Copyright Law

Render Unto Caesar

Posted on April 15, 2010
On this worst of days in the American calendar... A pox on Adobe. A necessary security update to Acrobat Reader is still causing trouble, due to Adobe's insufferable arrogance. Not only did a simply update to an auxiliary program require a reboot, but it reset all of my defaults to point to Adobe's reader (which I must use on occasion for legal documents) and added a bunch of

Arrrrrrrgh!

Posted on April 13, 2010
Some interrelated musings this morning, mostly inspired by not-quite-breaking news: Pirated goods shock horror: It's not as simple as anyone claims. Gee, you mean that conclusions that a sixth-grader could have drawn from the history of counterfeit silverware in London's East End in the eighteenth century might continue to have some validity for the internet piracy debate? And that

Cognitive Dissonance Monday Link Sausages

Posted on April 12, 2010
This is so, so wrong that it can only be Monday. Someone has updated haggis to be more marketable. Here's another reason to avoid loud, clicky keyboards on laptops (even better than that I'll take a bloody sledgehammer to it if you're typing away on a redeye while I'm trying to sleep): they enable a listener to know what you're typing...

Post-Birthday-Party Hangover

Posted on April 11, 2010
I just have a birthday hangover today. Yesterday was the 300th birthday of the Statute of Anne, 8 Anne ch. 19 ? the first modern copyright statute, and the cause of all of the current struggles between writers and their patrons. That's right: Absent the Statute of Anne, we wouldn't have GBS litigation, or questions over who "owns" Superboy/man or Captain America, or who is entitled to what share

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Modulus of Density

Posted on April 09, 2010
These sausages are exceptionally heavy this morning. No light, fluffy, quennelles-in-a-casing here; these are all (and, in the third item, almost literally) made with ground plutonium. They're not quite dense enough to have their own event horizons, but they're close...

Onyx Wednesday

Posted on April 07, 2010
Please allow me to introduce myself: Please offer up some sympathy for the librarian. Now if only he preferred a workable (and, ironically enough for a Brit, less US-centric) classification system than Dewey, with its nineteenth-century flaws that put entire law libraries between 340 and 347, to name one obvious flaw...

Bleary-Eyed Monday Morning

Posted on April 05, 2010
It's definitely Monday. A study at the Center for Social Media concludes that copyright ignorance is harming scholarship in communications studies. This is not overly surprising. I've not read the whole report yet ? just the executive summary on the webpage ? but there appears to be one egregious omission from the potential copyright barriers to scholarship discussed in the report.

Other Celebrations

Posted on April 04, 2010
The following editorial message is offered to you in place of religious hierarchs unable to admit that they are human - and therefore fallible; not quasidivine - and therefore, at least by self-created internal definition not related to reality, infallible...

2010 Hugo Nominations

Posted on April 04, 2010
Some of the Hugo nominees are: Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form (under 75 minutes) Doctor Who, "The Next Doctor"; Written by Russell T Davies; Directed by Andy Goddard (BBC Wales) Doctor Who, "Planet of the Dead"; Written by Russell T Davies & Gareth Roberts; Directed by James Strong (BBC Wales) Doctor Who, "Waters of Mars"; Written by Russell T Davies & Phil Ford; Directed

Death, de Nile, and Denial

Posted on April 02, 2010
This week presents us a rather bizarre confluence of death that ? mostly ? expresses relief at, and perhaps even celebrates, mythological deaths of others. And one death that this year falls on a sadly ironic day. The elder Abrahamic religion is spending the whole week denying itself leavening, overcooking tasty lamb, staying in after dark, and celebrating the death of the first-born sons of

Not Entirely Foolish

Posted on April 01, 2010
I wish these were all April Fools' Day items. The joke here is that it's such a surprise, and so long in coming: Simon Singh may actually present a defense of "opinion based on truth!" against libel charges in the UK. One of the absolute disgraces of the UK legal/social/communications system is that ? unlike virtually every other cause of action ? once a libel accusation is made, the

Overlapping Wave Patterns

Posted on March 31, 2010
The last few days have included some interesting intellectual property law decisions that will have an impact on authors. Some of the effects are less than obvious; some are ? as anyone reading this blawg will sardonically anticipate ? downright obscure...

Embracing Chametz

Posted on March 30, 2010
In defiance of (part of) my ancestry, I'm baking bread today... bread made with beer and yeast. The lamb for dinner last night was yummy, and quite rare. From the department of point/counterpoint, we have a fascinating glimpse at what "arts funding" means to artists playing against the story of an artist who escaped starvation...

Lamb Shanks ? Extra Rare

Posted on March 29, 2010
We'll start and end today with some visual aids. I guess I'm old... because I actually remember Yippies. So, too, does Mr Trudeau. The really sad thing about this strip is that I didn't think of it first... because both the dynamic of the groups' memberships and the dynamic of their respective monologues is virtually identical...

Excessively Aged Internet Sausage Links

Posted on March 26, 2010
Late again, I know; hopefully, I'll be able to get back on track next week, including the unconscionably delayed Package and GBS essays. In the meantime, though, chew your way through these sausages (but please, please don't inquire how they were made - especially not the first one)...

Bloated Sausage-Like Thingies

Posted on March 22, 2010
Maybe things really could be worse at GITMO. We've destroyed our credibility with the world; we've destroyed our credibility with ourselves; we've relied on unreliable interrogation techniques; but at least we haven't done this: Yet. Now that I've enlivened your morning with some humor - not literally gallows humor, but close enough - here are a few thoughts on the Independent Contractor

A318x

Posted on March 18, 2010
I'm just sticking my head above water for a moment here... Justice Ginsburg presided at a trial of Henry V. Leaving aside that Professor Dinh was absolutely right when, on behalf of his French client, he proclaimed "The one thing we know as French is how to surrender," this trial would have been better treated as a bifurcated penalty phase...

Daylight Savings What????

Posted on March 14, 2010
Everyone who has sleeping disorders in the family is probably marching on Washington at this moment. Still zombie-like, still asleep. We hate Daylight Savings Time. It's not WW2 any more, guys! Friday was spent in waiting rooms waiting for various results on the remoras' tender fins...

This Year in Jerusalem

Posted on March 11, 2010
Once upon a time, I took an oath to "protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic," as did every member of the Congress that voted to ratify the "under God" language the Pledge of Allegiance in both 1954, and again in 2002. In the latest case advanced by Michael Newdow, the Ninth Circuit today held (2 (Bea) – 1 (Reinhardt)) that the Pledge of Allegiance including the "under

Multilingualism

Posted on March 10, 2010
This is a multilingual household. But our first language is not English: I've long grumbled about dead-hand control of one's social and economic potential... and it appears that the UK and the US reify such dead-hand control more than do other developed countries, as reflected in an OECD report on social mobility compared to parental income...

Four Chords and the Truth

Posted on March 09, 2010
A separate sausage for each; and no, those aren't vocal cords in that sausage... I think. I'll start out with the four chords. Shortly after I discovered the subtitled audio, Professor Pasquale at Madisonian connected it directly to a hazily remembered quotation that demonstrates exactly why we don't want judges ever (especially in the Second Circuit)

I Don't Like Mondays

Posted on March 08, 2010
...but I won't shoot the whole day down. I don't own any firearms. Here's an obvious follow-up to yesterday's gripe: The Oscar broadcast is over for another year. Good riddance. If they gave out awards for "worst scriptwriting," "worst fleeting performance by an actor or actress, regardless of the nature of the role," "worst directing," "worst unoriginal score," etc...

The Enemy

Posted on March 07, 2010
Sorry about the unscheduled hiatus ? Life intervened. A more-frequent/regular posting schedule will resume tomorrow. In the meantime, though, I leave you with this thought: Chuck Lorre Productions must be destroyed. While under the weather and otherwise tied up, including some time sitting in waiting rooms, I was forced to watch two of the worst examples of antiintellectualism I've seen come out

Breaking News: Muchnick Decided

Posted on March 02, 2010
I'm running out to remora duty, so there's not much that I can say about the Muchnick opinion issued a few minutes ago at the moment. The Reporter of Decisions summarizes the holding as: Section 411(a)?s registration requirement is a precondition to filing a copyright infringement claim...

Post-Olympic Letdown Internet Sausage Rolls

Posted on March 01, 2010
OK, so some of the skating didn't involve fashion rejects from Milan. Too bad NBC - which, ironically enough, also carries NHL hockey on occasion - couldn't be bothered to notice... Here's a step in the right direction. Maybe. Or at least a potential step in the right direction...

Diversified Sausage Platter

Posted on February 26, 2010
Once again, Shoe leads off with a topical piece relevant to both politics and entertainment. Roman Polanski should pay for publicity this good for his new film... Which, disturbingly, also leads directly into the first sausage on the platter. This is why elected judiciaries are such a bad idea...

Sausage Pie

Posted on February 25, 2010
From the department of "Hello darkness, my old friend," some musings on the meaning of silence and removal... How the brain manages silence (well, maybe, because this study concerns how the brain handles the sensory data called silence... not how it handles the intellectual concept)...

You're Staring at My Story's Package (2)

Posted on February 24, 2010
Part 1 (21 Feb 2010) The Essay Form Turning away from the Copyright Act for a moment, it becomes substantially clearer what we mean by "package" by looking at the commercial reality of publishing. As an example, Tad Williams's doorstop novel11 To Green Angel Tower (New York: DAW, 1993) illustrates the package problem rather clearly...

Will Blawg for Caffeine

Posted on February 22, 2010
We'll start off with three bits of ignorance from the Grauniad and move on from there... The ten-rules-for-writers meme is starting to infect the 'net. They're all missing the single most important rule for writers: Read. Voraciously. Continuously...

You're Staring at My Story's Package (1)

Posted on February 21, 2010
This set of musings - which will probably extend over several entries, not necessarily consecutive - has little to do with salacious imagery... except insofar as copyright law in the US almost always involves the actual, human creator(s) getting kneed in the groin...

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