J.R.McHale

Chilling Effects describes how the federal courts have increasingly eviscerated the “innocent infringer” defense to copyright infringement. For example, at least with respect to music downloads, the chance of prevailing on the argument that one did not know they were downloading copyrighted material or that one thought they had permission to download the copyrighted material appears to be increasingly slim.

For fans of The Thomas Crown Affair and motion picture producers trolling for ideas for a heist caper.

Time: Current routers are not the only cause of internet bottlenecks (e.g., last mile issues), but as Cisco, Google and others work to dramatically speed up the internet, Hollywood and other content providers are likely to experience even greater disruptions to their business models.

Vanity Fair has an interesting excerpt from “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine,” the new book by Michael Lewis being published this month by W.W.Norton. Lewis describes how a 32-year-old hedge fund manager and former doctor spotted the bubble in the subprime-mortgage bond market and diligently and patiently developed a strategy to reap large profits by betting against the market.

Motoko Rich in the New York Times sketches out the economics of book publishing in comparison to ebook publishing and pricing. Rich makes the common mistake of assuming overhead as fixed, when there is little reason for many large components of publishing overhead (e.g., rent) not to be slashed in a world of ebooks.

According to The Financial Times: “Hollywood’s hopes for a future built on digital film downloads have been severely undermined by research showing cooling consumer demand for movies online… . US revenues for 2009 were substantially lower than forecast at $291m. ‘The market just cooled off,’ said Arash Amel, a research director with Screen Digest. ‘This wasn’t caused by economic factors . . . the level of interest in digital downloads just isn’t there.’”

Via Futurepundit.com: “A study headed by Anna Dahl, MS, of Sweden’s Jönköping University, found that individuals with higher midlife body mass index (BMI) scores had significantly lower general cognitive ability and significantly steeper decline than their thinner counterparts over time. These statistics were compiled from a study of Swedish twins that took place over the course of nearly 40 years, from 1963 to 2002; the results were the same for both men and women. The press release also describes how people with a history of cyclical weight loss and gain have more problems in their old age.”

According to Techcrunch: Two law firms filed a class action lawsuit in federal court alleging unfair business practices by Yelp – “The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review.”

Among the tips given by Fred Von Lohmann of the EFF: (1) get your own domain name; (2) back up your blog, be ready to move it; (3) make sure your hosting provider can reach you; and (4) choose a service that has clear DMCA policies.