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.
*Thank you for reading. For daily IP news, please follow us @KLipcorp.