Intellectual Property Law

Lessig on the Remix Culture Vid and Who Gets It

Posted on March 08, 2010
About a month ago, boingboing posted, and I noted, a video that described an evolution in remix culture. In today's boingboing post, Jimmy Guterman links to a talk by Lawrence Lessig at TEDxNYED in which he uses this same video to make a point about how (some) conservatives "get it" with respect to sharing culture and some other people do not...

Ephemeral Art, Writ Big-Name

Posted on March 04, 2010
I'd been wanting to write about Apple suing HTC, about which there is a nice write-up at Gizmodo. My interest in this is somewhat personal as I'm about to become a 'droid owner. Also, Greg Aharonian managed to get himself quoted in the New York Times claiming that at least some of Apple's patents will be found to be invalid...

How To Rescue Things from the Slush Pile

Posted on February 18, 2010
I got a very nice comment from Vincent Chandler of Slush Pile Reader, on the topic of the death of the slush pile and wanted to point those of you who are interested in self-publication to his site. Slush Pile Reader is a (still in beta) publisher that provides editing, publication, distribution, and promotion services for submitted books - a slush pile, in effect...

CCC Has More To Say On Google Books

Posted on February 18, 2010
CCC, the Copyright Clearance Center, sent me a link to another of their ongoing podcast series. This one, by Lois Wasoff , gives their take on the latest developments in the case, arguing in part that the government's support of Bush-era DOJ filings in the case is not necessarily a fatal blow to the proposed settlement.

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IFPI Commits Blogocide - Rules Be Damned

Posted on February 17, 2010
A nice piece on EFF Deeplinks yesterday by Tim Jones noting how the IFPI cause Blogger to delete six music blogs. Included in the killing was the blog "I Rock Cleveland" whose author had meticulously followed all the rules for getting permission to post or link to the music he discussed...

Reclusive Mathematician to Crowdsourcers: Hold On There

Posted on February 16, 2010
Steven Landsburg's blog "The Big Questions" tells the interesting story of the aborted attempt to crowdsource the work of Alexandre Grothendieck. The work in question is a series of very dense volumes of fundamental, game-changing publications in mathematics...

DOJ to Google Books: "Hold On There"

Posted on February 12, 2010
I haven't posted anything in the long slog over the Google Books deal since last November. People do still send me pointers, which I appreciate, but I just haven't found any of them interesting enough. This story on CNET (by Elinor Mills) caught my eye, given that this is the new Cartel-owned DOJ we're talking about here...

Air Force Repeats McCain Campaign Mistake

Posted on February 12, 2010
Remember when I noted that the McCain presidential campaign was getting itself sued for using songs without permission? Well it now seems that the US Air Force Reserve appropriated (pirated? stole? covered? remixed?) the White Stripes' song "Fell In Love With A Girl" and used it in a Super Bowl recruitment ad...

Remix As Social Activity

Posted on February 08, 2010
Boingboing pointed to a very interesting YouTube video on "The Evolution of Remix Culture". The video is, in lovely recursive fashion, also something of a mash-up of previous videos. In a short eight minutes, the author identifies a generational change in how remixes are being used...

Mashup As New Music

Posted on February 01, 2010
If you don't like modern music you're probably going to hate a good chunk of what I blog about this year. I may create a new category tag so people can find or skip these as they wish. However, I think that modern dance music, particularly the mash-up, is one of the most Copyfight-challenging and lively art forms out there...

Publishing for People Who Want to Read (Magazines)

Posted on February 01, 2010
The state of magazine publication is the suck these days. You can read it anywhere - the magazines themselves are smaller, printed on cheaper paper, and so full to bursting with ads that you get barely any content. This is in large part because the single-issue and subscription prices do not cover the costs of print publication and newsstand distribution...

Scalzi on Amazon Fail

Posted on February 01, 2010
I find myself unable to add anything to the snarky but oh-so-on-point commentary by John Scalzi on just exactly how epic Amazon's fail was this past weekend in its spat with Macmillan. You'd think after the 1984 fiasco, and the gay books fiasco they would have learned something...

Obama v Tenenbaum

Posted on January 27, 2010
Remember when I warned that the RIAA was taking over Obama's DoJ? Anyone who had any doubts they'd continue pursuing their old agendas should be reassured now. They will, and they have. This gang of Cartel cronies has filed papers opposing a motion by Joel Tenenbaum's lawyers to have set aside a huge monetary decision against him...

Banksy to Debut Film at Sundance

Posted on January 27, 2010
Copyfight's favorite UK prankster, Banksy, is set to debut his "street art disaster movie" at Sundance. Supposedly it will show Banksy and other graffiti artists at work but it's not clear if his identity will be revealed.

Copyright + Common Sense? Maybe So.

Posted on January 26, 2010
In the past, I've made the comparison of copyright laws and speeding laws. If you go faster than the posted limit you're breaking the law. Likewise you may be breaking the law by copying or sharing copyrighted materials. Doing either can get you a chat with the cops and some hefty fines...

Evil Librarians

Posted on January 25, 2010
Eric Hellman writes a blog called "Go to Hellman". As you might expect from the name it's not always the most reverent or deferential of posting sites. Earlier this month, Hellman had some really choice words for the publishing part of the Cartel. You see, the publishers are starting to scare themselves again with the specter of "online book piracy," based on a study by Attributor, a company whose product I reviewed a couple years ago...

Good Hackers

Posted on January 25, 2010
Good hackers who love books and evil librarians, really, but that's too long for a post subject. In response to this morning's posting on the silliness inherent in trying to breed panic over people reading other peoples' (e)books, someone pointed me to this statistic from O'Reilly: their e-book sales for 2009 were up 104%...

OK Go Admit They're In Slavery

Posted on January 20, 2010
In response to my piece on OK Go's latest video fail on YouTube, and petulant-sounding follow-up letter, commenter "mike" directed me to a long open letter posted by the band on their forums. In the letter, OK Go admit that they don't control their videos on YouTube, EMI does...

The Slush Pile and Self-Publishing

Posted on January 20, 2010
A Friday opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on the "death" of the slush pile is generating some amusing responses around the blogosphere. (The "slush pile" is the name given to the unsolicited and unagented manuscripts that are submitted by authors directly to publishers, movie studios, etc...

We Interrupt Your Copyright Wars for a Moment

Posted on January 14, 2010
I'm sure all of my readers have been reading plenty about the disaster in Haiti. If you're in a position to make some kind of donation to help out, please do so. Every relief expert I've heard talking in the past few days says there is a desperate need for simple cash, which can be used by organizations that already have infrastructure in place to get the most needed supplies to the people who are in the direst need in the shortest amount of time...

Mashups Go Mainstream - Cartel Notices

Posted on January 14, 2010
It's easy to say that mash-ups have been around forever. For at least the last 15 years popular club dance music has featured DJs who use various technologies such as turntables, mixers, and effects boxes to produce sounds using two or more original recordings...

Marshal McLuhan Paging OK Go

Posted on January 13, 2010
Marshal McLuhan is a famous media theorist; among his best-known aphorisms is the notion that "the medium is the message." How does that apply to pop hit band OK, Go? Well, it's like this... Back in 2006, OK Go were just your average unknown 4-guy pop band...

The (Public Domain) Day That Wasn't

Posted on January 12, 2010
According to The Public Domain blog, January 1 is supposed to be Public Domain Day. I confess I'd never heard of it before. Nor did I know that Jan 1 of this year was originally going to be the day that famous works of American and European literature would have passed into the public domain...

Why Music Sounds Worse

Posted on January 11, 2010
At the end of last year, NPR did a series reviewing some interesting developments in the music field during the past decade; as part of that series they did a piece on "The Loudness Wars". The story talks a little about MP3 compression, which I assume most Copyfight readers understand, and its impact on audio quality...

FMC Promotes Tool for FCC Comment-Filing

Posted on January 08, 2010
FMC, the Future of Music Coalition, sent me a pointer to their latest tool, an online way for "musicians, composers and songwriters [to] file public comments" in the FCC proceedings on net neutrality. The tool is just a simple form with text boxes that segregate comments into logical groups in response to standard question prompts such as "Give the FCC details about your life as a musician...

Have Some International Schadenfreude

Posted on January 07, 2010
I suppose it all depends on where your priorities lie. If you're China then you're much more interested in suppressing dissent than in respecting international IP treaties you've signed. Thus you ignore the billions in counterfeited (pirated) goods made in your country...

How Are Textbooks Like Prescription Drugs?

Posted on January 04, 2010
It's been a while since Copyfight paid much attention to the highly IP-restrictive market in college textbooks, particularly since I stopped teaching a few years ago. Efforts like Ed Felten's seem to have petered out. So I was very pleased to read Andrea James' piece in boingboing yesterday taking on the textbook cartels directly...

Nokia N900 Unboxing

Posted on December 23, 2009
"Unboxing" in this case refers to the experience of taking a product out of its box. For the average consumer the unboxing experience is usually pretty mundane. But companies often put together special packaging that is sent to reviewers who are expected to be influential in their initial presentations of the product...

What Does That Make Us?

Posted on December 17, 2009
Big damned heroes, sir! (*) This is old news but I just heard about it. MIT's faculty voted unanimously to put all their research papers online. That may not seem like a big deal outside of academia but let me assure you it's a huge deal inside the ivory towers...

Who's a Pirate? The Cartel's a Pirate!

Posted on December 07, 2009
In one of those "you gotta be kidding me moments", the dogged Canadian pursuer of matters online and intellectual, Michael Geist, blogs that the Cartel (Canadian version) may have pirated as much as CDN 60 billion in recordings. The admitted facts amount to at least $50 million in infringements, but you remember how the Cartel went for "statutory damages" (the maximum allowed by law) when it was suing its customers? Yeah, that...

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