On Friday, April 25, 2008, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) released its annual “Special 301″ Report on the adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection by U.S. trading partners.

This year’s Special 301 Report places forty-six (46) countries on the Priority Watch List, Watch List, or the Section 306 monitoring list.  There are nine (9) countries on this year’s Priority Watch List: China, Russia, Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Pakistan, Thailand, and Venezuela. Countries on the Priority Watch List do not provide an adequate level of IPR protection or enforcement, or market access for persons relying on intellectual property protection, in absolute terms and/or relative to a range of factors such as their level of development. Priority Watch List countries will be the subject of particularly intense engagement through bilateral discussion during the coming year.

Answering the question about how long a copyright lasts, or whether a particular copyrighted work is in the public domain and can be readily used without the payment of royalties, is an impossible question to answer in the abstract.  This is because over the years the United States Congress has periodically altered the length of copyright protection and the formalities that must be followed in order to establish a copyright that can be enforced against others.  What this has done is create a bit of a puzzle that requires one to know when the work was created, and in some instances when the work was published. 

The Egyptian government is attempting to enact legislation that would seek to force royalty payments from anyone who uses an image of the pyramids or one of the other to be protected antiquity images.  I saw this story in the LA Times this weekend, but it appears to have been first reported by National Geographic about four weeks ago.  Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told National Geographic News: “We want to protect Egyptian antiquities. We want to protect our values. This is the most important thing.”

Before we get all offended by this story and the fact that Egypt also apparently wants to enforce this soon to be enacted law against those in the United States and China, there is absolutely no chance that even if enacted this law will be enforced in the United States.  In fact, I would put the chance that such a law would receive recognition in the U.S. at roughly the same chance as a snowball’s chance in that extremely warm and undesirable spot of legend, and I am not talking about Hell, Michigan, but rather about the place of eternal damnation, you know the one I am talking about.

Recently Hollywood executives approached both AT&T and Verizon to seek their help in preventing piracy over their networks.  According to a New York Times article, AT&T is working with the entertainment industry to figure out how to identify illegally copied material that is being transmitted over its broadband network.  Verizon, on the other hand, said — NO — we are not going to be the police force for the entertainment industry online.

According to U2 manager Paul McGuinness, Internet service providers are to blame for continuing music piracy.  Speaking at conference in France, McGuinness said that ISPs should be disconnecting those who download tracks illegally, stating that ISPs have “been at our trough for too long.” He also claimed that ISPs are to blame for the “shoddy, careless and downright dishonest way” in which artists have been treated in the era of digital music.

Excuse me for noticing, but U2 seems to be doing just fine, so how McGuinness thinks that artists are being treated poorly in the era of digital music is simply ridiculous.  In fact, I would say that the statement that artists are being treated poorly because of Internet Service Providers is hysterically funny if it were not so tragically sad.  Either McGuinness just isn’t paying attention to reality, he is recklessly ignorant or he is just plain arrogant. 

EDITORIAL NOTE: This is the first in a two part series that will attempt to answer a hypothetical copyright infringement question surrounding the movie and book “I am Legend.”  This post discusses the differences and similarities between the book and the movie and the next post (during the week of January 21, 2008) will address the law associated with determining whether there would have been copyright infringement.  If you have not seen the movie or read the book “I am Legend,” and you plan to, you probably do not want to read this post until you have.

Last week my husband and I went to the movies to see Will Smith in “I am Legend.”  I had received the book for Christmas and tried to get at least a third of the way through it before seeing the movie.  I was surprised in reading only the first few chapters to learn that there were quite a few differences between the movie and the book.

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