Intellectual Property Law

How to Steal Like An Artist

Posted on March 30, 2011
You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. A friend pointed me to Austin Kleon's blog entry on how artists find material and get started on a creative life. Kleon adapted the entry from a talk he gave about his own experiences as an artist/creative person and the lessons he wished someone had laid out for him...

CNET (and others) Get It Wrong, Miss the Actual Story

Posted on March 24, 2011
I've been avoiding writing about the LimeWire debacle, not least because of potential conflict of interest (*). As always, I speak for me and nobody else. Not Corante, not my company, and certainly not Gorton or LimeWire. With that out of the way, let me just say: CNET, you're wrong...

Don't Kill - C-393 Follow-up

Posted on March 22, 2011
David Ng has a couple more posts on C-393 (which I pointed to last week) up at Boingboing. One even comes with amusing visual aid.

US Wants More Penalties on IP Violators

Posted on March 17, 2011
Under the ponderous title "Administration?s White Paper on Intellectual Property Enforcement Legislative Recommendations", the Obama Administration has issued its latest call for more punishment of IP criminals. The 20-page PDF is a hodgepodge of wishlist items an enforcement bureaucracy can dream up, and it has the unpleasant behavior of lumping together all forms of IP crime...

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Copyright vs Free Speech at SCOTUS

Posted on March 17, 2011
David Post at Volokh Conspiracy writes about the US Supreme Court's decision to grant cert to Golan v. Holder, appealed up from the 10th Circuit. This case is interesting for Copyfight on several fronts, as it touches on issues of copyright, copyright extension (and retroactivity), and freedom of speech...

Money, Patents, and Killing People

Posted on March 16, 2011
Under the heading "IP That Kills" I've visited this topic several times in the blog. Today we have two more entries on the sad roster of how we use intellectual property control regimes to kill people. First, a story from ABC News on a sudden spike in the cost of preventing a premature birth...

Obama Administration Continues to Export Jihad

Posted on March 15, 2011
People who told me I had nothing to worry about when Obama appointed a slew of Cartel lawyers to the DoJ should take some additional notice here. The US continues, under the guise of "trade agreements" to export its war on sharing, copying, and anything that challenges the Cartel's notion of control...

Dangers of the Patron Model

Posted on March 08, 2011
This morning NPR did a piece on the various celebrities, including Usher and Beyonce, who are presently squirming for having performed private shows to the family of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. This points out an unpleasant side to the patron model, a model I've mentioned here several times - what happens when your patron is a scum? This is nothing new, of course...

Sometimes Things Couldn't Be Better

Posted on February 26, 2011
The band Arcade Fire recently won a Grammy and, as they're not a big-name, mass-produced, Cartel-controlled act there was a good bit of whining from that contingent over it. Suck it up and deal. I particularly liked this response from Scott Rodger, the band's manager: "Arcade Fire are now one of the biggest live acts in the world...

Patrick Rothfuss offers to help Nathan Fillon buy back Firefly

Posted on February 24, 2011
In a way this is a story for my kind of nerds, but it's also an interesting story about creativity and control and why copyrights aren't always good things. First some background for the newcomers: Firefly was a TV series shown starting in 2002 that never had that big of a following...

Because These Things NEVER Go Wrong

Posted on February 18, 2011
A quick follow-up to my rant yesterday about the epically bad plan to allow one-sided seizures (hijackings) of domain names: TorrentFreak notes that the US Government just shut down 84,000 sites 'by mistake'. So, yeah, we should definitely pass a law saying that this is our policy for how to deal with illegal copying...

The Shakespeare Conspiracy

Posted on February 17, 2011
(No, not that conspiracy.) Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, David Post has a stinging rebuttal to an idiotic New York Times opinion piece. The column, by Authors? Guild leaders Scott Turow and Paul Aiken with professor James Shapiro makes a plea for support of the COICA bill (Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act) that is presently before Congress...

How Could They Not Screw It Up?

Posted on February 10, 2011
If you read Boingboing, Make magazine, or any of the numerous "maker" blogs you know that 3D printing is one of the hottest new technologies being explored by folk who like to make their own stuff. People are 3D printing everything from whimsical art items to seriously functional tools, to experimental objects for use in things like teaching anatomy...

When A Crowdfunded Project Goes "Off the Rails"

Posted on February 03, 2011
Cory Doctorow has a do-not-miss post up at Boingboing summarizing the current status of Diane Duane's experiment in trying to get potential readers to subscribe to an upcoming book and thus subsidize its writing. This is a variant of what I called "writing for those who want to read" and was intended to get a book called The Big Meow written and published...

Artists Should Earn Money

Posted on January 31, 2011
Boingboing and Kottke both pointed to a piece on the99percent.com by Francis Ford Coppola. As you'd expect of someone with that long a career he has a lot to say, but for Copyfight purposes let's focus on his discussion of copying, which comes off his response to the question about developing one's own style...

Thierry Guetta, Shepard Fairey, and Copyright Lawsuits

Posted on January 28, 2011
Earlier this week Sean Bonner posted a piece on Boingboing covering this ground. The blog entry is a bit long but well worth reading. I had been meaning to note that, earlier this month, Fairey had settled his 'hopeless' case with the Associated Press...

RIAA Continues DoJ Takeover

Posted on January 26, 2011
The RIAA's legal wrecking crew continue to assimilate the US Department of Justice. In their latest move, Donald Verrilli Jr. has been nominated by Obama as the nation?s Solicitor General. The SG is the person appointed to argue the government's side in cases before the US Supreme Court, as well as the usual level of supervision and direction of cases you'd see in a high-level appointment...

Canadian RIA Pays Up

Posted on January 13, 2011
I thought I had blogged about this case years ago when I first heard about the Canadian recording artists who had grown frustrated with trying to get their version of the Cartel to pay up on owed royalties. But I can't find it, nor can Google, so there you are...

Copyrights in a List

Posted on January 07, 2011
A list that is a mere compilation is generally not copyrightable. However, various specialized lists can be copyrighted either by virtue of their arrangement (e.g. lists of court cases) or by virtue of their unusual content. A few days ago Eugene Volokh pointed to a (dare I use the word) unique list - Schindler's List - and a copyright dispute surrounding it...

The Brads on Why DRM Doesn't Work

Posted on January 04, 2011

2010, The Year of the Mashup, is Over

Posted on December 29, 2010
If you had any doubt left that 2010 was the year that mash-ups went mainstream, take a quick peek at the latest set of bits posted to promote Tron:Legacy. The first item on the list is titled "DJ Breakdown" and it's a fan-created audio/video remix of Daft Punk's (themselves master remixers) soundtrack tune "Derezzed"...

Tune in to Tunecore (A 6-part series)

Posted on December 02, 2010
Thanks to EFF Deep Links and Boingboing for pointing me at Jeff Price's 6-part series called "The State of The Music Industry & the Delegitimization of Artists". This is a great series of blog posts that ran in October and November looking at the state of the music industry - that is, the business of recording and selling recordings of music - and the state of the Cartel...

A Sane Approach to Sharing (News Online)

Posted on November 18, 2010
I read a lot of financial blogs and such as part of my day job, and I happened to notice this in the footer of an ft.com (Financial Times) article: Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT...

Cartel Lawyers No Longer Shocked By Big Win

Posted on November 11, 2010
Back in June of last year, the Cartel appeared to think that getting a huge jury award against Jammie Thomas (now Thomas-Rasset) wasn't necessarily a great thing. They were willing to take USD 25,000 in order to get Judge Michael Davis to vacate his judgment that the original award was "monstrous and shocking"...

A Personal Puzzler - Who Owns This Audio?

Posted on October 25, 2010
This is an actual problem I have, and I've been unable to figure out a good answer to it, so I turn to you, my readers, for pointers and advice. Some time ago, I made an audio recording of an author reading her own book. The recording was made with the author's knowledge and (verbal) permission...

WOFF Proposal Looks Set To Solve Web Font Issues

Posted on October 21, 2010
I've written before about the way that intellectual property and sharing concerns have held back the use of different typographic styles on the Web. It looks like the long impasse may be about to end. A Copyfight reader sent me a pointer to an entry in The Economist's Science & Technology section on a budding compromise in the font stalemate...

Gene Simmons Has A Big Mouth

Posted on October 20, 2010
But then again, he'd need it to hold that much tongue. Except holding his tongue has never been his strong suit, has it. The ex-KISS bassist has managed to get himself a personal Google headline "Make sure your brand is protected," ... "Make sure there are no incursions...

Canadian Scientists Take Their Case to the Public

Posted on October 20, 2010
In an attempt to get around what seem like heavy-handed rules from the Canadian government, the scientists' union has put up a Web site to publicize members' work. The Globe and Mail has coverage of the issue, noting that there seem to be an increasing number of hoops for government scientists to jump through if they want to talk about their work to the media...

First-Sale Doctrine Under Fire

Posted on October 19, 2010
A notice of filing an amicus brief from the EFF reminded me that I had also meant to blog about Vernor v Autodesk, another crucial case that has received far too little mass-media press attention. Technically the issue at the heart of the three-judge opinion issued last month is a technical point of copyright law...

Lego Loses EU Trademark; More Trouble Coming?

Posted on October 18, 2010
This past weekend I attended the Media Lab's 25th anniversary celebration, which was great fun. Lego is a big sponsor of the Lab, and that reminded me I've been meaning to write about this. Back in September, EU judges ruled in favor of Mega Brands and against Lego, canceling Lego's trademark on the brick...

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