What is Hatch's Hit List? Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has introduced the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (IICA, née INDUCE Act) in the Senate. The bill would make it illegal to "intentionally induce" copyright infringement, but is worded so broadly that it would have all sorts of unintended consequences, one of which is to severely limit, cripple or kill innovation in many different fields. Hatch's Hit List is a daily exploration of some of the technologies and fields that the bill would likely affect. See also, Introducing Hatch's Hit List and the Hatch's Hit List Archives. Send list suggestions to ernest.miller 8T aya.yale.edu.
Today on Hatch's Hit List: JANE Magazine
Japan's copyright industries have been suffering from a rather unique form of infringement according to the BBC (Japan's 'digital shoplifting' plague):
Japanese bookstores are set to launch a national campaign to stop so-called "digital shoplifting" by customers using the lastest camera-equipped mobile phones.
The Japanese Magazine Publishers Association says the practice is "information theft" and it wants it stopped.
It is the kind of thing that most Japanese young women wouldn't think twice about doing.
They might spot a new hairstyle or a new dress in a glossy fashion magazine and they want to know what their friends think - so they take a quick snap with their mobile phone camera and send everybody a picture.
But the publishers of those magazines feel they are being cheated out of valuable sales.
So far, we have been spared this plague in the US.
However, JANE Magazine is doing its best to import and induce such copyright infringement with a promotion they are running (JANE Talks Back):
You won't want to flip through the September issue of JANE without your camera phone. There's a ton of freebies, sweepstakes, MP3s and cool stuff in it for you....Want a refresher on how to play with Mobot and JANE? Oh relax, it's easy:
- Grab your camera phone and the SEPT issue of JANE
- Take a picture of ANY full page ad and send it to jane@mobot.com
- Listen up as JANE Talks Back...you could hear good, good things
They are literally training people to use their cameraphones to snap picks of magazines and distribute them via email! Once trained to snap pics of pages in magazines with the increasingly ubiquitous cameraphone, does JANE think these people will stop?
Thanks to JANE, the magazine industry will soon be the smoking ruin that once was the music industry in the US.
Want to know more about the INDUCE Act?
Please see LawMeme's well-organized index to everything I've written on the topic, including Hatch's Hit List: The LawMeme Reader's Guide to Ernie Miller's Guide to the INDUCE Act.
Ernest Miller pursues research and writing on cyberlaw, intellectual property, and First Amendment issues. Mr. Miller attended the U.S. Naval Academy before attending Yale Law School, where he was president and co-founder of the Law and Technology Society, and founded the technology law and policy news site LawMeme. He is a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
Ernest Miller's blog postings can also be found @
