random quotes ... to amuse, inspire, enrage:
William Faulkner: He [Ernest Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
Ernest Hemingway: Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
how on earth does blizzard keep winning these horrible cases? do they bribe the courts?
Patry covers the new case on software cheats, MDY Industries v. Blizzard.
How one might ask can there be a violation of the Copyright Act if no rights granted under the Act have been violated? Good question.
To [...]
Bill Patry was withering in his critique of the Copyright Alliance’s efforts to define itself as one of the big kids. For example,
Leaving aside the painfully juvenile use of © in voi©e, the math used by the Alliance challenges even the math used by the IIPA in its annual country “piracy” reports.
That is [...]
According to Robert Brauneis’ new paper, “Copyright and the World’s Most Popular Song”, the song “Happy Birthday To You” — long held as an example by us copyright reformists — is most likely not copyrighted after all, due to the tortuous path of ownership and failure to re-register.[linked from patry copyright blog]
See also the brauneis [...]
Word on the street is starting to trickle in that the popular music was not licensed:
* John Lennon’s “Imagine” was definitely used without permission. The Lennon estate + EMI are suing. (See Reuters, 4/23 (link from pharyngula); the NYT, 4/24; and Paste Magazine. (I can just picture the graphic on The Daily Show: “Ono you [...]
So, Wal-Mart is fighting with its former video contractor over ownership of a variety of recordings of internal Wal-Mart affairs.
An aside: From the description, it seems like some of them might have been automatically captured footage. The question of copyright over surveillance camera footage and other automated recordings is an interesting one, [...]
4/11: I had previously (3/27) drafted a brief commentary on Expelled’s use of copyrighted material. Then, I unposted it while I checked on something, to try to make it more complete. I hadn’t gotten back to it, when the other shoe dropped: One of the copyright holders’ whose material was used in Expelled wrote [...]
This professor is claiming that a student note service violates his copyright on his lectures. (wired 4/4, link from Fred @ EFF on a mailing list)
Student note services gather actual student notes of lectures, and sell them to students — who presumably missed a lecture, took bad notes themselves, or want to see another [...]
The Section 108 study group has finally released their report. See:
Section 108 Study Group
Executive Summary of Report
Full report
For those who are not copyright or library geeks, Section 108 is one of the most important parts of the Copyright Act for libraries.
For those who are having trouble reading the medium-grey on light blue summaries of recommendations [...]
The awesomeness of Miro
Miro is the awesome successor to the Democracy TV player. It’s open source and supports open content. It’s being developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, whose president, NAME, was recently interviewed at Groklaw.
Reville had this to say about DRM:
[Miro is] not [compatible with DRM], and we don’t support [...]
* Judge White withdrew his order requiring the shutdown of wikileaks.org. See also 3/1 bits blog. (NYT 3/1)
* The music industry has yet to pay artists any of the money it has received in settlements and lawsuits; the artists are pissed. NY Post 2/27)
* The owners of the game scrabble are pissed off at Scrabulous. [...]
Randy Cohen’s NYT “The Ethicist” column took on “ethics” versus “legality” and got it right. The Ethicist, Feb. 24, 2008.
John Naughton had a nice column last week in The Observer (at the guardian) trashing the British Phonographic Industry. Triggered by their spokesperson’s statement that “For years, ISPs have built a business on other people’s music,” Naughton awarded it “Fatuous Statement of the Month” and went on to excoriate their arrogance and the legislation they’re [...]
Friend and colleague Wendy Seltzer has a new column in Craft Magazine about copyright. Copyright has been increasingly applied by crafters and craft-pattern companies to craft patterns, in “shrinkwrap” style licenses. I’m greatly pleased to see some attention to this issue! Thanks, Wendy!
Related reading:
* idahobeauty writing about the impact of copyright on quilting culture
* RePost [...]
Some poor kid took a short clip of the Transformers movie, and was hauled out and arrested. The theater (Regal Cinemas Ballston Common 12, in Arlington, Virginia) is pressing charges that could land this 19yo in prison for a year for the 20-second film clip. She recorded the clip to show her little brother, because [...]
Hal Varian, the economist, has a nice editorial on orphan works.
After the silly editorial by Mark Helprin, who has obviously been confused by an absolutist romantic view of “property”, the NYT published 7 or 8 letters all in substantive disagreement. Now their theater section looks at another problem that copyright terms can cause: over-control of casting decisions by playwright’s heirs.
Since Bernard-Marie Koltès died in 1989 [...]
Last week a copyright imbroglio broke out at a science blog which had written a post critiquing mainstream coverage of a science article; the blog had posted a figure from the paper to demonstrate bad science writing in the mainstream media. Wiley sent a C&D; the blogger agreed to take the material down (actually took [...]
In an SFgate story about conflicts between folks trying to take Shaolin practice in different directions, I spotted this:
In recent years, the main temple’s abbot, Shi YongXin, has tried to copyright the Shaolin name. He’s also been criticized for commercializing the faith. YongXin gave his approval to Ho’s venture in San Francisco.
Really? I thought. [...]
The large corporate music industry has been whining to all the major media outlets that its CD sales are down. Accordingly numerous stories have been written in the last month about the trials and tribulations of the industry, whose dreadful loss of CD sales hasn’t been made up by the sale of individual songs.
First [...]
The NYT has two interesting stories right now featuring, shall we say, different approaches to artists and IP.
The first in a genre near and dear to my heart is a profile of Dark Horse Comics, which “built [their] publishing platform around creators’ rights … [Their] pitch was, ‘We’ll match the rights that you get [...]
