Friday’s Endnotes – 05/13/16

New Research Debunks Myth That Piracy Site Blocking Does Not Work — “The trio studied the effects on consumer behavior of the court-ordered blocking of 53 piracy websites in the U.K. in November 2014. Their research paper released last month showed those take-downs caused a 22% fall in total piracy (including blocked and unblocked sites) for all U.K. users of blocked sites and a 16% drop in piracy consumption across all U.K. internet users. Even more positively, there was a 10% increase in videos viewed on legal ad-supported streaming sites such as the BBC and Channel 5 and a 6% increase in subscription streaming sites such as Netflix.”

Italian court says that rightholders do NOT have to indicate URLs when submitting takedown requests — Eleonora Rosati reports on the decision, saying, “If not a general obligation to monitor, this closely resembles what rightholders have been advocating for a while, ie a notice-and-stay-down system.”

Judge Refuses to Dismiss Lawsuit Over Crowdfunded ‘Star Trek’ Film — The latest on litigation involving an unauthorized Star Trek film, Prelude to Axanar. The court declined to throw the complaint out, saying Paramount has sufficiently alleged copyright infringement.

One Simple Trick to Make Journalism Profitable? Copy and Paste It. — The story of a local news startup caught scraping another site’s content rather than, as it claimed, creating its own. “Dopkin observed that in technology-focused Silicon Valley, content is usually a minor concern. Nor do the Valley’s digital gurus respect the blood, sweat, and tears frequently required to produce it, he said.”

The biggest problem for the Oracle v. Google retrial: Judge Alsup’s reality distortion field — Florian Mueller takes on the Oracle v. Google retrial. Following a Federal Circuit decision in 2014 holding that the Java API headers and structure, sequence, and organization, which Google copied, is protectable under copyright law, the litigation came back to the District Court this week for a jury to determine whether Google has a fair use defense.

Dear YouTube: An open letter from Irving Azoff — The notable artists’ manager writes, “You state with apparent pride that you have licenses with labels, publishers and PROs. But don’t confuse deals made out of desperation with marketplace deals made by willing participants. YouTube has benefitted from the unfair advantage which safe harbors gives you: Labels can take the deals you offer or engage in an impossible, expensive game of ‘whack a mole,’ while the music they control is still being exploited without any compensation. Spotify and Apple don’t have that advantage, and this is why they are better partners to music creators.”