This past week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation took another swipe at what it calls ten of the worst “crimes against the public domain”. The EFF’s Patent-Buster Project, first organized five years ago, succeeded in getting the US Patent Office to review the sixth offender on the original 2004 list of ten. The target this time is Seer Systems and US Patent No. 5,886,274, relating to the storage and joining of digital music files. The original patent covers now-ancient standards relating to MIDI sounds banks, MIDI instruments, and joining together work files for network distribution. Nearly every current computational device is capable of reproducing one or more “instrument sounds” via MIDI, which means the claims potentially cover an enormous range of devices.

The EFF uncovered a series of examples of prior art, including a published book by the original inventor, that the Patent Office found warrant reexamination. Seer Systems has not yet responded to the Patent Office’s action.

Additional Links:

The EFF’s Ex Parte motion for re-examination

The recent case of US v. Dove invloved a former administrator of a group known as Elite Torrents, a distribution site for free copyrighted music and movies. The admin was found guilty of criminal copyright infringement as well as conspiracy, and was sentenced to two concurrent eighteen month terms in jail and $20,200 in fines. After the conviction, the RIAA and Lion’s Gate Entertainment, one of the groups whose movies were distributed on the site, submitted requests for restitution.
Under the restitution statute in question, 18 U.S.C.A. § 3664(e), the victim’s recovery is limited to the losses provable by a preponderance of the evidence standard. The RIAA‘s formula — the number of file transfers, multiplied by the wholesale price of the album at time of transfer — produced a figure of $124,000. Lion’s Gate’s formula was based even more in conjecture: assuming an arbitrary number of total downloads (“over one million units”), and multiplying by the average price of the film ($19), they produced a number of $22 million in total losses.  Because Lion’s Gate only owned 4% of the movies that were illegally distributed, they only requested 4% of the loss calculation: $880,000.
However, the Judge rejected both requests for restitution for failure to show evidence of actual losses from the downloads. The court noted that there were multiple alternative methods of obtaining the media in question and that “Customers who download music and movies for free would not necessarily spend money to acquire the same product. ” The court rejected the theory of diverted losses (that every illegal download represented a lost sale to the RIAA and Lion’s Gate). Without an alternative theory, the restitution request was denied.
It remains to be seen whether decision will have influence on the remaining civil ”John Doe” RIAA lawsuits, or on future internet infringement cases. It is, however, a significant example of what can happen when loss calculations from internet piracy are carefully analyzed.

Additional Links

Link to the Judge’s decision Re: Restitution

The American Bar Association has released its list of the top 100 law blogs. It’s a nice mix of law professor, techie, gossip, and practice-oriented sites.

Yes, this is the real deal.  According to the National Counterterroism center’s website, “[t]his edition, like others since the Calendar was first published in a daily planner format in 2003, contains useful information across a wide range of terrorism-related topics: terrorist groups, wanted terrorists, and technical pages on various threat-related issues. The Calendar marks dates according to the Gregorian and Islamic calendars, and contains significant dates in terrorism history, as well as dates that terrorists may believe are important when planning ‘commemoration-style” attacks.’