Google and YouTube argue that they are innocent in the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom because they are protected under the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions. But Safe Harbor only protects websites that have no knowledge of infringement yet YouTube founders clearly knew of and almost entirely depended on pirated content. One YouTube co-founder even uploaded stolen content himself.

The FCC is set to deliver its national broadband plan to Congress on Wednesday, and YouTube will be interviewing Chairman Julius Genachowski about the plan and other topics a day before its release. Digital Society submitted a question on intellectual property enforcement in the digital economy.

The 2010 Intellectual Property Rights Index has been released. While it serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of property rights to economic growth and developing economies, new restrictions on digital business models may have an un-measured negative impact on property rights.

DigitalWrong.org claims that whenever piracy is tracked to a particular home, then it was obviously the neighbor’s kid that did it by breaking into the home’s wireless network. Digital Wrong claims that these home wireless networks are impossible to secure, but that is blatantly wrong.

Despite being a Boxee user and fan of the service, (I have been a user of both the Alpha and Beta clients for over a year) I have to call out Ronen for trying to be too clever by half. The fact is, Zucker has the more honest argument on this point. Boxee doesn’t, in fact, act just like a browser.

Update 2/3/2010 – Some have contacted me that the following post is over simplistic, and they raise some very good points.  It isn’t the RIAA that is seeking the million dollar fines; they’re usually asking for ~$3500 settlement fees; it is the juries that are issuing these multi-million dollar fines if the case goes to court.  Someone else criticized my blog posting that:
“This is way way way oversimplistic.  The penalties were, of course, originally set in a world where a copyright violation might be a movie, or a record, or a …

Princeton Senior Sauhard Sahi (under the supervision of Princeton Professor Ed Felton) conducted a study of 1021 randomly selected files pulled from the trackerless variant of BitTorrent.  10 of the 1021 files were found to be likely non-infringing, which would mean that more than 99% of the files sampled were copyrighted content.
Figure 1 – Types of BitTorrent files sampled by Sauhard Sahi

While 99% of these files sampled were pirated, it doesn’t directly translate to the percentage of BitTorrent network traffic.  The network traffic number could simply be computed by weighting …

Upon venturing to the FCC’s new Future of Media site you will be of course welcomed to the future. It seems lately that the FCC has been welcoming us all to the “future” in a lot of areas. Which generally means that FCC fingers and venturing into areas we are not used to seeing them.

Jaron Lanier discusses important digital economy issues. The further we go into the digital economy, the greater the need to develop a better system of property rights for intellectual property. The information economy will not thrive where information must be free.