copyright
The Policeman's Lot is Not a Happy One
You can't make this stuff up:
UK music licensing outfit the “Performing Right Society” (PRS) - the guys that come asking for money when you play any music within earshot of the public - is rolling out the big guns ready for a High Court showdown with a little known group of music pirates, known in the UK as ‘the police’. Not the band of the same name, but that government organization people rely on for keeping law and order.
According to a report, the police in the county of Lancashire have apparently committed a terrible crime and let the whole country down. Rather like the copyright infringing tea-rooms and their carol-singing occupants we wrote about last year, it appears that the police have been recklessly listening to music in stations all over the county - without a license. The PRS aren’t happy.
ACTA's Unspeakable Acts
It seems that the Mighty behind the imminent ACTA are aware that what they are up to is literally unspeakable:
I’ve recently heard through a grapevine that ACTA negotiants have reportedly signed non-disclosure agreements as a condition of their participation in this week’s secret closed-door meeting in Geneva.
This is an amazing and frightening step backwards in the history of global governance. It also epitomizes the ACTA negotiants’ dismissive attitude towards the importance of credible, transparent trade policy-making in the current global environment.
Anyone who would seek to radically transform the world’s trade in intangible assets without the participation of most of the world’s governments has learned little from the Asian Financial Crisis, the Iraq War, or the ongoing real estate and credit catastrophe.
Freedom Fighter of the Digital Age
"As music, movies and books move further into the digital realm, the question of our freedoms being diminished was raised by Richard Stallman at Cambridge University on April 30th at his talk on 'Copyright vs Community'.
[FSF] Free Software Supporter - Issue 3, May 2008
## In this issue
* Free Software Supporter exclusive: WBUR is streaming Ogg Vorbis!
* DBD Action Alert - Libraries: Eliminate DRM!
* Get DeltaH, gNewSense 2.0
* Get your next machine with gNewSense
* Silicon Mechanics to ship servers with free BIOS preinstalled
* Can we rescue OLPC from Windows? by Richard M. Stallman
* End Software Patents: the Bilski hearing, heard.
Software Patents, Microsoft Trolls and Intellectual Monopoly Miscellany
The intellectual insanity resumes. Let’s take a quick look at some highlights from the news.
Total power over execution of a program
RMS: «The EFF is fighting an attempt to twist copyright law to give the software developer total power over execution of the program. Victory in this case will not eliminate the practice of restricting how users run proprietary programs. It will only limit the developers to using contracts as the means. This will not make users free.
H.R. 4279: Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008
The House passed H.R. 4279 (PRO-IP Act) yesterday, which, among other things, would create the “Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative” under the Executive Office of the President. It also increases the amount of resources and personnel related to CHIP (Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property) enforcement.
The EFF has this to say about the legislation (House Passes Controversial PRO IP Act):
Do You Copy, RIAA?
Here's an important observation:
Though there is already a growing body of legal decisions that seem to be weighing against RIAA efforts to discourage individual consumers from copying content, the Howell decision is notable in that the judge went to particular pains to delve into the technological "hows" of file sharing as well as into legal precedents. In doing so, Judge Wake has challenged publishers pursuing such suits to recognize that the more that they go into these suits the more that they create a wide portfolio of rulings that begin to flesh out the full reality of electronic content use - a portfolio that over time has weakened rather than strengthened their claims to inhibit content copying. Put simply, the more that these suits continued, the more circumscribed their claims become and the more that their presumption of complete power over copying will weaken.
Poor Little Rich Intellectual Monopolies
Here's a droll piece about poor, little unloved intellectual monopolies:
At the highest level, there are those who no longer believe that all property is theft but appear to make an exception for IP. Since every newly created work builds upon the words, the thoughts, the ideas, and the knowledge created by countless others in their furtherance of humanity, any attempt to ring-fence an item of IP, and exclude others from it is an attempt to misappropriate part of the common intellectual heritage of mankind. Since knowledge and information can be shared with others without depriving oneself of them, there is no loss to oneself if such an act of sharing takes place.
[HowTo] Know if someone is copying your Blogposts?
I was at the Bangalore Barcamp 6 or the BCB6 as it is popularly known and one of the most important doubt queried there was related to Copying of Blogs, Plagiarism. Lets learn how to know if someone is copying your blog contents and the next steps after that.
Copyspace is a free service which makes it easier for you to find copies of your contents on the web. All you need to do is type in the address of your blog or webpage and Copyscape does the rest. Copyscape finds out the sites which have copied your content without permission and also those which have quoted you. However, Copyscape only provides first 10 searches free, in order to get more searches, you need to be a premium user.
Where Would We Be Without Patry?
William Patry, incidentally Google's copyright man, and, more pertinently, pretty much the world's leading expert on anglo-american copyright, has the shameless demand of the Music Business Group (MBG), a coalition of UK music publishers, record labels, and licensing organisations, for a second licensing fee for personal format shifting nicely skewered in this great post:
Venezuela Gets It on Eye-Pea
Who doesn't want intellectual prosperity?
The term “intellectual property” is a new-speak propaganda word. First, the topic it covers varies from copyright, patents, trade secrets and trademarks to a variety of other things, all of which are very different and unrelated. Second, it is based on the premise that you can give someone something intangible and yet control it as if it or they were your physical property, even the ideas they may have in their mind.
The consequences of treating ideas as if they are tangible property are the very destruction of science and education, and the elimination of individual rights and freedoms.
The consequences of treating ideas as if they are tangible property are the very destruction of science and education, and the elimination of individual rights and freedoms. Science is in part built upon the idea that new knowledge is created by incrementally improving ideas.
Content Is Becoming a Commodity
Sarah Parez: Over the weekend, it seemed that everyone in the tech blogosphere contributed to the discussion around fractured blog comments; Robert Scoble even went so far as to say that the "era of blogger's control" is over. What all these discussions hinged on was whether or not a web service called Shyftr had the right to appropriate bloggers' RSS feeds and build their brand around our content (a practice they've now modified due to this outcry).
Interview: How a hacker became a freedom fighter
"One of the founding fathers of "free software" and an esteemed elder of the hacking community, Richard Stallman has made defending people's freedoms his life's work. That usually means supplying hackers with software and attacking copyright law.
The US Fashion Industry's Death-Wish
Another great post from Mike Masnic:
The fashion industry got jealous of the entertainment industry's ability to crack down on innovation with copyrights and pushed Congress to introduce new legislation that would add a copyright for fashion design. Recently such laws have been getting a big push from politicians who are pandering to the fashion industry. Of course, studies have shown that the very reason the industry has thrived was because the lack of IP protection. In fact, one bit of research showed that adding IP protections to fashion could kill the industry.
