“Watching the video I thought that it was wise of Major League Baseball to combine this sort of sentimental moment with mass speculative litigation. It kept brand values strong. I felt strangely
grateful that I could have a moment to remember that afternoon. Surprised by the evidence of both copyright violation and father-daughter affection.” —Paul Ford,
“Nanolaw with Daughter” [more inside]
posted by kipmanley
on May 15, 2011 -
26 comments
The Music-Copyright Enforcers “A few years back, we had Penn, Schoen and Berland, Hillary’s pollster guys, do a study. The idea was, go and find out what Americans really think about copyright. Do songwriters deserve to be paid? Absolutely! The numbers were enormously favorable — like, 85 percent. The poll asked, ‘If there was a party that wasn’t compensating songwriters, do you think that would be wrong?’ And the answer was, ‘Yes!’ So then, everything’s fine, right? Wrong. Because when it came time to ask people to part with their shekels, it was like: ‘Eww. You want me to pay?’ ” [more inside]
posted by availablelight
on Aug 9, 2010 -
121 comments
Last week US District Court Judge A. Howard Matz
ruled against Google and found them to be in copyright violation for thumbnailing images from the soft core magazine/site
Perfect10 (NSFW)... more inside
posted by cedar
on Feb 27, 2006 -
36 comments
A new, controversial law making its way through the Finnish parliament is
confusing, but its implementation may infringe on already existing Finnish laws of free speech. With decisions set to be made later this week, a
demonstration has already been planned for Tuesday. On the other hand, some sources seem to be saying that this new law should
present no major issue. Thus, it seems like there's a small amount of confusing legal voodoo going on: while the law wouldn't make it illegal to copy music to MP3 players, it would mean that "the breaking of copy protection for the copying of the content of a sound or video recording for personal use would be prohibited." It looks like no one knows exactly what they want out of this law, or how to interpret it.
DMCA, anyone?
posted by taursir
on Oct 2, 2005 -
6 comments
In response to Justice Konrad von Finckenstein ruling that
file sharing was legal in Canada (previously discussed
here), Federal Heritage Minister Helene Scherrer has stated that
"As minister of Canadian Heritage, I will, as quickly as possible, make changes to our copyright law".
The problem is that Canadian copyright law has been going through a slow and thoughtful reformation process. Since the unveiling of
A Framework for Copyright Reform in 2001, a lot of progress has been made in updating the laws to reflect the needs and concerns of content producers, and the public domain.
Now, however, it seems that all of this work may be bulldozed by Helene Scherrer, who
declared her intentions at the Juno Awards last night.
posted by Jairus
on Apr 3, 2004 -
11 comments
Vans Stevenson, senior lobbyist for MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America), was the last to revise a letter California State Attorney General Bill Lockyer is to distribute to other attorney generals. Lockyer is the president of the National Association of Attorneys General. - is your government owned? Lockyer receives thousands in campaign contributions from MPAA, RIAA, and '
[via: The Register]..corporate and private donations from the major studios, including The Paramount Pictures Group, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Warner Bros PAC, AOL Time Warner. Senior executives, such as Alan Horn and Howard Welinsky, respectively CEO and senior VP at Warner Brothers..." Adam Eisgrau of P2P United said that "the draft attributed to the attorney general's office contains many significant factual errors, eyebrow-raising metadata, and articulates a very broad expansion in several important respects of product liability and consumer protection law that would have enormous effects..' It's in
The NY Times.
Slyck has
the original document.
posted by giantkicks
on Mar 15, 2004 -
3 comments
How I Lost the Big One Lawrence Lessig on losing Eldred v. Ashcroft: "We had in our Constitution a commitment to free culture. In the case that I fathered, the Supreme Court effectively renounced that commitment. A better lawyer would have made them see differently."
posted by ericost
on Mar 3, 2004 -
40 comments
Europe's not-too-modest anti-piracy proposal. If accepted, it means that "not only could a teenager who downloaded a music file be sent to jail under it; so too could managers of the Internet service provider that the teenager happened to use, whether they knew what the teenager was doing or not." The proposal is being spearheaded by French parliamentarian Janelly Fourtou. Coincidentally enough, her husband is the chief executive of
Vivendi Universal.
posted by Ljubljana
on Oct 19, 2003 -
9 comments
Lessig and the RIAA's Matt Oppenheim This great Q&A between two very well spoken opponents in the copyright wars answers (very clearly) many of the questions that have stemmed from the ongoing erosion of the public domain by copyright law and the degradation of the music industry by file swappers. I was struck by how straight many of the answers were... a fascinating read
posted by dirtylittlemonkey
on Jun 12, 2003 -
29 comments
“You can't deny, even if you are a spiritual being, that you are living in a world organized by money." Bikram Choudhury, yoga’s
bad boy and proponent of the
intense, sweaty version that
bears his name, has copyrighted his famous sequences and is suing schools that teach them without his permission. Many adherents of the ancient technique, whose name can be translated as “unity”, are outraged, and are starting to
unite against him. The Beverly Hills resident, who calls his style “the only yoga”, says
"I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody f*cks with me." (Click through for free Salon day pass)
posted by gottabefunky
on Apr 4, 2003 -
28 comments
Drop the marker and back away from the CD-RW drive. Add Senator Joe Biden (D - Delware) to the list of politicians eager to put the brakes on technology, kowtow to Hollywood and otherwise stop the Earth from turning:
Biden's new bill would make it a federal felony to try and trick certain types of devices into playing your music or running your computer program. Breaking this law--even if it's to share music by your own garage band--could land you in prison for up to five years. And that's not counting the civil penalties of up to $25,000 per offense.
Biden's bill is on the fast track and not getting the same press attention that
Sen. Holling's CBDTPA bill had earlier this year.
posted by scottandrew
on Jul 29, 2002 -
28 comments
Kelly vs. Arriba (PDF) Arriba search engine has been determined to be infringing on the copyright of photographer Leslie Kelly. The reason? Arriba displays thumbnails of copyrighted images in their search results, and displays the original page in a frameset. What kind of precedent will this set for Google and the rest of the web?
posted by johnjreeve
on Feb 11, 2002 -
17 comments
Copy protection for CDs does not have future says
Philips. Philips spokesperson Klaus Petri, speaking to Reuters, says its company counts on the fact that the refusal of consumers will convince the music industry to step back from copy-protected CD's. Petri said that Philips could sue the manufacturers of CD's with copy protection (as managers of the world-wide CD patents), because they would not correspond to the standards. "those are silver disks with music on them, but which do not resemble CD's". [via
Neowin.net]
posted by riffola
on Jan 9, 2002 -
16 comments
The RIAA wants to hack your computer (via
Fark ) The RIAA tried to attach a rider to the anti-terrorism bill currently in Congress that would have allowed them to hack anyone's computer without consequence. One more reason why the RIAA is evil.
posted by Maxor
on Oct 15, 2001 -
34 comments
This NYT article on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), written by Prof. Lawrence Lessig (author of an excellent
book on copyright law and policy in the digital age), raises concerns that were academic prior to the recent
arrest of a Russian software programmer at a Las Vegas computer security convention for violation of the act's
Sec. 1201(a)(1)(A)'s anticircumvention provision.
Is Lessig right that Sec. 1201 essentially makes coders (and their employers) into
de facto lawmakers and, if so, is this a bad thing? If Sec. 1201 is bad policy, are there any more reasonable alternatives for effectively protecting access to software and/or providing negative incentives for the unauthorized use of software? (NYT article, registration required)
posted by estopped
on Jul 30, 2001 -
16 comments
