/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2010-01-27T10:08:33-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/01/27/banksy_to_debut_film_at_sundance.php Copyfight's favorite UK prankster, Banksy, is set to debut his "street art disaster movie" at Sundance. Supposedly it will show Banksy and other graffiti artists at work but it's not clear if his identity will be revealed.... 74242@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2010-01-27T10:08:33-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/10/16/in_their_own_words.php 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... 74099@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2009-10-16T08:37:31-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/08/17/the_struggle_to_be_noticed.php 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... 74020@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2009-08-17T11:53:09-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/01/12/clay_shirky_predicts_media_for_2009.php Shirkey has a few specifics and a few generalities in his "Year Ahead in the Media" piece on guardian.co.uk. Nothing hugely surprising - more newspapers will stop printing, magazines (specifically specialty publications) belong online, DRM for television shows is a disaster, and print-on-demand for books will flourish. Check back in 12 months and see how right he was.... 73683@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2009-01-12T10:38:48-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/12/15/teach_your_kids_to_break_the_dmca.php Neil Gaiman pointed to Gever Tulley's 2007 TED talk on "5 dangerous things you should let your kids do". As a parent who wrestles almost every day with what I should and should not let my kids do I found the concept interesting. And there, near the end of the talk, Tulley just flat out says "teach your kids to break the DMCA". Because it's a law that attempts to limit how we can interact with the things that we own. True, that. Unfortunately, TED talks are highly compressed presentations so Tulley doesn't go into any sort of detail, nor... 73650@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2008-12-15T11:22:27-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/06/23/the_war_on_photography.php Bruce Schneier has an update on his article for the Guardian describing the "movie plot" efforts to link public photography and anti-terrorist work. The gist is that there is no credible evidence linking public photography - even of public buildings, infrastructure, etc - to terrorist acts. Therefore, acting against photographers is not increasing security - it's just making people feel good and wasting resources. His blog entry pulls out all the embedded URLs from the article and includes four links to discussions of photographers rights. Bookmark this one: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0806.html#1... 73388@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2008-06-23T08:50:43-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/05/05/help_cory_help_others.php 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... 73278@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2008-05-05T10:36:04-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/04/25/gaiman_final_thoughts_and_mcfarlane.php 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... 73257@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2008-04-25T12:45:45-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/04/22/fair_use_one_authors_view.php 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... 73247@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2008-04-22T10:09:18-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/03/26/update_on_the_gaiman_experiment.php 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... 73185@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2008-03-26T09:58:22-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/03/25/sharing_part_of_the_power_of_everybody.php 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.... 73182@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2008-03-25T12:50:49-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/02/29/go_get_your_free_book.php 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... 73132@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2008-02-29T16:39:51-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/02/11/its_more_complicated_and_more_interesting.php 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,... 73105@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2008-02-11T13:27:38-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/12/28/the_smile_of_success.php Neil Gaiman's blog today contained this exchange:Question: I wonder how you feel about both Beowulf & Stardust being among the top 10 most P2P traded movies of the year? Gaiman: I'm simply glad that they're popular. [...] Because mostly the solution to piracy seems to be providing the pirated thing yourself.... 72973@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2007-12-28T13:54:13-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/12/05/as_the_troll_turns.php Or should that be "weasel"? Anyway, John Bringardner has a fascinating piece up this week on law.com on Ray Niro. If that name is at all familiar to you it may be because the term "patent troll" was initially coined to describe the activities of Niro and his firm. So where is our hero today? Bringardner uses the polite phrase "controversial situations" - I call it a soap opera. In episode 1, Niro won a big judgement for Philip Jackson against Glenayre Electronics Inc. on a patent infringement case. However, the judgement was reduced by more than 75% on appeal,... 72917@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Interesting People 2007-12-05T10:52:54-05:00