Mixi chief calls for looser content sharing laws
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(InfoWorld) - The CEO of Japan's leading social networking site, Mixi Inc., said Wednesday he hopes the country's law will be changed to allow users more freedom in sharing and viewing copyrighted content on the Internet. Mixi is Japan's third largest Web site in terms of traffic and enjoys more than 8 million users, two-thirds of whom log in at least once every four days to update their online diary, share pictures with friends and participate in group discussion forums. "Presently it is very difficult to upload any film that was shown on TV and distribute that over the Internet," Kenji Kasahara said at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo. "I do hope that will change because I believe that it is natural that people want to see and listen to music and video on the Internet. I do hope that it will become easier and the law will offer a legal way to do that over the Internet." "In the end I hope we will have a situation where the copyright holders, the people who view and listen to music and the people who provide that content can all be happy together," he said. Kenji Kasahara's comments come a day afterÂ YouTube's top executives met with Japanese copyright holdersÂ to hear complaints about the amount of Japanese content on YouTube. They also follow Apple CEOÂ Steve Jobs' open letterÂ for music companies to abandon the idea of digital rights management for downloaded music. To date Mixi hasn't had to contend much with the need to police its user base for copyrighted content. Much of the site consists of user-generated content, of which the vast majority is text and photos. On Monday Mixi started allowing users the ability to upload videos, but in an attempt to head-off copyright violations is limiting single clips to either five minutes in length or 50MB in size. It also requires users to click an agreement that they won't upload copyrighted content. However most Web sites take this same step and it generally doesn't stop users uploading whatever they want. "We hope that we can prevent any violation of copyright," said Kasahara. He said he believes most users want to upload personal content to show to friends and the number of people that might use the platform to share copyrighted content is low.
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BANGALORE, INDIA - Peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing would never have gathered momentum if the music industry had adopted models for distribution over the Internet, said Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Craig Barrett, addressing IT executives in India Friday.
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Should creators insist on copy protection and other technologies to block the unauthorized spread of their works? That's the first question in a week-long debate on Bits between Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, and Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School.
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The way we use the Web is changing and the future lies in mixing, mashups and pipes, argues Bill Thompson.
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Update Slammed for touting unavailable but unlicensed content
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By Leader  EDINBURGH MP Nigel Griffiths is right to call for more control by website operators like YouTube over material which encourages criminal behaviour, but politicians should resist introducing formal measures to clamp down on such sites.
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Vice Chairman Bob Wright says media companies need to join forces with Internet service providers in the battle to end piracy.
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Slammed for touting unavailable but unlicensed content
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(InfoWorld) - Buying digital music from a mobile phone is too difficult and the music and mobile phone industries need to improve the process to meet demand, the chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group Corp. said on Wednesday. A study last year found that only 8.5 percent of people who own a phone that can be used to download and purchase music actually did so, saidÂ Warner Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr.,Â speaking at the opening session of theÂ 3GSM World CongressÂ in Barcelona on Wednesday. "Why? It's expensive, it's complicated and it's slow," he said. "It's amazing that we've generated as much revenue as we have given how cumbersome the experience can be." Forty percent of mobile phones in the U.K. have music players, said Ralph Simon, chairman of the Mobile Entertainment Forum for the Americas, speaking at the same event. This year, US$9 billion in revenue is expected to be generated from mobile music, including ring tones and over-the-air downloads, Bronfman said. While MTV's core customers are typically young and technically savvy, even they find buying mobile content too difficult, said Mika Salmi, president of global digital media for MTV Networks, a Viacom unit. Simplifying the process is key, he said. For example, business models that make it easier for customers to pay for content could boost take-up, he said. MTV encourages operators that it works with to sell subscriptions, which it has found increases use because customers know exactly what they'll pay. Buying a ring tone is an example of the complexity people can face. On average, users must click 20 times in a process that takes around two minutes to buy a ring tone, Bronfman said. Buying digital music on a phone is similarly complicated, he said. "So many platforms aren't capable of even the most basic content configurations, like a track bundled with a video," Bronfman said. That means buying the same content that would typically be included in an album over a mobile phone would be comparable to having to visit three stores to buy the album, its liner notes and the art work, he said. Apple's iPhone, the combined MP3 player and mobile phone expected to hit the U.S. market later this year, is a step in the right direction, Bronfman said. "Before it's even hit the market it has raised the bar in terms of what users expect with a user interface and what music phones should do," he said. Now it's up to other mobile phone makers to meet users' expectations. "For those who invent with a similarly inspiring vision, the opportunity is immense," he said.
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The legal action is the latest bid by the music industry to wrest back control over content.
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A Japanese entertainment group is not happy with YouTube's progress in weeding out copyrighted content, and is asking the social video site to implement stricter policies on video uploads.
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A voluntary code of practice is needed fpr internet content, says the Press Complaints Commission's director.
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In response to the rise of film piracy, the film industry in general is calling for stricter Canadian laws.
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A bipartisan group of Senate leaders has asked the country's highest-ranking copyright official to rewrite controversial legislation targeted at companies that profit from encouraging the public to commit copyright piracy.
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One reason that mobile users don&#39;t access more content from a mobile phone, like video clips, is because finding content is cumbersome -- but that should change in the future with intelligent network services, said one expert speaking on a panel at the Consumer Electronics Show.Currently, smartphone users may not be accessing as much content or online services as they&#39;d like because it&#39;s difficult to do so. &quot;If to discover content you have to type in a URL, it&#39;s never going to happen,&quot; said Muzibul Khan, vice president of product management and engineering at Samsung Telecommunications America.He suggests that using voice commands is the best way to look for content from a mobile phone. &quot;Voice is the most natural medium,&quot; he said.But Intrinsyc&#39;s CEO thinks that even voice command technology is rooted in the past. &quot;We&#39;re talking about a paradigm for Web searching that was built for the PC,&quot; said Glenda Dorchak, who is also chairman of Intrinsyc.While there may be a transitional period in the near future when voice or other improved search techniques are used for content discovery on mobile handsets, ultimately a more intelligent system will prevail, she said. In the future, a context-aware, server-driven system will emerge, where the network will forward relevant and useful content to users. The type of content that users will get will depend on their location and other preferences that they&#39;ve set.Key to that vision will be multiple radios in mobile devices working together. She imagines a time when a phone might have Wi-Fi, GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), GPS (Global Positioning System), Bluetooth, satellite and WiMax, each finding and delivering information to end-users, possibly simultaneously. The phones will be smart enough to pick the most appropriate network for delivering the content, she said.But running that many radios in a single device consumes power and requires sophisticated algorithms, so she suggests a few years will pass before it happens. However, the technology already exists to support part of that vision, such as converged cellular and Wi-Fi offerings that roam between the networks without dropping voice calls.In the meantime, operators and content providers are working to figure out exactly how to deliver video to users now. The Tivo generation wants to be able to choose what they want to watch and when, said Jeff Finkelstein, multimedia product manager for Palm. &quot;They don&#39;t want to wait for the headline news to start on the hour,&quot; he said.However, companies building mobile broadcast TV networks around the world like DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld) would likely disagree.Easier sharing capabilities could boost mobile video use too. For about the past year and a half, statistics about how much video people watch online from their PCs haven&#39;t changed much, said Frank Barbieri, CEO of Transpera, a company that provides technology behind mobile video services. &quot;Maybe in five years the phone could surpass the Web in terms of video snacking,&quot; he said.
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Media & professional: Â· Radical shakeup proposed to limit bar on payouts  Â· ABI insists changes would not help consumer
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Bill Pence, Napster's chief technology officer, questions the wisdom of proprietary music DRM in his response to a recent Wired News column. In Listening Post.