Tributes, parody and copyright
The
Guardian newspaper
reports from the Edinburgh Fringe theatre festival in
Scotland on the trend for tribute and parody acts, with shows
inspired by Fifty Shades of Grey, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who,
Downton Abbey, Quantum Leap, Breaking Bad, Star Wars (right),
Lord of The Rings and Fawlty Towers.
The article addresses the copyright issues raised, and notes
that some of the performers have agreed licences with film
producers.
However, a new
parody exception to copyright is coming into force in the
UK on October 1, which will provide a defence where the use is
"fair and proportionate". It will be interesting to see how
that applies to situations such as those described in the
article.
Not so fast
Cinemagoer Philip Danks has been jailed for 33 months after
he filmed the movie Fast And Furious 6 in a cinema in Walsall,
UK and uploaded it online, according to the BBC.
It was subsequently downloaded 700,000 times. An accomplice was
sentenced by the judge to do 120 hours of unpaid work.
The Federation Against Copyright Theft, which brought the
case along with West Midlands Police, said the losses to
Universal Pictures amounted to "millions of pounds". This
figure can only be based on the assumption that all or most of
the people who downloaded it would otherwise have paid to watch
the film in the cinema, something that seems doubtful to
us.
It’s another example of why it would be helpful
one day for an economist of other qualified person to
independently study the impact of counterfeiting and piracy,
and estimate how many sales are actually lost in cases such as
Danks’s.
Are Irish ayes smiling?
Ireland’s
voters will have the chance to say yes or no to the Unified
Patent Court within the next year, after the government
said this week that it will hold a referendum.
All of the participating member states have to ratify the
Agreement on the Court before it can come into effect. So far,
Denmark is the only one to have held a referendum –
which overwhelmingly backed the new system.
See you in Singapore?
Our
Asia editor Peter Leung (right) is on his way from
Hong Kong to Singapore for
IP Week (August 25 to 27), where he will be moderating some
discussions and hoping to find out more about the
country’s ambitions to be an IP hub. Ahead of
time, he interviewed Tony
Piotrowski of MPEG LA.
We’re pleased to be a media partner of what
looks like another very interesting event.
If you’re attending next week, please do say hello
to Peter.
New face
Finally, we welcome a new Americas reporter to our New York
office this week. Stephen Calabria will be working alongside
Americas editor Michael Loney and the rest of our editorial
team, focusing on reporting news from the US, Canada and Latin
America.
We have some exciting plans for our US editorial coverage,
so it’s great to have Stephen on board. Do look
out for him at the big US events during the coming months.
Also on the blog this week:
Guest post: The lessons from Apple and Samsung's smartphone
stalemate
Where do you stand on plain packaging?
And in our news and analysis: