Cory's latest Publisher's Weekly column describes his most recent round of struggles around publishing his latest book online. In particular, he's trying to get the book available without extra DRM attached, and to have an electronic copy sold under the same terms and conditions as are attached to a sale of a physical book.

You'd think that wouldn't be a particularly revolutionary thing to try, but you'd be surprised. (OK, if you've been reading me rant about the locked house that iPad is and why I bought a Droid rather than an iPhone, then maybe you're not surprised.) Doctorow talks about his "First Law":

"Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won't give you a key, they're not doing it for your benefit."

That's sort of obvious but apparently not something people at Apple and Sony agree with, as they're the two publishers Doctorow calls out for being unwilling to cooperate with his plans. As always, his books are available for free download elsewhere anyway, so it's really unclear to me what those companies think they're protecting.

My father sent me a pointer to Robert Darnton's review in the NY Times titled "A Republic of Letters". The review discusses the new book by Lewis Hyde (see also http://www.lewishyde.com/) called Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership.

As you can guess from the title and my interest, the topic of the book includes ownership of things that have come to be called intellectual property. In particular, Hyde's book is portrayed as a plea to protect our "cultural patrimony" (*cough*sexistmuch?*cough*) from "appropriation by commercial interests."

I'm sorry, guys, but that ship sailed a long time ago. I don't know whether you want to mark the passage of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, the enactment of the DMCA, or MGM v Grokster as the important milestone - or even something else. The point is still that we've moved from the realm of public sharing of common heritage into a realm where everyone thinks it's natural for big corporate interests to own our genomes, our family histories, and every bloody other thing they can lay their hands upon.

From an academic perspective it's nice that Hyde can go as far back as the Middle Ages, and tie a belief in a thriving public sphere to the American founding fathers. But practically speaking? Who cares. The Cartel are not patriots - the only use they have for nations is as enforcement arms for their control regimes. Appeals to the lofty principles of dead intellectuals is just chaff in the wind.

If we're going to make arguments from history, which I think we should, then it's essential to point out the historical pragmatics - what did it mean for intellectual property to be shared as it was then, and what are we losing by locking it up now?

I suppose it's worth noting that I left academia for roughly these reasons, many years ago. I like good research and the challenge of connecting the dots within the vast streams of knowledge and discovery of the as-yet-unknown. But I also want to see those dots connected to practice, pragmatics, and with a clear relationship to today's reality.

Xeni Jardin at Boingboing pointed at an experimental film by François Vautier that is a great example of the way digital technology is enabling new forms of (derivative) art.

For this project, Vautier took every frame of the film Blade Runner and laid them out on a vast plane. He then made his own short film by moving a virtual camera over this plane of images so you can see certain frames of the film, but mostly get abstract color and movement impressions. The film has a soundtrack taken from Blade Runner's score and dialog but I found that it had much more of the feel of 2001.

The work is labeled a tribute but of course it's also a derivative work and probably a massive copyright violation as it uses the images and sounds of the original. But trust me, nobody's going to mistake this for a rip-off of Blade Runner.

A story in the New York Times from earlier this week examines the challenges of defining and educating around plagiarism for remix-culture youth. Trip Gabriel's story notes that what we might call inadvertent plagiarism is on the rise - students copy material that has no obvious author and don't feel they've done anything wrong.

An interesting point about this is that it's not another "copying is bad" story; it's a hint that we as a society may be moving to a different social model of authorship. The vast majority of plagiarism still is done by people who know it's wrong and who ought to know better, and to have been trained better. But there's also the sense, put forward in this story by ethnographer Susan Blum of Notre Dame, that some people are copying in texts in much the same way as they mash up, or in the way that songs and television shows reference each other. The standards for ownership and credit may be seen differently and students may not feel that what they're quoting is attributable material. After all, who is the author of a Wikipedia article?

Boingboing's Xeni Jardin was on the Rachel Maddow show earlier this week making an interesting point. Xeni suggests we look past Wikileaks itself to the question of who owns secrets. She and guest host Chris Hayes discuss the idea that this is a transformative moment similar to the mass emergence of Napster for music sharing, or BitTorrent for movies/games/software/television.

Xeni also posted about the interview on boingboing, with links to related blog items.

The discussion is clearly going to continue and I have yet to figure out exactly what I think about it. I personally find it fascinating that the Obama administration is having conniptions where the UK government's response is something along the lines of "meh." There's clearly a form of power involved here that isn't involved in P2P networks that share entertainment content. Government secrets and ownership of information represent a strong form of control, but haven't we argued for years that the Copyright Wars are really control wars? Control over peoples' opinions, actions, opportunities? Maybe Xeni is right and they are of the same ilk.

In yesterday's post about the 5th Circuit decision, I noted that most other courts have not agreed with this interpretation of the DMCA. Well, that may be about to change largely due to the strenuous efforts of the EFF and its allies in pushing the US Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress.

Yesterday evening I got a press release from the EFF describing three new exemptions to the DMCA. These exemptions apply to the "anticircumvention provisions" of the act, the same ones addressed in the MGE vs GE ruling. The EFF got the Copyright Office to grant its applications for exemptions, and those exemptions cover acts such as:

• "jailbreaking" a cellphone - freeing a phone from being locked into a particular carrier or a specific app supplier (actually one new exemption and a renewal of an existing one).
• remixing short clips from copyrighted DVDs; for example, for use in personal videos such as those people post to YouTube or educational displays in places like classrooms.

This is a big deal, and a bit of good news in the Copyright Wars and EFF is to be commended for continuing to work on restoring these rights to consumers.

I cannot resist reminding readers that the EFF is a volunteer organization supported by donations. On that press release page are links for folk who want to help out the EFF by donating directly or indirectly by buying their swag. I still have my very first EFF shirt, bought in 1990.

Over the weekend both Slashdot and Boingboing pointed to a story about GE and the DMCA. Formally, the case is known as MGE UPS Systems Inc. v. GE Consumser and Industrial Inc. What drew the blogs' attention was that in this case a 3-judge panel of the 5th circuit has ruled that using a hacked security key to get access to a work is not itself a violation of the DMCA. That's a pretty surprising outcome since it runs counter to the way the DMCA has generally been interpreted.

On the face of it, contrary interpretations of a law are usually a good reason for the Supreme Court to grant cert, reviewing the case(s) and the law on which the Circuits disagree. For that to happen, the ruling would have to be appealed to the 5th en ban and if upheld at that level could then be appealed to SCOTUS. So there's still a ways to go on that front.

The decision seems to hinge in part on a distinction between access and copying. In particular, GE claims that the dongle it cracked didn't stop copying from happening - it just blocked access. The 5th definitely agreed that GE was enjoined from copying or using illegally copied software and trade secrets; GE did not contest that the software was a copyrighted work, and the fine against it was upheld. But the Circuit panel found that the original decision for MGE was in error because it accepted too broad a meaning of "access". The key sentence highlighted in the Courthouse News report is this:

"The owner's technological measure must protect the copyrighted material against an infringement of a right that the Copyright Act protects, not from mere use or viewing."

That's extremely significant because, as Cory noted in his post, legal access and viewing is something that one might want to do in, say, one's own home with one's own material but cannot do because of DRM locks that are applied by DVD makers, iPad software, or any number of audio-book publishers.

It will be interesting to see where this case goes. Given that the monetary damages against GE were upheld, MGE has little motive to appeal in defense of an abstract principle of law.

Slashdot and Boingboing both pointed this week to a publication by the Software Freedom Law Center titled "Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices". The page at that URL has the full text and you can download PDF and Postscript versions if you want.

The SFLC, chaired by Eben Moglen, is an advocacy organization for free/open software. In this case they're arguing that the closed proprietary software of IMD - implanted medical devices - is another instance of IP can kill. They have a raft of scary statistics on product recalls of IMDs and note that although the hardware parts of these devices are regulated and tested by the FDA the brains - the software that controls the device - is not only not tested, it's not testable. It's an opaque black box that exists and is distributed, revised, and updated (or not) at the manufacturer's whim. If the manufacturer goes bankrupt or leaves the medical device field the code goes with it.

This puts patients in a place where they either have to trust these manufacturers literally with their lives, or turn down potentially life-saving treatments. SFLC argue that this is not an acceptable position and that the code as well as the hardware should be subject to review, to recall, and ideally to replacement with open source that could be inspected, debugged, and maintained by those who care the most about it.

Which is, you know, an admirable idea. And also approximately as likely as my suddenly sprouting a prehensile tail. What's far more likely is that there will be a bug, and someone - or many someones will die. There will be lengthy court proceedings - made more difficult because in 2008 the US Supreme Court (in a case known as Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc.) prohibited patients harmed by defects in FDA-approved devices from seeking damages against manufacturers in state court and also eliminated product liability lawsuits against manufacturers of approved devices. However, state suits are not the only possible avenue.

As usually happens with these things if the outcry gets big enough then Congress will feel compelled to act, but neither the courts nor Congress are big fans of open source software. The solution will probably be more FDA oversight or something along those lines. In this sense the SFLC paper does a good job of highlighting a potential danger but a poor job of sketching out how we might address such dangers.

The Copyright Clearance Center sent out a blurb announcing that they've upgraded their Rightslink tool, a set of software and services that is designed to help creators figure out what they want to license, to whom, and on what basis. There are a variety of tools that creators need if they're going to get their content out inside of a for-pay infrastructure. I'm not in the business of promoting one tool over another but I'm happy to list resources and encourage users to share their experiences.

Jane Park, Communications Coordinator for Creative Commons wrote to let me know that Lawrence Lessig has thrown down the gauntlet on behalf of CC against the accusations made by ASCAP. Lessig has challenged Paul Williams, the president and chairman of ASCAP, to a debate.

Why? Well, it seems that Mr. Williams is at best uninformed and at worst... um, I think the word is lying about what Creative Commons does. It seems to have started with a tweet from Mike Rugnetta. He got a fund-raising missive from ASCAP and posted a picture of it.

In the letter, ASCAP asks for money to fight organizations like CC, EFF, and Public Knowledge that, it claims, are trying to undermine "our" copyrights. Oh really? This isn't the first time ASCAP has misrepresented what CC does, as Lessig points out in his response on The Huffington Post. Sadly, Lessig isn't calling for pistols at dawn (dueling is illegal in the US, if you get right down to it) and his challenge is entirely too gentle.

But it's there, and you can read it. I doubt Paul Williams will read it, and I doubt he'll respond. It's not that I think Paul Williams is right - it's that he cannot possibly win this debate and he'd be a fool to get into it. He doesn't want to hand CC or EFF or Lessig any more free publicity.

Which is where I, and I hope you dear readers, will help out. Publicity for this kind of thing is really the best response. Respond to lies by stating the truth; respond to confusion with clarity; respond to uncertainty with understanding. And just in case you get the chance? Slap Williams across the cheek with a white glove. Do it for me.

I generally love reading Nate Anderson's work on ars technica. He covers many areas of interest to this blog including ongoing IP cases and new business practices in content areas.

He's at his best when he cuts loose with the snark, as he does in a recent post about ACTA, the still-not-really-secret-but-can't-be-openly-discussed copyright revision treaty. If you're still not familiar with the shenanigans around ACTA, Michael Geist's blog is a great place to start.

What Anderson's piece points out is that ACTA is going through this ridiculous cycle of secret negotiation followed immediately by leaked copies of the drafts. The leaked copies draw fire from all quarters and the negotiators hunker down again behind closed doors for another round, as if somehow their latest deliberations would remain behind those doors. It's not always clear who is leaking the drafts or why, but it is clear that both the parties involved in the negotiations as well as the excluded players are unhappy about it. Libertarian and pro-Copyfight bloggers are also screaming mad about the treaty's provisions and process. Cory has been dogging the story at boingboing for months.

So, what's the point here? What is so important that the US has to blackmail other countries in an effort to keep the process secret? I don't get it. The entire thing is degenerating into a farce, as Anderson highlights. So far that farce hasn't really penetrated the mainstream media but if this keeps up I can't see any way for the treaty to get approved. You would think the US had learned something from the backlash that arose against the healthcare reform legislation's secret back-room deals. Apparently not.

(In the spirit of helping out businesses trying new models I should note that ars is offering "ars premier" with "insider access" to its content, live chats with the editors and industry people it interviews, etc. I'm not yet a subscriber myself but if anyone has experience with this or similar subscriptions I'd be interested in hearing from you.)

Ray Beckerman of Recording Industry vs The People offers up a sarcastic handful of statistics in yesterday's blog post. Drawing together a bunch of numbers published by p2pnet, Beckerman points out that the RIAA has recovered about two cents for every dollar spent on lawyer fees to sue its customers. Actually the numbers are probably worse, but the point remains the same - whatever the Cartel thinks it's doing with its jihad against consumers, making money is not on the agenda.

Unless you're a Cartell lawyer, I guess.

(Aside: I apologize for misspelling Joel Tenenbaum's name in my Monday post. The error has been fixed.)

In a blog post yesterday, Jason Sanford put forth an interesting idea: maybe the problem some creators have with the 'net isn't really about control of their content . Maybe the issue is control of their image.

It's true that the two are often inextricably linked. Authors, for example, are famously assumed to believe things they have their characters say or advocate. And the recent mess Mel Gibson has made of himself clearly shows how creators' images affect our view of their created works.

Sanford looks briefly at the attempts by author Harlan Ellison and musician Prince to dissociate themselves from the Net. Neither of these men is J. D. Salinger but I'm reminded of Salinger's desire to cut himself off by these men's ongoing attempt to snub the Internet. Ellison is a famously cranky individual (best headline: "Harlan Ellison files lawsuit, In other news, sun rises") so it's not all that surprising he would try to tell an entire technology - not to mention social infrastructure - to F off. I used to think Prince was more hip, though.

Almost two years ago I made the prediction that the Cartel would settle its suit against Joel Tenenbaum - WRONG! Instead, Tenenbaum ended up admitting on the stand that he had shared music files, the judge directed a verdict, and the jury came back with a massive judgment against him.

No problem, said the Cartel-infested DoJ which opposed a motion to reduce the damages to the statutory minimum. WRONG! said the judge.

As Nate Anderson explains in a piece for ars technica, Judge Gertner has ruled that the massive award is unconstitutional as a violation of the due process clause. In the US, the notion of due process originates with the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which is very simply written but complexly interpreted. In essence, what is at issue here is the fairness of the punishment - sometimes put as the idea that the punishment ought to "fit" or be proportional to the crime. To make the punishment more fit, Gertner slashed the damage award to $67,500.

Anderson's article discusses the similarities and key differences between this situation and the Jammie Thomas case, in which the damages were also reduced but through a different legal strategy. That case is going back around again, and you can bet the RIAA isn't going to sit still for this slap. Tenenbaum maintains he doesn't have even the reduced amount but that's not the point. The RIAA are out for their pound of flesh and will certainly appeal.

Back in May, I noted that Marc Weidenbaum was making the assertion that even if the current record industry structure went away there would still be music, still be musicians and there would be things like this.

Go ahead and watch; I can wait.

What you have there is a real musician, Lenny Kravitz, coming unexpectedly on a group of people performing his music ("Fly Away"). So what does a real musician do? He doesn't ask about if they have the right to play this music - he listens, he claps, he jams with them, sings with them, and generally delights the audience as well as the performers.

If you wanted evidence that Weidenbaum was right, here it is. This is what musicians do; this is how music is made and loved and passed on. Uptight Cartel executives take notice, please.

If you're bored by my theme this year of trying to walk the border between remix culture and the copyright wars you can skip this entry, too.

There was a video (now sadly removed by a copyright violation notice from the BBC) that showed Dizzee Rascal joined by Florence of Florence and the Machine live on stage at the Glastonbury Festival that just concluded. Musicians join each other on stage all the time - nothing new here, just going to cover one of their songs with the other artist guesting in, right?

No, sorry. That's not remix culture. Instead what they did was perform a live version of "You Got The Dirty Love" - a remix. I hope that the fan video of the event stays available. It's terrible quality, but as it's from the audience point of view you can clearly tell a few things. For one thing, the audience goes absolutely bananas once they hear what's going on. For another, a large chunk of the audience are singing along, which means they've heard the remix. Certainly you can find enough copies of it posted on YouTube and elsewhere if you want to check.

Let's trace the loop here - two popular artists release tracks, separately. A remix artist takes those tracks and mashes them together. The mash is released and gets popular with fans. The original artists know about the mix and know its hooks, beats, and lyric exchanges well enough to be able to perform it live. The fans are ecstatic to see performers they love playing together and being knowledgeable enough, and hip enough to perform a mash-up for them.

That, ladies and gentlemen? That's remix culture, right there live on the big stage in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans. And you know what else? Fuck copyright. The remix is probably a copyright violation. Posting it all over the Web is probably violating more copyrights. The artists performing it are probably violating the remixer's copyrights, if he has any. It doesn't matter, though. The question is irrelevant.

Now, to be fair, this didn't happen by random chance and it's not just any artists who are doing this sort of thing. Dizzee in particular has been out on tour for several months with The Young Punx backing him up. The Punx have not only spun for Dizzee but they've done live mashes within his performances, playing backing instruments doing such songs as Nirvana's famous "Smells Like Teen Spirit" while Dizzee does his raps a capella over the backing band.

In this specific case the track "You Got The Dirty Love" was created by the Punx in cooperation with Dizee and Florence. You can read their blog entry at APC for the details - the track is available on iTunes with the proceeds going to charity.

A while back I noted Apple's poor treatment of developers and paternalistic gated community approach to apps in its store as reasons I went for an Android phone. A legitimate question then arises: how does Android behave when it finds an app it doesn't like?

A post last week on the Android developers blog from Rich Cannings (Android Security Lead) gives a clue how they plan to operate: with more caution, in cooperation with developers, but still clearly in control. Like it or not, the Android is not a wide-open free-for-all space.

You can read the post yourself for details, but the gist is that they found two useless apps that were masquerading as something else. The developers then agreed to remove the apps from the Marketplace and Android exercised what it called a "remote application removal feature" to de-install any remaining copies of the apps from users' phones.

In this case the applications were free, so the people who had them removed were not out any money. I assume that Android would refund money spent for a pay app it removed in this way; regardless, though, the message is still clear: Android owns this environment.

Remember when I said yesterday that watching Minister Moore rant about radical extremists reminded me of Tom Cruise's infamous Scientology defense video? The one where he doesn't blink for, like, nine minutes? Yeah, that one. Anyway, remember how that video got more or less disappeared from the nets? You can find it, but you have to search hard. I didn't make the comparison lightly - I made it after watching the linked video myself.

Well now comes today's entry by Michael Geist in his blog, reporting on an apparent attempt to cover up those remarks. Moore denies making them and (as of now) the official version of the video doesn't show him making them. Am I the one hallucinating here?

Well, maybe not. According to Geist, "IT World Canada reporter Brian Jackson compiled his own video of the event" and that video shows the remarks. Here, go watch the video and judge for yourself: http://video.itworldcanada.com/?bcpid=7044989001&bctid=101481423001

You won't have to watch for long. At 0:38 into the video, Minister Moore starts in on "radical extremists." So, Minister, what do you call people who lie and suppress the truth about their own past remarks? (If you're American, you call them "our former president" but that's beside the point.)

Coming in hard on the heels of Michael Geist's post, Cory Doctorow has a long and direct challenge to Minister Moore.

Cory reminds us that he is a well-published Canadian author, one of those whose life and livelihood ought to be improved by these copyright reforms. Instead, going point by point, Doctorow dissects Moore's pro-industry position and shows how the only ones who are going to get richer from these so-called reforms are the corporate purveyors of certain technologies. Authors will get poorer and and readers will get less useful experiences.

Now, who exactly is Moore working for? If it's not authors, and it's not readers the Minister has some explaining to do and, as Cory points out, he owes more than a few people an apology.

This is like the Copyfight equivalent of Tom Cruise's infamous Scientology video. Here we have a supposedly even-handed minister in the Candian government (Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore) nearly foaming at the mouth in his extensive effort to warn of the dangers of people who oppose copyright treaties.

It's really not clear what his problem is, except that he seems to think that these "radical extremists" oppose any change in copyright law. Well, um, maybe that's because the changes are bad? You know, just maybe. And really, Minister Moore, we're not talking about people leaving bombs in SUVs in Times Square here. We're talking about academics (like Geist) who have spent a lot of time and effort researching the issues. They may be wrong. You can certainly disagree on the issues and their merits - after all, that's what academic debate is supposed to be about.

But it seems pretty seriously out of bounds for a government minister to be giving speeches painting academics and scholars with the broad brush of "radical extremism". In addition, as Geist points out in his blog entry, the Minister's position is that one should oppose and attack these "extremists" which also seems contrary to how a government ought to act in regard to citizens with differing opinions. We've had too much of the Cartel making war on ordinary people in the past decade; there's absolutely no call for governments to act like that.

(Having just watched the US beat Algeria in the World Cup I was tempted to title this post "James Moore Gets a Red Card" but really the refereeing in that game was so bad I didn't want to be associated with it.)

The short form: SCO lost. Judge Stewart granted Novell's request for declaratory judgment and that should put to last the final vestiges of this awful abomination. You can read lots of dry news stories on the topic, but instead I recommend you head over to Groklaw and read one of the best schadenfreudian blog postings you're likely to see in a long time.

For those new to this story, Groklaw - and Pamela Jones - have been dogging SCO for years, laying out in fairly painstaking terms all the weaknesses in the case and arguing that judgment should go the way it has now gone - in favor of Novell. PJ, as she's commonly called, has some paralegal training and has called bullshit on more than a few statements, filings, and other fully legally certified at the bar issuances in this case. So if she's feeling a wee bit justified this month, I can't say I blame her.

I, personally, would like to see SCO die in a fire for all the expense, FUD and general heartache they brought to the free and open source community, but there's probably not enough left of the company to burn.

About 10 days ago I noted that Michael Geist was predicting that India would come out against ACTA. And hoo boy have they ever.

Yesterday's blog entry from Geist notes some sharp language from India against the ACTA treaty and the very secretive process that produced it. A process that, not coincidentally, has excluded India and other developing countries.

India's statement (called an "intervention" at the WTO) shows that it has broad-reaching concerns, not least of which is that even though it was excluded from the treaty, it (and other non-party nations) could be expected to enforce ACTA provisions. This would imperil legitimate Indian businesses and the rights of people in that country. India's opposition is no small thing - it is a major growing economy with political and economic influence of its own. In addition, Geist hypothesizes that India is not just speaking for itself here, but also front-running for a coalition of countries that have been excluded from the ACTA process and are feeling threatened by it.

Guest blogger Christina Mulligan has a brilliant post up at Balkinization on the popular TV show "Glee" and copyfight issues. She calls copyright "The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club" and she's absolutely right. The show's cast commit copyright violation after copyright violation and yet the topic isn't part of the show - the word isn't even uttered.

As I've noted before, this is the generational change we've come to. The kids in Glee's high school reproduce, co-opt, adapt, remix, and produce derivative works. In their fantasy world they get to upload stuff to YouTube and become viral heroes. If they put this stuff out on P2P networks in the real world they'd get sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars in statutory damages. But since it's on a network show the whole issue is glossed over.

And you know what? It should be. The urge to share may or may not underlie what has happened but it's inarguable that the generational change has happened.

I don't particularly like Glee-the-show (musicals give me hives, what can I say) but to the extent that they're accurately representing the way today's high schoolers view remix and appropriation my hat is off to them.

The New York Times reports on the latest rounds in the battles between ticket vendors and resellers (or scalpers depending on your point of view). The challenge is that a "ticket" is often no longer a physical object whose transfer can easily be monitored. Getting into a venue can be a matter of what's on your smartphone, what's in your email, etc.

Most of the article is about the effort to fight botters and scalpers but the key Copyfight issue here turns around whether or not you have the legal right to resell your ticket. In the era of physical tickets you could usually sell a ticket for what you paid for it even in the states that had anti-scalping laws. However, taking a cue from airlines who have effectively prevented the resale of plane tickets, venue ticket sellers now require identity papers with admission via paperless ticket, which pretty effectively prevents even legal transfers of the ticket.

This is a pretty standard story in the Copyright Wars - attempts to prevent illegal activity lead to restrictions on legal activity and the consumers end up screwed.

I have what I consider to be a very loose policy on what I'll accept for comments. Opinions are not censored and I certainly have no problem with people telling me I'm wrong. If you want to advertise your event or publication, please send me a mail and I'll look at it.

That said, if you are going to leave a comment it should be related to the subject matter of the post, or the issues raised by the post or of concern to the blog and its readers. I interpret intellectual property pretty liberally, and I'm often concerned with the related areas such as business policy and social implications.

Please don't use the comments area to promote your product, service, book, blog, all-singing, all-dancing whatever. Thank you.

Canadian law professor Michael Geist remains the go-to man for keeping track of what's going on with ACTA. Public Knowledge also has a good page of reference information and links

Geist's blog entry from this morning links ACTA with a topic that has been of recurring interest to me here, the ability of countries to produce generic versions of life-saving, but patented, medicines.

According to Geist, India is seeking allies to help it block at least the portions of ACTA that could allow seizures of shipments in transit. This would impact India, a major producer of generic medicines, as it tries to ship those medicines to third-world countries. The recipient countries, in many cases, depend on these generics to keep their people alive.

From all I've read about ACTA it's a bad deal for pretty much everyone except the big intellectual property monopolies and should probably be scrapped. Any time a treaty negotiation has to depend on secrecy and subterfuge you can pretty much bet it's a bad deal for the average person. However, scrapping ACTA still won't address the underlying problems. Copyright, patent, and other IP regimes around the world remain inconsistent, massively outdated, and increasingly lopsidedly tilted against the people who actually make and use the items that are supposed to be protected.

Last August I wrote about Typekit, which was supposed to help us untangle some of the mess around licensing and use of fonts on the Web. Then a friendly reader pointed me to a story about Typekit on Readable Web.

In the blog entry from March, Richard Fink points out some clear evidence that Typekit either isn't working as designed or is putting up misleading copyright information. Fink uses the word "fraud" but in the comment back and forth with Typekit's Jeffrey Veen, Fink admits that he may be guilty of unnecessary hyperbole. Veen's defense, that he (and Typekit) don't know how to write licenses and so may be guilty of bad wording at worst, may be true but seems like sloppy work. Is there no one at Creative Commons or other organization that could help out here?

One other tech link I saw in Fink's post is worth surfacing here: The League of Moveable Type, an organization dedicated to the production and distribution of free and open fonts for use on the Web and elsewhere.

Following in the footsteps of the US Air Force and before that Presidential candidate John McCain, the Republican Governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, is using the Talking Heads' song “Road to Nowhere” in an ad for his Senate campaign. And David Byrne is going to sue him for it.

Byrne's blog post notes that he has always maintained a no-ad use (though I seem to recall him appearing in some non-US ads possibly without Talking Heads music) and makes the point that the use of a person's music may imply some kind of endorsement. Ironically, Byrne notes that when McCain got sued by Jackson Browne part of the settlement (McCain lost) was an agreement by the RNC to obtain licenses in the future. I guess Crist forgot about that part of upholding law and order.

According to a piece in Billboard magazine on the suit, Byrne has retained the same attorney who represented Browne and who presumably was part of those settlement negotiations. Byrne is asking for USD 1 million in damages, a symbolic amount to be sure, but (again, according to Billboard) it's representative of the amounts Byrne has been offered in the past for use of his material.

If the Cartel had any soul at all it would be filing amicus briefs on Byrne's behalf. But I'm not holding my breath.

Boingboing pointed me to this really excellent example of how the new generation feels about the remix culture it is bringing to live. The example comes in the form of a three-part video posted to YouTube (under a Creative Commons license of course).

This video, called "Walking On Eggshells: Borrowing Culture in the Remix Age" is a documentary produced as a final project for a Yale course titled "Intellectual Property in the Digital Age". In the documentary, the three student filmmakers interview a variety of creative types (artists, writers, and lawyers) and muse on the society and technology of the remix. In a way it's a paean to the art form, and it's also a plea to the forces of the Cartel please to leave this form be, to let it nurture and grow.

Everyone in the film seems quite aware that remixing is appropriation and appropriation is at best questioned and at worst punished. And yet, it's what they do. It's what's expected. It is, as I've said before, the culture of the next generation. It's the background assumption. The only question to be answered is how long will people like this have to walk on eggshells before the law and business learn to adapt to this mode of doing and treat it with cooperation rather than trying to exterminate it. The "mystique of authorship" is not just unnecessary, it's counterproductive.

Back in January, Seth Fischer dropped by to point out that if you want to escape the slush pile, small press is where it's at. Self-publishing has always had the taint of untalented egotism on it - they don't call it 'vanity press' for nothing.

But as Virginia Heffernan explains in a New York Times Magazine piece from last month, the size and quantity of self-published material is now more than double that produced by traditional (big) publishing houses. And the trend strongly favors the self-publishers, with a 180%+ rise in volume produced year-over-year while the big guys are down another fraction. Vanity it may be, but it's gotten cheap enough, easy enough, and dare we hope popular enough that it can be done by anyone with something to say.

Heffernan points to CreateSpace (still one of the most popular Copyright posts for the past few years) and a couple other outfits/imprints that are trying to help people preserve, create, and disseminate their own work. I confess I was surprised to see the degree to which the industry has grown in just the past two years.

The question now is whether the self-publishing industry will be a victim of its own success. One of the things that publication from a major house gets you is at least some level of review and editing, which people take as at least a first-order measure of quality. What will become the markers for quality in self-publishing? Every social media site has some kind of populist like/rate system but how useful is that?

...even if the (current) music industry dies the death it seems so richly to deserve. So assures us Marc Weidenbaum , publisher of the online electronic 'zine Disquiet. Normally, Disquiet only has things to say about its musical topics, which are primarily ambient and electronic music.

However, in the May issue of The Atlantic, editor Megan McArdle took to task the current generation of "freeloaders", complaining that "...a generation of file-sharers is ruining the future of entertainment." Are we, now? Responding to the news that last year was yet another dismal year for the recording portion of the Cartel, McArdle recites figures that lament the aging of the music acts that pull in big bucks. She's apparently completely unaware of the club scene, the DJ scene, the remix scene or - frankly - anything that someone under 30 would consider modern, new, interesting music.

It's true that if your concert tickets are $200 each then you're not going to get a lot of young people at your shows. But really is that something wrong with the audience, or with your ticket price? It seems that McArdle is confusing a couple of different concepts here.

Weidenbaum points out another fundamental contradiction in the piece - the conflation of "the music industry" with "musicians." And to point out that contradiction he wrote a response and commissioned something very much like a musical (ambient) score to go along with that response. He asked ambient musicians to riff on the illustration that accompanied the Atlantic piece (which itself might have been technically a copyright violation) and then he goes to town on McArdle.

The result is a mixed media piece called "Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album" that you can read and listen to (for free) on archive.org. Ambient music is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition for me, but I really enjoyed playing the album while reading Weidenbaum's thoughtful response. I encourage you to do the same.

No, really. I can't make this stuff up. Back in June of last year Sweden elected an MEP (Member of the European Parliament) from the Pirate Party. The party's platform included a focus on protecting copyrights from over-regulation and abuse.

The MEP, Christian Engström, now has published on his blog site comments from the Danish anti-piracy group lawyer Johan Schlüter at a Stockholm meeting a couple years ago. According to this blog post, Schlüter thinks ”Child pornography is great" because authorities can be talked into blocking Web sites that host child porn, and therefore will be more amenable to blocking file-sharing sites. Never mind that the one thing has nothing to do with the other. This is what the Cartel thinks is clever strategy.

I'm reminded of Bruce Sterling's 2002 remark about the "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse." Child pornography is a universally reviled evil; no one can be in favor of it. Therefore, you just need to link the thing you think is bad (file sharing) somehow to child porn and presto you taint that thing with the same scourge. Assuming, of course, that your audience is gullible. Or morons. Or both, which is apparently what the Cartel thinks of its audience.

Back in January of last year I wrote about the indie film Sita Sings The Blues, which had gotten tangled up in some hairy ridiculous amount of copyright snarl. Since then the film's maker Nina Paley has gone on to settle most of her copyright troubles, line up major distribution (despite copylefting the film itself) and generally enjoy what I'd say is the happy ending kind of possible in the current Copyright War regime.

Now she's written a blog post about why you can't get Sita via Netflix. It comes down to DRM. She wants her movie distributed DRM-free and Netflix won't make an exception, even for her free movie. Netflix also won't make a policy exception to let her insert a message before the movie pointing to where people can get it for free. So it won't appear on Netflix and Paley will pass up the revenue she'd get from the distribution deal. Just another brick in the wall.

(Oh, and she takes a swipe at the "everything-DRM" iPad so you might want not to read that, iPad lovers. Actually, I'm sure I've ticked them all off and they're not reading this blog anymore, but you know just in case I figured I'd give fair warning.)

A couple weeks ago I posted that I was undecided on the question of gene patents. A recent commenter took me to task on the issue and reminded me that I'd meant to read more on this. I have a query in to my local library to see if they have a copy of Genetics in Medicine, which recently did an issue on the topic.

In addition, Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize-winner in economics) and John Sulston (science ethicist) have a stongly worded editorial piece in the April 16th Wall St Journal opposing gene patents. Both of them were supporters in the recent case in which the patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes were invalidated. A key component of their argument is that the patent here does not serve basic economic interests; rather, the monopoly power of the patent actually hinders both competitive development and the additional research that is necessary to understand more fully the roles that these genes play.

In effect, the argument goes, the patents form a roadblock that impedes both useful commerce and necessary research. This argument runs in parallel to their more fundamental argument that genes - as naturally occurring sequences - are not patentable inventions. Given the disastrous state of current law and practice on what is and is not patentable, I think it's wise to make both arguments since any attempt to apply what would seem to be common-sense logic to our current patenting practices seems guaranteed to produce only stress and gray hair.

As to my own point of view, I think Stiglitz's economic arguments are important and moderately persuasive. I have not read the extensive evidence submitted in the case but I'm willing to believe that the plaintiffs made a convincing economic case, which undercuts the "patents are a necessary incentive" argument I've believed in the past.