MPEE goes to China

Posted on June 7, 2013 by karaganis

For those of you who have been waiting to read Media Piracy in Emerging Economies in Chinese, we have good news!

We are pleased to release MPEE-Chinese Edition, free for download under a CC license.

We (Joe Karaganis and Jinying Li) will also  be giving public talks at CUHK in Hong Kong and Renmin U in Beijing in mid-June. Details as they become available.

The translation was a major project, and we owe special thanks to Huijia Xie, South China University of Technology, Jinying Li, from Oregon State, and–on the production side–Lijin Zhou from Peking University.

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‘Big Deals’ and Publisher-Library Competition

Posted on February 14, 2013 by karaganis

Andrew Odlyzko has a very interesting draft article on  “Open Access,  Library and Publisher Competition.”  The piece covers a lot of territory, but the core argument that (1) in the digital environment, publishers and libraries compete for the role of access provider to materials; (2)  the publishers/content owners have some important advantages in this match up, including that the libraries are still defending large physical plants; and (3) truly low-cost open access models have developed too slowly to challenge them.  Add piracy and you have something close to the model of the ‘ecology of access’ to educational materials at the center of our current work.

One important point Odlyzko makes is that Harvard’s widely-cited revolt against journal subscription prices last year happened in a context of extensive price discrimination by the publishers.  Elsevier and others charge the Harvards of the world a lot more than they do the U Montanas–or U Capetowns, for that matter–for the same journal bundles.  Obviously they can ill-afford defections at the high end, but one benefit of the strategy has been expanded access at schools with fewer resources.

Protesters, such as those who endorse the boycott [of Elsevier], tend to cite the high profits of commercial publishers, most commonly of Elsevier, the largest one, as injurious to scholarly communication, and unjust, being based on donated labor of academics. They also often complain about the “Big Deals” that large publishers, again with Elsevier in the forefront, force libraries into, cf. [4,11]. In these contracts, which are universally shrouded in secrecy, libraries are forced to accept multi-year commitments with steady price escalation and little flexibility in selecting what journals they get. This has all the obvious disadvantages for libraries and the academic community. However, such discussions almost universally ignore the positive effects of the “Big Deals,” as well as the degree to which those positive effects are key to the main action in scholarly publishing, namely the competition between libraries and publishers. …. Continue reading →

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On Informal Internet Freedoms (also, Paragraphs I Wish I Had Written Differently)

Posted on February 10, 2013 by karaganis

Updated 2/14

Here’s an addition to my list of ‘paragraphs I wish I had written differently.’  From my National Review piece (mostly paywalled):

And so we face a dilemma. When we download a movie we infringe. But we can also infringe when we forward an e-mail or repost a funny picture to Facebook or upload a video of kids dancing to a pop song. We are safe as paying consumers of our rich audiovisual culture but not as active users of it — and we are all active users now. This mismatch between law and practice has persisted, more or less, because enforcement has been rare. The vast array of casual infringements passed below notice. But now, as the capacity for enforcement scales up, we need to be better at setting boundaries around the spheres of activity we value.

The paragraph gives short shrift to fair use (even after the editors at the National Review did me the favor of reinserting the conditional ‘can’).  A better paragraph would have been clearer about the reasons.  So let’s try it again.

And so we face a dilemma.  When we download a movie we infringe. But we can also infringe when we forward an e-mail or repost a funny picture to Facebook or upload a video of kids dancing to a pop song.  Some of these activities are protected by the ‘fair use’ provisions of copyright law.  But they have  depended more fundamentally on a wide zone of ‘uncontrolled use,’ which allows new practices to emerge, spread, and redefine free speech.  As the capacity for enforcement grows, this zone becomes a matter of choice rather than necessity.  And so we need to be better at setting boundaries around the spheres of activity we value. Continue reading →

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The Curse of Tanya Grotter

Posted on February 9, 2013 by karaganis

Ted Striphas has a great account in The Late Age of Print of the legal battles surrounding unauthorized adaptations of the Harry Potter novels.  All the usual “Media Piracy” elements are in play here: “windowing” practices for massive global hits that make them unavailable for months or years in developing countries.  Extensive local adaptations and commercializations at lower prices.  The zero point of originality determined by who has the most lawyers.  Among the nice touches: a Dutch court splitting hairs over whether Harry Potter was itself a derivative work.

Despite Rowling, Warner Bros., and other authorities’ intensive global efforts to police their coveted Harry Potter copyrights and trademarks, fakery has proven to be endemic to the book series. Consider what China Today calls “The Chinese Harry Potter Epidemic,” or a spate of “Harry Potter read-alikes” circulating in and around the country. These include books like Harry Potter’s Sister, author Serge Brussolo’s book Girl Wizard Peggy Sue, which Chinese publishers retitled and repackaged—apparently without the author’s consent—hoping to cash in on China’s Pottermania. Then there’s The Magic Violin, a novel purportedly written by nine-year-old Bian Jinyang. As with Harry Potter’s Sister, Bian’s publisher attempted to capitalize on the explosive popularity of the Harry Potter series by reissuing the book under the title China’s Harry Potter. Continue reading →

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Broadband Adoption in Low-Income Communities

Posted on January 21, 2013 by karaganis

Post updated 1/22

I thought this would be a Copy Culture week for me but it looks like it will also be a broadband regulation week.  So for those of you coming from this New York Times story about Comcast’s ‘Essentials’ program, which unexpectedly cast me as the main critic, here’s some background and  a few comments

I was part of a group asked by the FCC in 2009 to conduct a qualitative study of barriers to access to broadband in low-income communities.  This was intended to complement the FCC’s phone-survey-based study on access (phone surveys run into difficulties in reporting on low-income and minority populations, and the FCC was rightly concerned about this).  Both studies found that low-income communities were being consistently under served by broadband providers.  Our study also documented a wide array of ISP practices that made maintaining access particularly difficult in those communities, especially bait and switch tactics around pricing and hidden fees.  Continue reading →

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Presenting ‘Copy Culture in the US and Germany’

Posted on January 15, 2013 by karaganis

Copy Culture in the US and Germany is a comparative study of digital culture, focusing on media consumption, media acquisition, and attitudes toward copyright enforcement. The study is based on a large-scale phone survey of Americans and Germans in late 2011.

Read/download the full report here.

Get a PDF of the US infographic or the German infographic.

Some core US findings:


And some German ones:

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Canadian Book Pirates

Posted on December 24, 2012 by karaganis

An interesting account of the Canadian side of 19th century trans-Atlantic book piracy (from Rowland Lorimer’s Ultra Libris)

It was routine for [Canadian] booksellers to sell pirated editions of British titles, produced in and imported from the United States, rather than importing from Britain. Like European countries of the time, the United States did not recognize British copyright law. Nor did Britain recognize the copyright laws of other countries, the United States included. The importation of pirated works into the British Empire (i.e., Canada), where U.K. copyright law clearly did hold, was a problematic but prevailing reality. Responding to intense lobbying by booksellers, and wanting some revenue rather than none, in 1847 the British passed the Foreign Reprints Act, which allowed booksellers to import pirated editions of U.K. books for a 12.5 percent tax. This act not only officially sidelined Canadian printers, but also hijacked a significant part of the pre-Confederation market from Canadian distributors of British works. A U.S. company could print and publish U.K. copyright books to be sold in Canada, but a Canadian company, because it was within the British Empire, could not print and publish the same titles…. Continue reading →

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The ‘Kill the Hobbit to Save Regular Earth’ Initiative

Posted on December 5, 2012 by karaganis

The editors at Bloomberg View were nice enough to publish this charming drawing by Matt Leines alongside my op-ed, Kill the Hobbit Subsidies to Save Regular Earth (thanks Paula and Matt!).

(For those just joining us, the basic story is that Warner Bros extracted  $120 million in taxpayer subsidies plus support for a slew of bad labor and IP laws to keep production of The Hobbit in New Zealand.)

Returning to the matter at hand, the drawing raises some intriguing questions!

First, I confess I hadn’t fully thought through how to map the various heroes and villains of ‘Kill the Hobbit’ back onto ‘The Hobbit.’   But on reflection, this drawing seems a bit off.  In my version of the story, the hobbit is the villain, stealing gold from the people of New Zealand (I guess to take back to Hollywoodshire?)  This  would make Smaug the dragon the public, and Smaug’s giant pile of gold the commonwealth (that’s why it’s so large).  Smaug should be casting the Expecto Patronum (EP) spell to banish the Hobbit, not the other way around.

But hey, people may see it differently, and their right to publish those perspectives on our common culture is part of what’s at stake in ‘Kill the Hobbit to Save Regular Earth’ (pivoting  here to New Zealand’s support for the IP-enforcement-on-steroids Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement).

So with that in mind, I am happy to announce the ‘Kill the Hobbit to Save Regular Earth’ Initiative– KH2SREI for short (pronounced Kisstory, after the ancient Elven admonition to beware Hobbits bringing gifts).

I invite you to flesh out the Kisstory allegory in whatever direction makes most sense to you.  If you send me pictures, I will publish them here (as long as they are not obscene or gratuitously nasty).  I will even try to talk the good people at Bloomberg View into running them.  Continue reading →

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A Behind the Scenes Look at the Making of ‘Kill the Hobbit Subsidies to Save Regular Earth’

Posted on December 5, 2012 by karaganis

The complete (and more concise) version appears on Bloomberg View.

So how much taxpayer money, would you guess, did Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. need to produce the films based on the J.R.R. Tolkien book? The answer is zero. The studios are investment companies, and the films are almost certain to be immensely profitable.

But now you aren’t thinking like a studio. The real question is: How much taxpayer money can Warner Bros. demand from the government of New Zealand to keep production there (rather than, say, in Australia or the Czech Republic)? That answer turns out to be about $120 million, plus the revision of New Zealand’s labor laws to forbid collective bargaining among film-production contractors, plus the passage of three-strikes Internet-disconnection laws for online copyright infringement, plus enthusiastic and, it turns out, illegal cooperation in the shutdown of the pirate-friendly digital storage site Megaupload and the arrest of its owner, Kim Dotcom.

For keeping Warner Bros. happy, Prime Minister John Key, a former Merrill Lynch currency trader, got a replica magic Hobbit sword from U.S. President Barack Obama and a chance to hang New Zealand’s fortunes on becoming the tourist destination for Middle Earth enthusiasts. What could go wrong?

For the KHS2SRE completists out there, we’ve assembled some outtakes and extras: Continue reading →

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Copy Culture by Race and Ethnicity

Posted on November 22, 2012 by karaganis

We’ve looked at the difference age makes to copying and downloading (a lot), and gender (not much), and politics (not much).  How about race/ethnicity?

Well, it makes some.

Here is our sequence of questions about attitudes toward sharing music.

Continue reading →

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