I don't blog much about the minutae of the cascade of digital music-related lawsuits in part because there are people who obsessively blog these things and I've lost patience with it over the years. One place that hasn't lost patience and generally does a very good job with the details is Recording Industry vs The People.

Yesterday they published an entry that caught my eye because it goes to the heart of something I've been wanting to see for a while: someone is trying to kick the legs out from under the set of suppositions that the RIAA are using to sue the pants off everyone and anyone.

Here's a short list of things the RIAA would like us to believe and have (by and large) gotten judges to agree with:

• You are not allowed to make MP3 copies of tracks on CDs you legally own


• Placing MP3s into a file directory that might be accessed from outside your computer is equivalent to giving away copies


• An IP address is equivalent to a personal identifier

Well now we a judge rejecting the RIAA's motion for summary judgement in the case. If the judge had bought into the RIAA's premises above the case would've been another slam-dunk win for the Cartel. Instead Judge Wake appears to be ready to change his earlier stance and agree with the defendants (and their EFF counsel) that simply placing copies in a directory is not a "distribution". This is key because if there's no distribution then there's no copyright infringement.

Furthermore, there's a good question to be argued as to whether the defendants are even the ones who put that MP3 file there. Such an issue would be settled by a trial, but the RIAA doesn't want trials. Its jihad is based on filing and rapidly settling thousands of these lawsuits. Having them go to trial would prove time-consuming, risky, and expensive even if the Cartel won.

For a large variety of reasons, the Cartel can't afford to wage this war in the court trial dockets. It needs to be conducted in the mass, scalable fashion whereby the threat of the judiciary is used to extort payment from consumers... err, victims... err, named defendants.

Despite the amount of time this case has already dragged out, it's still in the very early stages. As Eric Bangeman pointed out in his ars technica story on the denial, Judge Wake's reasoning is at odds with other judges' decisions on similar issues. For the great majority of cases, the RIAA is being successful in its jihad. My guess is that they'll argue this case a little further to see if Judge Wake can be swayed back. If he continues to rule against them, they'll drop the case before it goes to trial - they have no incentive to get an actual verdict on the books against them and an appeal would be even more expensive. So long as the tide continues to run in their favor, the Cartel can keep going even if it has to drop a case now and then. To truly kick the legs out from under them would require an act of Congress or a decision by a much higher-level court. Neither will happen soon.

Cory Doctorow has structured an interesting...something around his book Little Brother. I don't know what to call this - it's part charity, part pay-for-value-received, part experiment.

The idea is that Cory gives away this book - it's online for free. But there are people (true fans, maybe?) who want to donate to Cory in return for the value they receive with this book.

Cory doesn't want direct donations, not least because he doesn't want to cut his publishers out of the loop. In the donation page linked above he points out that they add significant value. So what he's proposing is a method for people to get copies of the book into the hands of teachers and librarians, who otherwise might not have funds for it or who might have to pay out of their own pockets. Librarians or teachers who want to receive free copies put in requests and they're matched up with people who want to donate. Cory and his staff are apparently donating their time and administrative effort to coordinate the giving.

This is my little signal boost for a guy who seems to keep showing how giving away his books makes things better.

Clay Shirky is one of the better Big Thinkers on the Web today, particularly in the arenas of social media and cooperative interactions. He's published an essay called "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus". In part this is related to his new book Here Comes Everybody but focused around a single idea.

The idea is that, contrary to the naysayers, we are doing something, potentially the start of something huge. That something is participating, whether it's in something as erudite as Wikipedia or as trivial as lolcats and World of Warcraft. We're taking some of the hours we currently waste on passive television viewing (Shirky estimates roughly one trillion hours of television are watched by the Internet-connected population) and putting them into "an architecture of participation."

Now, as a Copyfighter, the thing that interests me is that almost all of that participation involves creation and sharing, to some degree. If you're in a constrained environment like Warcraft or Second Life, then the acts of creation and sharing you can engage in are limited by the virtual world's structure, coding and rules, few of which are accessible to the mass of players. But if you're out on the wider 'net then your creation and sharing are inevitably going to bump up against the intellectual property structures of the physical world.

So maybe the Copyright Wars were inevitable. And maybe, if Shirky is right, they're not only inevitable, but it's inevitable that we - the online, wired, connected, sharing population - will win. Or our children will. Looked at this way the Copyright Wars aren't just the death throes of a few mass media empires with badly outdated business models - they're the collateral damage of a tectonic culture change. That's a cool thought, even if it's probably wrong in some of the details.

Gaiman included a few "final" thoughts on copyright. Given how much he's involved himself in the discussion of these issues over the years I seriously doubt this'll be his final word, but perhaps he feels he has no more to say on the Rowling case.

In this entry he's reflecting on his own copyright battles with Todd McFarlane over authorship of certain material that Gaiman wrote. He also links to the judge's decision in that case. There are no real parallels that I can see, and Gaiman says as much. Still, it does point out that he has first-hand experience of someone trying to steal things he wrote and that there is a framework within law for dealing with such things - where such framework does not include Ms. Rowling's emotional appeals to 'think of the charity'.

Gaiman put up a blog entry explicitly calling out fair use. In it he talks about the Rowling/RDR Books case, noting that her approach is different from his own in response to 'unauthorized' material that has been put out on him and his writing.

He also notes that his own two first books were at best legally shaky in Fair Use terms - an aggressive lawsuit could easily have shut him down from writing anything more. On the one hand that'd be a shame - Gaiman is popular and has gone on to write many well-respected and awarded books. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's a career path we can depend on a lot of people following.

Ms Rowling is not the only one concerned with how much of her work others are taking. Law.com has a report from Janet Conley on a lawsuit by three academic publishers against Georgia State University.

At issue are incidents like a 32-page copy made by a music professor. The prof claims that the copying was within University guidelines ("no more than 20%") and that the cost of the volume ($250) was prohibitive for students to purchase. The publishers claim that the U's practice of digitizing and distributing course packs of excerpts costs them money in lost book sales.

The case is a little different from typical copyright suits such as the Rowling case. The publishers are not seeking monetary damages, nor are they particularly trying to punish the University. Instead what they're hoping to do is create a legal precedent saying that Georgia State's guidelines and practices do not constitute fair use and not only should this university be enjoined, but the multitude of other schools with similar practices should be stopped.

As Conley points out, this case may break new ground. Past cases have been decided on issues around the creation of paper copies (Xeroxing) often by for-profit institutions. In this case, the copying at issue is digital and the organization doing the copying is non-profit. The educational area is one where courts have traditionally afforded a greater degree of leeway in fair use and even the plaintiff's lawyer has to admit that he can't find a law or binding precedent stating how much digital copying would be "not too much." It seems likely that if the case ever makes it as far as a decision that decision would be appealed. My personal opinion is that they'll work out a settlement before it gets that far - neither side wants to see a precedent set that would go against them. Plus there's a core reality that academic publishers and educational institutions exist in a kind of death-grip dependency that would harm both if it was violently broken.

Or, formally, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. v. RDR Books, 07-cv-09667. But since it was Rowling testifying Monday, that's where the focus is. If Mark Hamblett's piece for law.com is accurate it appears things are getting nasty right off the bat. Considering how heated some of the comments were on my last entry on this topic I expect there's a fair bit of passion in the air.

The basic question is whether or not the lexicon itself is a protected fair use creation or whether its printing should be enjoined as copyright infringement. Or, as Rowling called it, "wholesale theft."

Rowling's arguments seemed to be laced with emotional appeal and what strikes me, frankly, as shenanigans. She's so upset about the book that she had to fly personally to New York to testify, even though the judge offered to accept written testimony. The book has also "decimated [her] creative work" even though she gave the Lexicon Web site an award in 2004. And, somehow, the publication of this book is going to stop her project of doing her own lexicon, as if her fans wouldn't buy every single work she published. Did you know she was just about to give away all the proceeds from her lexicon to charity? News to me. Hey, Rowling, how about you take some of that $9 billion in book sales and donate it instead?

Mind you, I'm not convinced she's not right - the Lexicon book may well be infringing. I just dislike cheesy appeals to emotion. Think of the children! Puh-leeze. None of this is really germane to the question of whether or not the Lexicon is a transformative reference work, in which case it ought to be protected. Fortunately there's no jury to be swayed in this trial - let's hope Judge Patterson sticks to reasoning from the facts.

Daily Kos posted a think piece this weekend. The essay argues that big media have, in effect, caused their own devaluation. That is, the "amateurish" state of news on the Web is not really due to the proliferation of bloggers or non-authority sources such as Wikipedia. This is the thesis advanced by Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur. Instead, the problem is that there has been a systematic attack on big news sources once considered reliable (CNN, the NY Times, the Washington Post, etc.) by forces such as talk radio and Fox News.

It's no coincidence that these latter are by and large right-wing, and Daily Kos is itself quite left-wing. However, that doesn't make the argument necessarily wrong. Just something more to think about.

Neat-o-rama blog reported that students in UT San Antonio were told to come up with a "code of academic integrity in order to combat plagiarism". Apparently they then copied a chunk of their code from BYU.

Now on the surface this is a ha-ha funny story about kids who copy when they shouldn't. But the people I think don't get it here are the teachers and Neat-o-rama (though in fairness the blogs' commenters seem to get the point better than the blog itself). Why shouldn't the students copy an existing code from a university that is respected and has presumably tested and refined its code over some period of time? What's the value in inventing something new when there are good examples around?

By analogy I suspect you wouldn't find many differences in the criminal codes of the various US states pertaining, say, to burglary. The established terms and definitions are shared; the understanding of the crime is shared. The specific wording may vary here and there, but if I was going to set up a 51st state it would seem logical for me to look at and probably copy criiminal codes that have (you should pardon the term) been debugged by others.

In terms of inventive arts I don't think there are a whole lot of innovations one ought to make in putting together a code of conduct. Clarity, forthrightness, simplicity and other metrics related to the understandability of the result seem to me to count for a whole lot more than how the particular words are arranged.

It's true that one of the important parts of an educational writing exercise - as well as in the real world - is learning to acknowledge one's sources properly. And I'd bet the students didn't do that here, but whose fault is it for not teaching them that?

Riffing on the same theme as compfight, Google has added a feature to its advanced search that lets you find Web pages with explicit usage rights as a search parameter. The parameter lets you specify a few combinations of free to use, share, and modify.

Unfortunately, the feature is buried by default under a collapsed page region. It's one click to expand, but I wonder if many people - even advanced search users - will go that extra step. Most searchers I know are in a hurry to get results.

The search form provides a link to an explanation of Usage Rights, which includes a further link to Creative Commons. It's not exactly the kind of feature that will drive awareness and publicity, but it's a small step forward.

Onion Network News gives us a guideline for how to figure out whether the FCC will find something obscene or permissible. Maybe the Supreme Court should include this in their review.

Neil Gaiman posted an update on the experiment of making American Gods free online to read. Numbers from Harper Collins, which is hosting the e-book, show a decent number of unique views and a fair number of page impressions. If their numbers and my math are right the average viewer is reading about 45 pages online, which is 1-2 chapters.

That's not much for a full-length novel, but apparently it's enough to interest people, since H-C reports that weekly sales of the book have gone up threefold since the start of the experiment. Sadly there's no way to correlate sales data with the free online read data. Perhaps it's new readers, perhaps it's people remembering they meant to buy it anyway, or replacing an old copy. Perhaps it's people dissatisfied with the cumbersome online interface but interested enough to invest their cash in getting a better interaction.

One experiment is just a data point and doesn't necessarily tell us a whole lot. However, the positive trends in all these numbers are probably good enough leverage for Gaiman to push the experiment further. We shall see. Meantime, it's probably not wrong to say "free books online sells more paper copies." I think that's what Cory said last year.

Clay Shirky gave a talk at the Berkman Center covering some of the ideas from his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The video is online from Harvard under a Creative Commons license. The focus of the talk is Shirky's notions about the enabling power of the Net and along the way he has a lot of interesting things to say about sharing, including Napster and a variety of other collective sharings like American dubbings of Japanese anime.

There's a lot of power in sharing and Shirky points to several interesting examples of that power. The video is a bit long and definitely not high production value, but definitely worth the time. I need to read the underlying book to parse through the ideas more fully than I can get from a single talk.

File this under "rampant speculation." The headline is that New Line Cinema, maker of the Lord of the Rings movies, is calling it quits, with top execs out and assets being snapped up by Warner Brothers. Question: did the ongoing legal problems over those movies sink the studio?

End of last year it looked like New Line was in the clear, having finally settled its long-running legal battles with Peter Jackson, and green-lighting two "Hobbit"-based movies. But just about four weeks ago trouble broke out again with the Tolkien estate suing New Line for... well let's call it "cheating them blind."

Ironically, just about the time this suit was filed I pointed to an LA Times piece on how Disney had screwed over a naive young author. The Tolkein estate isn't young and it has lots of money to hire lawyers. Their primary claim seems to be the same, though - given the massive grosses taken in by the Rings movies they've been paid, um, let's see here... NOTHING.

I can't figure out from the various news stories whether WB is taking on all of New Line's debts and obligations or whether those will be shed the way New Line's 600 employees will be. Assuming that WB still wants to see the Hobbit movies made (on the "we will make another kajillion dollars this way" theory) then they'll probably come up with some kind of settlement that leaves them in clear control of the rights.

Kevin Kelly has caused a bit of a stir by putting out a model for patronage support of creative people. His concept is that of a "true fan" and the piece's title is "1,000 True Fans". The idea is that if a person was willing to spend about one day's salary (Kelly picks the arbitrary sum of $100) then an artist could be supported by one thousand such people.

This is on the surface a very attractive idea, not least because the numbers seem manageable. Most people well enough off to be regularly on the Net probably can manage a $100 donation. Most people can conceive of appealing to an audience of 1,000. It's almost the polar opposite of the mega-millions/blockbuster mentality that pervades so much corporate media production, from books to movies to music and so on.

Unfortunately the idea isn't as appealing once you dig past the ideal surface and into the gritty details. Probably the best counter-analysis I've read so far is John Scalzi's: "The Problem With 1,000 True Fans."

Scalzi starts from the point of being someone who probably has at least that many True Fans already. And then points out a number of uncomfortable things, such as those fans being drawn from a base population that is at least two orders of magnitude greater. And that even though the tens of thousands of well-off Netizens represents a good pool of people from which Fans may be drawn it's still a very small pool and quickly exhausted.

Just to pick my own personal favorite example, the south-by-southwest festival this month features over 2000 bands, interactive artists/designers, filmmakers, and other creative types. Supporting just that one festival by Kelly's patronage model would consume nearly a quarter-million True Fans. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of the vast sea of writers, musicians, and artists who would like to get paid and maybe even make a living from their creative work.

That doesn't make Kelly's idea stupid - it just makes it not-completely-thought-out, which is OK. Right now you can cast your eyes around the Web and find a hodgepodge of "Donate" buttons and similar mechanisms for fans to express their direct support of creative types; these also have their pros and cons. We need more big thoughts on how to develop alternatives to (that can co-exist with) large corporate funding.

A couple weeks ago I blogged about Neil Gaiman's work with his publisher to put up one of his books for free download. At the time, the fans voted on which book they wanted put up for free. Well, it's up, and last night Gaiman blogged this:

For the next month, your free copy of American Gods is waiting for you at http://tiny.cc/WRiXE

Feel free to spread the link as widely as possible around the web. If it works, and people read it, then a) we may be able to put up another book and b) sooner or later they'll simply let us give away the book in electronic form....

Also, if you think Gaiman is being naive or doesn't understand what he's doing, you might want to hop over and read today's blog entry titled "The nature of free". You may or may not agree with him, but I don't think anyone can accuse him of going into this unknowingly.

"I see that politicians have a way of borrowing from each other."

On msnbc.com I found a video of a Meet the Press segment that begins by addressing the issue raised by Mrs. Clinton of whether or not Mr. Obama had plagiarized some political speech lines.

The discussion is partially about political views, but it's also got a few things to say about originality and 'plagiarism' in political speechwriting. As with so many other creative endeavors, this kind of writing does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it sits within a stream of history, an awareness of what has worked earlier and what has failed, and it copies from the successes of the past. In some sense, speeches are copyrighted works, owned by the creators. When performed (spoken) they're also recognizable works, with added rights beyond the written texts. And yet, it makes no sense to build rigid regimes of ownership and limitation around them - doing so would weaken political discourse. But our conversation around copyright and ownership of IP has become so constrained of late that I don't see people generally willing to acknowledge this. As Obama says, we've "entered the silly season".

A friend of mine blogged about a talk by David Wallis, whose book "Killed Cartoon" catalogs political cartoons and photographs that have been killed by newspaper and other print publication editors because of being anti-war.

The logical question, not answered by Mr. Wallis, is why not take this material on line? For me the definitive online anti-war cartoon was always "Get Your War On" which never pulled any punches. On the other hand, it never made any money that I'm aware of - according to Wikipedia, the print book version's royalties were donated to landmine clearing organizations.

Could it just be that there's no established revenue model for taking independent cartoon work online and getting paid for it? I certainly read a lot of Web comics but beyond the occasional Paypal or donation drive by the cartoonist I don't pay for any of them. Like e-zines, about which I blogged earlier this month, online comics have been around for enough years that one would expect a reasonable set of business models to have emerged.

What's holding things back?

This is being painted in the context of net neutrality and copyright enforcement; I see it as a way to automate attacks on any particular users of any information. There's no reason this technique couldn't be used by, say, the Chinese government to disable access to Web sites it finds objectionable. Or paint your own picture.

The story starts with an announcement by AT&T that it's going to police all traffic it carries for copyright violations. That's both stupid (legal liability anyone?) and practically impossible. Packet volumes and encryption render this a nonstarter. The volume of lawsuits alone would be staggering even at AT&T's size.

But let's apply a little intelligence to the problem. Assume you don't need to examine every packet - just the highly visible and highly accessed sources of copied material. Torrents are the prime example of this. Nicholas Weaver wrote in his blog last month of a hypothetical method that would permit AT&T, in cooperation with a copyright-holding entity like the MPAA, to disable torrent downloading.

The plan involves examining a torrent to see if it has material the MPAA doesn't want sent around, then selectively disabling pairwise communication between providers of the torrent and would-be consumers. The torrent identifies participants, so they can be blocked and Weaver describes a fairly clever scheme that disables pairwise communication without harming general network communication. The system has significant advantages to its users, not least of which are that it's completely automated and scalable. It also means AT&T gets out of the content-examination business and avoids the associated liability. The copyright holder (MPAA or other) is examining the content and assuming liability if legitimate content is blocked. This is the same situation we have now with DMCA 'takedown' notices.

The system isn't perfect - I can imagine counter-strategies - but it would certainly disable general P2P networks as they presently operate.

Hometown paper the LA Times runs an extensive piece on the complete screw-over that studios give to writers. To say that they lie, cheat, and defraud doesn't begin to cover it.

In this case the victim is one Deborah Gregory and the villain is Disney but the same story could be told hundreds of times - just change the names and it's the same again and again. In this case Gregory started as a successful but naive author, then signed with Disney for 4% of net. After two movies, millions of CD and DVD sales, and god-knows-how-much spin-off merchandising, Gregory has gotten exactly nothing for any of this. In fact, Disney won't even give her statements showing revenue and expenses that would allow her to pursue her share of the profits.

As the Times piece points out Hollywood has been using shady accounting and unfair contract terms to screw people for decades. They have all the power, especially when dealing with newcomers, and they use it shamelessly. Keep that in mind the next time they cry about how much money they're losing to "piracy"; I'm not a big fan of theft, but I sure do love schadenfreude.

Earlier this week I had a chat with Jason Nazar of docstoc.com. The company had contacted me a while back suggesting the chat. They're a beta-level software startup dealing with professional, legal, and business documents.

I was initially dubious that there was a Copyfight angle to this story. As Nazar himself pointed out, there's not a lot of illicit traffic on the P2P nets in business content, particularly when compared to the volume of entertainment-oriented content (music and movies primarily). That said, docstoc does have some points of interest for this blog, particularly in thinking about new business models that could be built around sharing.

First, back up a few steps. Docstoc is a hosting, sharing, and community site. Like YouTube it produces no original content bur rather holds and shares content (documents) uploaded by people. There's no membership fee and anonymous uploading is allowed. If you want to download a document, then you have to have a site login.

Since the point of the site is to share documents, everything placed on the site is in some sense free. Docstoc takes advantage of several Creative Commons licenses so when you upload files you can specify varying degrees of free - free to view and free to download being the two most popular I saw. The site uses a proprietary Flash program to embed the content for viewing, which allows them to encapsulate most of the popular business document formats (PDF, Word, Excel, PPT, and so on) in a uniform UI. In addition, they allow the player itself to be embedded; for example, here is a TechCrunch blog entry on WikiMedia's financials that contains an embedded docstoc player. Paradoxically, their use of an encapsulating player may both protect documents from casual copying while thwarting automated scanners like Attributor, which attempt to detect reposting of private content.

Docstoc is what I'd call a 'data cloud' play. Like Google Documents and other applications, there is an appeal to upload your content and access it from anywhere you have a net link, not just the hard disk on which the document currently resides. Like YouTube it also has nascent community features, including ratings, view counts, and personal blogs. Though these seem to be de rigeur in today's apps I'm not sure of their value here.

So, if everything is free, how does anyone make money? Well, from an individual point of view, docstoc is at worst free advertising. Many small companies and sole proprietorships put free samples, white papers, and other business-related downloads on their sites, which then languish in obscurity. These same files, uploaded to docstoc, become indexed and searchable both on the docstoc site and on major search engines that crawl the docstoc pages. When Google searches start to return hits into docstoc's cloud there's a good chance the uploader is going to see higher SERP placement than he could manage on his own.

Docstoc itself has to figure out how to make money on this and so far they don't have a solid model in place. Obviously there are advertising possibilities. As with any kind of targeted search, docstoc has the chance to generate high-quality sales leads to advertisers. There's also an option to partner with high-end paid content providers. These providers (think Gartner Group) are never going to put up their expensive paid research on docstoc. But they could put up teasers and previews, then kick back a piece to docstoc for sales leads and link referrals.

Finally there's the idea that documents + service are more valuable than just documents alone. This is similar to the open-source notion that software+service is better than only raw code. If I've just downloaded a business plan template it might behoove me to sit down with a consultant in my area to flesh that plan out. Again, docstoc is positioned to know what I've downloaded and possibly where I'm located so they can hook me up with a service professional, taking a small slice of the business referral revenue.

It's an unproven model, but that's true for most anything you can say about trying to make a legitimate business around freely sharing information. I don't know if I'm convinced enough that I would invest my own cash in the business, but I'll probably upload some documents and see how they fare.

Dave Langford's February ANSIBLE (a fanzine for fantasy/SF readers and authors) has a commentary from Steve van der Ark relating difficulties encountered in producing a print edition of a "Harry Potter Lexicon."

For some time there has been an online Lexicon, which has been criticized for both using and linking to large chunks of Rowling writing. Many of the critics feel that the online Lexicon goes beyond the bounds of fair use. In an attempt to avoid this, van der Ark rewrote, cited, and reduced the use of original material. He claims to have "received assurances from several copyright and intellectual property experts that the book we were creating was legal."

Except now there's a lawsuit. Warner is suing the Lexicon's intended publisher in an effort to enjoin the book as a violation of both copyright and trademark protections. The book's author and publisher are vowing to fight, noting that Rowling doesn't have "the right to completely control anything written about the Harry Potter world."

Intuitively I'd tend to agree with that assertion, but IANAL and it's not at all clear to me which way the judge is going to go in this case.

Neil Gaiman has been blogging online for seven years now. If you go to that link you'll find a poll asking you to vote for which of Mr. Gaiman's books is to be put online for free for a month to celebrate the event.

Gaiman's blog entry today also quotes from a New York Times story on this contest. In that Times piece Gaiman admits that he didn't buy every book he read growing up. He borrowed them from friends, from libraries, found them, and so on. Eventually he grew up into a normal book-buying adult.

The point, he says, is not just that, it's that

...there's not and there has never been a simple one-to-one relationship between the books you read and way you find authors and the books you buy. It's more complicated than that, and more interesting. It's about the way that it's assumed that books have a pass-along rate, that a book will be read by more than one person. If the people who read the book like it, they might buy their own copy, or, more likely, just put the author in that place in their heads of Authors I Like. And that's a good place for an author to be.

Bloggasm is a thoughtful collection of entries from Simon Owens that focuses on media and journalism. In yesterday's entry he reviews the troubled history of e-zines, particularly those focused on SF/F and speculative fiction in general.

E-zines in this field are at least 10 years old now and one would think they'd have had time to establish a field. Instead what we see is a vast graveyard of virtual corpses and nobody with a sustainable business model. That's kind of sad but perhaps we're still in the infancy of this market and someone will figure out a good content model soon.

Baidu, the Chinese search powerhouse was on the receiving end this week of a lawsuit by three of the big four record companies. They are asking that Baidu be ordered to stop linking on its music-delivery service to copyrighted tracks. Separate suits were filed against Sohu and Yahoo! China over related infringement charges.

The Chinese market for media is hot and growing fast. Fool.com recently published a piece advising that Baidu was undervalued. This is interesting considering the site's earlier posting advising people to get out of investing in the music business. Baidu has much larger businesses in search/online advertising than it does in music so they may agree to go along with these suits in order to keep their core businesses untouched. Or they may just ignore any decision, as they have in the past.

Oops, not so fast. Yesterday I blogged about Qtrax, a company with big claims to be providing ad-supported music downloads. An alert reader sent me a pointer to a Guardian Unlimited story in which UMG, Warner and EMI all said "No deal". Qtrax appears to be admitting to some overblown claims in announcements (wait - a software company announced vaporware?! I'm SHOCKED.) but their Web site still contains the "25 million" claim.

If you've been around politics since the last US Presidential election you might remember some of the popular parodies such as JibJab's "This Land Is My Land". I haven't seen a comparably memorable parody yet this season, but I have seen "The Yes We Can Song" (warning: page has a plug-in that auto-plays on load).

This mashup takes one of Barack Obama's New Hampshire stump speeches and remixes it with contributions from over 35 artists. The motivating forces behind this appropriation - the campaign doesn't appear to have authorized or endorsed it - include Jesse Dylan (son of Bob Dylan) and will.i.am of the group Black Eyed Peas.

I'm familiar with this kind of overlay/remix/mashup (I'm still not completely clear on the appropriateness of the terms) being used with things like popular music, but I've never seen it done before with a contemporary political speech. As in the NIN case, the "Yes We Can" remix is being used to support the original cause - I think these two projects arise from much the same sensibility though they're in different spheres.

I'm reminded of the point Cory Doctorow made in his latest piece for the UK Guardian Unlimited. In this entry in his "Digital rights, digital wrongs" series Doctorow argues for a tuning of the sensibilities of copyright law. In particular, the law doesn't distinguish between the reuse of a copyrighted work for a mass commercial project such as a blockbuster movie and the reuse of a copyrighted work for personal and noncommercial use.

Doctorow argues that "folk copyright" use existed for a long time prior to the net, but

Now you have billionaire media empires behaving as though parents should get a licence for a Prince song before they upload a YouTube video of their adorable toddler dancing to it.

Doctorow names (but doesn't point to) A2K, the Access To Knowledge project around reforms to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties. A2K is trying to make this new copyright regime happen, but WIPO is a huge thing, dominated by big companies... err, excuse me, countries doing the work of big companies such as the US carrying the banner for the Copyright Cartel. Any change through this method will be many years in the making.

Meanwhile we have an election coming whose outcome just might change what positions the US chooses to defend at WIPO and in related forums.

I tend to avoid most digital music stories not because they're not Copyfight-able but because I find them boring. After eight-going-on-nine years of the Copyright Wars there's very little new in the trench warfare. So excuse me if I gloss over a lot.

First up, Yahoo has announced that Rhapsody America (Real + Viacom) will now handle its digital music subscription service. The current customers will probably end up paying a few bucks a month more for more or less the same thing. Yahoo dumps a dragging business and one hopes focuses more energy on revitalizing itself. If that fails and it gets bought by Microsoft then customers will probably have to choose between switching outright to Rhapsody and whatever Zune service Microsoft is pushing at the time.

By the way, I keep hearing persistent rumors that Microsoft is having to fork over $1 of every track sold on Zune to the Cartel. Truth? Anyone have a good source?

Also, yesterday I heard about a new online music service, Qtrax. Yawn, another service, right? Well, hold on, this one is "free." That's 'free' as in 'ad-supported', but they're claiming to have over 25 million tracks available (for PC at the moment - Mac version coming in March).

How is this possible? Ad revenue goes to the Cartel, natch. And you download their player, which means you lock into their DRM scheme though they make a big point of claiming no adware, spyware, or spoofing. Because, you know, the Cartel would NEVER put stuff like that on your PC, nope nope.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to get an activated account to check it out - anyone had first-hand experience with it?

The writers behind the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert comedy/satire shows staged a mock debate on Capitol Hill to illustrated some of the issues of the WGA strike.

My sense is that many members of Congress are sympathetic, but I doubt they're likely to get involved. Anyone have a video of the 'debate' itself?

The EU has been remarkably persistent in going after Microsoft for what the EU sees as anti-competitive and antitrust issues. Last year the EU had its earlier antitrust case upheld. According to Business Week, the first case "ended up costing Microsoft billions of dollars".

But the new case may be an even bigger deal from a business perspective. Now the EU are looking into "addresses core aspects of its business model and the preservation of its core monopolies," again quoting Business Week. The issues once again are bundling and interoperability, but this time looking at desktop and server OS. In specific, the complaint alleges that Vista and Office 2007, Microsoft is deliberately holding back information in order to hamper interoperability.

Well, um, no duh. This is what they've always done - it's just being extended to the Internet and services at this point. So far Microsoft is promising cooperation with the investigation. My guess is that they'll try to drag things out and keep it out of court for as long as possible without making any actual changes.

Or, "More reasons why EMI is in no position to force changes to the RIAA".

EMI is attempting to cut costs by laying off up to 2000 workers. That's not unusual for companies that have been bought out and whose new owners are focused on fixing the bottom line. But it is a definite sign of how much trouble the music label is in, from a bottom-line perspective.

More troubling are the ongoing revelations that musicians are abandoning the sinking ship. Big names like Paul McCartney and Radiohead, who left last year, have been joined by Britpop act The Verve. Claiming they want "assurances" that the label will remain viable, the group's manager has said they'll be withholding their new album.

In all likelihood, few people care what a band that hasn't had an album in 10 years does now. Except that EMI's name keeps appearing in bad news stories and I just can't see that strengthening their position when pushing for change at the RIAA.

I seem to be all about the events this month. In addition to talk about copyrights and open-source nerd rap, there's a showing this Friday that local folk might want to check out:

The Harvard Film Archive is showing two historical "edgy" films this Friday. Both were made before the first production code was enforced on movie content. Back in the pre-MPAA days filmmakers explored the racy and seamy undersides of Depression-era America. The results led to outrage, outcries, and the start of enforcement of the Production Code in 1934. That lasted until 1967, when the censorship system we know today was first put in place.

The Archive will show the films all weekend - see their posted schedule for details. On Friday the films will be preceded by a talk by Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration.

(Thanks to srl for the initial pointer and for corrections to this posting.)

Or maybe just "wishful thinking."

Relaying heavily from a Variety Magazine piece, Nate Anderson at ars technica asks whether the RIAA could go away, at least in its present form.

The base of the problem is that the RIAA isn't solving the music industry's problem - plummeting sales - and is costing it millions of dollars. From a pure cost perspective, it would make sense to jettison this loser. However, only one of the four big record companies is even making any noises in this direction and that one, EMI, is the smallest of the four. So long as the RIAA enjoys over 75% support I don't see any major changes on the horizon.

Two factors might change that: Variety reports that all four major labels are pushing the RIAA for change; EMI is just the loudest because it has been bought by a private equity firm that is likely much more cost-conscious. Also in the works is a rumored IFPI reorganization. That body represents 1,400 record companies in 75 countries according to Variety. If IFPI is indeed reorganized, it might make sense to fold in the RIAA at the same time.

Speaking of Boston-area science fiction and comics conventions, I've noticed that Open-Source Beats nerd rapper MC Frontalot is scheduled to appear at Anime Boston in 2008, nominally Saturday the 22nd of March.

Shared-world writing has been around a long time. Whether it's someone writing a Sherlock Holmes story long after Doyle's death, or a co-created world like Robert Asprin's Thieves World in which authors cooperate on characters and settings, it's been done. And, honestly it's probably been done on the 'Net before, though I couldn't find any professional examples in my quick search.

Now comes "Shadow Unit". Originally the brainchild of Emma Bull, the writing crew also includes Elizabeth Bear, Will Shetterly, and Sarah Monette. Bear explains the concept in her LJ posting as "...the website for a serial drama in internet form. Or possibly it's a fan site for a TV show that doesn't exist. "

What makes this interesting to me from a Copyfight point of view is the plan to include a variety of materials with a variety of revenue models. Some things will be free; some will be subscription. I imagine some things will be direct sales. it will be interesting to see how readers respond to this kind of experimentation and whether the model is picked up or expanded on. I'll probably blog updates now and then if significant things happen; bookmark the site itself if you want to see first-hand.