Recent quotes:
“The WikiLeaks text also features Hollywood and recording industry-inspired proposals – think about the SOPA debacle – to limit internet freedom and access to educational materials, to force internet providers to act as copyright enforcers and to cut off people’s internet access,” Burcu Kilic, a Public Citizen intellectual property attorney, said in a statement.
According to his analysis of the draft, there are some 100 unresolved issues, and the U.S. push to export its intellectual-property rights law has “led to a negotiation stalemate,” he said.
Chris Dodd, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said last month that “International markets are critical to the continued competitiveness of the U.S. motion picture and television industry. As such, we place the highest priority on working with our trading partners and the U.S. government to achieve a comprehensive, high-standard and commercially-meaningful agreement.”
The measure increases overseas copyright terms and would impose a so-called “graduated response” program on internet service providers. In the United States, a voluntary “graduated response” program provides for extrajudicial punishment of internet users who download copyrighted works without permission. Commenced earlier this year, the program’s punishment for repeat violators includes temporary internet termination and throttling connection speeds.
The accord, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the U.S., outlaws the marketing of products that circumvent digital rights management. And the definition of what a patent is “looks fairly similar to what we see in the U.S. patent law,” Chris Mammen, an intellectual-property attorney, said in a telephone interview.
The TV business is having its worst year ever.
Audience ratings have collapsed: Aside from a brief respite during the Olympics, there has been only negative ratings growth on broadcast and cable TV since September 2011, according to Citi Research.
Media stock analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson recently noted, "The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever." All the major TV providers lost a collective 113,000 subscribers in Q3 2013. That doesn't sound like a huge deal — but it includes internet subscribers, too.
Broadband internet was supposed to benefit from the end of cable TV, but it hasn't.
In all, about 5 million people ended their cable and broadband subs between the beginning of 2010 and the end of this year.