Heavyweights Clash Over Policing Repeat Copyright Infringers

SolKeshNaranek tips a story at TorrentFreak about an ongoing copyright case that revolves around how much effort websites need to expend to block repeat infringers after responding to DMCA requests. In 2011, a judge ruled that a website embedding videos from third parties had correctly removed links to infringing videos after receiving a DMCA request, but failed to do anything to police users who had created these links multiple times. For this, the judge said, the website would be required to adopt a number of measures to prevent repeat infringement. Google and Facebook wrote an amicus brief opposing the ruling, as did Public Knowledge and the EFF. Now the MPAA has, unsurprisingly, come out in favor. They wrote, "Contrary to the assertions of myVidster and amici Google and Facebook, search engines and social networking sites are not the only businesses that desire certainty in a challenging online marketplace. MPAA member companies and other producers of creative works also need a predictable legal landscape in which to operate. ... Given the massive and often anonymous infringement on the internet, the ability of copyright holders to hold gateways like myVidster liable for secondary infringement is crucial in preventing piracy."

Re:You mean infringers like China? Or IBM?

[hemo_jr]

Asimov's _Foundation_ stories started to be published in 1942 (they were not written in 1945). They were originally sold to Street & Smith which owned publication rights (and the works were published in _Astounding Science Fiction_). Asimov was paid for his work and apparently satisfied with payment (or he wouldn't have sold the stories -- hell he wrote the stories for Astounding which was the most lucrative and prestigious market for SF at the time ).

Asimov was paid for his work at least three times. He won the lottery. Most of us, no matter how creative we are at work, only get paid once. And, actually, Asimov would only have been paid once without the generosity of John W Campbell (editor of Astounding) who gave the rights back to the authors after first publication.

And as far as Gnome press goes, it was essentially a fan publishing house. It published Asimov's work in hardback, which was an enormous prestige thing of the day. Nor do I think that marketing was the issue that kept the work languishing, There was a fanzine that won a Hugo in 1961 called "Who Killed Science Fiction?" And it was a real question, because SF wasn't selling at the time and the market dwindled to a handful of magazines, a few paperbacks and hardbacks only surviving because of library sales (and most of those were juveniles). Asimov, himself, abandoned writing SF for around a dozen years and concentrated on the more immediately lucrative science popularization market .