One of the interesting side effects of the debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act earlier this year was the question of whether the legislation would damage the alignment between the tech community the Democratic Party. But as the Republican convention winds down, the GOP isn’t exactly making a major pitch either to Hollywood or to tech donors.

““The Republican Party platform language strikes a very smart balance: it emphasizes the importance of us doing more as a nation to protect our intellectual property from online theft while underscoring the critical importance of protecting internet freedom,” Motion Picture Association of American chairman Chris Dodd said in response to the Republican platform.

But there isn’t that much detail there. The platform talks about intellectual property mostly as a trade issue between nation states rather than as a matter of consumer behavior abetted by the kind of entities the content industries have identified as major malefactors. In the party’s section on China, IP comes up as part of a larger package of issues: “Our serious trade disputes, especially China’s failure to enforce inter- national standards for the protection of intellectual property and copyrights, as well as its manipulation of its currency, call for a firm response from a new Republican Administration.” And in more general terms, the platform promises that “Punitive measures will be imposed on foreign firms that misappropriate American technology and intellectual property.”

On tech, the Republican platform doesn’t really differ from the Democratic promise in 2008 to “implement a national broadband strategy (especially in rural areas, and our reservations and territories) that enables every American household, school, library, and hospital to connect to a world-class communications infrastructure”—it just blames Democrats for making “no progress toward the goal of universal coverage—after spending $7.2 billion more. ” And it has a real contempt for net neutrality, describing it as “trying to micromanage telecom as if it were a railroad network,” in itself a revealing sentiment.

We’ve yet to see what the Democratic platform will include, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some attempt to bridge Hollywood and the tech community and make up for the damage done by the SOPA debate. But these are party platforms, and this is a year when the broad strokes of the economy are going to predominate in favor of a segment of the economy that may be key to some donors’ hearts, but won’t swing a huge chunk of swing voters at the ballot box. It’s easy to forget this while we’re immersed in the internet, but we’re a long way from the point where a substantive conversation about cable, the internet, and the way we govern and access content is going to be a mandatory part of the political conversation.

Google’s announcement last week that its search algorithm will begin downgrading the search rankings of sites that have been hit with numerous claims that they’re violating copyright that have determined to be valid has been treated in some quarters as if it’s a worrisome surrender of a commitment to a free and open internet. But its decision to play ball with copyright holders doesn’t actually strike me as particularly surprising. And if its policy works as designed, it could provide incentives that would be a useful alternative to legislation.

It’s not particularly surprising to me that Google would come around to factoring valid takedown notices into its search results given the extent to which Google wants to be a content company just as much as a search company. On YouTube, Google’s response time to takedown notices is astonishingly fast—it’s not as if Google is new to responding to copyright violation complaints in a forum where it’s in the company’s interest to make content providers feel comfortable hosting their material there. Google Play may not be a seriously-established competitor to iTunes or Netflix yet, but the division is signing and promoting new content deals on a regular basis. And long-term, that’s probably a focus that makes sense. I have to think that Google can make more money from long-form video advertising on licit content in front of YouTube videos and from its share of download sales than it can from passive display advertising on illicit torrent streams. Google will always have interests in internet freedom, because access is a big part of how it makes money. But the company has long had some interests aligned with Hollywood’s, and is moving increasingly in that direction.

Then, there’s the question of incentives. One of the biggest arguments by cyberlockers and other sites that end up with users who distribute some illicit content is that it’s not fair to characterize them as primarily piracy sites. Google’s new policy gives them an incentive to prove their intentions by getting serious about removing illicit content, banning users who are repeated infringers, and making running a clean locker a competitive advantage. Now there’s no question that there are risks of false positives, and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are right to keep an eye out for abuse of takedown notice abuse. It will be interesting to see if Google balances this algorithm change by bumping down the priority rating of copyright holders who file bogus or harassing takedown notices repeatedly—good incentives should work in both directions. But a focus on incentives, and on driving users to licit, quality streams of content, is where this debate should be.

There are lots of interesting tidbits in Google’s new efforts to report the takedown notices it receives and to explain how it complies. NBCUniversal is, by a wide margin, the content company that’s most aggressive about issuing takedown notices, asking that 1,073,536 URLs be yanked since Google began collecting data, trailing Microsoft, with 2,717,163, and leading the RIAA member organizations with 445,189. HBO, despite having one of the most-pirated shows in the world in Game of Thrones, comes in only at 55th, with takedown notices filed against 17,303 URLs, representing 1,136 domains. There’s been a general upward trend in the number of takedown notices Google’s received since it began aggregating this data in 2011, with a particularly sharp recent spike, which could be due to an attempt to lock down leaks from May sweeps, or a recognition that with SOPA or a similar bill not forthcoming, the studios will have to beef up their reporting efforts.

But perhaps the most interesting bit of data in the report comes in the form of two accidental blind items in the section of the report where Google explains some of the illegitimate requests it’s fielded and turned down. Among them: “A U.S. reporting organization working on behalf of a major movie studio requested removal of a movie review on a major newspaper website twice” and “A major U.S. motion picture studio requested removal of the IMDb page for a movie released by the studio, as well as the official trailer posted on a major authorized online media service.”

I would be endlessly curious to know which movie studios, or people working on their behalf thought it would be a smart move to treat critics and news organizations—some of the last people defending the idea that it’s hard and expensive to create excellent content and it requires a carefully-calibrated business environment to make it work—like they were pirates. And I’d love to know why they thought they’d have a chance of getting away with it.

I don’t know whether there was a specific incident or specific set of incidents that led to Dan Harmon’s dismissal as showrunner of Community, and without knowing that, it’s impossible for me to say if that decision was fair or just. It does seem likely that the show without him will change considerably—a fellow critic suggested over dinner this weekend that Community’s heart will have to shift from Abed to someone else, because the other characters can be more easily kept alive and vibrant by writers other than Harmon. But while many questions about Community’s future remain, I feel pretty certain about one thing: it makes no sense, as some folks have suggested to me online, to pirate or delay watching Community beyond the time when you’d count as part of the audience because you want to punish NBC for Harmon’s dismissal.

First, there’s the question of whether it would even be effective. I tend to believe, as I’ve written before, that repeatedly telling Hollywood that piracy doesn’t actually hurt their bottom line gives content companies license to ignore people who do pirate content because they’ve been informed over and over again that pirates were never their potential customers in the first place. If NBC or Sony, which produces Community, and therefore shares responsibility for Harmon’s firing with the network on which his show has aired, does pay attention to a spike in pirated Community episodes, it’s more likely to be interpreted as a sign that even the angry audience is weak and unwilling to give up the show entirely. This is not a tactic that will move the hearts that broke Harmon’s.

Second, as much as Harmon’s singular vision has informed Community, he isn’t the only person who works on his creation. The actors who have turned in great work for the show, and who are at least publicly deeply distressed by Harmon’s departure, don’t deserve to be punished with declining ratings for a decision that’s beyond their control. If, under the new regime, they continue to turn in good, enjoyable work, it seems unfair to try to drive their chances of continuing to do that work into the ground, perhaps before they even know if they’d like to continue doing it.

And there are people other than Harmon who write Community. We should continue to give them credit if they continue to do good work even absent his tutelage. I’d particularly really like female writers like Megan Ganz and Annie Mebane to have creative and ratings success and to get credentialed by their work with a new regime of showrunners. As upsetting as Harmon’s firing is, I’d like to see people who share some of his wild and wonderful approach to television out there and succeeding to keep the flame he lit alive. Dan Harmon isn’t the only person working on Community I want to support, or keep an eye on to see what tremendously exciting things they do best. Dan Harmon isn’t the only person involved in Community who’s worth trying to keep the ratings up for so they’ll get renewed or have credibility pitching other shows in the future, particularly if you care about weird, smart, innovative, self-reflective television. Maybe pirating or driving down the ratings on those other people’s work will make someone out there feel like they’re in solidarity with Dan Harmon. But it isn’t an effective way to support the kind of work he’s given us for three years, or to make sure we see more like in the future.

There are a lot of folks who think that copyright terms are too long, locking up works long past the point when the people who created them can benefit from their sale. But when Congress passed the extension of copyright, it also wrote in the requirement that after 35 years, artists who gave up their copyrights to the companies they were signed with, often when they were in unfavorable negotiating positions, to get them back. And now a federal court has upheld that ability to reclaim copyrights, despite industry objections that producers should be given a share of rights or that individuals can’t reclaim their copyrights on works with multiple authors, which means that Victor Willis can get his copyright to some of the Village People’s most famous songs back. From Eriq Gardner at the Hollywood Reporter:

It’s a ticking time bomb for the music industry, and thus, the lawsuit by Scorpio and Can’t Stop to prevent Willis from making his own termination became one of the industry’s first and most important legal battles on this front.
In the case, the publishers made the argument that Willis’ copyright pullback should be deemed improper because the songs were created by several authors — not just Willis. They argued he couldn’t terminate a share; that he needed all of the co-authors on board.

On Monday, Judge Moskowitz rejected that assessment. “The Court concludes that a joint author who separately transfers his copyright interest may unilaterally terminate the grant,” writes the judge in the opinion.

The judge adds that the law doesn’t require a joint author to enter into a joint grant with one of his co-authors, nor does the statute provide that “where two or more joint authors enter into separate grants, a majority of those authors is needed to terminate any one of those grants.”

This is copyright working as it’s intended, to help non-corporation people benefit from the work they’ve created. I’d imagine the music industry will continue to fight this and do its best to hold on to as much copyright as possible. But I’ll be curious to see how the business model responds. Record companies are already confronting the fact that artists don’t have to rely on them for distribution. It’s not a good look to be the folks who are fighting artists’ attempts to profit off their own work, as if 35 years isn’t enough.

There’s something fitting about the fact that Tor, which publishes a lot of books in which people think about what the future might look like, has decided to remove digital rights management protection from their ebooks. From the company’s press release:

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

DRM-free titles from Tom Doherty Associates will be available from the same range of retailers that currently sell their e-books. In addition, the company expects to begin selling titles through retailers that sell only DRM-free books.

I don’t think that all DRM protections are inherently evil, though I think the limits on the number of devices on which you can consume content from Amazon and Apple could be higher to be responsive to consumers’ needs. But ditching DRM is a sign that Tor trusts its customers and wants to meet them where they’re at. More signals like that would be a welcome thing from the entertainment industry. Something like the movie industry’s Ultraviolet effort to bolster DVD sales by packing discs and digital copies together are sort of missing the point. They’re trying to create a new space rather than going to the cloud lockers and the means of distribution and consumption their consumers are already using day to day.

Over at Ars Technica, Tim Lee brings news of a disturbing lawsuit, now supported by the Motion Picture Association of America, that could set a legal precedent that embedding copyright video, rather than hosting it, counts as copyright infringement:

“Although there is nothing inherently insidious about embedded links, this technique is very commonly used to operate infringing internet video sites,” the organization writes. “Pirate sites can offer extensive libraries of popular copyrighted content without any hosting costs to store content, bandwidth costs to deliver the content, and of course licensing costs to legitimately acquire the content.” The MPAA also notes that embedding can enable sites to monetize infringing content by surrounding it with ads…

Numerous websites embed content from third parties they have not personally inspected. Under the theory articulated by Grady, and supported by the MPAA, these websites would be responsible for this content, exactly as if they had stored it on their own servers. This could create a serious disincentive for sites to allow users to post embedded content, hampering the convenience and user-friendliness of the Web

I, and the rest of my colleagues at ThinkProgress (not to mention our peers elsewhere on the internet), would have to dramatically reassess the way we do business, were this precedent to become law. Embedding is an elegant tool for journalists, and a great convenience for readers. It lets us write posts and stories that have a neat flow to them, framing a piece of content, letting the reader consume that content, and then move on to our analysis all without forcing them to click away, perhaps never to return. Sure, it keeps people on our site and lets us make money, but it’s also a convenience for the reader that provides a coherent consumption experience.

If this legal precedent is established, it would create a hugely complex situation. There’s a lot of content that the copyright holders would like to see widely embedded and distributed, whether it’s move trailers, music videos, campaign ads that no one actually intends to spend money to air but they would like to be seen, speeches, etc. That desire isn’t going to disappear if a new legal regime governing embeds comes in place. And that creates a terrific problem for both people who want their content embedded and those of us who need to embed a wide variety of content to do our jobs. Given the huge amount of content out there, and the large number of vectors through which it’s made available, it’ll be extremely difficult to comply with a new regime if there’s no clear way to tell if the content’s licit or not. And without that clarity, media outlets might be less willing to distribute even licit content if they can’t clearly document its provenance. That skittishness could prevent transmedia campaigns like the Peter Weyland TED Talk that’s being used to promote Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, where video is meant to appear sui generis rather than clearly coming from a studio, from taking off, which would be a loss both for the content producers themselves, and for the people who would enjoy that content if it was distributed to them.

Given the fuzzy, burdensome precedent this lawsuit could set, I’d like to see the clear numbers that explain why the potential use of embedding for intentional copyright violation is so harmful that it justifies upending the legitimate use of embedding for the rest of us.

The bridge is yours.

-Stock sitcom plots that no one makes anymore.

-Angela Bassett as Storm in an X-Men movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow would have been the greatest of all things.

-Is this the next huge dystopian YA series?

-Because Battleship didn’t make little enough sense already.

-Can we all agree the Emmys miniseries category has no plausible definition for what qualifies to compete in it?

-Morgan Spurlock goes to Comic Con:

There’s a long tradition of pop culture fans banding together to raise money for or take action on good causes, whether it’s the Browncoats, fans of Joss Whedon’s Firefly series raising money for charity, or the Harry Potter Alliance, which has done everything from send medical aid to Haiti to campaigning for marriage equality in Maine.

And fans of Suzanne Collins dystopian young adult series The Hunger Games are no different. Pegged to the opening of the film adaptation of the first book in the series, a movie that could be the most profitable film release of 2012, Imagine Better, an umbrella group of multiple fan franchises spearheaded by the Harry Potter Alliance, partnered with Oxfam to launch a campaign called “Hunger Is Not a Game.” It’s a multi-pronged effort, but the main thrust is in support of Oxfam’s GROW campaign, which aims to make food aid more efficient by encouraging local cultivation to reduce shipping costs and waste from spoilage.

These are noble goals, and you’d think Lionsgate would welcome the good publicity that stems from them. It should be a gift to the studio that The Hunger Games isn’t just poised to be a massive blockbuster, but that it’s getting young people to think and act critically, so much so that they’re getting written up in the New York Times for it. And a month ago, that appeared to be the case: a Lionsgate representative emailed Andrew Slack, the executive director of the Harry Potter Alliance which is the organizing force behind Imagine Better, in February to say that while Lionsgate couldn’t join Imagine Better as a partner, they wished Imagine Better “the best of luck.”

Apparently no longer. Lionsgate’s senior vice president for business affairs and litigation, Liat Cohen (who’s been rather vigorous in defense of the project in the past), has issued a takedown notice to the campaign through Oxfam, accusing them of “piggy backing off of our motion picture” and “causing damage to Lionsgate and our marketing efforts.” The full text of the email is here:

Hello,

This morning I left 2 phone messages for your CEO Mr. Jim Daniell regarding your campaign “Hunger is not a Game” piggy backing off of our motion picture “The Hunger Games” and using Lionsgate’s fans and fan internet sites to promote your cause.

As I mentioned in my phone message, Lionsgate has formed a partnership with two large organizations fighting hunger, the UN’s World Food Program and Feeding America. We are encouraging fans to support this effort by going to www.wfp.org/hungergames.

What is not a part of the Lionsgate plan is the distortion of our Motion Picture title. That is what Oxfam has done with your “Hunger is not a Game” logo. And with the many website you have incorporated into your campaign. This is causing damage to Lionsgate and our marketing efforts.

We understand and support your cause and mission. We are on the same side. We are looking for an amicable resolution. For a start we request that you immediately remove any mention of “Hunger is not a Game” from all of your websites and its affiliates and stop using the slogan in your interviews and publicity or press releases. Additionally, please contact the undersigned so we can work out a mutually acceptable plan to go forward where we do not infringe on each other’s rights.

We are truly making an effort to work with you on this. We have the ability to take down your sites as a violation of our trademark and other intellectual property laws. We hope that will not be necessary as this is too serious a subject.

All rights reserved. Thank you.

Liat Cohen, Esquire
Senior Vice President Business Affairs & Litigation

It’s not clear that the takedown notice would hold up, but it’s still an aggressive move against advocates who are passionate fans of the franchise and have no desire to damage it.

“Fans have been changed by this story and have expressed a wish to change the world based on the message of this story,” Slack emailed me. “I would hope that Lionsgate would celebrate fans, not pick on them, for taking the message of their own movie seriously. It’s amazing that they’re working with two great partners already to fight hunger. But why get in the way of fans who are working with a third one?”