ICANN met in Sao Paolo this week. Topics included Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), signing the .ASIA Registry Agreement, and, reportedly, “kiting.” See ICANN Board member and law professor Susan Crawford’s blog posts: Day 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
The Digital Hollywood Europe discussed several topics relating to DRM. One topic was forensic watermarking, a sort of “DRM lite,” which allows content to be traced to its last legal owner and provides much greater interoperability. Also discussed was whether government regulation (as in France) or voluntary industry standards are the best way to ensure interoperability.
Researchers Urs Gasser and Silke Ernst, sponsored by the Open Society Instutute, have released a best practices guide of recommendations
“for transposing the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD) into the national
copyright frameworks of accession states and candidate countries.” Even
the linked summary is lengthy, but a couple particularly intriguing
suggestions are under the heading Peer Collaboration &
Distribution: “Provide for a broad private copying exception that is
applicable to both analog/offline and digital/online works” and
“Provide for a private copying exception that encompasses the act of
downloading copyrighted material from the Internet, including from P2P
file-sharing networks, regardless of the lawfulness of the master copy
or the distribution platform.” Sounds interesting enough that I may
just have to read the report.
