never mind, we closed the service.

... But that is no help to those who bought or rented content and who now find it unplayable. Google is giving them a $2 (£1) credit for digital goods - though it stipulates that they must be bought through services which use its own Google Checkout payment system, and must be claimed within 60 days. | Kiss goodbye to your DRM-protected Google Video clips

china has become one of the important market for gaming but has been more or less ignored at former years when the us and europe came together to define wipo and wto intellectual property treaties. you can add iso, too. the trips treaties for sure favored especial the us, yet china is gaining ground and starts tp play the ball back more often. while the us is still sniveling at wto, china files claims.

Two stories out of China this week worth pondering in tandem: 1) The U.S. escalated its format trade dispute with China over Beijing's alleged lax enforcement of intellectual property rights; 2) A Chinese IT company has filed one of the largest copyright infringement claims in Chinese history against an American videogame developer.| The yin and yang of copyright in China

interesting article from robert g. picard, tobias dahlström, and edward humphreys. if i understand it right i would assume that the pressure to transform copyright infringment from a civil to a criminal act combined with the eu-discussion about the value of national monopoly of the collecting society, can lead to a justification problem of author rights and copyright in general¿?

The rationale for criminalization of copyright infringement is that appropriation is a form of theft that creates social harm in addition to individual harm to the copyright owner. This occurs because society is denied the economic benefits of copyright by illicit uses. | picard

lawyers say that its the collecting society that justifies the existence of copyright as they split it into shares. although their maths is not always easy to follow.

if appropriation is a form of theft, governments have to invest into law enforcement which would diminish the value of copyright law for the society in general; beside of the fact that - as fear goes - the remodeling of the collecting societies in europe could end with the creation of one giant private monopoly. if so the argumentation "economic benefit for the society" wouldn't exist anymore and copyright and author's right would loose its most important byline: of social interest; then what?

It has also been shown that infringement does not create uniform economic harm to producers and the effects vary depending upon the characteristics of the copyrighted product involved (Picard, 2004).