April 02, 2008
Royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable licenses
With disappointing repetitiveness, I stumble across some bozo up in arms over some company that's attempting to "steal your copyright." These are usually in a lather because they've actually read the Terms of Service for [insert web-based application here] and noticed language that looks something like this:
"the submitting user grants [company] the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license."
A good example is this comment on the Slashdot story last week about Adobe launching an online version of Photoshop Express. I've had to deal with these kind of complaints for the web properties I'm responsible for, but my annoyance is nothing new. The first time I remember coming across complaints about these kind of terms is almost a decade ago when Yahoo! took over Geocities. It annoyed me even back then when I was just a humble ed tech trainer, not a product manager responsible for honest-to-goodness web applications.
Although I am not a lawyer and you definitely shouldn't take legal advice from me, let me explain to you what the heck is going on here: it's called the Internet.
When you upload your content from your computer to [insert web-based application here] you are transferring that content from your computer to the centrally-hosted web application that, presumably, will reproduce that content when it serves it up for display to you or someone else on the web page. This is is commonly known as publishing in web parlance, a way to distribute content over the World Wide Web. Etc. etc. Terms starting to sound familiar?
The Web works by making copies of content and transmitting/distributing those copies all over hell and back anytime someone views a web page, not to mention all the caching of copies. Any company that's going to get into the business of helping you put content of any sort on the web needs to get your permission to do fling that content all over the globe.
If the vendor didn't explicitly make the license to do that part of the terms, then some other bozo is going to come along and say "I uploaded a photo to your photo sharing site, and you had the unmitigated gall to -- horror or horrors -- transmit my content to the web browser of someone, and in the process of doing so allowed them to cache a copy of that photo on their own computer! How dare you! I'm suing you for copyright infringement, Mr. Vendor!" The type of terms like those quoted above are about how the web works and making sure that some litigious jackass doesn't sue the vendor over doing what's necessary for a web app to exist. It's not about "stealing copyright."
So, you "stealing copyright" bozos, please stop getting your knickers in a twist. Put your tinfoil hat back on and wait by the front door for the black helicopters.
Oh, by the way, the quoted terms above? They're quoted from the Slashdot Terms of Service. ;-)
Posted April 2, 2008 07:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
January 08, 2008
Post runs a correction on the RIAA article
The Washington Post got the message (if not from me, then from other sources with a wider audience), and published a correction to Marc Fisher's inaccurate story on Atlantic v. Howell. The correction reads:
A Dec. 30 Style & Arts column incorrectly said that the
recording industry "maintains that it is illegal for someone who has
legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer." In a
copyright-infringement lawsuit, the industry's lawyer argued that the
actions of an Arizona man, the defendant, were illegal because the songs were located in a
"shared folder" on his computer for distribution on a peer-to-peer
network.
At least they corrected it. But it reminds me that the standard print newspaper practice of burying corrections someplace deep in the paper (and, in the case, website) is as atrocious as it has always been. Corrections, especially for regular columns, should run in the same space that the original ran and run above the lede, not at the bottom of the column.
Posted January 8, 2008 08:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
January 03, 2008
Wow. I got it right.
If I had any doubt that my interpretation of the RIAA's Atlantic v. Howell brief and the Washington Post's lousy reporting on the case was dead on, those have been washed away by William Patry, current Senior Copyright Counsel at Google and former copyright counsel to the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary. Patry also pretty much wrote the book on copyright, the "book" being a 7-volume, 5500-page treatise on copyright with a foreword by former Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O'Connor.
On The Patry Copyright Blog, he writes:
Pretty much spot on the argument I was making. Vindicated! :-)On page 15 of the brief, we find the flashpoint:
"Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recordings into the compressed
.mp3 format AND they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the
authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs." I have capitalized the word "and" because it is here that the RIAA is making the point that placing the mp3 files into the share folder is what makes the copy unauthorized. The RIAA
is not saying that the mere format copying of a CD to an mp3 file that
resides only on one's hard drive and is never shared is infringement.
This is a huge distinction and is surprising the Post didn't understand
it.
Posted January 3, 2008 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 31, 2007
Unbelievably standing up for the RIAA (this one time)
Yesterday, Marc Fisher of the Washington Post wrote a piece entiled "Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use." (Free registration might be required to view.)
One of my favorite bloggers, Daring Fireball's Jon Gruber, referenced this briefly yesterday. I've seen this crop up on lots of other blogs and various media outlets, and the story is always presented in basically the way that Fisher presented it:
[I]n an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.
The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.
The problem is that's not what the brief says at all.
I was as outraged as you probably are when I first read about this brief a few weeks ago. So I looked up the Atlantic v. Howell brief. It was easy to find through Google, but here's a link for you: Plaintiff's supplemental brief in support of their motion for summary judgment pursuant to court's order of October 3, 2007. (PDF format).
Read it for yourself. When you read the brief it quickly becomes clear this isn't a case about converting CDs to MP3s, but a case about someone who plopped his converted MP3's into the Kazaa file-sharing service. What the brief actually says is:
Defendant admitted that he converted these soundrecordings from their original format to the .mp3 format for his and his wife’s use. . . . Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recording into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs. Moreover, Defendant had no authorization to distribute Plaintiffs’ copyrighted recordings from his KaZaA shared folder." (p. 15)
Note the "and" in that second sentence. This is boolean logic at its simplest. Not once in this brief -- not once -- is it even remotely implied that "copy[ing] their CDs onto their computers," as Fisher said, is an illegal act in and of itself. The entire case revolves around taking those MP3s and making them available to other people via the Kazaa file-sharing service. Had Howell just converted his CDs to MP3s and dropped them into a location on his computer that wasn't shared with millions of other users, we might assume that there wouldn't be a lawsuit taking place.
In other words, in the Atlantic v. Howell brief, the lawyers for the RIAA are not objecting to a user copying CDs onto a computer, but to a user putting the ripped audio files into a shared folder that he knew would distribute it via the Kazaa file-sharing service -- precisely what the RIAA has been objecting to for nearly a decade.
I'm no apologist for the RIAA; I loathe their policies and their tactics. But loathing the RIAA isn't an excuse for letting sloppy, misleading, and irresponsible reporting go unnoticed. I haven't seen any coverage of this case that has actually reported the full context, i.e. that the RIAA was objecting to the converted files in question being shared over the Kazaa service.
There's nothing new -- or newly nefarious -- here. The only new thing here is that the defense lawyers are being much more clever this time around about taking language about "unauthorized copies" out of context and spinning it to their advantage in the media and blogosphere. And the media and bloggers are eagerly taking the bait without doing the simple legwork that any resepectable journalist, blogger, or thinking person should do.
Posted December 31, 2007 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
June 14, 2004
The Clear Channel Patent Smackdown
From Rolling Stone, comes this article, "Clear Channel Limits Live CDs:"
In the past few years, fans leaving some concerts have discovered a souvenir far better than a T-shirt: a live recording of the show they just attended. Bands including the Allman Brothers, moe. and Billy Idol have sold instant concert discs, and the Pixies and the Doors plan to launch similar programs this summer. The recording-and-burning company DiscLive estimated on April 12th that it would gross $500,000 selling live discs this spring alone.But in a move expected to severely limit the industry, Clear Channel Entertainment has bought the patent from the technology's inventors and now claims to own the exclusive right to sell concert CDs after shows. The company, which is the biggest concert promoter in the world, says the patent covers its 130 venues along with every other venue in the country.
Gah! Clear Channel, not file-sharing, should be held responsible for declining audio CD sales because they're radio division is almost singlehandedly responsible for the lack of diverse programming on commercial radio. This move by their concert promotion division only confirms my low opinion of them.
Posted June 14, 2004 11:55 AM | Permalink
May 27, 2004
The Value of Free
Interesting essay/blog entry (is it an essay? is it a blog entry? who cares -- ridiculous distinction, anyway!) on the Free Culture AudioBook Project.
Posted May 27, 2004 12:15 PM | Permalink
April 28, 2004
MIT Interview with Jack Valenti
The Tech, an MIT newspaper, has published an interview with Jack Valenti, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Valenti comes off as uninformed about the nuances of the copyright debates and seems only capable of speaking about the issues in soundbites that feel, to me, a bit pre-programmed -- like this is going to be his response to any question regarding copyright, no matter the nuance. I imagine his PR flack reminding him before the interview, "Stay on message, Jack!"
It's all the more apparent because I'm about halfway through Free Culture, by Larry Lessig, which you can purchase in the bookstore or download for free. In a testament to Lessig's point, I read a couple chapters in PDF format, then bounced over to Amazon to purchase the physical object for more efficient and comfortable Metro and coffee-shop reading.
Anyway, Lessig, the anti-Valenti (or maybe the Valenti antidote, we can hope), presented both sides of the issue in a comprehensive, nuanced, and not-so-propagandic way. Highly recommended reading.
Posted April 28, 2004 05:24 PM | Permalink
January 27, 2004
The Real Lock-In
More so I don't forget these links than for you, dear readers:
Yesterday, Robert Scoble, who works for Microsoft, wrote a long entry (choosing a media player. Scoble's basic point is if you plan to buy DRM-protected music online, you should buy a media player powered by Windows Media software instead of an Apple iPod because it's likely there will be more Windows Media powered devices (e.g. moving the DRM-protected song from your media player to a car stereo) than there will be Apple devices.
Scoble's logic -- or lack thereof -- was so brain-spinningly ass-backwards that when I began to write about it yesterday, I got so frustrated I gave up. Glad I did, because today Cory Doctorow managed to explain the flaws in Scoble's argument better than I could have:
In this world where we have consumer choices to make, Scoble argues that our best buy is to pick the lock-in company that will have the largest number of licensees.Bravo.That's just about the worst choice you can make.
If I'm going to protect my investment in digital music, my best choice is clearly to invest in buying music in a format that anyone can make a player for.
Posted January 27, 2004 06:00 PM | Permalink
November 30, 2003
How We Learn Poetry
Ray Kurzweil, a well-known inventor, has received a patent (NY Times, free registration required) for software that creates poetry by reading poems, learning the style of the poet, and imitating it.
It's probably a bit more complex than that, and the results are likely underwhelming as poetry (the example in the article certainly is), but what I'm more interested in the potential impact of providing a software patent (which are dodgy patents anyway) on the computerization of common artistic practices.
Can the patent holders litigate against human students of poetics for patent infringement if those students create poems by reading and imitating the style of existing poets?!? Think of the repercussions on graduate creative writing programs!
Posted November 30, 2003 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Broadcast Flag Primer
A good introduction to the FCC's broadcast flag ruling on Slate:
Broadcast-flag technology works like this: Digital TV signals that are broadcast over the air, rather than transmitted via cable or satellite, will include an invisible data tag -- the broadcast flag -- along with the picture and sound. By FCC fiat, any digital TV tuner built after July 1, 2005, must refuse to allow broadcast-flagged programs to be recorded in such a way that they can be redistributed in their high-definition format. You'll be able to record Letterman tonight and watch him tomorrow but you won't be able to e-mail a copy to your friends.
Link via Scripting News.
Posted November 30, 2003 08:25 AM | Permalink
October 14, 2003
Solving Piracy
The digital watermarking concept in my previous post sparked an idea. I've written before that music retail (and eventually video and book retail) as we know it is in its death throes. The oh-so-twentieth-century "grocery store" model of bins of physical media (CDs, DVDs, books) won't last. Music retail is not not doomed because of file-sharing, which I think will turn out to be just a blip in the history of how we deliver and consume content, but because it's just bad business: why pay the enormous overhead of manufacturing, shipping, warehousing inventory, rent and utilities, employee salaries, etc. to sell and distribute content that, thanks to the digital age, can be reproduced and distributed for a miniscule fraction of those costs?
The primary reason we continue to do so that the mega-corporations that control the content also own, control or are invested in a many of the manufacturing and distribution channels. For the last several hundred years, content has been a manufacturing industry, with big factories that churn out physical media that just happen to have this abstract stuff called content cut, stuck, or burned on them. Likewise, some of the distribution channels, e.g. Wal-Mart, are as powerful (if not more so) in our culture than the media conglomerates.
Eventually greed eliminates even a powerful status quo, though. The media industry will find a way to divest themselves of the physical distribution infrastructure, because, as the software industry alread realized, you can make better margins selling just the bits. Which brings me back to the digital watermarking.
The challenge of piracy to the content distributor is that, currently, content is pretty much untrackable. I can rip a CD, share it, and once it's shared it's nearly impossible to track that particular file back to me. Big value (e.g. free content), little risk (e.g. hard to track me down), leads to lots of file sharing.
However, suppose you go to an online store, enter your account information, and every song you download is stamped with a digital watermark identifying you as the purchaser? What if you didn't purchase a CD that was a duplicate of 5 million other CD's, but instead went to a retail kiosk, entered your account information, and had a CD custom-burned for you (or even more likely the files transferred wirelessly to your MP3 player/personal content storage device), again with a digital watermark identifying you as the purchaser? Suddenly it becomes much simpler for the copyright infringement to be tracked back to you, thus providing a disincentive to illegally share the file, but -- and this is the important part -- this custom digital watermark does so without squashing fair use.
That model requires some pretty drastic changes, not the least of which is the eradication of the retail content industry (record stores, video stores, and eventually book stores), but also probably some advances in the speed of burning/transferring content (I need to be able to get 50 songs nearly as quickly as a clerk can ring up 5 CDs), advances in digital watermarking, and a significant mind-shift among consumers. Also, it only works moving forward -- back catalogs are already lost to file sharing because they were never watermarked (but, for the most part, it's the new content where the money is made).
If, for the purposes of this thought experiment, I can fiat all those assumptions into existence, I think the custom digital watermarking idea might work.
I can't be the first person to have thought of this, can I?
Posted October 14, 2003 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Jack Valenti: Enemy of the People
Okay, the whole "enemy of the people" bit is a little over the top, but the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its director, Jack Valenti, run a close second behind the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for actions designed to stomp out every use of intellectual property that doesn't directy line the coffers of big move/recording studios. In Why inspecting a turkey sandwich won't stop movie piracy, film critic Roger Ebert writes about a recent Valenti edict that basically takes independent film out of the running for Academy Awards:
[Valenti] announced that signatories of the Motion Picture Association of America would be forbidden to send out the thousands of advance DVD ''screeners'' that jam the year-end mailboxes of Academy members and critics compiling Best 10 lists.His reason is that screeners have been used by video pirates to make illegal copies of movies. That is true. It is also true that pirates will find a way to steal prints anyway.
The Valenti Decree would cripple the chance of a small independent film getting an Oscar nomination. With dozens of films opening at year end, the academy population lacks the time and energy to attend all those screenings in theaters. The DVDs pile up at home, and when the buzz turns hot on a title, they look at it.
Ebert goes on in the article to provide an excellent alternate solution for Academy screening purposes: "disposable" digital video discs which self destruct after one viewing and are digital watermarked with the name of the Academy member to whom it is distributed.
Posted October 14, 2003 08:04 AM | Permalink
October 08, 2003
Getting behind filesharing
Wired News: Music Label Cashes in by Sharing:
Berkeley-based Magnatune calls its approach "open music," a blend of shareware, open source and grass-roots activism.The idea is to let users try music before they buy, and when they do, to give half of every sale to the artist.
Magnatune's motto: "We are not evil."
Nice motto. :)
Posted October 8, 2003 06:43 AM | Permalink
September 30, 2003
The Copyright Cage
Excellent article by Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard's Berkman Center, titled The Copyright Cage. It's a terrific overview of some of the insanely twisty legalities of copyright law. [link via Online Learning Daily]
Posted September 30, 2003 11:36 AM | Permalink
September 05, 2003
RIAA Loses Whats Left of its Mind
In yet another stroke of being brilliantly out of touch with reality, the RIAA announced today that they would provide amnesty for users sharing files:
The RIAA's offer would require Internet users to complete a notarized amnesty form that includes promises to delete any illegally downloaded music and not participate in illegal file-trading in the future. In exchange, the RIAA would agree not to file a potentially expensive infringement lawsuit.I mean, good grief, who do they think is going to take them up on this besides the uber-paranoid? Yeah, those are the customers you want to cultivate. They probably only listen to the Collected Spoken Word Recordings of Oliver Stone.
In related news, Universal appears to be about to slash audio CD prices, potentially lowering retail CD prices into the $10-$12 range. Of course, it still only takes less than a buck fifty to produce the CD's.
What we're seeing here folks is the death of music retail. Tim Oren wrote about this [link via Scripting News]:
Remember there were once software specialty stores? For a variety of reasons, but particularly including Internet ordering and downloading as an alternate channel, those stores first consolidated, then vanished, followed by most of the broad line computer stores. Now software is smallish section at Office Depot or Best Buys, a pale shadow of the old channel. Today, the music business may have taken its first overt step down that same path.Like we said auf wiedersehen to the Software Etc. and Egghead Software shops at the mall, it's now time to bid au revoir to our pal Sam Goody, say sayanora to good ol' Kemp Mill (only DC locals get that reference), and adios to aisles of music at the Barnes & Noble.
I'm not going to predict how long it will take, but I will predict that eventually music retail will consist of two channels:
1. Downloading music via the Internet onto your own computer for a per song fee.
2. Kiosks in retail locations that download (via the Internet or a private network) and burn CDs (and print cover art) on the spot.
The latter is a necessary transitional technology because many people, particularly outside the first world, still don't have sufficient connectivity to support a robust music habit.
Once the margin dips below a certain point, record industry distributors will cease to pay the physical distribution costs (burning, printing, shipping, etc.), and retailers won't be able to afford their own costs (rent, employees, etc.). Then we can dispense with all this physical distribution and retail infrastructure just to move digital bits around.
Of course, even with the two retail channels above, there will still continue to be a robust back-channel of consumer-to-consumer file-sharing.
Amnesty or not.
Posted September 5, 2003 05:25 PM | Permalink
August 20, 2003
File Sharing Legal in Canada, Though Not As Popular as Hockey
Evan's analysis of file-sharing legalities starts out with consideration of whether Canadian copyright law makes file-sharing through peer-to-peer networks legal, but Evan goes on to provide an excellent (as usual) analysis of alternative financial models for the recording industry. Good reading.
Posted August 20, 2003 12:38 PM | Permalink
August 05, 2003
Open Access to Medical Research
From this morning's Washington Post, A Fight for Free Access To Medical Research:
[T]he vast majority of the 50,000 to 60,000 research articles published each year as a result of federally funded science ends up in the hands of for-profit publishers -- the largest of them based overseas -- that charge as much as $50 to view the results of a single study online. . . .The Public Library of Science is using a Creative Commons license, although Creative Commons is never mentioned in the article.Why is it, a growing number of people are asking, that anyone can download medical nonsense from the Web for free, but citizens must pay to see the results of carefully conducted biomedical research that was financed by their taxes?
The Public Library of Science aims to change that. The organization, founded by a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and two colleagues, is plotting the overthrow of the system by which scientific results are made known to the world -- a $9 billion publishing juggernaut with subscription charges that range into thousands of dollars per year.
In its place the organization is constructing a system that would put scientific findings on the Web -- for free.
Posted August 5, 2003 07:43 AM | Permalink
August 03, 2003
Stealing vs. Copyright Infringment
Matt Haughey, posting on Metafilter, about the difference between stealing and copyright infringment
Stealing is walking into a Art Gallery and taking a painting under your arm and leaving.About as good an explanation fo the difference as I've read.Copyright Infringement is going to a national gallery and taking a digital photograph of a painting, then going home and printing it for placement on your wall.
One involves the theft of property, making it so there is 1 less painting in a gallery, the other does not. In either case, no money exchanges hands with the gallery, but in the second case there was potential for a sale of a painting.
It's a thorny issue, and neither side is completely in the right, but there is a difference between "stealing" and "copyright infringement" that is worth noting, and perhaps, worth thinking about when drafting new laws to deal with it (please, please, please don't use old property laws for copyright infringement).
Part of the problem with the whole debate over file-sharing, MP3s, et al is that "intellectual property" is a term that misleads people into believe that the creative works must be treated the same as physical "property." In fact, they simply aren't. Don't believe me? Try this experiment:
Give someone your blender. Let them take it home with them. Now sit in your house, and try to make a smoothie in your blender.
Now, give someone your idea. Let them take it home with them. Now sit in your house, and try to make use of your idea.
You can't do the former because physical property is "rivalrous." It is a limited resource and can't be owned or consumed concurrently. If I steal the Mona Lisa, you can't go to the museum and see it. If you take my blender, I can no longer use it. Intellectual property is a "non-rivalrous" resource. My consumption of it doesn't impact yours. If I take a photo of the Mona Lisa, the original is still hanging on the wall of the museum. You can take my idea, but I haven't lost it by you taking it.
Posted August 3, 2003 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
July 03, 2003
FUD about DVDs
This letter to the editor, The Law and DVDs, in the Washington Post infuriated me when I read it this morning. The letter is a response to Rob Pegoraro's June 22 Fast Forward column, DVD-Piracy Paranoia Proves Counterproductive.
The letter's author, Roberth Sugarman, is counsel for the DVD Copy Control Association, the people who control the Content Scramble System (CSS), the DVD copy-protection mechanism.
Sugarman's letter is full of blatant, outright lies about copyright law. I'm not a regular writer of letters to the editor, but I couldn't let this one pass. Here's the letter I wrote and sent today:
Dear Editor:
It disappoints me to see Richard Sugarman misrepresenting the law in his July 3 letter to the editor. ["The Law and DVDs"].
In responding to Rob Pegoraro's June 22 column ["DVD-Piracy Paranoia Proves Counterproductive, Business], Sugarman says "it is illegal for [Pegoraro] to use the content of those discs for anything other than his own viewing pleasure." As a member of the bar, Sugarman should be better acquainted with the many legal uses of copyrighted material. US Code Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 states that "the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies . . . for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
Fair use of copyrighted material does not require the copyright owner's permissions to make use of the copyrighted material, however the Content Scrambling System (CSS) on every DVD prevents fair use copies from being made. The CSS technology is licensed by the organization Mr. Sugarman works for, the DVD Copy Control Association Inc.
Mr. Sugarman also says "CSS was developed to prevent the illegal copying and circulation of DVD movie content." While that is true, he fails to acknowledge that CSS also prevents the thoroughly legal fair use of the content on a DVD.
To complicate matters, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 makes circumventing copy-protection systems, like CSS, a crime. Therefore, to make legal fair use of CSS-protected content requires one to break another, contradicting law.
Congress continues to pass legislation like the DMCA and copyright term extensions that benefit the large media companies that own most of the copyrights and make most of the money from them. Mr. Sugarman and the industry he represents certainly have a right to worry about mass piracy of their content. However, we should not allow media companies to strongarm Congress into trampling fair use and the public domain in the process of protecting copyright.
Greg Ritter
Washington, DC
Posted July 3, 2003 01:20 PM | Permalink
July 01, 2003
Intellectual Porkerty
Hormel Foods, makers of Spam (the canned ham, not the unsolicited bulk email) is suing SpamArrest for trademark infringment.
Posted July 1, 2003 08:19 AM | Permalink
June 24, 2003
I Call the Patent on Ass-Whuppin'!!!
Remember when you were a kid and you could say things like, "I call first turn on the Atari when we get back home from Putt-putt!" And the rest of your nine-year old crew would respond, "Awww, man! But I guess we gotta give it to him. I mean, he called it first."
Apparently patent law has devolved nearly to the point of "calling" things, as evidenced by the report that Netflix now has a patent on subscription-based DVD rental, as opposed to per-unit DVD rental. [link via Slashdot]
Sheesh. Somebody needs to take James Rogan out back and whup his ass.
I call the patent on ass-whuppin'!!!
Posted June 24, 2003 06:11 PM | Permalink
June 15, 2003
The Diminishing Public Domain
Speaking of copyright, here's a disturbing graph that indicates the number of creative works that have been prevented from entering the public domain by changes in copryight law over the last 30 years. [link via Lessig's Blog]
In 1992 Congress retroactively applied the copright extension to works back to 1923. What had been a 28 year term became the life of the author plus 70 years (or 95 years for work owned by a corporation).
By extending the copryight term, Congress has robbed the public of over more than half the works that would have entered the public domain in our lifetime.
Simply put, that ended growth of the public domain.
Don't kid yourself that all of that stuff not in the public domain is "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (the Constitutional mandate for copyright). Only 2% of that work lost to the public domain has any continuing commercial value. The other 98% of those creative works are out-of-print or out-of-publication material that is locked away behind copyright, languishing, never to see the light of day again in all likelihood. That lost 98% provides no revenue for the copyright holder and is prevented from providing any value to the public.
Posted June 15, 2003 09:52 AM | Permalink
Copyright Conundrum
The online version of PBS' NewsHour with Jim Lehrer published a Q&A on copyright with Stanford law prof and copyright activist, Lawrence Lessig, and Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America.
Definitely well worth a read. I know I'm biased toward Lessig's position, but even trying to take that bias into account, it seemed to me that Lessig's responses were so much more carefully thought out and specific, while Oppenheim's seemed to simplistic and repetitive.
Posted June 15, 2003 09:31 AM | Permalink
May 06, 2003
©opyright Law
An Education in ©opyright Law: A Primer for Cyberspace:
"Some recent copyright legislation such as the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and TEACH Act concern web-based education. This work provides an overview of U.S. copyright law including the new legislation and related issues."
From the recent issue of LIBRES. Interesting that a good overview on U.S. copyright law comes from an Australian library journal. [link via Free Online Scholarship News]
Posted May 6, 2003 06:32 AM | Permalink
April 11, 2003
Stickin' it to the RIAA
The President of Michigan Technical University, Curtis Tompkins, sticks it to the RIAA in a letter responding to their lawsuit over file- (aka song-) sharing. The suit asks for damages against a Michigan Tech student at the rate of $150,000 per song, which, by some estimates, could equate to $97 billion dollars in damages.
Apparently, though, the RIAA didn't follow their own notification procedures that they have asked universities to comply with. Kudos to Tompkins for calling them out.
Posted April 11, 2003 06:24 AM | Permalink