Never Ending Copyright Story: Part II

One of the major instruments in abetting de-growth of the piracy market worldwide calls for blocking of pirate sites which in other words can be termed as a Herculean task. Why? Because, real professional pirates are generally demoralized but educated buffs and intentionally break into the copyrights protected music/videos for the sake money.

What is copyright?

Copyright is a privileged and exclusive right given to a person or organization for publishing and selling music, literature and artistic work. A copyright therefore is granted against every original piece of work done either by a musician, writer or an artist. This is no child’s game; rather it has been acclaimed and recognized internationally.

How does copyright come into play?

Piracy as the definition suggests involves plagiarism and plagiarism is deemed as an infringement to the copyrights and therefore is eligible for punitive action by the law of the land.

Advocacy from RIAA & MPAA:

Recording Industry Association of America, in short RIAA is scouting to block pirate sites for music/videos; but until now it’s been struggling very hard in achieving significant success in curbing the menace. Industry stalwarts are therefore forging alliances on non-conflict technical sectors with a view to minimize or even completely eradicate the burning issue of online piracy.

RIAA and MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) have been the torchbearers in augmenting such alliances which will otherwise make music/videos legally available online. Both RIAA and MPAA urge other service providers too for the uplift of this concept so much so that people in general behave with more sensitivity by way of legalized downloading or copying of the original work/s.

Issues in hand with the RIAA:

There are a lot many issues the association has to handle right at the moment such as creating alerts in case of copyrights infringement, domain issues along with advertising and payments and setting up UGC Principles.

Alerts for copyrights infringements: RIAA is looking at somewhat agreement with the user-generated content sites and thereby aims to create a wide awareness on DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).
Copyright Alert System is to be construed as an outcome of the stringent measures that RIAA is trying to implement for the good of the industry as a whole against piracy; but the alert system is still at the fledging stage with some positive developments.
Domain Issues along with advertising and payments: The task here is to create new top level domains and restrict revenues to the rogue sites. Advertising and payments therein get affected in view of severing ties by the online payment processors such as PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Amex and Discover with a website that continually offers illegitimate content.

UGC (User Generated Content): With a reference to the first ever voluntary anti-piracy initiative of CBS, Disney, Crackle, Daily Motion, Veoh, Microsoft. Fox and others RIAA aims to achieve the following –
Use of fingerprint technology for filtering unauthorized video and audio

Provide copyright holders with enhanced searching and identification means; i.e., SEO
Identify and block the link of highly inclined infringing sites
Accommodate fair use of sites while tracking, identifying and banning repeat infringements
RIAA has been working hard to safeguard the interest of the music industry much of which however looms large on the support from Google.