/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2013-01-31T10:54:05-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/01/31/nma_on_the_wto_dustup.php Who needs to wait for big Hollywood productions? Ying Ho of the humorous news animation outfit known in English as NMA wrote to let me know that they'd done their own take on Antigua and Barbuda's proposals for a copyright haven in the Caribbean, called of course "Pirates of the Caribbean". NMA - in their typical style - make light of the silliness of the situation. Most of their videos are news parodies that poke fun, but their clip also points out that the online gambling industry provided over 4000 jobs, a significant figure for two poor and tiny nations,... 76179@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2013-01-31T10:54:05-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/10/16/in_year_zero_copyright_will_be_funny.php Joel Rose at NPR did a profile on Rob Reid and his recent novel, "Year Zero". The book starts from the premise that aliens suck at making music and thus take their music from us. That's all well and good until someone decides that this is a massive galactic case of copyright theft, and hilarity ensues. Yeah, that had my eyebrows going up, too. However, Reid isn't writing this stuff from an outsider perspective. In past lives he's been an entrepreneur and had a hand in the founding of listen.com which eventually led to Rhapsody - an online music service... 75934@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2012-10-16T09:51:16-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/07/06/blogger_qa.php I've never done this before, but people ask me questions and it's rare that I answer them. I try to keep the blog about the news, not about me. Feel free to share your stories in the comments. Q: How do you buy music? A: I've refused to buy retail CDs since the Cartel went after Napster, long ago. I buy used CDs, sometimes. Often I buy new CDs from artists via their Web sites or at their shows. I buy through iTunes a fair bit, and rarely from other stores like Amazon or Beatport. Almost all the music I... 75745@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2012-07-06T12:07:31-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/06/21/pi_as_a_hand_dance_not_copyrighted.php With all the serious doom-and-gloom stuff of this month I felt we needed a bit of a humor break, so here's the delightful Vi Hart visually expressing her outrage at the silly notion someone would make a copyright claim for a song based on the first few digits of pi. One of my current hopes is that my younger son who, at age 8, thinks the Fibonacci Sequence is cool, grows up to be like Vi with a love of math and art and music and no hesitation about sharing it with the world.... 75056@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2011-06-21T13:19:38-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/04/07/fans_to_blame_for_tunes_for_tyrants.php In today's Doonesbury, Jimmy Thudpucker explains that it's all the fans' fault that the patron model has certain risks.... 74944@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2011-04-07T14:20:30-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/01/04/the_brads_on_why_drm_doesnt_work.php This cartoon appeared early last year but someone just sent me the link so I figured I'd pass it on in case someone else hadn't seen it. It's the user experience, stupid!... 74811@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-01-04T14:37:10-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/07/14/maybe_they_think_tenenbaum_will_cover_their_legal_bills.php Ray Beckerman of Recording Industry vs The People offers up a sarcastic handful of statistics in yesterday's blog post. Drawing together a bunch of numbers published by p2pnet, Beckerman points out that the RIAA has recovered about two cents for every dollar spent on lawyer fees to sue its customers. Actually the numbers are probably worse, but the point remains the same - whatever the Cartel thinks it's doing with its jihad against consumers, making money is not on the agenda. Unless you're a Cartell lawyer, I guess. (Aside: I apologize for misspelling Joel Tenenbaum's name in my Monday post.... 74583@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2010-07-14T10:44:33-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/03/22/ok_maybe_bottled_water_wasnt_such_a_great_analogy.php Periodically I've enjoyed pointing out that the Cartel, in attempting to sell a product (digital music) that is now available for free, faces much the same dilemma as the soda companies faced when they created the demand for bottled water. After all, most of us get essentially all the high-quality water we want for next to nothing, so why are we so hooked on paying thousands of times as much for the stuff in bottles? Well, the answer isn't particularly pretty for the bottled water people, either, as you can see at "The Story of Bottled Water." So for all... 74357@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2010-03-22T14:33:10-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/01/25/evil_librarians.php Eric Hellman writes a blog called "Go to Hellman". As you might expect from the name it's not always the most reverent or deferential of posting sites. Earlier this month, Hellman had some really choice words for the publishing part of the Cartel. You see, the publishers are starting to scare themselves again with the specter of "online book piracy," based on a study by Attributor, a company whose product I reviewed a couple years ago. As I noted, Attributor believes that its technology to track where copies go is superior to DRM technologies that attempt to prevent copies from... 74236@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2010-01-25T10:33:36-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/09/09/dilbert_has_a_new_line_of_business.php http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-09-09/. But... trademark? Everyone knows patents are more profit(eer)able.... 74054@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2009-09-09T05:50:08-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/07/21/phd_comics_on_scientific_ip.php 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... 73987@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2009-07-21T08:10:12-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/02/06/bale_out.php I'm certain there will be lots more of these and I promise not to blog them, but I did want to point to one amusing remix of Christian Bale's f-bomb laden tirade on the Terminator 4 set. This is what we do now - we parody it on YouTube. There are also apparently remixes of the remix, using the audio track with different visuals. I'll leave it to you to find the one with Legos.... 73727@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2009-02-06T09:48:31-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/02/04/uk_copyright_law_in_verse.php No, that's not "inverse" as in backwards. It's "rendered in verse" as in "poetically." Or at least, in rhyming couplets. Back in 2006, Yehuda Berlinger put up a rendition of US Copyright Law in verse form. Now he's added the UK's copyright law - though he does point out that there are upcoming changes, which may require him to re-verse.... 73719@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2009-02-04T14:22:08-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/12/17/support_the_eff.php EFF has an amusing song/cartoon riffing on the "12 Days". It's a fund-raiser, obviously, and it references several of the things Copyfight cares about. Learn more about this video and support EFF!... 73655@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2008-12-17T15:30:58-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/12/10/acdc_idiots.php Opinionated Canadian blogger Scott Feschuk has a column lampooning AC/DC for striking an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart. The aging Oz hard-rockers are hardly the first to strike this kind of deal. Given how influential big-box retailers have become in the dwindling world of physical platter sales it's not a big surprise that artists would go where the sales are. Still, the parody struck me as funny.... 73643@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Humor 2008-12-10T09:24:37-05:00