(Apr 7, 2014) At least 20 million patacas is to be set aside for the operation of a govt-owned company to sustain free-to-air broadcasts.

A government-owned company – called “Macau Basic Television Channels, Limited” – is about to be set up to lead the relay of free-to-air broadcasts to local households with most copyright issues already settled, deputy director of the Bureau of Telecommunications Regulations Hoi Chi Leong told media.

Read more at Macau Business Daily

(Mar 31, 2014) Websites offering illegal copyrighted material could see their advertising revenue cut under a new initiative.

Police have created an online database of websites “verified” as being illegal.

It is hoped that firms that handle advertising will use the resource to make sure they do not serve advertising on those sites, cutting off revenue.

Top piracy sites generate millions of pounds thanks to advertising.

One estimate, from the Digital Citizens Alliance – a group backed by rights holders – suggested that piracy websites worldwide generated $227m (£137m) from advertising revenue each year.

Even smaller sites commanded revenues into the hundreds of thousands, the group said.

Read moer at BBC News

by Per Strömbäck

(Mar 30, 2014) Technology is defined not so much by innovation and break-through research, but rather by government investment, policy decisions, competing standards, market changes, opposing business interests, and not least legal developments. Napster may have brought the music industry to its knees in the late Nineties, but it could not have happened had it not been for a very specific piece of legislation. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996was the Clinton Administration’s attempt to strike a balance of the opposing interests of the entertainment and telecom businesses. The latter were granted immunity from any infringements on the part of their users, the former the chance to send cease-and-desist-letters and bring cases. It may have looked like a great solution at the time, but as is obvious to the present day observer, the legal process was much slower than the pirate distribution. Worse, the DMCA created a business climate where the intermediaries have little incentive to take action against any sort of abuse, but can tinker with the traffic as they see fit – discriminating against services that threaten their revenue (such as voice-over-IP-telephone services) and selling extra capacity to those who can pay (like the recent Netflix-Comcast deal). If there is one root cause of the problems online today, it boils down to this intermediary privilege. Money laundering, Silk Road drug sales, child pornography, TOR gun/bomb shopping lists, online bullying, phishing… you name it: J’accuse the DMCA.

The European version of the DMCA is the Infosoc Directive of 2001, complete with immunity for intermediaries and a legal mechanism to counter infringement, §8.3. However, in its European implementation, these rules allow courts to order intermediaries to block their users to access services and websites which contain infringing content. And it works, according to afresh report from the music industry, the ten EU countries where courts have ordered ISP’s to block infringing services have 11% lower use of Bit torrent (the main standard for file-sharing piracy).

This week, the Court of Justice of the European Union, ruled in the so calledKino.to-case which concerned the Infosoc 8.3 rules. The CJEU found that website blocking is a balanced and effective way to counter copyright infringement. Some say that this ruling “breaks the internet”. If you think the internet is about anarchy and freely taking (and distributing!) what is not yours, then sure: that may be broken. But if you agree that the Internet must be part of society, where the same rules apply and where rule of law, democracy and human rights prevail, then the CJEU-ruling rather fixes the Internet than breaks it. Dare we hope it’s a first step to getting rid of the intermediary privilege altogether?

Excerpted from the Netopia.eu blog

(Mar 18, 2014) The Asia Pacific region is undergoing a rapid digital TV conversion that will see penetration increase from 28.9% of TV households in 2010 to 51.7% in 2013 then 61.2% by end-2014 and on to 97.5% in 2020 – or up by 501 million homes between 2013 and 2020, according to a new report from Digital TV Research.

The Digital TV Asia Pacific Forecasts report reveals that China will provide 225 million of the extra digital TV homes, with India adding a further 118 million. However, 159.6 million homes in the region will not own a TV set by 2020, although this is down from 195.9 million in 2013 and 221.8 million in 2010.

Read more here

(Mar 18, 2014) Around six out of every 10 Singaporeans say they have committed online piracy at some point in their lives.

This activity is especially prevalent among the youth, with 74 per cent of young Singaporeans aged between 19 and 24 years actively engaged in digital piracy.

This is according to a survey of 900 Singaporeans aged 16 to 64 by international research consultancy Sycamore Research and Marketing.

Read more here and watch video here

(Mar 11, 2014) Commercial satellite fleet operators on March 11 said international regulators are using “flawed” documentation in calculating the future radio-spectrum requirements of terrestrial mobile broadband services.

The result, they said, is that overblown estimates of how much spectrum will be required for terrestrial wireless broadband will be distributed to governments worldwide in the run-up to a meeting in 2015 of global radio spectrum regulators.

Read more at Space News

The Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) – which has been a major rules-setter in international advertising self-regulation since 1937 — has issued a statement calling on the global advertising community to set self-regulation guidelines that guard against placement of advertising on sites engaging in or facilitating illegal activity, including content piracy.

Brent Sanders of Microsoft Corp, the Chair of the ICC Commission on Marketing and Advertising, said “There is consensus among everyone in the ecosystem that advertising should not support illegal activity.”

The ICC statement (written in consultation with the World Federation of Advertisers and other industry associations), urges actions to reduce the risk of ads being placed on sites “dedicated to either engaging in or facilitating illegal activity.” Measures that are “commercially reasonable” should be taken to remove or exclude piracy (and other “illegal activity” websites) from marketing campaigns.

Here is the ICC press release. The statement itself can be downloaded here.

(Feb 26, 2014) According to Jill Lesser – Executive Director of the US’s Center for Copyright Information (CCI) – a collaborative effort between content creators in the movie and music industries and leading IPSs to help educate the public and deter copyright infringement – a voluntary agreement between the entertainment industry and major Internet providers that aims to reduce online piracy through peer-to-peer networks by sending warnings to users is proving effective.

Read more at Advanced Television

(Feb 25, 2014) When Youku was launched in 2006, it was called a Youtube clone. Seven years later Youku has become China’s leading online video hosting service and boasts of 14 million unique daily users. Interestingly, according to Alexa rankings, it is now the second-largest online video site in the world (Youtube is, of course, the biggest with 1 billion unique monthly visitors). While Youtube focused on content uploaded by users, Youku initially chose to distribute TV shows and movies: its library contains more than 4,500 movie titles, 2,700 television serial dramas and over 900 variety shows.

Determined to lead the next phase of online video development in China, Youku acquired its main competitor, the youth-centric online video portal Tudou in August 2012. Back then, Victor Koo, CEO of Youku, said the goal was to represent a “differentiated leader in the online video market in China with the largest user base, most comprehensive content library, most advanced bandwidth infrastructure and strongest monetization capability within the sector”.

The two entities—Youku and Tudou—are run in parallel under a dual platform strategy aimed at retaining users of both their distinctive audiences. On top of that, they do share a unified advertising system that ensures more efficient marketing coverage and ads reach.

Read more at Ent Group