Intellectual Property Law

Gin, Television, and 100 Wikipedia per Year, for Sharing

Posted on April 30, 2008
Clay Shirky is one of the better Big Thinkers on the Web today, particularly in the arenas of social media and cooperative interactions. He's published an essay called "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus". In part this is related to his new book Here Comes Everybody but focused around a single idea...

Gaiman, Final Thoughts, and McFarlane

Posted on April 25, 2008
Gaiman included a few "final" thoughts on copyright. Given how much he's involved himself in the discussion of these issues over the years I seriously doubt this'll be his final word, but perhaps he feels he has no more to say on the Rowling case. In this entry he's reflecting on his own copyright battles with Todd McFarlane over authorship of certain material that Gaiman wrote...

Fair Use, One Author's View

Posted on April 22, 2008
Gaiman put up a blog entry explicitly calling out fair use. In it he talks about the Rowling/RDR Books case, noting that her approach is different from his own in response to 'unauthorized' material that has been put out on him and his writing. He also notes that his own two first books were at best legally shaky in Fair Use terms - an aggressive lawsuit could easily have shut him down from writing anything more...

Publishers vs Academics

Posted on April 18, 2008
Ms Rowling is not the only one concerned with how much of her work others are taking. Law.com has a report from Janet Conley on a lawsuit by three academic publishers against Georgia State University. At issue are incidents like a 32-page copy made by a music professor...

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Rowling versus the Lexicon, Round 1

Posted on April 15, 2008
Or, formally, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. v. RDR Books, 07-cv-09667. But since it was Rowling testifying Monday, that's where the focus is. If Mark Hamblett's piece for law.com is accurate it appears things are getting nasty right off the bat. Considering how heated some of the comments were on my last entry on this topic I expect there's a fair bit of passion in the air...

What is the Value of News?

Posted on April 14, 2008
Daily Kos posted a think piece this weekend. The essay argues that big media have, in effect, caused their own devaluation. That is, the "amateurish" state of news on the Web is not really due to the proliferation of bloggers or non-authority sources such as Wikipedia...

People Unclear on the Concept?

Posted on April 02, 2008
Neat-o-rama blog reported that students in UT San Antonio were told to come up with a "code of academic integrity in order to combat plagiarism". Apparently they then copied a chunk of their code from BYU. Now on the surface this is a ha-ha funny story about kids who copy when they shouldn't...

Google Advanced Search Adds Licensing Info

Posted on March 31, 2008
Riffing on the same theme as compfight, Google has added a feature to its advanced search that lets you find Web pages with explicit usage rights as a search parameter. The parameter lets you specify a few combinations of free to use, share, and modify...

Update on the Gaiman Experiment

Posted on March 26, 2008
Neil Gaiman posted an update on the experiment of making American Gods free online to read. Numbers from Harper Collins, which is hosting the e-book, show a decent number of unique views and a fair number of page impressions. If their numbers and my math are right the average viewer is reading about 45 pages online, which is 1-2 chapters...

The Onion Explains FCC Censorship

Posted on March 26, 2008
Onion Network News gives us a guideline for how to figure out whether the FCC will find something obscene or permissible. Maybe the Supreme Court should include this in their review.

Sharing, Part of the Power of Everybody

Posted on March 25, 2008
Clay Shirky gave a talk at the Berkman Center covering some of the ideas from his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The video is online from Harvard under a Creative Commons license. The focus of the talk is Shirky's notions about the enabling power of the Net and along the way he has a lot of interesting things to say about sharing, including Napster and a variety of other collective sharings like American dubbings of Japanese anime...

Finding Legally Usable Pictures - compfight

Posted on March 20, 2008
A friend pointed me to a new search tool, compfight, that allows you to search for pictures posted to the Web photo hosting site flikr. The cool part is that you can check a box that lets you search for Creative Commons-licensed photos.

Fleeting Words, Extensive Review

Posted on March 17, 2008
Back in June of last year I noted that Fox was going to court to fight the FCC's policy of punishing "fleeting" expletives. The trial judge called the policy "arbitrary and capricious." SCOTUS agreed to add the appeal hearing to its fall docket. Given how bad this Court's rulings have been in recent speech cases, I'm not too hopeful, but we'll see.

Did IP and Hollywood Shenanigans Sink New Line?

Posted on March 14, 2008
File this under "rampant speculation." The headline is that New Line Cinema, maker of the Lord of the Rings movies, is calling it quits, with top execs out and assets being snapped up by Warner Brothers. Question: did the ongoing legal problems over those movies sink the studio? End of last year it looked like New Line was in the clear, having finally settled its long-running legal battles with Peter Jackson, and green-lighting two "Hobbit"-based movies...

Artists and How to Support Them

Posted on March 12, 2008
Kevin Kelly has caused a bit of a stir by putting out a model for patronage support of creative people. His concept is that of a "true fan" and the piece's title is "1,000 True Fans". The idea is that if a person was willing to spend about one day's salary (Kelly picks the arbitrary sum of $100) then an artist could be supported by one thousand such people...

More Media Offerings

Posted on March 04, 2008
A couple of interesting links from the pile today. First up is what looks like "Netflix for audiobooks", though they don't use that slogan. Simply Audio Books requires a monthly fee or prepaid subscription and based on how much cash you put up front they let you hold onto 1-4 audio books as long as you like...

Go Get Your Free Book

Posted on February 29, 2008
A couple weeks ago I blogged about Neil Gaiman's work with his publisher to put up one of his books for free download. At the time, the fans voted on which book they wanted put up for free. Well, it's up, and last night Gaiman blogged this:For the next month, your free copy of American Gods is waiting for you at http://tiny...

Copying in Political Speech

Posted on February 25, 2008
"I see that politicians have a way of borrowing from each other." On msnbc.com I found a video of a Meet the Press segment that begins by addressing the issue raised by Mrs. Clinton of whether or not Mr. Obama had plagiarized some political speech lines...

Get Your War On, Cartoonists

Posted on February 21, 2008
A friend of mine blogged about a talk by David Wallis, whose book "Killed Cartoon" catalogs political cartoons and photographs that have been killed by newspaper and other print publication editors because of being anti-war. The logical question, not answered by Mr...

Could BitTorrent Be Disabled Automatically?

Posted on February 20, 2008
This is being painted in the context of net neutrality and copyright enforcement; I see it as a way to automate attacks on any particular users of any information. There's no reason this technique couldn't be used by, say, the Chinese government to disable access to Web sites it finds objectionable...

As the Cartel Turns

Posted on February 15, 2008
Hometown paper the LA Times runs an extensive piece on the complete screw-over that studios give to writers. To say that they lie, cheat, and defraud doesn't begin to cover it. In this case the victim is one Deborah Gregory and the villain is Disney but the same story could be told hundreds of times - just change the names and it's the same again and again...

Like YouTube for Business Documents

Posted on February 14, 2008
Earlier this week I had a chat with Jason Nazar of docstoc.com. The company had contacted me a while back suggesting the chat. They're a beta-level software startup dealing with professional, legal, and business documents. I was initially dubious that there was a Copyfight angle to this story...

No You Can't

Posted on February 14, 2008
The next in what I expect will probably be a chain of parodies of the Yes We Can song has appeared in my inbox: Billionaires for Bush bring us the "No You Can't" song. Unless one of these parodies generates something new or newsworthy I'll probably not blog them but you can feel free to keep sending me links, if only for the amusement value.

Like A Stack of Books 348 Feet Tall

Posted on February 13, 2008
Creative Commons is boosting signal for Public.Resource.Org, who announced that they have put online - for free, with no restrictions on reuse - a vast source of US caselaw. The total is over 1.8 million pages, including all SCOTUS and US Court of Appeals decisions since 1950...

How Much Potter Does Rowling Own?

Posted on February 12, 2008
Dave Langford's February ANSIBLE (a fanzine for fantasy/SF readers and authors) has a commentary from Steve van der Ark relating difficulties encountered in producing a print edition of a "Harry Potter Lexicon." For some time there has been an online Lexicon, which has been criticized for both using and linking to large chunks of Rowling writing...

Can E-Zines Succeed?

Posted on February 11, 2008
Bloggasm is a thoughtful collection of entries from Simon Owens that focuses on media and journalism. In yesterday's entry he reviews the troubled history of e-zines, particularly those focused on SF/F and speculative fiction in general. E-zines in this field are at least 10 years old now and one would think they'd have had time to establish a field...

Like Hope, But Different

Posted on February 11, 2008
In a move that surprised nobody under the age of 50, the "Yes We Can" political remix has spawned its first parody. The john.he.is video mashes up bits of John McCain speeches with... well, it's a parody so I won't spoil it.

It's More Complicated, And More Interesting

Posted on February 11, 2008
Neil Gaiman has been blogging online for seven years now. If you go to that link you'll find a poll asking you to vote for which of Mr. Gaiman's books is to be put online for free for a month to celebrate the event. Gaiman's blog entry today also quotes from a New York Times story on this contest...

Bye Bye (Buy?) Baidu

Posted on February 07, 2008
Baidu, the Chinese search powerhouse was on the receiving end this week of a lawsuit by three of the big four record companies. They are asking that Baidu be ordered to stop linking on its music-delivery service to copyrighted tracks. Separate suits were filed against Sohu and Yahoo! China over related infringement charges...

Qtrax Backtrax

Posted on February 05, 2008
Oops, not so fast. Yesterday I blogged about Qtrax, a company with big claims to be providing ad-supported music downloads. An alert reader sent me a pointer to a Guardian Unlimited story in which UMG, Warner and EMI all said "No deal". Qtrax appears to be admitting to some overblown claims in announcements (wait - a software company announced vaporware?! I'm SHOCKED...

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