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By Chris Meadows

wolvieIt has been a busy couple of days for the battle between the forces of copyright and those who would infringe it. Here are three of the most happening stories:

You Can’t Keep a Good Wolverine Down

Or a bad or indifferent one, it would seem. Someone leaked an unfinished work print of the upcoming Wolverine prequel movie to peer-to-peer, and by now it is all over the Internet despite 20th Century Fox’s best efforts to contain the damage. Fox is very angry about the leak, and has promised to prosecute the leaker and distributors to the fullest extent of the law—if it can find out who they are.

Eric Garland, the chief executive of the file-sharing monitoring firm BigChampagne, called the widespread downloading of “Wolverine” a “one-of-a-kind case.” “We’ve never seen a high-profile film — a film of this budget, a tentpole movie with this box office potential — leak in any form this early,” he said.

Needless to say, TeleRead does not condone this kind of infringement, and does not recommend downloading this print—aside from the ethics involved, torrenting it could open you to prosecution for aiding and abetting the transfer if your IP address is recorded by MPAA watchdogs. You can bet they are watching this case extra-closely.

Boxee Continues to Jump Through Hulu’s Flaming Hoops

Back in February, the executives of the TV networks that supply Hulu’s content laid down the law: no more integration with Boxee. Boxee is an application for Windows, Linux, or Macintosh that allows streaming web content to be displayed on television screens, and the networks do not want people to be able to watch content downloaded from Hulu on their TV sets.

If they’re going to watch it on TV, the thinking goes, they should watch it direct from the networks, because the networks get more advertising dollars that way. So, in February, Hulu stopped working with Boxee to allow that content to be displayed.

But that did not mean Boxee stopped displaying it. Since February, it has been a game of cat and mouse between Hulu and Boxee, as Hulu keeps changing its system to try to prevent Boxee from snagging content while still allowing ordinary web browsers to do so—and Boxee keeps updating to work around Hulu’s changes.

In the latest exchange of salvos, Hulu has turned to encryption and browser plug-ins to try to keep non-browser applications like Boxee from sniffing out where their content is. And true to form, Boxee has already come up with a plug-in to work around this (for Macintosh users, at least, as of the time of the article’s writing).

Of course, the effort is largely doomed to fail, because Hulu still has to be accessible by a web browser in order for people to view it on their computer—and a web browser is very easy to spoof. Don’t look for this to be settled any time soon.

Queen Elizabeth II, Copyright Criminal?

Found on BoingBoing today: The EFF is concerned about Obama’s recent gift to England’s Queen of an iPod with 40 showtunes on it. To wit, given the license terms of the mp3 stores from which he could have loaded it, transferring them to a third party may not be allowed. (Not mentioned by the EFF is the fact that even if Obama bought them on CD and ripped them to MP3, he’s still breaking copyright law unless he gives her the CD along with the iPod.)

Obama just can’t seem to give media to anyone in British officialdom without causing some kind of faux pas, it seems—the DVDs he gave to Prime Minister Gordon Brown last month would not play in Brown’s Region 2 player.

The gift of the iPod does raise questions about the nature of intellectual property law with regard to digital works. How can you legally give an iPod full of music to someone if you are not the head of state? You could give a CD or a book or even a movie very easily, but mp3s (or for that matter, e-books)…not so much. The Doctrine of First Sale just doesn’t seem to apply to digital files.

 
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