Intellectual Property Law

World e-Book Faire

Posted on July 02, 2009
Project Gutenberg and the World Public Library are co-promoting a month-long event with that name. Their theme is one of "public access" and they're offering something like two million eBooks for download. I haven't investigated completely but it appears that all the offered downloads are in PDF format without any DRM or other electronic encumbrances...

Proof That Even Very Smart People Can Say Very Stupid Things

Posted on June 29, 2009
Generally I have a lot of respect for Richard Posner. The word "brilliant" gets thrown around casually a lot, but I really do think Posner verges on brilliance. You don't get 40 books published by writing nonsense or wasting readers' time. Let's settle for saying he's a very smart, very widely influential judge...

A Win Too Far?

Posted on June 21, 2009
Almost everyone, including the Cartel's own lawyers, appears publicly shocked by the USD 2 million verdict returned against a Minnesota mother whose fight against the RIAA has been something of a rallying point in the war the labels have waged on their customers...

Eh, Mebbe Not

Posted on June 11, 2009
The highest legal review body in France, the Constitutional Council, has said "non" to legislation trumpeted by the Cartel that would have allowed cutting off Internet access of people accused of copyright violations. The French constitution contains clauses promoting a presumption of innocence and the Council determined that the legislation - which had already passed in Parliament (WAKE UP YOU GUYS YOU'RE BEING OWNED) - violated those clauses as well as infringing on French Constitutional guarantees of free speech...

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A Style Mash-Up

Posted on June 10, 2009
What would you get if you took the 19th-century notion of a penny dreadful and updated it for the 21st-century iPhone? The makers of Steampunk Tales think they have an answer. Steampunk is a pop-culture phenomenon this decade. There are books, music, and cons devoted to this movement...

And Now A Pirate MEP

Posted on June 09, 2009
In addition to Vikings, reindeer, and cute blonde girls, Sweden can now say it has a Pirate member of the European Parliament. According to Veronica Ek's story for Reuters (here reprinted by the Globe and Mail) about seven percent of the Swedish electorate cast ballots that sent a member of the Pirate Party into office...

IAF Goes For The Sponsors

Posted on June 01, 2009
The Interstitial Arts Foundation (IAF), whose event I mentioned a couple weeks ago, is putting together a new volume of fiction writing. The book, currently called Interfictions 2 is a follow-on to their successful publication in 2007 of a work of collected short fictions that exist between the large spaces of current mass-market genre definitions...

Not Satisfied with Copying Policy, Canadian Think-Tank Copies Verbatim

Posted on May 29, 2009
This kind of thing is too good not to snark about, so excuse me for a moment. According to Matt Hartley's story in Toronto's Globe And Mail online site, the Conference Board of Canada got caught plagiarizing. Why is this funny? Well, the reports (plural, three of them) that had to be withdrawn were supposed to be giving the Ottowa government advice on how to update Canadian copyright laws...

EFF Launches "Teach Copyright" (free)

Posted on May 28, 2009
And by "free" we mean both "Creative Commons licensed for free use" and "free of Cartel propaganda." Nice combo. Here are some excerpts from the press release they sent:Last week, the Copyright Alliance Education Foundation -- a nonprofit mouthpiece for the entertainment and software industries -- unveiled plans to spread its protectionist ideas to the nation's schools and libraries through the distribution of a curriculum titled "Think First, Copy Later...

More Fun Free Things

Posted on May 19, 2009
"Feed Your Soul: the free art project" - free, downloadable art. Cardstock it, frame it. Just don't resell it. The Hype Machine - an aggregator for blog discussions about music. Mostly it's a "play in browser" type experience but they link back to the original blog entries, which often have download links...

Interstitial Arts Foundation Event

Posted on May 14, 2009
After my post about new art forms I got a pointer to this event: Interstitial Salon, June 11th in New York City. I don't know anything other than what I've read on the Web about this Interstitial Arts Foundation - anyone have any contact or experience with them? My first response is that, no, interstitial doesn't really describe what I was after - I'm looking for something that is more broad-brush and definitive of new forms, not something trying to fit itself into the spaces between existing forms...

Pay to Play May Come to Broadcast At Last

Posted on May 14, 2009
No, I'm not talking about modern payola practices in radio again. I haven't bothered to keep up with it in the past few years but I'm convinced that it still goes on. Instead I've had it called to my attention that the US House of Representatives has taken a step forward in passing legislation that would force traditional radio broadcast stations to pay the Cartel for playing songs on the air...

Real DVD Monopolies (or so says RealNetworks)

Posted on May 14, 2009
Last year I made a passing note of a product called RealDVD that was supposed to let you burn a DVD onto a PC drive, with copy prevention software intact. I was sort of dubious that the product would amount to anything. Well, it appears to have amounted to (another) antitrust claim against the Cartel...

Can Tim O'Reilly Re-Invent the Book?

Posted on April 30, 2009
In today's O'Reilly Radar column, Tim tackles the notion of how one might re-invent the book. Whether or not one thinks this medium is in need of re-invention there's no doubt that the book publishing industry is continuing to upheave, and possibly at a faster rate...

Sometimes It Is That Easy

Posted on April 30, 2009
I've been pursuing various links in my continuing quest to find easy ways to pay for music I like. I came across RCRD LBL.com which appears to be a curated online community for artists, labels, and fans to share and talk about music. They're obviously aiming at the hipper, more online-centric crowd; for example, you can follow them on Twitter and their "Genres" page is a tag cloud that I'd bet is derived by aggregating tags artists put on the uploaded content...

Copyfight is Everywhere

Posted on April 20, 2009
No, not this blog. We continue to trundle on in our small way. The lack of outraged emails telling me what an idiot I am is evidence that we're no longer much noticed. Copyfight issues, though. Those are everywhere. Two examples came across my radar this week...

More Good Free Science

Posted on April 14, 2009
The Social Science Research Network is offering free introductions to material within its now Cognitive Science Network (CSN). CSN will provide "a worldwide, online community for research in all areas of cognitive science." They will have seven e-Journals in various cog-sci areas and are offering free subscriptions until October 2009, and then $40 after that...

Why Is This Still So Goddamn Hard?

Posted on April 13, 2009
Once upon a very long ago I wanted to hear a very specific song. I was at work, and was making a point to a coworker about how certain male and female voices went together. This duet was part of the point I was making, but I didn't have it at hand. Had someone said "Give me a buck and I'll give you a copy of that song you can play on your computer" I would have cheerfully handed over my USD and been pleased at the exchange...

Anti-Staples Ruling Troubles Free-Speech Advocates

Posted on March 23, 2009
Staples' slogan is "That Was Easy." Now it appears that the ease of mass-mailing something to a large number of employees may have brought trouble not only to this company but to everyone - bloggers, journalists, critics, etc - who relies on the notion that truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel...

Is Silence the Price of Patents?

Posted on March 20, 2009
I've written in this blog about the drug industry before, most emotionally in regards to the dangers to life posed by intellectual property restrictions in copying AIDS medication. I've also noted that drugs, which rely most heavily on patent protection, tend to lead to higher-quality patents than we see issued in the software field...

"Mash Up" Just Seems So Inadequate

Posted on March 20, 2009
These days lots of people send me links to things they think are interesting and Copyfight-able material. I don't want to discourage people, but I can't possibly blog every one. Cory Doctorow I am not. But I did want to use this video of interesting images from Google Earth to jump off into a bigger thought or more like a set of related questions...

Reverse Image Search

Posted on March 18, 2009
This is billed as pure tech, but its use in tracking material, possibly copyrighted material, are obvious: TinEye, a reverse-image search. The idea is that you upload a picture to it and it tells you where else on the Web it has seen that picture. One obvious use would be sourcing material - I have this picture, who might it have come from - and another would be finding people who are using your images...

Thru-You, the YouTube Mashup

Posted on March 14, 2009
Enough people have sent me this one that I feel obliged to blog it, though I'm not sure I have anything new or original to say: "Through You" is a massive mash-up of clips from films found on YouTube. It makes for some interesting music, and the author goes to some lengths to give complete credits...

Newspapers are Laughably Expensive

Posted on March 02, 2009

Who Does She Think She Is?

Posted on February 17, 2009
A new independent film documentary is starting to make the rounds of small theaters and informal showings. Who Does She Think She Is? explores the particular conjunction of female artistry and motherhood, particularly in modern American society. As a group, women are under-represented in American galleries, shows, and in teaching about American art...

LimeWire Going Legit

Posted on February 10, 2009
Chris Crum over at WebProNews has posted a Q-and-A with LimeWire George Searle, who has a couple comments on ongoing partnerships and attempts to move beyond the trench warfare with the Cartel. (Reminder: I work for a company that is technically related to LimeWire, but have no contacts or interest in that bit of the business...

DMCA Rulings Overbroad in Gaming Too

Posted on February 09, 2009
Blizzard Entertainment has just scored another victory in its campaign against "botters" - or rather, makers of bots. The company had already won a judgment against bot-maker MDY on grounds of interference; now it has won on DMCA grounds, and not everyone is happy about that...

RIAA Takes Over DOJ

Posted on February 06, 2009
 OK, enough with the funny stuff. The new Obama administration is shaping up to be a disaster for Copyfighters everywhere. In particular the new Department of Justice is stacked with lawyers who've been on the wrong side of copyright and intellectual property lawsuits for the last eight years...

Bale Out

Posted on February 06, 2009
I'm certain there will be lots more of these and I promise not to blog them, but I did want to point to one amusing remix of Christian Bale's f-bomb laden tirade on the Terminator 4 set. This is what we do now - we parody it on YouTube. There are also apparently remixes of the remix, using the audio track with different visuals...

UK Copyright Law, In Verse

Posted on February 04, 2009
No, that's not "inverse" as in backwards. It's "rendered in verse" as in "poetically." Or at least, in rhyming couplets. Back in 2006, Yehuda Berlinger put up a rendition of US Copyright Law in verse form. Now he's added the UK's copyright law - though he does point out that there are upcoming changes, which may require him to re-verse.

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