/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2013-05-18T06:12:42-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/05/18/when_a_lawyer_isnt_enough_get_an_ip_lawyer.php Mike Masnick has a long but really excellent column up on a tempest in my local teapot. The short form is that Jonathan Monsarrat and his lawyer/business partner have caused quite a stir in my part of the world by filing a raft of copyright, defamation, and generic John Doe claims over a years'-old incident. I don't plan to write much about this because I know the named defendants and many of the John Does personally but I wanted to point out how Masnick's column illustrates something important: If you are involved in an IP-related legal action, get a lawyer... 76424@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2013-05-18T06:12:42-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/02/15/academic_disruption_and_the_difference_between_publication_and_prestige.php About a year ago a fair kerfuffle emerged as academic authors began to revolt openly against Elsevier, the biggest and probably greediest of the academic publishing dinosaurs. As I and others noted back then academic publishing is a gigantic scam in which free labor (peer reviewing) is used to filter works submitted for free by people (researchers) who got other people (usually taxpayers, corporations or endowments) to pay for the research in the first place. All this free and paid-for-by-others stuff is then turned into extremely expensive dead trees by publishers like Elsevier who charge so much that even very... 76217@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2013-02-15T16:08:26-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/07/10/penny_arcade_tries_to_kickstart_an_adfree_year.php Popular gaming/webcomic/blog/discussion site Penny Arcade has put up a Kickstarter trying to raise a quarter-million dollars. The initial money will go to pay the people who won't get ad revenue for their income, and the project has stretch goals that include converting the entire site to a Creative Commons license. Back in the old days, when P-A was just two people, they ran for a year on donations but as the enterprise grew so did its need for (paid) services such as bandwidth/hosting, and professional staff that have families to support. This is an intersection of two threads that I've... 75749@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2012-07-10T12:48:25-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/02/06/the_next_generation_joins_the_copyright_wars.php When the Cartel smashed Napster back in 1999 and I first started blogging about Copyfighting, Paul Tassi wasn't even in high school. Now he's writing for Forbes magazine and he has some very definite things to say about where we are and how he and, I think, his age group peers view this conflict. In an opinion piece titled "You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You" he lays out how he sees the Cartel's position in the immediately post-SOPA world. "Doomed" doesn't quite cover it, but "dumb" sure applies. His argument is one we've made here... 75434@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2012-02-06T15:35:13-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/02/01/if_i_cant_share_i_cant_dance.php John Battelle posted an interesting piece to his Searchblog this week describing a surprising personal experience and its relationship to sharing and culture. Battelle has had a hand in founding WIRED, Web 2.0 (the conference), and The Industry Standard, among other things. He's seen more than a few crowds in his day and has a good feel for them. The Searchblog focuses on search, but also on the intersection of media and culture. So it's a little bit of a surprise to find him writing there about his experiences at a Wilco concert, titled "What Happens When Sharing is Turned... 75422@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2012-02-01T13:01:00-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/01/31/tyler_neylon_on_what_elsevier_should_do.php Yesterday I published an entry around "The Cost of Knowledge" petition organized by Neylon. In the entry I noted that the petition did not call for specific action on Elsevier's part. Neylon very kindly responded in comments, but his item was caught by our overzealous spam filters. I've now published the comment and would like to draw attention both to it and to what it links to, which includes a link to a blog entry by Tim Gowers on what to do next. The blog post mostly seems to be "rah rah electronic journals in math" which is all well... 75417@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2012-01-31T10:34:08-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/01/30/the_peasants_are_revolting_scientifically.php There has long been an undercurrent of opposition to the publishing houses that control scientific and technical publication. Unlike other publications that at least nominally pay their contributors, these publishers profit off the free work of researchers, editors, and reviewers - none of whom get paid for their journal work - who are captive to a "publish or perish" ecosystem within academia. The journals are often quite expensive and are sold to libraries in high-priced bundles. Almost nobody is happy with this arrangement: authors complain that their work is taken and used for someone else's profit; libraries complain that these... 75413@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2012-01-30T07:06:42-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/12/29/2010_the_year_of_the_mashup_is_over.php If you had any doubt left that 2010 was the year that mash-ups went mainstream, take a quick peek at the latest set of bits posted to promote Tron:Legacy. The first item on the list is titled "DJ Breakdown" and it's a fan-created audio/video remix of Daft Punk's (themselves master remixers) soundtrack tune "Derezzed". The war over ownership has moved to a new stage - creation becomes not just product but source material. In 2011 you will see more companies moving to co-opt, own, and control the remixers and the remix processes - even the Cartel will have to get... 74806@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2010-12-29T09:40:34-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/06/30/dizzee_rascal_and_the_live_remix.php If you're bored by my theme this year of trying to walk the border between remix culture and the copyright wars you can skip this entry, too. There was a video (now sadly removed by a copyright violation notice from the BBC) that showed Dizzee Rascal joined by Florence of Florence and the Machine live on stage at the Glastonbury Festival that just concluded. Musicians join each other on stage all the time - nothing new here, just going to cover one of their songs with the other artist guesting in, right? No, sorry. That's not remix culture. Instead what... 74560@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2010-06-30T12:41:07-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/06/09/where_is_the_copyright_war_in_gleeland.php Guest blogger Christina Mulligan has a brilliant post up at Balkinization on the popular TV show "Glee" and copyfight issues. She calls copyright "The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club" and she's absolutely right. The show's cast commit copyright violation after copyright violation and yet the topic isn't part of the show - the word isn't even uttered. As I've noted before, this is the generational change we've come to. The kids in Glee's high school reproduce, co-opt, adapt, remix, and produce derivative works. In their fantasy world they get to upload stuff to YouTube and become viral... 74517@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2010-06-09T15:13:40-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/02/01/mashup_as_new_music.php 74257@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2010-02-01T13:26:52-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/01/14/mashups_go_mainstream_cartel_notices.php It's easy to say that mash-ups have been around forever. For at least the last 15 years popular club dance music has featured DJs who use various technologies such as turntables, mixers, and effects boxes to produce sounds using two or more original recordings. Like many "underground" pop phenomena, the mash-up has escaped its original scene and been incorporated into everything from television shows to console games. Lately, even such staid journalistic entities as the Wall Street Journal have taken notice of mash-ups. With popularity comes vindication, and a sense that people finally get what you've been doing all along.... 74220@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2010-01-14T14:35:47-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/01/14/we_interrupt_your_copyright_wars_for_a_moment.php I'm sure all of my readers have been reading plenty about the disaster in Haiti. If you're in a position to make some kind of donation to help out, please do so. Every relief expert I've heard talking in the past few days says there is a desperate need for simple cash, which can be used by organizations that already have infrastructure in place to get the most needed supplies to the people who are in the direst need in the shortest amount of time. My personal choice for donations is MSF/Doctors without Borders. But there are a lot of... 74218@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2010-01-14T10:57:50-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/01/11/why_music_sounds_worse.php At the end of last year, NPR did a series reviewing some interesting developments in the music field during the past decade; as part of that series they did a piece on "The Loudness Wars". The story talks a little about MP3 compression, which I assume most Copyfight readers understand, and its impact on audio quality. But most of the piece is about how dynamic compression has been used to make everything more uniformly loud. Christopher Clark's infographic accompanying the story illustrates this point in terms of peak sound levels over three decades of hit songs. And the NPR story... 74212@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2010-01-11T15:37:07-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/08/17/bmo_responds_to_eff.php 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... 74019@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Culture 2009-08-17T08:16:23-05:00