying DSL business.

Some posters -- not yourself -- may be conflating takedown notices with something that, AFAIK, has nothing to do with books -- copyright alerts:

http://customer.xfinity.com/help-and...opyrightalerts

[wannabee]

I suppose you could make Google the copyright police. They already have all the necessary security back doors in place and intergovernmental connections.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Where I live, almost everyone who has non-dialup web access is using either Verizon or Comcast as their ISP. They stopped hosting NNTP years ago. If most ISP's host newsgroups offering pirated books, these must be tiny ISP's in the dying DSL business.

Some posters -- not yourself -- may be conflating takedown notices with something that, AFAIK, has nothing to do with books -- copyright alerts:

http://customer.xfinity.com/help-and...opyrightalerts

Yes, it is sad that the Mega ISP's have dumped NNTP.
I was grandfathered with EL for a while, but that finally went byebye (it was outsourced years before).

SONIC, My (DSL) ISP (Serves San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angles), still has the Service for a Large subset of the available groups.
I also have an account at Eternal September for fill or redundancy

[auspex]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Are there ways the pirate uploader can get around this?

Sure, absolutely any change to the contents changes the hash. It's way easier with books than with images (though even then, just changing the compression settings changes the hash). btw, hashes are, by definition, not unique. Two very different books could (if quite unlikely) have the same hash.

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

As for people who are storing their own copies, I would think that, except for a small number of book collectors with thousands of saved titles, they can easily fit in free private cloud storage, like Windows OneDrive.

Heck, even collectors. I have 1300 books and they're still under 1.5GB.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Also, what child pornography hash list?

I've forgotten the name of the specific task force, but it uses the hash values of child porn, to track the spread of that material.

Perhaps surprising, but typically the hash values do not change, as the material is passed from website to website. (This does not appear to be true for "regular porn".)

The FBI tends to keep mum on precisely how they obtain, and track that material, but during court testimony, the agent implied that there was a team that logged into the various sites on a daily basis, downloading individual files. Personally, I suspect that bots, not humans, are used to download and analyze the images. For starters, it is incredibly boring drudge work. Much easier, faster, and more reliable for a program to analyze and write a report about an image, or video, than a human. The algorithms used in facial recognition software have been adapted to identify people by other body parts.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Also, I still want to know what the point of your original statement was, because I can't see why it matters whether or not most ebook pirates don't know what a torrent is.

Apps like 100,00 Free Books in the Google Play store appear to be legit, but probably aren't.

Likewise, to the casual user, sites like Library Genesis appear to be legit.

Then there is UseNet, which used to, and for all I know, still has gigabytes of files flowing through the pipe line, every day. Again, to the naive user, those postings could be construed as being legit.

And finally, IRC, which is about as easy to setup, as a torrent client. This is a little harder to claim "legit", but even so, some legitimate material is exchanged this way, so there is a chance that a person could think that everything exchanged thusly was legit.

I have no idea what the market share of those four methods is, or how that usage compares to torrent sites. However, I wouldn't be surprised if they were responsible for more illicit distribution, than torrents are. Certainly the first option (apps like 100,000 Free Books) is responsible for more innocent downloading than torrents are.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I think you might be confusing patents and trademarks.

Why do you say that? What he said is perfectly true of patents.

[SleepyBob]

Originally Posted by ApK

Why do you say that? What he said is perfectly true of patents.

At least according to Wikipedia, "On November 27, 2012 the US Patent and Trademark office approved Apple's application and "Retina" is now a registered trademark for computer equipment."

So Apple didn't get a patent on the word retina when used with computers, they got a trademark.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by ApK

Why do you say that? What he said is perfectly true of patents.

He said:

Originally Posted by crane3

[...] including apple's patent for the work "retina" when used with computers.

Now, I read "work" as a typo for "word", since I couldn't make the sentence make sense with any other interpretation.

Apple cannot have a patent on the word "retina" when used with computers. You cannot patent word use. They might well have a trademark on the word "retina" when used with computers.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

He said:


Now, I read "work" as a typo for "word", since I couldn't make the sentence make sense with any other interpretation.

Apple cannot have a patent on the word "retina" when used with computers. You cannot patent word use. They might well have a trademark on the word "retina" when used with computers.

Ha! I fixated on the first clause and didn't even notice that.
I thought you were questioning the idea of a patent for an item without a working example of the item.