China Association of Copyright on Literature Works (CACLW), the governmental authorized org for collective copyright management) is searching the books which are scanned by Google, and calling Chinese authors either sign the GoogleBookSettlement or join CACLW’s collective legal action.

The following are the lists of the authors whose works are scanned by Google, collected (seems manually) by CACLW. And today the third list is published. Besides, the lists are published on the webiste of China Association of Writers, which is actually not the authorized collective management organization in China. Why not the website of CACLW itself? Because the CACLW’s website seems passed out because of technical problems … Unarmed fighting?

The calling was announced in October before the revised google settlment was submitted. While it seems there is no where noticing that the revision of the settlement has excluded the foreign works … 

BTW, According to China’s Regulations to the Collective Copyright Management, the establishment of a collective managment organization should fulfill some qualifications before approved by the State Copyright Administration Office. When googleing the news, I see very confusing news, from the China Association of Writers’ website, the CACLW was just celebrating its establishment on 1 Sept. 2009. But based on my understanding from other sources, the CACLW has celebrated its setup once in last Oct … What’s the hell are they doing?

Let’s see what will happen …

This is a Column essay in Chinese, published in 21cn Economic Post (GuangZhou). Here is a brief English abstract.

Abstract: China Audio-Video Copyright Association (CAVCA) filed a law suit against SuperStar Co. (a KaraOK service company) on the breach of contract. CAVCA is a national-wide copyright management organization to the audio-visual products in China. The contract says the CAVCA licenses the the copyrights of all the MTV works that it managed to the SuperStar. The SuperStar should pay the money to an account “designated by TianHe Inc.” Tianhe Group is a company established in 2007, and it’s only job is to manage the MTV copyright under the CAVCA’s authorization. This article recalled the aim of the collective copyright management, and questioned the legitimacy of such authorization.

The full-text and the machine translation by Microsoft Translator can be accessed at here (alert! the translation is really terrible).

Just a cross-post from Berkman Website. I am going to talk at Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group monthly Meeting on 2 December 2009. The content of my talk will be posted later.

6:00 pm – 8:30 pm, Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Conference Room 202, Berkman Center
23 Everett St 2nd Floor, Cambridge, MA
Please RSVP to Herkko Hietanen at herkko.hietanen@hiit.fi before 12/2/09
Refreshments provided

Donnie Hao Dong is a Fellow at Berkman Center and a Lecturer at Yunnan University (PRC). His research interests cover copyright law, cyber law and law and social development in digital age. He got a JSD from China University of Polictics and Law with his dissertation on the public domain in the context of Chinese copyright law. Now Donnie is a PhD Candidate in City University of Hong Kong closing his research on the lessons of Chinese copyright reform for digital age.  His publications, short essays and nags can be accessed athttp://www.BLawgDog.com.

David Singh Grewal is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. His first book, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization was published by Yale University Press in 2008. He holds a JD from Yale, and is currently completing his PhD in the Harvard Government department, where he is finishing his dissertation, “The Invention of the Economy.” He is also on the board of the Biobricks Foundation, a non-profit working to develop an open-source platform for the emerging field of synthetic biology.

Mackenzie Cowell graduated from Davidson College with a BS in Biology in 2007 and currently works as a Research Assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.  He is booting up a public biotech lab in Boston (bosslab.org). He tweets: @100ideas.

Donnie will discuss his research on the justification of copyright protection in China. He will review the Chinese legislative history of copyright protection during the past hundred years, and draw the conclusion that the Chinese copyright law has been, and still is, justified with the utilitarian approach.  He thinks that this characteristic, rather than the difference between the respective legal systems, may be one of the reasons that cause the continous collision between the US copyright law and its Chinese counterpart in future.

David will examine the question of: Is there a way to bring “free culture” into biotechnology? His talk will explore one recent effort to do so: the creation of the Biobricks Public Agreement, a legal mechanism meant to assist the development of an open, shared platform in the emerging area of synthetic biology.

Mackenzie Cowell co-founded DIYbio.org after witnessing hundreds of undergraduate teams successfully design and build standardized biological parts and devices while competing in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, which Cowell helped organize at MIT from 2006-08.  DIYbio.org is now the center of a diverse and international community of people interested in amateur biotechnology, from artists to scientists to schoolchildren to garage entrepreneurs. In this presentation, Cowell will present some of the projects currently being developed by this community of non-institutional researchers.

Followed by Open Discussion

The “Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group” is a forum for fellows and affiliates of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, Yale Law School Information Society Project, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University to discuss their ongoing research. Each session is focused on the peer review and discussion of current projects submitted by a presenter. Meeting alternatively at Harvard, MIT, Yale, the working group aims to expand the shared knowledge of young scholars by bringing together these preeminent centers of thought on issues confronting the information age. Discussion sessions are designed to facilitate advancements in the individual research of presenters and in turn encourage exposure among the participants to the multi-disciplinary features of the issues addressed by their own work.

This is the outline of my talk at Berkman Fellow’s Hour on 17 Nov. 2009. Needs improvement, just post for commentaries.

1. Copyright protection is justified in a utilitarian way in the US. Contrary to many people’s granted thought, my study find that although it is deeply affected by the Germeneric-japanese form of civil code system, China’s current copyright law is also based on utilitarian philosophy.

2. Pros and cons of the utilitarian justification to the copyright law, as well as some of cyberspace law.

Advantage: that’s the sourse of various thinking to the legal reform.
Disadvantage: when the understandings of “progress” (US Constitution Art. 8; China’s Constitution Art. 19, 20, 47, Copyright Law Art. 1) in different countries conflict with each other, conflicts of the law will be inrooted and hard to be coherent.

3. When the US is a giant but China is a dawf in the matters of either economy or civilization, US can impose its understanding of “progress” and the corresponding detailed copyright law to China, as it has been for many years. While if China becomes a giant also, what will happen? No matter how do people celebrate it or demonize it based upon different values/ideologies, the unique “socialist regime with Chinese characteristics” is an existence, and has developed a more and more complicated legal system.

4. The first formal head-on confrontation happened at the WTO dispute on the provision of denying copyright protection to the “illegal works” (either content-illegal or procedure-unlawful) in China’s copyright act.

5. There is a trend of the isolation of the Internet. The isolated and respectively utilitarianized legal system may enlarge the differences of copyright/information law among countris in future. (example (1) firewalled but flourishing Chinese “Intranet”; example (2) differentiated treatment to the books in the latest Google book settlement because of the needs to comply with the territorial copyright law).

6. What would be a uniform legal justification for the future reformed copyright law (or law on “creation in commons”)? Or, in what level, that justification is possiblly uniformed in such a utilitarian world?

In the context of digital copyright law:

• Works (literature, music, painting) are fixed expression of ideas;
• Intangible mediums (digital files) are fixation of works with certain digital format in specific sequence;
• Tangible mediums (CD, hard disk, flash storage) are fixation of intangible mediums.

This three “fixation” are fundamentally distinct from each other. In my view, the solution of the copyright dilemma in the digital age have to be sought from this triple fixation, or any revision to the copyright statutes in the digital age will conflict to the traditional framework that formed in the paper-based material age. The discovery of the intangible mediums is one of my most important academic achievements in recent years. Hope this can be widely accepted.

I am now writing the thesis in which elaborated this dicovery. To discuss this topic, please contact me at Donnie[AT]BLawgDog.com. If you can read Chinese, please also refer to the following article – I raised the concept of intangible mediums firstly in this paper:

DONG Hao:
Neighboring Right Owners’ Right of Communication to the Public through Information Networks

If you hope to discuss this discovery in your reserach, please, please contact me and refer me, so we can discuss it further. I don’t care about the copyright, I care about the rightness of the theory and the exploitation of this discovery. Thanks.

Good news! XIE Lin, a PhD Candidate joined blawgdog as a co-writer. Please read her recent paper:

Presentation in International conference: DIME – Creative Industries Observatory (CIO) – Birkbeck

SOLUTIONS TO P2P COPYRIGHT CRISIS

XIE Lin

Dowload Full-text at Here (PDF).

Abstract:

Recently, most countries face the problem of revising copyright law because of the introduction of Peer to Peer (P2P) technology on the internet which has badly aggravated the piracy of unauthorized file-sharing. This paper will first examine the traditional creative incentive theory of intellectual property under a new digital circumstance and find out the best position the law should take between P2P users, ISPs and copyright owners. It will discuss technology protection, fast piracy speed, new market models and free culture. Second, it will highlight and explain the legal uncertainties of primary and secondary liabilities. With regard to P2P users, it will review the dispute issues in Hong Kong Bit Torrent case, Tai Wan P2P case, discuss the tendency of other countries to revise unauthorized uploading and downloading liability. For Internet Service Providers (ISPs), it will explore four kinds of liabilities, contributory, vicarious, authorized and joint liabilities in representative jurisdictions, through studying series relevant cases, e.g. Grokster Case, KaZaa case. Third, it will compare scopes of these two liabilities with alternative solutions, in order to achieve an optimized model of solutions. Levy system, compulsory licensing and other possible solutions will be evaluated altogether. Considering the different legal traditions and national situations, the proposed solutions in different countries might be similar but not exactly the same.

Keywords:
unauthorized uploading and downloading; criminal liability of P2P; users; liability of ISPs; licensing