On Wednesday, the American Society of Media Photographers and other groups representing visual artists plan to file a class-action lawsuit against Google, asserting that the company's efforts to digitize millions of books from libraries amount to large-scale infringement of their copyrights.
Russia used to be considered a lost market by distributors due to large-scale infringement, but due to new, innovative tactics the Russian market has become the second largest in terms of revenue for some distributors.
A3 NATIONAL A18-25 Record Industry Intensifies Attack on Online Piracy The record industry filed lawsuits earlier this month against four college students who operated Web sites that helped search for and copy music files, accusing them of enabling large-scale copyright infringement and asking for billions of dollars in damages.
Similarly, as far back as 2008, the US trade representative Sean Spicer was saying that the cross-border content inspection stuff that opponents said could be applied to your iPod was really about large-scale copyright infringement – "which can frequently involve criminal elements".
But I think it is important because over and over again we've seen large-scale copyright infringement suits fought between the large organizations (e.g., Authors Guild v. Google, Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, Elsevier v. SciHub, Cambridge University Press v. Becker (Ga. State)) without much input at all from the actual authors of the works that form the basis of those lawsuits.
The US trade representative Sean Spicer said in a statement on June 5 (tinyurl.com/5voyhk), after the last round of Acta negotiations, that "the main focus of the discussion was border measures, particularly how to deal with large-scale intellectual property infringements, which can frequently involve criminal elements".
Even though elements of Acta may be needed to combat large-scale copyright and trademark infringement, it can be argued that the risks associated with the whole are too great.
Melih Çuhadar, speaker of the Ankara Chamber of Commerce, told the Guardian: "Legal measures have been significantly improved over the last years, and fines for infringement have increased". In April the Istanbul police conducted a large-scale operation against counterfeiters for the first time, raiding 137 stores inside the Grand Bazaar.
The much-anticipated Belgrade to Budapest high-speed rail line, which was touted as China's "express lane" to Europe, is being reviewed by Brussels for potential infringements of the European Union's requirement that public tenders are offered for such large-scale infrastructure projects.
The Olympic committee trademark cops field about 600 inquiries a year, not all of them infringement-related: everything from grade school requests to host mini-Olympics to potential investigations of large-scale counterfeiters.
Ah, large-scale ecclesiastical patronage.
