I can't be here this week, but I'll be back & blogging as usual starting Monday morning (Sept. 19th). In the meantime, check out the blogs to your left listed under "copyfighters" -- especially the following, which are consistently at the top of my list for copyfight-related news & analysis:
Want to kick legal butt for the open source/free software community? Check out this new position at the Software Freedom Law Center, run by FSF's Eben Moglan and PubPat's Dan Ravicher:
STAFF ATTORNEY - SOFTWARE AND CORPORATE LAWThe Software Freedom Law Center, a newly formed not-for-profit legal
services organization that provides legal representation and other law
related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software,
seeks an experienced and entrepreneurial Staff Attorney with a strong
background in software for its New York headquarters. For more
information about SFLC visit www.softwarefreedom.org.
Continue reading "Free/Open Source Software Law Center Looking to Hire"
The winners of the EFF Blog-a-thon have now been announced -- congratulations, IO Error (Most Inspiring), clash (Most Humorous), and Laura Crossett (Best Overall)!
There were a quite a few excellent posts; if you check out the links embedded in the opening paragraph of the announcement, you'll find an extra handful of top contenders. Here's one of my personal favorites -- an entry that Copyfight readers will especially appreciate:
Mockingbirds Must Be Free to Sing: "For me, [the copyfight] means continuing to assert, even if none will listen, that the freedom to draw from shared fountain of musical and literary expression of the past -- known to lawyers as the public domain, or the works that are publici juris -- is a freedom that exists, and ought to exist as a matter of right, and that needs no justification. It is the monopoly restrictions that the law builds by taking away parts of this freedom from us--the so-called copyright laws--that need to justify themselves over and over again, and to be kept within reasonable limits by a watchful public."
Derek Slater has the scoop on a new counter-propaganda campaign tailor-made for copyfighters:
More information on the competition is available here. As Derek says, feel free to "steal" the info and pass it along.
Never afraid to reach new heights on the unintentional comedy scale, Microsoft UK debuted its Thought Thieves film competition in May. Microsoft called for original videos "about people stealing the ideas in your head" [PDF] and "intellectual property theft."To counter this misleading campaign, a few good souls "stole" the idea and started the Thought Thieve$ film competition "about big companies stealing and profiting from the knowledge commons."
Think about it: how would you feel if you saw your cultural traditions, collective creativity, thousands-year-old seed strains, indigenous medicinal knowledge, or even your very genetic code being passed off as the property of some multinational corporation? What would you do?
Update: previous Copyfight coverage: In the "Are You S***ting Me?" Category
From the producers of "Grokster/BrandX" comes a MobBlog that will keep you hovering over your laptop from start to finish, never letting up on the tension until you decide that you, too, must join the discussion. Featuring Fred von Lohmann as a man who must come to grips with legal and technological forces beyond his control, "Measuring the DMCA Against the Darknet" opens Internet-wide on August 15.
Excited to blog your click moment but can't get to it by Tuesday? Never fear, fair copyfighter, EFF has decided to extend the deadline for its Blog-a-thon by a week until August 2.
Blog-a-thon tag:
EFF15
For
the past 15 years, EFF has been fighting to preserve the constitutional
right to freedom of expression on the Internet. Founded to protect publisher Steve Jackson Games when its servers were seized, EFF has grown as new technologies -- such as weblogs -- gave citizens their own First Amendment machines.
To celebrate its 15th anniversary this month, EFF is putting these distributed Gutenbergs front and center, holding a weeklong EFF15 Blog-a-thon where you're invited to blog about your personal experiences fighting for freedom online — a project that will celebrate new publishing tools, attract new EFF members, and mark the 15th all at once.
From EFF's Announcement: We want to hear about your "click moment" — the very first step you to took to stand up for your digital rights -- whether it was blogging about an issue you care about, participating in a demonstration, writing your representatives, or getting involved with EFF. As a thank you, we've enlisted an independent panel of judges to choose from among your posts for "Most Inspirational," "Most Humorous," and "Best Overall." At the end of the Blog-a-thon, we'll announce the names of the three bloggers with the best posts on our website and in our weekly newsletter, EFFector. We'll also publish the three best posts on our site and send the authors a blogging "kit" as an extra thank you: an EFF bloggers' rights T-shirt, special EFF-branded blogger pajama pants, a pound of coffee, and a pair of fuzzy slippers.
Tell us why you became a copyfighter! Visit EFF's blogathon for more info about participating in and following the posts.
On Monday I noted that EFF was warning the public about Hollywood trying to sneak the Broadcast Flag through the Senate as part of an appropriations bill (Broadcast Flag to Sneak Through Senate Tomorrow?!?).
We now have an update from EFF: Flag Day
At the beginning of this week, we learned that a Broadcast Flag amendment might slip past the gates in an appropriations bill. It's easy to see how this could happen. Despite strong opposition to the flag in the Internet community, in many circles it's still considered "non-controversial."However, it ain't over til it's over. Read the whole thing ... and if you haven't already, TAKE ACTION.But that was Monday evening.
Within the space of a few hours, the committee was Slashdotted, BoingBoinged and Instalanched.
By 6 p.m. on Tuesday, the 27 members of the Senate Appropriations Committee received more than 11,000 emails and faxes. That's nearly 500 faxes an hour. Dianne Feinstein alone received more than 2,600 messages in her inbox. Kay Hutchison, the senior senator for Texas, received 1,441 letters. [emphasis, links in original]
This is relatively old news, but we haven't shared it yet with Copyfight readers: the Berkman Center's Jonathan Zittrain is headed to Oxford to lead its Oxford Internet Institute (OII). I'm very proud and happy for him -- and it's very smart move (natch) on Oxford's part. Thankfully, the Berkman Center isn't losing him entirely:
He will coordinate a significant research and teaching relationship between the two centres, and become the Berkman Visiting Professor at Harvard. His recent research includes the study of Internet filtering by national governments, the role of intermediaries as points of control in Internet architecture, and the taxation of Internet commerce.
Remember when Larry Lessig signed away his copyright in an article to a law review and vowed never to do it again (Never Again)? He has since been throwing his weight behind efforts to make legal scholarship open to all -- including a brand-new project that Science Commons announced today: the Open Access Law Program:
Professor Lessig is the first signatory on the Open Access Law Author Pledge, where law professors can agree to support open access principles. This support includes encouraging journals to become open access and promising to publish only in journals that are open access.Through its Open Access Law Program, Science Commons will work with law schools, authors, libraries and journals to encourage open access to legal journals and articles, and plans to expand the Program into other areas of law publishing. Although the program’s initial focus is on legal publishing in the United States, Science Commons is also supporting international efforts to make legal material freely available to all.
Update: Ernie Miller responds: "[Why] not simply have the journals that do sign publish the works directly, if the authors have similarly signed, into an Open Access Repository at the end of the limited exclusive license, rather than leave it up to the authors? And why no call on OAL Journals to proselytize Creative Commons to its authors?"
We're very excited to welcome veteran journalist, author, and consultant JD Lasica to Copyfight as part of his virtual book tour for Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation. The book has just been released by John Wiley & Sons, and JD has been featuring tasty bits over at the Darknet blog -- including a previously embargoed 2003 interview with former ReplayTV CTO Andy Wolfe, who tells us what Hollywood was really after in the legal battle that killed the company:
[The Hollywood studios] essentially wanted to control what anyone could record on TV. They wanted sole discretion over how long you could keep a show after you recorded it. They wanted to limit how many episodes of the same show you could record. They wanted to ban thirty-second skip buttons and to prevent fast forward from reaching a certain speed.
In addition to writing Darknet, JD has been hard at work co-founding and sheparding the ambitious OurMedia project; check out the IT Conversations interview for an in-depth look.
Suffice it to say that JD has been doing a lot of thinking (and doing) about the issues we address here every day, and we're honored to have him as a guest author through Wednesday of this week (June 8th). Welcome aboard, JD!
Seen first in Susie Bright's blog and today there's a nice AP obit (here on WIRED). Copyfighters may remember her best as the woman who tried (and lost) a case to prevent Hustler from using her name in association with sexually explicit caricatures. I didn't agree with her, or her writings, but I was made to be more thoughtful by having to argue against her attempts to legislate her views. I'll let this quote from Gloria Steinem stand in closing: "In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them."
EFF (hyperlinks, mine): "This year's winners, nominated by the public and selected by a panel of independent judges, are entrepreneur and EFF co-founder Mitch Kapor, Princeton University computer science professor Edward Felten, and human rights activist Patrick Ball."
Update:Although they are called EFF Pioneer Awards, EFF does not pick the Pioneer Award winners; they are, as we noted in the press release, nominated by the public and chosen by an independent panel of judges. Everyone except for the current EFF staff and the board is eligible -- meaning that if some day, you want to nominate Robin Gross of IP Justice, you are free to do so -- even if she once worked for EFF. This explains why Mitch Kapor won a very well-deserved EFF Pioneer Award this year. The public nominated him and the independent panel voted for him -- and we couldn't be more proud.
Read all 55-pages of the Grokster oral argument transcript here: Grokster Oral Argument [PDF].
Courtesy of The Challenge of P2P, the blog for Prof. Pam Samuelson's "Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Technology: Legal and Policy Challenges" class at Berkeley this semester.
[UPDATE - April 7, 2005]
An easier-to-read format of the Grokster transcript: Transcript of MGM vs. Grokster oral arguments.
True cause for celebration: Walt Crawford of the consistently excellent Cites & Insights has joined the blogosphere.
For a taste of Crawford in action, here he is analyzing the FCC's reply brief in ALA v. FCC -- that is, the legal challenge to the broadcast flag technology mandate:
I've gone through the 45-page FCC response (also available from the EFF site). All I see is a series of "Did not!" responses. The brief includes demonstrably false statements, assumes that the bluff issued by Viacom and others is legitimate and the basis for dramatically overstepping the FCC's bounds, and nonsensically claims that the broadcast flag "protect[s] the integrity of broadcast digital transmissions" although it has nothing to do with broadcast quality or integrity. The brief is as breathtaking in its assertion of boundless FCC power as it is dulling in its lack of legitimate evidence or serious counter-argument.
In other bloggy news, three developments I wanted to blog about this past week but couldn't (Grokster + EFFector + extremely silly EFFector in one week = no time):
Lauren Gelman sends word of "Cyberlaw in the Supreme Court," an Grokster-night event that nicely frames what's at stake in the Grokster and "Brand X" cases, both of which will be heard before the Court only one week from today:
On March 29, 2005, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments in two cases that together will greatly determine how government can and will regulate the Internet in the future, and the impact that the public interest will have on the development of cyberlaw over the next decade.In MGM v. Grokster, the Court will decide whether copyright holders can veto consumer electronics and computing innovations that upset the content industries' prevailing business models, even where the technology's non-infringing uses provide substantial benefits to consumers. The question is whether consumer demand for new and better products will drive technological development, or copyright owners' demand for control will retard it.
In Brand X v. FCC, the Court will decide whether the FCC should retain the option to regulate cable modem services to promote open access to broadband lines, universal service and network neutrality, as it did in the early days of the Internet when most people connected over common-carrier telephone lines. The question is whether tomorrow's communications services will be defined by citizen choices or by the business interests of a handful of cable broadband companies.
To help gear up for the MGM v. Grokster oral argument happening on March 29 in D.C., EFF is throwing a "send off" party for the legal team involved in the case, along with many of our friends who filed in support of our arguments or helped out in other ways. It's a public party and a time to celebrate, so if you'll be in the SF area on March 24th, please come and celebrate with us.
MGM v. Grokster Send-Off Party
1751 Social Club (1751 Fulton Street, SF, CA 94117)
Thursday, March 24 @ 8pm
Driving Directions
Here. This has been a service of the copyfight blogging network.
Lawyers:
Ever dreamed of battling the Broadcast Flag, defending P2P, busting bad patents, or fighting for fair use on the Web?
Here's your chance. EFF has an opening for an intellectual property attorney on our legal team. You'd get to work on cutting-edge cases dealing with public-interest technology issues and help shape national and international IP policy. We're looking for someone mid-level or higher, who can take a good idea and turn it into a lawsuit or an educational campaign and then run with it. The person will need to either live in the San Francisco Bay Area or be willing to relocate. For more details, check out the formal announcement below:
--------
Staff Intellectual Property AttorneyEFF is seeking an intellectual property staff attorney for its legal team. Responsibilities will include litigation, public speaking, media outreach, plus legislative and regulatory advocacy, all in connection with a variety of intellectual property and high technology matters.
Qualified candidates should have roughly three years of experience with litigation in at least one substantive area of IP law (patent, copyright, trademark, or trade secret) and a solid knowledge of the litigation process. Candidates should also have significant experience managing cases, both in terms of overall case strategy as well as day-to-day projects and deadlines. Candidates should have good communication skills and interest in working with a team of highly motivated lawyers and activists in a hard-working nonprofit environment. Strong writing and analytical skills as well as the ability to be self-motivated and focused are essential. Tech savviness and familiarity with Internet civil liberties and high tech public interest issues preferred.
Interested applicants should submit a resume, writing sample, and references to ipjob--at--eff(dot)org.
Local gadgethounds who've been following the conversation about endangered gizmos are hereby invited to come hang out with Copyfight's Wendy Seltzer and others at the next BayFF event on Tuesday, February 22nd in downtown San Francisco:
Today we are very excited to welcome Alan Wexelblat to Copyfight. Some of you may know Alan as "Dr. Wex" from Blogbook IP -- where he's a frequent, incisive critic of the copyright cartel -- but he's been a commentator on the copyright wars since 1998. In his day job, Alan works as a Senior Staff Human Factors Engineer for EMC-Legato and runs HOVIR, an independent consultancy that provides usability, human factors, and project management services. He is a member of Usability Professionals Association (UPA) and Vice President of Operations for ACM SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction). Alan's background includes a PhD from the MIT Media Lab and 20 years of work in the computer industry.
Welcome aboard, Alan!
David Bollier sends word about (another) conference on creativity and originality -- specifically, the fashion industry's embrace of sampling, appropriation, and borrowed inspiration:
I thought you might be interested in "Ready to Share," a conference about the ownership of creativity in fashion, to be held this Saturday at the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. The one-day event will explore how most of the creative output in fashion cannot be owned and, indeed, how creative appropriation and derivation is the norm. Yet fashion still serves up plenty of originality and is a creatively robust, competitive global industry. A webcast will be available. Details and other contact information can be found...at www.readytoshare.org.
Check out the winning videos from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain's moving image contest for wonderfully creative answers. My personal favorite: "Stealing Home."
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