actual proof

Earlier this week, we talked about how the US Chamber of Commerce was citing the totally bogus stat that 750,000 jobs are lost in the US due to intellectual property violations.

The original article tried to track down the source of the number and found a tangled web of government agencies all pointing at each other.

Julian Sanchez has apparently been hot on the trail of the real source of that number, along with the equally bogus claim of $250 billion lost to IP infringement in the US.

In the ongoing saga of the Jammie Thomas trial, where the RIAA tried to get its first serious victory in court against an alleged file sharer, things may be looking a bit grim for the RIAA's argument.

The RIAA echoed its sister lobbying group, the MPAA, by telling the Jammie Thomas judge that solely making available copyrighted works on a peer-to-peer network is enough to prove unauthorized distribution with fines of up to $150,000 per violation.

Any higher standard of actual proof would "cripple" copyright enforcement in the digital age.

Following in the footsteps of the MPAA, the RIAA has now filed its response in the Jammie Thomas case, claiming again that actual proof of distribution doesn't make sense: "Requiring proof of actual transfers would cripple efforts to enforce copyright owners' rights online." See, there's just one problem with this.

The law isn't designed to make it easy to enforce copyright owners rights.

I'm not a huge fan of the term "patent troll" which I agree can be unfairly negative, and without a clear definition often leads to problems.

Recently, it seems that the term is most often applied to "non-practicing entities" making some people think that the patent system is mainly abused by those operations.

That's a bit of misdirection. There's just as much, if not more, abuse of the patent system done by large companies.

The entertainment industry has been pushing for courts to rule that simply "making available" content for file sharing is the equivalent of copyright infringement.

There's a big problem with this, however. Copyright covers a few different things, and the key ones under which most people are charged is unauthorized "distribution." But, if there's no evidence that a file was actually shared, it's difficult to see how distribution actually occurred.

Adam Penenberg is a fantastic tech journalist whose work I've admired for many years. However, I simply can't figure out what made him write a huge fluff piece in Fast Company magazine that makes a number of stunningly bad claims.

Mostly, the article is a love note to Marc Andreessen's Ning social network in-a-box startup that has had its ups and downs but has been able to raise a lot of money.