Recent articles in Outdustry and CNET announced the pirating of iTunes gift cards in China.   Apparently, hackers in China have figured out a way to generate keycode numbers for iTunes gift cards and then sell counterfeit $200 iTunes gift cards using these numbers for less than $3.  People can then buy these cards and use them to buy songs etc. on iTunes just as anyone else would do with a legitimate iTunes gift card.

The obvious victim here is Apple, who's out the money that it would normally get from selling the card to a consumer.  Not only do they lose that revenue, but they also have to turn around and pay a royalty to whomever owns the rights to the downloaded songs. 

So why should you care about this?  Maybe you don't care if Apple loses a few million dollars to piracy.  Maybe you shouldn't.  That's a discussion for another day.

What you should care about is the "other" victim here -- perhaps, the "real" victim.  This is about the honest person who buys a legitimate iTunes gift card only to find out that their card is invalid because some pirate in China stole his or her keycode number and already used it on iTunes.

For those who think piracy is a victimless crime -- think again.  The victim here, as in most cases of piracy, are the millions of honest people who play by the rules and who buy legitimate software, movies and music.  It's these honest people who are suffering the consequences of piracy.  More...

After the news broke on January 12 that the Supreme Court had asked the Solicitor General for its views as to the CNN v. Cablevision case, which is now under review for certiorari,  I overheard two attorneys saying that the case could have a lot to say about the application of copyright law to user-generated content (“UGC”). That struck me as wrong, until I started thinking about it and realized that I had really never bothered to define that term very precisely. Roger Faxon, CEO of EMI Music Publishing, has been quoted as saying that UGC is “taking copyrighted content, whether that is a song or a recording, and the user is, without authorization, turning it into another product.”   That is precisely what’s going on in the Cablevision case: users are turning a time-bound television broadcast into a view-on-demand product.  Does the lack of “authorship” by the user change anything? Should it? 

If somebody uploading a copy of a sound recording onto YouTube gives rise to UGC, why not somebody telling Cablevision to record a movie for them on a digital video recorder (DVR)? Copyright consequences aside, does it matter that the YouTube content is visible to the world and the Cablevision DVR content is accessible only by a single subscriber? What follows is an attempt to think about these fundamental UGC questions without translating them into the language of copyright.  To paraphrase Benjamin Kaplan in his 1967 book, An Unhurried View of Copyright,  “I shall take you on a stroll over some of the [UGC] terrain and examine various knolls and gullies in a rather desultory, even naïve way; finally we shall climb to the top of a hill and see whether anything can be usefully said about the whole landscape.” More...