IP Update


In case you are not up-to-date with what’s happening in the IP world, here are the highlights of the week that just passed.
Last week’s most notable event is undoubtedly the rejection of the controversial global anti-piracy treaty ACTA. On July 4th, the European Parliament has crushed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement by 478 votes to 39, this meaning that the deal won’t come into effect in European Union-member nations. It’s interesting that out the 39 votes for ACTA, 21 came from France. You can find here a complete list of the 39 MEPs that voted in favour of ACTA.
Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Justice, Citizenship and Fundamental Rights pointed out that the ACTA vote was not unexpected, while it remains extremely important to focus on a “profound copyright modernisation”.
ACTA’s fate was also uncertain in the United States, despite the Obama administration signing its intent to honour the deal last year. A very interesting ArsTechnica piece discusses to what extent the rejection of ACTA in the European Parliament made the US Government realise that copyright maximalism won’t work.
On another note, a recent copyright infringement study commissioned by Google and the Performing Rights Society shows that the piracy of live television is growing the fastest. The live streaming segment has seen an increase of 61% in the last 12 months with up to 1.1 million unique users to one UK site alone. The research also shows that these pirate sites are most likely to have a mobile site and a social networking presence, as we have demonstrated ourselves with our Social Barometer.  It would be really interesting to see the findings of a research dedicated to the piracy of sports events, as “due to the transient nature of live content” it wasn’t possible to capture this data in the current report.

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