The copyright industries' assault on Canada, which the U.S. Trade Representative declined to join last month, picked up some support in Congress today. The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus declared Canada to be one of the "ignominious three," alongside China and Russia, when it comes to protecting intellectual property.

The complaint against Canada is that it hasn't "modernized" its copyright law for the digital age. The International Intellectual Property Alliance -- a trade group backed by studios, labels, software companies and publishers -- has been pushing Washington to prod Canada into complying with the WIPO treaties. Among other things, it wants Canada to adopt anti-circumvention language a la the DMCA, "create strong legal incentives" for ISPs to help combat piracy, and "clarify that illicit file-sharing services are a violation because they authorize infringement." Of course, the United States hasn't really done the latter two things, either, at least not to the extent that the copyright community desires. That's one of the reasons the push to punish Canada has drawn scorn north of the border.

With that in mind, here's a few words from the geniuses at South Park:

The judge in Capitol v. Thomas -- the first of the RIAA's lawsuits against individual file-sharers to go to trial, it resulted  in a $222,000 judgment against a single mother in Minnesota -- threw the verdict into doubt today. Defendant Jammie Thomas had moved for a new trial on the grounds that the award was excessive and unconstitutional. In response, U.S. District Judge Michael J. Davis issued an order calling for a hearing on a different issue: whether he erred in instructing the jury that simply making a song available for others to download violated copyrights. He gave that instruction at the request of the labels' attorney, Richard Gabriel, who has since left the case to take a seat on the Colorado Court of Appeals.

U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper has handed BitTorrent index site TorrentSpy a bill it couldn't possibly pay. Having ruled in favor of the major Hollywood studios' lawsuit in December, Cooper awarded the studios damages of $30,000 per movie allegedly infringed with the assistance of TorrentSpy's site. The total for the 3,699 movies listed in the studios' complaint: $110,970,000. Wow. (You can download a PDF of the ruling here.)

Like David going 15 rounds with Goliath, StreamCast Networks Inc. battled the biggest companies in the entertainment industry for nearly six and a half years before finally dropping the slingshot and hitting the dirt. The file-sharing company filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition last week, sending it down the road to liquidation.

But the company's demise wasn't triggered by Hollywood studios or the major record labels, as much as they would have liked to have done so. Instead, StreamCast was felled by one of its own rocks: a lawsuit it filed in January 2006 against file-sharing rival Kazaa and a host of related companies. It proved to be a tactical blunder of the first order. Two of the defendants in that case counter-sued, won and locked StreamCast in a financial death-grip. And here's the delicious irony. StreamCast executives had long grumbled that Kazaa had sabotaged their business just as it was taking off in 2002, enabling Kazaa to dominate the second generation of file-sharing networks (i.e., the one that succeeded the original Napster). That may or may not be true, but there's no doubt that StreamCast's attempt to take revenge against the extended Kazaa family proved its undoing.

StreamCast Networks, the company behind the Morpheus file-sharing software, filed for protection Wednesday under Chapter 7 of federal bankruptcy law. Now, perhaps, the when-will-it-ever-end legal battle known as MGM v Grokster will finally come to an end, more than six years after the major record companies and movie studios sought the federal courts' help against StreamCast, Kazaa and Grokster. At the time, those companies were the three heirs apparent to the original Napster. In fact, StreamCast -- backed by Timberline Venture Partners, a venture capital firm tied to legendary VC Tim Draper -- had begun life (under the name MusicCity Networks) piggybacking onto Napster's protocol and client software. It eventually switched to the FastTrack network it shared with Kazaa and Grokster, only to be booted unceremoniously from that network and forced onto Gnutella. Its bankruptcy doesn't come as a shock (except, perhaps, to the employees who were laid off as of April 22), yet it leaves a few intriguing legal questions unanswered.

Copyright-law guru Bill Patry makes an intriguing point in his post today on the recent ruling in Atlantic v. Howell, which held that making songs available on a file-sharing network did not, in and of itself, constitute infringement. Although Patry welcomed that portion of the ruling, he took issue with a second key finding by Judge Neil V. Wake. If the courts ultimately side with Patry, it could be much harder for the RIAA to prove its claims.

Talk about a case going full circle: U.S. District Judge Neil V. Wake has rejected the RIAA's motion for summary judgment in its claims against Pamela and Jeffrey Howell, completely reversing the ruling he'd made last August. The new ruling, dated Monday but released today, sets a high bar for proving infringement claims against file-sharers, potentially spelling trouble for Hollywood as well as the record companies. The decision won't control other courts, but it adds to the growing stack of rulings that make cases against file-sharers more difficult to win.

Microsoft has an uphill climb with Silverlight, the browser plug-in technology it's developing to compete with Adobe's ubiquitous Flash technology. To boost its chances, it's taking a distinctly un-Microsoftian tack: it's designing the technology to work on software platforms and devices outside the Windows universe. And in that vein, it's working with Widevine to supply a non-Windows DRM for content delivered via Silverlight.

There's been a lot of discussion in the blogs lately about court rulings that could complicate the RIAA's lawsuit campaign against illegal file-sharers. The three limit, to varying degrees, the record companies' ability to argue that p2p users violate copyrights merely by putting songs into folders from which other users could copy. The best post is (not surprisingly) from William Patry's copyrights blog, which summarized and analyzed the decisions out of New Haven, New York and Boston. It's also worth reading this post by EFF's Fred von Lohmann (make sure to follow the links to this earlier, related post), and this one by Eric Bangeman of Ars Technica.

Those entries cover the legal issues far better than I could. However, they don't discuss how little relief the rulings may give to those sued by the RIAA. As the Jammie Thomas trial demonstrated, the RIAA's case doesn't rely on the allegation that a defendant merely put songs in his or her shared folder. Its anti-piracy contractor, MediaSentry, actually downloads songs from the target's shared folder. That enables the RIAA to allege that the songs were reproduced and transmitted without the labels' permission.

Gracenote announced a couple years ago that it was entering a new line of business, to go along with CD and music recognition services: it would supply lyrics, fully licensed by the copyright owners, to websites and device makers. It has landed a few notable deals since then, including Yahoo and MTV, but today it's unveiling its most interesting new customer: MetroLyrics, a British Columbia-based site that specializes in song lyrics. The deal is a sign that at least some sites operating in a legal and ethical gray zone online are ready to join forces with copyright holders, if the terms make sense.

I have a column running today on latimes.com that explores the emerging differences in strategy between RIAA members and MPAA dues-payers over how to respond to Internet users' demand for large quantities of content on the cheap. I wouldn't argue that the labels and studios are fighting over how to respond. Both of them support the idea of using content-identification technology to ID and block unauthorized transfers of copyrighted works. But label executives are expressing increasing support for all-you-can-download plans, the most extreme of which being the file-sharing-friendly stance taken by Warner Music Group's Jim Griffin.

You could, of course, argue that the labels' comments will amount to little more than lip service until they actually license an all-you-can-download offering such as PlayLouder MSP, a broadband service in the UK that allows subscribers to share music to their hearts' content. But at least they're saying interesting things.

If Warner Music Group hired Jim Griffin just to provoke discussion about new business models, it's already gotten its money's worth. Portfolio.com started things off with a piece about Warner signing Griffin, a vocal critic of the major record labels' approach to file-sharing, to a three-year contract. He'll be the guy drawing up and selling Warner's plan to create the ultimate subscription-music service: for about $5 a month per subscriber, ISPs could enable their customers to download and share an unlimited number of MP3s. It's an idea Griffin has been floating for several years, and it meshes nicely with former Warner new-media guru Paul Vidich's unsuccessful campaign to include some form of free music in the price of Internet service. Among other observers, Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng liked the idea; TechCrunch's Michael Arrington did not. No, really. TechDirt's Mike Masnick gave it a thumbs down as well.

Mixwit lets you create and share playlists using music culled from the Web via Seeqpod. So I ask you, is this legal? Right? Fair? One thing's certain: it's really fun. And although there's no evident business model, if I were a label exec I'd be helping these guys to find one.... (If an image of an old-school BASF tape doesn't appear below, click here -- I haven't had much luck getting the embedded player to work with IE.)

Verizon, a leading provider of broadband services in the U.S., is the belle of the blogs today thanks to its work with a p2p trade group on a technology to speed p2p downloads. The technique, developed by researchers from Yale and the University of Washington, enables p2p software and broadband networks to work together to select the most efficient way to deliver a requested file.

For ISPs, this "P4P" approach offers a way to cut the amount of bandwidth hoovered by file-sharing applications -- in particular, the costly bandwidth between the ISP's local network and the rest of the Internet. That's because it would help downloaders obtain as much as possible from the shortest possible electronic paths.

MPAA chief Dan Glickman made it official today: Hollywood will fight Net neutrality regulations being considered by Congress and the FCC. Glickman's comments, which were in his annual "state of the industry" speech at ShoWest, weren't exactly surprising, given that the MPAA had urged the FCC last year not to adopt neutrality rules that would hurt anti-piracy efforts. Today, though, the nuance was gone. Said Glickman:

Government regulation of the Internet would impede our ability to respond to consumers in innovative ways, and it would impair the ability of broadband providers to address the serious and rampant piracy problems occurring over their networks today.

Ezmo, a music locker service that let users share their collections with friends, bit the dust today. The service alerted users in an email and blog post, saying it couldn't raise the money it needed to keep going. I spoke briefly this afternoon with David Leibowitz, who was Ezmo's chairman, and he still thinks Ezmo had a workable business model: encouraging people to buy music by letting them play for free the songs that friends own. It's much like Lala.com's approach, at least conceptually. I'll confess to being more than a little skeptical about the latter, largely because of the royalty payments it had agreed to make. But at least Lala.com has deals with the labels; Ezmo never got that far.

Warner Music Group announced today that its head of digital strategy, Alejandro Zubillaga, is stepping down to (as he put it) "get back to my entrepreneurial roots." In other words, he's still mulling his next move. Warner took some grief four years ago when it named music-industry novice Zubillaga -- a former telecom exec in Venezuela and venture capitalist whose firm, Lexa Partners, was part of the group that took Warner private -- to lead the all-important work of developing new digital revenue streams. The appointment had a patina of nepotism, given that Zubillaga's brother-in-law, Edgar Bronfman Jr., led the Warner buyout and became the company's chairman. But his leadership led Warner to make what strikes me as the flagship deal for the entertainment industry going forward: a pioneering agreement with YouTube to share advertising revenue.

Intel has been racking up the press clips in recent weeks for new chip designs aimed at cheap laptops and handheld devices (e.g., the Wall Street Journal today, Business Week last week, Engadget last month). The downsized chips promise to bring desktop computing power (albeit from a couple of desktop generations ago) to a new type of mass-market mobile Internet device -- something like an iPhone at half the price or less. This is another sign of the pieces falling into place for ubiquitous connectivity, that is, people being connected to the Net wherever they go. And when that happens, the Internet will probably change everything again.

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA, responded to my previous post with a chart showing a sharp decline in the number of infringement notices sent to college campuses that had been piracy hotbeds in 2006-07. Contrary to the highly unscientific sample I cited, these numbers suggest that the RIAA's enforcement efforts have made an impact on campus. Of course, students may have simply gotten better at concealing their file-sharing from The Man, found an alternative source of free music to replace Bit Torrent and Limewire, or put off their downloading until after Spring Break. But here's Jonathan's explanation of the data, followed by the chart (which you can download here) after the jump:

This is a ranking of schools receiving the most DMCA notices a year ago. We think the notices are a pretty good indicator of the extent of piracy on a campus: completely objective -- we are simply crawling the Internet and whatever we find, a notice is sent to the school.  Because of these notices, because of the pre-lawsuit letters, because of the focus of Congress on these issues, many schools taken rigorous steps to discourage students from visiting illegal sites.  Look at the notice reduction column during the past year.  That means that many fewer incidences of piracy found on those campus networks, which used to have the most prolific incidences of piracy. That, I think, is pretty compelling and a different way of looking at the impact of our collective efforts.

I was chatting with someone today about a column that explored whether unauthorized downloading was "theft" when he offered a tidbit of insight into the feeling on college campuses. My source (I'm being vague here to protect his students' anonymity) teaches a college class on new media business models, and he surveys each new group about their media consumption and attitudes. Bear in mind, this is a group of students interested in the media business. So you'd think there would be some degree of sensitivity toward copyrights. Nevertheless, this year's respondents said they download music regularly through file-sharing networks and other unauthorized sources, while buying music from iTunes intermittently (64% said they did so 1-4 times per month, with 5% saying more than 5 times). They were also asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 7 how nervous they were about being punished for illegal downloading, with 1 being "not concerned" and 7 being "extremely concerned." Two-thirds answered with a 1 (43%) or a 2 (24%). Only 4% put down a 5 or 6, and none went all the way to 7.

Given the frequency with which the students admitted to using file-sharing networks, these results can safely be interpreted as a nose-thumb to the RIAA. This isn't too surprising -- reporters have been writing anecdotal pieces for several years questioning the deterrent value of the major record companies' lawsuit campaign against file-sharers. The numbers, after all, aren't on the RIAA's side. Even though thousands have been sued since 2003, the targets represent a tiny fraction of the people downloading illegally. If these students are truly representative of those preparing to enter the media industry -- the ones who should be most aware of the labels' anti-piracy efforts -- you have to wonder what return the RIAA is getting on campus from its investment in attorney fees.

The RIAA logo is courtesy of the Recording Industry Assn. of America.

"Invoking the metaphor is a shield against thinking," William Patry, the chief copyright counsel for Google, wrote on his blog a couple of years ago. The topic was "technical protection measures," but he's argued that bad metaphors are also behind the entertainment industry's rhetoric that unauthorized downloaders are thieves. I give my own take today on the question of whether infringement should be viewed as a form of theft in a latimes.com column, which you can read here. I'm not completely in sync with Patry on this issue, so you should take my views with more than the usual grain of salt.

The Times of London had a remarkable story Tuesday about a UK government proposal to require ISPs to monitor their users' downloads and cut off service to those who repeatedly access pirated movies and movies. This is the entertainment industry's Holy Grail, or at least this year's version of it -- a set-it-and-forget-it approach to combating online piracy.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Google was preparing to add a new feature to its Chinese search site: users would be able download and keep legal versions of the songs they search for, free of charge. If Google wins support from all the major record companies (only Universal Music Group has signed on so far, according to the Journal, and Silicon Valley Insider questioned even UMG's participation), it will have pushed the music industry closer than it's ever been before to a model that depends on advertisers, not consumers, to pay the freight.

Kudos to Los Angelino Andy Baio for putting together a fabulous review of online movie piracy since 2003. It's mainly raw data today; Baio promised to offer some analysis on his blog, Waxy.org, tomorrow. Focusing on a slice of the film industry -- the titles that earned Academy Award nominations for their producers, actors or crew -- Baio examined how many days elapsed between the movie's release and the availability of various bootlegged versions online. Such movies aren't always in demand online; blockbusters seem to draw more attention from the scene than critical favorites (especially period dramas). So if anything, these titles move online more slowly than the average Hollywood film. Which is not to say that they dawdle en route to the darknet. By Baio's calculation, this year's Oscar nominees were bootlegged online only four days, on average, after they were released to theaters. And DVD-quality bootlegs were available online less a week after the official DVD was released to video stores or mailed to Oscar voters.

I wrote a couple of posts last year about the expanding field of companies offering content-recognition services to user-generated video sites, peer-to-peer networks and other businesses with inventories of uncertain provenance. At the DEMO conference this week, yet another firm joined the fray: Eyealike, a small company from Bellevue, WA, whose strength is in facial recognition technology.

Television networks have garnered a lot of attention in the past year for making their programs available for free online, be it through their own sites (e.g., cbs.com and comedycentral.com), joint efforts (hulu.com) or social networks (MySpaceTV). Many of these efforts rely on Adobe's well-nigh ubiquitous Flash format, which works on Macs as well as PCs. One consequence of using Flash is that the streams aren't encrypted, which means they can be recorded and redistributed. That's not necessarily a bad thing for advertiser-supported programming, but not a good thing if people routinely clip out the commercials before passing the video along. Where there is a vulnerability, there will be tech companies trying to exploit it -- and, inevitably, others trying to fend them off with tighter security.

Planetwide Media of Aliso Viejo was here showing off Comic Book Creator 2, the latest version of a computer program that enables people to make their own comic books. In essence, it helps users arrange photos, graphics and videos into comic-book-style panels, then overlay text in comic-book-style word balloons and caption boxes. It also makes it easy to post one's creations to blogs and social networks.

It's just the kind of tool that remix culture thrives on, because it can recontexturalize all sorts of media into a comic-book setting. In fact, Planetwide encourages this kind of mash-up by offering versions of the product that include imagery licensed from the likes of Marvel Comics. The addition of Marvel characters, however, forces Planetwide to subtract some of its software's most compelling features. For instance, Marvel doesn't allow its images to be mixed with anyone's personal media. (Some licensees impose this restriction and some don't.) As a result, Comic Book Creator can't be used for, say, a series of panels showing Wolverine battling the neighbors' cat. Nor does the Marvel version encourage posting to the Web.

You could argue that Marvel has to protect its characters and trademarks. Those characters and trademarks are valuable only if people are interested in them, though. So which approach seems more likely to sustain that interest: allowing Marvel figures to be part of the remix culture, or trying to keep them out of the fun?

-- Jon Healey