In case you didn't have enough reading to do this weekend, here are couple of items analyzing the Google Books settlement.

First, Fred von Lohmann at EFF just published his third blog entry on the topic.

1. The first piece, very short, points out the key conflict of this settlement: we're trading off increased access to works that might otherwise be difficult to find, but at a potential cost in lost privacy, lock-ins that discourage competition, and limits on what otherwise would be fair use.


2. The second entry, much longer, looked at the issues around access. Access is the big promise of what Google is doing - you can not just search, but read online, millions of books that would otherwise be inaccessible to most people.


3. Item the third, in yesterday's column, are the downsides - the price of that access. The big fear here is not that access will be denied, but that it will be controlled. It will be for pay - rather than free in a library - and on Google's terms, rather than US Copyright law fair use terms. Those terms, von Lohmann argues, are potentially monopolist or at least highly anti-competitive.
   

From von Lohmann's postings you can jump directly to the 300-page PDF of the settlement to read the relevant bits for yourself.

Or, if that's too much heavy reading for you, the Copyright Clearance Center has put online a 21-minute podcast of their analysis by Lois Wasoff (also available as transcript). CCC would also like you to note that they're hosting an online seminar Dec 10th with Ms. Wasoff. CCC is a rights-holders organization and so approaches this settlement from the point of view of those who might want to claim rights over the books that Google has (or will) include in this plan.

It has been pointed out to me that I may have underestimated the impact of some of Lynn Viehl's hypotheticals in yesterday's Blink. Although the statement she posted is indeed a factual description of her income, the column surrounding it has several big "if"s in the middle that I glossed over on first read.

First, she's confused about what qualifies someone for food stamps. Federal poverty guidelines appear to be based on adjusted gross income, not net income. Her AGI is well above poverty level even with just one book.

Second, there's an assumption that this one-book-per-year gig is the sole source of income for a family of four. I don't know Ms. Viehl's personal situation but I think it's safe to say that anyone who is sole support for a family of four is probably holding down either multiple jobs (one of which may indeed be "writer") or is trying for a job with a predictable income large enough to feed said family, and writing is far from a predictable income stream. Finally, even if one is a full-time writer, one has other sources of income available such as speaking fees, and possibly royalties from other books.

That does not mean Ms Viehl's column is wholly misleading; at base I think she's trying to give people a more realistic view of writing for a living. You can't just take one number - the advance - and draw conclusions from it.

Nate Anderson provides extensive coverage of Michael Fricklas's talk at Yale Law. Fricklas is top legal attack dog for Viacom, and the headline on the ars piece highlights the lawyer's admission that the Cartel's jihad against its own customers was... well, a jihad, though he uses the word "terrorism" which is an equally emotionally laden term.

Viacom, says Fricklas, isn't out to destroy fair use. Indeed, the company has won lawsuits and published Web sites based on fair use principles. It's just that, like the rest of the Cartel's philosophy, it wants your fair use to be on its terms and under its conditions.

For example, Viacom supports a "three strikes" policy - another terrible bit of info-propaganda. When people say "three strikes" they're usually referring to things like state laws that assign extra punishment to people who have been convicted in courts of breaking felony statues multiple times. When the Cartel says "three strikes" it means "we accused you of three copyright violations."

And of course if you've been accused by the Cartel you MUST be guilty, so it's OK to take away your Internet. And your household's Internet, too. Damned terrorists... oh, wait, it's Viacom who are the terrorists. Can we take away their Internet?

Fricklas is also still a big fan of DRM, a position for which Cory has no sympathy at all, calling it "magic bean syndrome." In essence, the Cartel have sunk so much money, time, and public image into the idea and implementation of DRM that they're unable to understand that it's the cold fusion of the content world. Fricklas appears to believe that the problem isn't DRM-the-concept, it's just the specific DRM that the Cartel have used to date. I don't think, so, Mr. Fricklas.

So what do we make of this set of admissions and non-admissions? I think it's important to remember that Fricklas is not an independent person. He's paid to create and promote the party line and that's what he's doing. It's no surprise to any sentient observer that the Cartel have figured out that suing their customers is a disaster from both financial and PR standpoints, so backing down there is a given. But in a sense this is a diversionary tactic. The Copyright Wars are, and have always been, a struggle for control. Viacom is just shifting which weapons it uses to maintain and extend that control.

The indefatigable Michael Geist has posted the slides and audio of his "ACTA 101" talk. This is must-see stuff, covering pretty much everything you need to know about ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that's being negotiated mostly in secret right about now. (I had some problems with the embedded version - you might need to click through to blip.tv to watch it.)

As Cory says, ACTA "stands to fatally wound all user-generated content sites from mailing lists to YouTube; [...] criminalize kids for noncommercial file-sharing; [and] put your internet connection in jeopardy if anyone in your house is accused of infringement..."

Remember how I said that the EFF weren't being sufficiently sarcastic in covering the Cartel's revelations about PVRs? Right, well, sometimes you do get good sarcastic commentary on the Web and today's helping is dished up by Cory over at boingboing.

He savages Rupert Murdoch for being the antiquated fossil he still is, someone who not only fails to understand the modern interlocked Web-centric methods of information distribution, but also someone who fundamentally opposes the very notion of fair use and seems to think if he just hires enough of the right lawyers he can make it go away.

OK, making fun of Rupert Murdoch is sort of shooting fish in a barrel but damn we need more funny stuff in these Copyright Wars.

...the Cartel are once again attempting to use law and regulation to control your home entertainment experience. Funny, it seems like just yesterday I was ranting about how they had stupidly misunderstood the value of PVRs. Oh, right, sorry, that was two days ago. Can't expect busy high-paid media executives to remember things for two whole days.

So (with a hat-tip to Boingboing again for the alert) I direct your attention to Public Knowledge's latest attempt to keep the Cartel from driving the home entertainment experience off a cliff. The details are long and boring - what you need to realize is that they are requesting permission to shut off part of your home entertainment system, whenever they think it's a good idea.

Of course, you'd have to buy all new equipment to comply with this. The straightjacket and compulsory eyes-open technology will no doubt be included, to ensure you're actually watching what and when they want.

Please, take a moment to read over Public Knowledge's suggested comments, make them your own (or write your own) and submit them.

The shocking part about this whole thing is that now, ten years or more into the Copyright Wars, we still have such stupid people in positions of control. Take this week's example, Alan Wurtzel. This specimen of executivius fossilus cartellae works for NBC as, apparently, some president of some research of something.

Whatever he's researching, it's certainly not television because Mr Wurtzel is shocked by the "completely counterintuitive" result that if you let people watch TV how and when they want.. surprise! they watch MORE of it. Give the consumer what he wants - clearly a new and revolutionary idea, and one that a whole network's research department was unable to come up with. Simply shocking!

Sorry, dear readers, but even making fun of these idiots has gotten old for me. I'll just post the links and you can go read and nod your head sagely because we - you, me, all the rest of the readers here - have known this forEVER. And I bet we don't draw Mr Wurtzel's salary, either.

New York Times piece explaining how the Cartel has discovered that yet another technology (in this case the PVR) is benefiting their business.

EFF Deep Links it, with insufficient sarcasm (if you ask me).

Obligatory back-link to two weeks ago when I pointed out the difference between the fossils (as nicely summarized by Nate Anderson) and the very with-it and hip Warren Ellis.

Yet Another Study Showing That People Who Download The Most (free stuff) Actually Buy The Most. This one is sure to be ignored as well, as the UK continues it's pell-mell course toward copyright extremism. Boingboing! has been doing a fabulous job tracking this particular idiotic trend as well as related efforts by the EU to define war as peace, hate as love, and make darkness the standard.

I wanted to point to two very different published items, both of which bring thought to bear on the current state of the Copyright Wars.

First, Nate Anderson - who has been doing stellar work in the trenches of this slogfest for several years, primarily at ars technica - published a piece called "100 years of Big Content fearing technology". This gem simply puts together things that the Cartel have spewed as they dug in their heels and fought kicking and screaming against every innovation of the last century. We all know about Jack "Boston Strangler" Valenti's insane rant before Congress, but did you know that John Philip Sousa penned a screed against the gramophone?

The Cartel did manage to kill DAT (Digital Audio Tape) by convincing Congress to impose onerous fees but their success in suppressing other advances has been less. And everywhere they failed, they made money. If this makes any sense to you, then you are not like me.

Warren Ellis, for some months now, has been publishing an online Web comic called "Freak Angels." It appears approximately every week, for free, on Fridays. And like many who publish online for free, Ellis makes money from associated sales of merchandise including hardcopy versions of the comics. In today's "Interlude" page, he notes that the preceding strip, which ends in something of a cliff-hanger, is the end of what will be printed in Volume 3. And he has some amused comments about how some of his fans respond to the different availability of the free and for-pay print editions. It's an interesting contrast to the men that Anderson quotes.

Actually that probably should be addressed to Ralph Lauren's lawyers, but in theory they're acting on behalf of the company, so we get to mock R.L., Inc.

The whole thing started with a photoshop disaster, reproduced here so you can see what we're talking about. The wholescale massacre of peoples' images for advertising purposes is well documented. You can go to YouTube and find a hundred videos showing Photoshop "makeovers" - one of the best is the "Dove evolution". But the gist is that anytime you see a model (almost always female) in a magazine, on a billboard, or any other advertising medium, she's been styled, made up, and then digitally altered so as to bear very little resemblance to how she actually looks. There are interesting Copyfight issues here about what is an original and what is a derivative work in this chain of illusion, but that's not what we're here to talk about.

No, instead I want to talk about how stupid a corporate lawyer can be. You see, that image there on the right? That's a Photoshop disaster. The retouching techniques have been taken so far that the person has ended up looking like a cartoon. If you search the blogosphere for "lollipop head" and "ralph lauren" you'll get a wad of scathing commentary on just how badly the image has been distorted. In fact the image was up on the "Photoshop disasters" blog for a while until they got a DMCA takedown notice and they or their ISP caved to it. (Interestingly, the top photoshop disaster currently shown is almost exactly the same disaster done to Brad Pitt, whose head and shoulders are grotesquely out of proportion to his hips and legs in the Edwin Jeans ad.)

Then a DMCA notice landed on boingboing's ISP. Dear lawyers, don't do that. Because not only will you not get your stuff taken down by doing that, you'll get mercilessly mocked. Which you roundly deserve. Copyfight salutes Boingboing's ISP for ignoring this threat and proffers a hat-tip to Cory for reminding us that sometimes humor is the best defense.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-09-09/. But... trademark? Everyone knows patents are more profit(eer)able.

My wife pointed this one out to me. It's a couple years old but the message is sadly accurate.

The assertion is that kids - today's learners, tomorrow's adults - want to be able to create, consume, revise, remix, and share. Where are the 21st century technologies, teachers, and most importantly the 21st-century thinkers who will teach them how?

(And because I'm into shameless promotion of things I think are good causes, check out Donors Choose where you can find school projects (in America at least) that teachers have put together and are seeking funding to make happen.)

The geek news sources have been abuzz the past few days with the news that Disney acquired Marvel. The mainstream press is focused on the financials, of course, but I couldn't help but think about the implications of trying to find and corral all the Copyfight-related interests at play here. Marvel of course was first known for comic books but as its characters gained popularity a huge variety of other interests spun off.

I imagine many readers have seen the movies (the success of which I think were a prime motivator in the acquisition) but there are also numerous TV shows featuring the licensed characters as well as more merchandise than you can imagine. Everything from cheap T shirts and Halloween costumes to mega-million theme park rides can be found with the Marvel logo somewhere And all of those items were produced by companies other than Marvel itself, under a variety of licensing schemes, many of which overlap in one character. The company that makes the Spider Man movies is not the same one that makes the Spider Man pajamas my kids love so much. Each has some variety of licensing rights that it now will have to (re)negotiate with the Disney empire.

Marv Wolfman has an excellent post raising a number of intellectual property and competition issues. He notes that some of the existing Marvel deals are with companies like Universal and Sony, which directly compete with Disney in areas such as movies and theme parks. And as Patrick Goldstein points out in the LA Times story, Disney is a manufacturing empire with "merchandising assembly lines" that will likely bring it into cooperation or competition with a wide array of former Marvel licensees.

(props to nerdcore.de for the Mickey/Wolverine mash-up image.)

First, a bit of background - bear with me here. It's an ongoing frustration for Web designers to try and get the things that show up on peoples' screens to look like what the designer wants. I vividly remember going to visit a customer who complained that my product looked terrible on her screen and discovering that she had somehow jiggered her Web browser settings to map the colors I had chosen into some hideous chemical green and pink.

For most of the history of the Web, designers have fought to take back control of the appearance of their product through techniques such as embedding text in images or using other technologies such as Flash that permit much more rigid and detailed settings than most browsers' HTML. Unfortunately these technologies tend to produce bad user experiences by being inaccessible to blind users, taking a long time to load, requiring constant updating of plug-ins, and so on. Over the past few years, the evolution of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) has allowed designers to do more of what they want without locking up their content. Most critically, freeing text makes page indexing more accurate, which helps findability.

One of the more recent additions to the CSS arsenal has been the ability to link to a specific display font. Without such links the designer is at the mercy of whatever fonts are loaded into the user's browser. Depending on the browser is at best an imperfect solution as fonts may be missing or have bugs in them. If you want your HTML-encoded text to be properly read everywhere by everyone, the best bet is to say "render it in THAT font" and then test the heck out of it to make sure it works.

Unfortunately, even linking to just the font you want may not work. Many fonts - even those that are supposed to be released for free use - do not contain correct licensing terms for redistribution. In comes Typekit, with a promise to provide fonts with a consistent license arrangement. It does depend on using JavaScript to access their library and request the fonts, which is a small drawback, but the ability to design Web content without tripping over more DRM is a big payoff.

(Full disclosure: Jeffrey Veen and I overlapped in time at the MIT Media Lab. I did not speak to him for this article.)

At least that's what the DoJ thinks is fair, according to papers it has filed in the Jammie Thomas punitive damages debacle. Yes, certainly Congress intended low-income students and single moms to be ordered to pay USD 2 million because... um, because something. Well, the DOJ seems to think that huge damages are deterrent. Which we can clearly see from the massive drop in file-sharing that has taken place since Congress passed this law in 1999. File-sharing has gone down in the last decade, right? That's what deterrence means, right?

"We are pleased that our sock puppets who have completely taken over the DoJ agree with us on this case" the RIAA barely managed not to say out loud.

It has been said many times, but it bears repeating once more: the biggest threat to most new artists is not copying, but obscurity.

I've been watching the struggle as one of my favorite new acts - the steampunk band Abney Park - works through the difficulties of getting themselves, and their unusual musical approach - noticed. They don't fit any radio or categorization format I'm aware of. They do mix in elements of industrial, but they also do old-style sea shanties, which doesn't make them consumable by the usual radio stations that play industrial.

Unlike writers, who can organize things like an Interstitial Arts book publication and join in the effort to publicize themselves, the band seem to be going it mostly on their own. They've played a number of conventions - steampunk cons mostly - and related festivals.

And in addition, they're giving it away. Almost every song they do is up on YouTube and other sites. If you prefer a direct feed you can subscribe to a blog (LiveJournal) at: http://community.livejournal.com/abneypark - and get fresh live vids of songs that aren't even released yet. According to numbers I've seen there, at least one of their vids has over 100k hits on YouTube.

Still, I'd venture to guess that most folk don' t know about Abney Park and I'm certain there are thousands upon thousands of other great bands out there all needing exposure and ways to connect to people who will love what they do. We so desperately need ways to help these creative types, and not more ways to lock up content.

When I posted the previous entry, noting EFF's critique of the Burning Man Organization (BMO) restrictive IP policy, I was uncertain what category to use. I chose "Culture" sort of on a hunch. Reading Andie Grace's extensive response in the "Burning Blog", I see this hunch was right.

What we have here is not just an argument about how our laws are interpreted. Nor does this appear to be a typical case of an organization attempting to clutch unto itself every right it can grab. This is a clash of cultures, both of which think of themselves as promoting a particular set of social good things, and tangling over the expectations and legal frameworks available to them.

On the one hand, we have BMO and a set of attendees, who seem to feel that what happens at Burning Man should stay at Burning Man. The potential impacts of publishing shots of people running around naked in the desert, and the personal violations of what many consider sacred space, are getting tangled up with talk of commercial exploitation (or use, depending on which side of the fence you sit) and the norm that I own my own photographs or other recordings and can use them. In addition, you have potential conflicts between BMO, which feels it has a "brand" to protect and does aggressively police use of its trademarks - and artists/performers who sink thousand of their own dollars into creation of performances and spaces and artifacts, the publicizing of which can vastly enhance the artists' reputations and careers.

These expectations sit within at least two different cultural frameworks, one of which says that the standards for things like model releases and permission grants should apply, and the other of which says that an event like Burning Man is essentially a private affair, within which the organizers are free to create the rules as they see fit - including rules about making recordings - and people who don't like those rules are free to vote with their feet.

Finally, we layer onto this at least two attempts at legal framing - the DMCA and Creative Commons. The first, as an attempt to top-down legislate how rights-holders should retain their copyrights is pretty roundly regarded as a failure. But there isn't anything better, except maybe Creative Commons which has attempted to craft licensing frameworks that are less restrictive. Since BMO feels that CC doesn't do what it needs, it has nothing else to fall back on except the DMCA and other antiquated legal structures.

What's the right answer here? Heck if I know. CC is certainly not the be-all and end-all of possible licensing arrangements. It needs to grow and evolve - one of the things that makes CC so interesting is that it can grow and evolve and be transnational in ways that US laws cannot and do not. I think that the people on both sides of this argument are good-intentioned and reasonable, which suggests compromise is possible.

Still, I think BMO are fighting a rear-guard action in a losing war. We live in a "facebook culture" where people post everything and anything about their lives and privacy is a quaint notion for graying hippies. People find out they've been broken up with via someone's status update. People follow the minute details of events in real time via Twitter feeds. People want to own their creative works and use them as they see fit and if that includes making a buck then so be it. Burning Man needs to find its place within that cultural shift, not attempt to be some Rock of Gibraltar standing against all tides.

(P.S. The comments on the Boing-Boing blog entry on the topic are also worth reading.)

I'm not a burner (person who attends the Burning Man festival) but several of my friends have gone in past years and some will go this year. And more than a few are unhappy with the Terms and Conditions that the festival is attempting to impose on recordings (photos and videos at least, probably audio as well) taken out on the playa.

As the EFF's Corynne McSherry puts it, the terms include a legal "sleight of hand" that will allow the organizers to claim ownership of rights in those recordings, if the person uses them in ways that the organizers don't like. McSherry argues that the Burning Man Organization, which runs the festival, appears to be trying to build up a wall of DMCA-backed bricks to cover itself in all sorts of questionably legal and highly restrictive ways.

Yeah, like THAT's going to work with the attendees.

Back in June of last year I suggested readers bookmark a link provided by Bruce Schneier that collected several items related to the false claims that anti-photography laws are a useful part of an anti-terrorism strategy.

Today a friend pointed me to a blog entry by Phil Coomes, a picture editor (and photographer in his own right) for the BBC. In this posting Coomes relates several stories of photographers in the UK who have been harrassed or worse for taking pictures of public buildings, of police officers, and so on. It appears that the British photographers and photojournalists have had enough and are forming an organization called, explicitly enough, "I'm a Photographer, Not A Terrorist".

The site invites people to upload their own photos, presumably posed with signs like the ones on the home page. In addition, they provide a "bust card" that people can print out and carry with them. The instructions are specific to the UK and relate to its "Section 44" law that had photographers protesting outside Scotland Yard not too long ago. I would be very interested in seeing examples of similar cards customized for other countries, such as the US and Canada.

(Full disclosure: I'm a hobbyist portrait photographer in the US and though I don't make any money from my photos I'd like not to get arrested for pointing my lens at a policeman somewhere.)

A friendly Copyfight reader sent me a pointer to V. Dion Haynes' story in the Washington Post covering the next round in the fight over this bill. The article highlights claims by the MusicFirst Coalition that, among other actions, radio stations have been refusing to run ads supporting the legislation. Notably, the accusation is made against Radio One stations. Radio One, you may recall, made a splash a few weeks ago by pleading poverty and arguing that having to compensate artists would put them out of business.

First, I want to acknowlege the comment made in this blog by Christopher, an owner of a small radio station. It's pretty clear that small radio stations are struggling, like many small businesses. The question is whether the bill contains the claimed exemptions for small stations and whether mega-conglomerates like Radio One are also struggling or whether they're simply using people like Christopher as shields.

The FCC is reviewing the complaints against the radio stations that refused to run the ads, and promises there will be a public comment period during the review, but no timeline is mentioned. Meanwhile the Post's article gives a hint of some of the confusion surrounding the issue - Radio One is reporting some revenue gains, but also a signficant drop in ad dollars. They're also claiming that the bill would result in job losses - but isn't that always the claim made when people want more money for things?

Finally, in a moment of amusing irony, I note that among Music First's sponsors are the noted Cartel bright boys, the RIAA. Maybe broadcast radio should have come to the aid of Web radio when the Cartel leaned on them, eh?

I can't decide if this is cool, creepy, or both. Best if you do the experiment yourself to see what's on, so follow these steps:

1. Go to http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205737/Man-killed-shards-glass-hurling-girlfriend-shop-window.html.


2. In your browser (I've tried in Firefox and others report it works in IE, Chrome, and other desktop browsers) select a passage of text, say a paragraph, and "Copy" it.


3. Bring up a text editor such as Notepad on a PC or similar (even works in Emacs) and Paste using whatever operation that editor uses for pasting text.

Now if you're like me and my friends you see the text that you copied and also this:

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205737/Man-killed-shards-glass-hurling-girlfriend-shop-window.html#ixzz0NuRbqTSe

The amount of text copied that is necessary to trigger this seems to vary by which browser you start in.

Viewing the page source doesn't give any immediate clues as to what's going on, so I'm guessing it's some kind of javascript hook. On the one hand I think it's a fairly clever way to encourage people to link back to the original content and seems to be much more in keeping with what I think of as the "spirit" of the Web than wrapping up content in passwords or DRM. On the other hand, silently adding text into peoples' copy buffers strikes me as creepy and probably a good way to manufacture a code injection hack.

I thought I had talked about the "Performance Rights Act" before - now called the Civil Rights for Musicians Act - before, but apparently not. You may recall that the act's sponsor, John Conyers, gained a moment of digital notoriety by publishing the Downing Street memos as samizdat that the official media wouldn't touch. Conyers' legislation is apparently attempting to close the rights loophole that radio enjoys.

Briefly: even though it's a pittance, artists do get some money from CD sales. Many of the digital download deals also funnel money back to artists. But when a musician's work is played on broadcast radio, no money goes back to the artist. Originally the theory was that the artist was 'compensated' in the form of exposure for his/her work, and radio producers and DJs chose things based on what audiences wanted or liked. Of course, there has always been pay-for-play (payola) of one form or another to influence radio playlists.

Conyers bill is an attempt to change this situation, instituting a set of fees for broadcast radio, along the lines of the fees that have been imposed on Web radio. One big difference: broadcast radio is extremely profitable, unlike Web radio. Satellite radio such as XM has made a splash but hasn't been able to back it up with solid financials. Sirius radio, for example, has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for a while.

To no one's great surprise, the big radio parts of the Cartel (particularly Radio One, which owns 54 radio stations in the US) have been hitting back. And this is where it gets really nasty, with Cathy Hughes, the CEO of Radio One, pleading poverty and making accusations about the motives of some of the bill's supporters. Which in turn has led Ms. Warwick to hit back in an op-ed piece blogged on Huffington Post in which she raises the specter not only of Cartel greed, but of outright racism in Hughes' attacks.

According to Warwick's column (and I confess I haven't read the bill), Conyer's Act would provide exemptions for the small and financially struggling radio stations while requiring large corporate radio to funnel at least a little money back to the artists. Sounds great - now why couldn't we get the same kind of Protection Act for Web radio?

I've been wanting to avoid writing about the (latest) mess Amazon finds itself in. However, the story is being mis-told all over the place, so I'm going to pontificate about it.

Compare, if you will, these two headlines: "Amazon redacts Orwell on Kindle like it’s ‘1984’" versus "Pirated copies of Orwell books pulled from Kindle". You'd almost think they were talking about two different things, but in fact they're talking about the same thing. And here is where Amazon seems to have failed completely to learn the lessons of its past gaffes.

It is true that Amazon pulled some e-books off Kindles after customers had paid for them. The problem is that those books were 'stolen goods' to which Amazon never had sale rights in the first place. The fact that those pirated e-books were Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm makes me think this was a deliberate hack set up to embarrass Amazon. And it seems to be working, as the company first took the action silently, then has failed to manage the publicity around the incident, starting with the initial New York Times piece.

The gaffe here isn't that they pulled e-books that people had bought; it's that they're currently in a situation where they're looking at new competition from a new e-book reader put out by competitor Barnes & Noble and they can't manage to keep egg off their face. The way this situation has been handled is putting doubts into the minds of customers who are already hesitant to adopt a new reader technology.

For years, the Cartel has slowly been infecting the public mind with the notion that by buying a CD or DVD you don't actually own that music or movie - you just own a piece of plastic and the bits that are burned into that plastic are still the Cartel's property. Now Amazon has shown that the same thing is true for Kindle e-books. You don't really own the books, you just own the hunk of plastic pictured above.

That has some further unpleasant implications; for example, Christopher Dawson's piece "Amazon ate my homework, or why DRM stinks for education" draws a direct line from Amazon's actions to the larger implications of harm to student education from digital control technologies. In an ideal world, schools would save a bundle by buying Kindles or other e-book readers and giving (or loaning) them to students. My bet is that, just as there is a serious economic argument for Kindle over home-delivered newspaper, there's a serious financial case for putting student texts onto e-readers.

But what teacher or school administrator wants to worry about their whole school's supply of a textbook disappearing overnight because of some error that the publisher (Amazon) decides to "rectify" by erasing all downloaded copies of the book? I'd guess none. Maybe Amazon can convince schools it won't happen. But really, you don't want to have to make that argument in the first case because this should never have happened. Amazon should have taken steps to make things right with the Orwell book rights holder without impacting its customers' experience. I feel like a broken record saying "customer experience matters most" over and over, but it's still true.

Amazon has just proven that it can take seemingly random actions that result in bad things happening to innocent people. And you're going to sell that as a good technology to... who?

PhD Comics presents its take on the process whereby scientists produce original material and then give it away (for free) to a system where other scientists work (for free) to select from those works so they can be published in journals that then charge huge fees to read this freely contributed work.

This is sort of funny, particularly in the way the cartoonist draws the rivalry between the journals Nature and Science. But it's also really serious business, in which peoples' life work gets held for very expensive ransom by an exclusivist system of copyright monopolists. It's one reason I'm a supporter of PLOS, the Public Library of Science.

The stated purpose of patents, as spelled out in the US Constitution is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts..." I've pointed out cases in the past where the way patents are granted and used is actually contrary to progress in the useful arts I practice. Now a pair of researchers have published a paper in Columbia Science and Technology Law Review called "Patents and the Regress of Useful Arts."

In this paper, the authors report on a simulation they conducted to examine the behavior of potential patent holders and competitors under a variety of condition. The PDF of the full paper is available from the bottom of that linked abstract page. They compared situations involving patents (exclusive rights) against two non-patent situations - commons and open source. The surprising result (to Copyfighters) is that open source produced inferior results to a pure commons system given how the authors measured innovation, productivity, and societal utility.

As with any simulation, it's certainly possible to argue with the parameters of the model, the experimental set-up, and the interpretations of the results. In addition, the game results may be biased by the selection of players who, in this case, were incoming law school students. It's also unclear whether any game of this sort can capture all of the motivations for patenting as they exist in the real commercial environment. People get patents to protect their own inventions or to restrict competition, of course, but they may also seek patents for purely secondary purposes, such as improving their bargaining position with larger rivals or with venture capitalists. Of course, you could counter-argue that none of that is really useful progress as conceived by the framers of the Constitution.

(Full disclosure: the second author of this paper was a grad student at MIT while I was there and remains a friend and professional colleague. For whatever reason, he didn't mention this work when I saw him back in April. I found this publication through the blog of a mutual friend.)

Project Gutenberg and the World Public Library are co-promoting a month-long event with that name. Their theme is one of "public access" and they're offering something like two million eBooks for download.

I haven't investigated completely but it appears that all the offered downloads are in PDF format without any DRM or other electronic encumbrances. (One can argue that PDF isn't as good as text, for any number of reasons, but that's a separate issue.)

Generally I have a lot of respect for Richard Posner. The word "brilliant" gets thrown around casually a lot, but I really do think Posner verges on brilliance. You don't get 40 books published by writing nonsense or wasting readers' time. Let's settle for saying he's a very smart, very widely influential judge.

He also blogs, with Gary Becker at the eponymous "Becker-Posner Blog". There, earlier this month, Posner put up a piece that was nominally on the future of newspapers.

The problems with newspapers are nothing new; what's new (and excuse my impertinence WRONG) here is one of the remedies Judge Posner suggests. After a long discussion of the costs and economics of newspaper publication, here's his final sentence:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

No. Just no. Linking is the fundamental technology of all hypertexts, of which the World Wide Web is by far the biggest and most popular. One of the reasons it is so large and so widely used is the ease with which information can be accessed, transferred, exercised, repurposed, and reused. The fact that this fundamental technology is in conflict with the page-centric advertisement+content revenue model is an indication that the ad model is flawed, not that we should erect further legal barricades to try and cripple the very thing the Web does best.

To be very clear, I have a large personal stake in this game. Copyfight, like so many other blogs, is built around the notion of taking things said elsewhere, pointing to them, and building on them. Since all writing in the US is born copyrighted, there would be a large blow to almost every blog if this kind of restriction were passed. It is a stupid idea.

The fact that it was put in as a final sentence in the blog posting makes me think Judge Posner hasn't really thought this one through. The comments in the blog are neither edited nor responded to, sadly, since several of the non-spam commenters take Posner to task over this nonsense.

Almost everyone, including the Cartel's own lawyers, appears publicly shocked by the USD 2 million verdict returned against a Minnesota mother whose fight against the RIAA has been something of a rallying point in the war the labels have waged on their customers.

The Jammie Thomas retrial was expected (at least by people on the reasonable side of the fence) to produce some kind of verdict that would indicate the general public's (as represented by the jury) disdain for asking someone to pay $222,000 for sharing 24 songs. To be fair, she probably wasn't the one who shared the songs, but they were shared from her computer. So she's held responsible. And now, facing a $1.9 million judgment, she's in an even worse position. Clearly the jury of her peers didn't share the common online opinion, which lends credence to the Cartel's claims that the general public support their position. As the Cartel's lawyers have noted, they did not ask for a specific penalty in their suit - it was the jury that came up with the damages number.

The question becomes: what happens now? Opinion in the blogosphere is still widely against the RIAA, up to and including artists such as Moby calling for "disbanding" the organization. Moby — who just released his latest album as an entirely self-made project, including free tracks and his own DJ remixes — is clearly speaking from an emotional center.

More legal-oriented opinions include the view that the damage award, and the copyright laws that underlie it, could be unconstitutional. The US Constitution has language against grossly excessive punishments including monetary damages. In addition, as Fred von Lohmann points out, the Supreme Court has issued some recent rulings indicating that it may find the practice of awarding large punitive damages as deterrents to be unconstitutional. These decisions may have played a part in the Cartel's decision to shift focus away from suing customers and onto turning ISPs into copyright cops.

Another widely discussed theory, discussed in depth by Greg Sandoval for CNET, is that Jammie Thomas could protect herself from any payment by filing for bankruptcy. This theory rests on a recent Ninth Circuit decision that held there are different standards for civil and bankruptcy cases. In a civil case, such as this one, the standard for finding against the defendant is that the act had to be "willful" - essentially the RIAA have shown that the file-sharing was not an accident. However, in bankruptcy court they would be required to show that the act was "willful and malicious" in order to prevent the debt from being wiped away.

My opinion is that they'll settle for some token amount. I can't imagine either side wanting this fight drawn out further in the courts or in the press. They are, as several pundits have pointed out, fighting about the past. And I'm guessing both sides would much rather put that past behind them.

The highest legal review body in France, the Constitutional Council, has said "non" to legislation trumpeted by the Cartel that would have allowed cutting off Internet access of people accused of copyright violations.

The French constitution contains clauses promoting a presumption of innocence and the Council determined that the legislation - which had already passed in Parliament (WAKE UP YOU GUYS YOU'RE BEING OWNED) - violated those clauses as well as infringing on French Constitutional guarantees of free speech.

The legislation already had to be revised once but passed on a second go. Now it's unclear whether the plan will be scrapped or whether Sarkozy will modify the law as the Council described and resubmit it.

What would you get if you took the 19th-century notion of a penny dreadful and updated it for the 21st-century iPhone? The makers of Steampunk Tales think they have an answer.

Steampunk is a pop-culture phenomenon this decade. There are books, music, and cons devoted to this movement. Since it has many roots in updated Victorian-era items it seems like fertile ground for bringing out something people from that time would have recognized as a novel, but updated to modern technological sensibilities.

Steampunk Tales is also drawing from the pulp-fiction publishing form that flourished in America in the mid-20th century. Pulp magazines back then focused on specialized audiences (westerns, horror, romance, detective stories, and science fiction were all popular pulp genres) and delivered a monthly dose of short fictions from a wide variety of authors.

In this case they're promising to deliver monthly story collections for a modest USD 2 price tag, much lower than the magazine-stand prices for the few specialty mags that survive to this day. Back in March of this year I noted that the economics of print paper distribution are horrible and getting worse, compared to e-book economics. The iPod is probably not an idea e-book platform, but it's much more widely available than even the popular Kindle and for reading short fiction it may serve well enough.

One of the things that steampunk celebrates is the "maker" culture (see for example Make Magazine) and in that spirit I celebrate Steampunk Tales' attempt to make a cross-century mash-up work. (Too bad I don't own an iPhone to read it myself.)

In addition to Vikings, reindeer, and cute blonde girls, Sweden can now say it has a Pirate member of the European Parliament. According to Veronica Ek's story for Reuters (here reprinted by the Globe and Mail) about seven percent of the Swedish electorate cast ballots that sent a member of the Pirate Party into office.

The party has been in existence for some time, largely known as a single-issue copyright deregulation group. However, the recent conviction of four operators of The Pirate Bay torrent-linking site has drawn attention to the party and its platform, though the site and the party are not linked. That platform calls for copyright deregulation, abolition of the patent system, and a reduction in Internet surveillance.

For whatever reason, the surge in popularity has, according to Wikipedia, moved the Party into the third most popular spot in Sweden in terms of registered membership. Engstrom, the likely seat-holder, claims that the party will use its seat to fight for intellectual property rights and personal privacy rights.

The Interstitial Arts Foundation (IAF), whose event I mentioned a couple weeks ago, is putting together a new volume of fiction writing.

The book, currently called Interfictions 2 is a follow-on to their successful publication in 2007 of a work of collected short fictions that exist between the large spaces of current mass-market genre definitions.

In the blog entry introducing the book, they break down the costs line by line and ask for sponsorship. You can sponsor an individual story, cover the online costs for the electronic companion to the printed stories, or cover the expenses associated with the production of the physical work itself (printing, typesetting, etc.). You can even cover the costs associated with sending out review copies. Since the IAF is set up as a US 501(c)3 organization your contribution is entirely tax deductible.

As I've discussed before, I don't think the sponsorship (or more elegantly 'patron of the arts') model is widely scalable. It's not going to replace mass market publication anytime soon. However, it seems pretty well suited to this kind of thing - a specific project, with a strongly dedicated audience. So go sponsor something already!

(I think I'll sponsor sending out review copies because I believe that publicity creates a virtuous circle. Thus this blog.)