/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2012-01-26T10:13:41-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/01/26/uspto_and_prior_art.php Tim O'Reilly pointed to this PDF from the US Patent and Trademark Office regarding Fair Use. It seems that various scientific and technical publishers are raising objections to the USPTO using their publications for prior-art searching. The PDF lays out the Office's position and policies around fair use. It's actually somewhat complicated but the document does a good job of describing things: In some cases, the Office has subscriptions and other forms of paid access. In others it's making use of public sources, or submissions by applicants. In some cases, the Office is providing copies of this material to applicants... 75406@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2012-01-26T10:13:41-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/08/why_is_anyone_even_vaguely_surprised_by_this_shit_anymore.php News flash: the government is incompetent. It is manipulated by ignorant selfish thugs from the RIAA into using extra-legal proceedings to shut down speech (blogs, in this case) that the Cartel doesn't like. I mean, seriously, we're in roughly the 12th or so year of the Copyright Wars and this is not even vaguely news. I should go back in the Copyfight archives and dig up my old postings like the first time the RIAA used the cops (L.A. at that time) or the first time I noted that the Cartel had taken over DOJ more or less wholesale. But... 75318@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2011-12-08T13:42:53-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/07/14/monkeying_with_copyright.php Having discovered how the porn industry is like the Cartel, we now visit the equally vital question of why a news organization would claim copyright in images taken by monkeys. No, I'm not making this up. I can't make up stuff this good. The real participants in this affair are the blog Techdirt, the award-winning nature photographer David Slater, and Caters News which claims to be the authorized syndicator for Mr. Slater's photographic work. However, the work in question here is a set of pictures that were taken by monkeys, who happened upon a camera that Slater had accidentally left... 75087@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2011-07-14T14:03:19-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/07/08/how_is_the_porn_industry_like_the_cartel.php This one is just too good to pass up. Answer: they share a 'business model' - sue your customers. The Palm Beach Post News reports that porn producers are mass-filing lawsuits against IP addresses. Does this sound familiar? Yeah, it's the same deal. Allegedly, computers at those IP addresses - 1,300 in two Florida counties alone and the EFF estimates as many as 150,000 nationwide - downloaded porn films. The question of whether the computers' owners or the people named in the lawsuits did that, or even knew it was being done, is left as an exercise for the courtroom.... 75083@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2011-07-08T12:02:28-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/05/26/nyse_claims_photo_violates_trademark_wtf.php Do pictures of stockbrokers on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange belong in a story about insider trading? If you're Talking Points Memo, yes. On the other hand, if you're NYSE, no. NYSE sent a letter to TPM claiming that the photograph accompanying that original TPM story violated NYSE Group's "Registered Trademarks." This is... um, hogwash I think is the polite term. First of all, a trademark isn't a copyright. To violate a trademark is to create confusion about the mark and anyone who thinks the TPM story was published or endorsed or paid for by NYSE... 75019@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2011-05-26T09:00:51-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/04/04/torrentfreak_reports_on_domainseizure_failures.php Back in February I put up a quick pointer to a TorrentFreak note that 84,000 domains had been shut down by mistake. Well, along with 84,000 mistakes the Feds also tried to seize the domain names of about 80 sites that were accused of sharing files or selling counterfeit goods. You'd think they could get it right 1 in 1000 times, no? Well, um, no. TorrentFreak's post-mortem on the shutdowns indicates that most were back on the net in a few minutes under new domain names. Sometimes it was a simple as changing a .com domain name to a .info... 74936@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2011-04-04T12:24:12-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/11/11/cartel_lawyers_no_longer_shocked_by_big_win.php Back in June of last year, the Cartel appeared to think that getting a huge jury award against Jammie Thomas (now Thomas-Rasset) wasn't necessarily a great thing. They were willing to take USD 25,000 in order to get Judge Michael Davis to vacate his judgment that the original award was "monstrous and shocking". So far Thomas-Rasset has refused all settlement offers (to my admitted surprise) and the case has yet to reach a higher court level where the overarching constitutional and precedential matters would be considered. The issues raised in 2009 are still hanging out there. Steven Musil reports for... 74755@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2010-11-11T12:09:18-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/11/09/now_thats_funny.php Remember how I said that the EFF weren't being sufficiently sarcastic in covering the Cartel's revelations about PVRs? Right, well, sometimes you do get good sarcastic commentary on the Web and today's helping is dished up by Cory over at boingboing. He savages Rupert Murdoch for being the antiquated fossil he still is, someone who not only fails to understand the modern interlocked Web-centric methods of information distribution, but also someone who fundamentally opposes the very notion of fair use and seems to think if he just hires enough of the right lawyers he can make it go away. OK,... 74129@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2009-11-09T10:45:45-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/10/07/dear_ralph_lauren_choose_your_targets_carefully.php Actually that probably should be addressed to Ralph Lauren's lawyers, but in theory they're acting on behalf of the company, so we get to mock R.L., Inc. The whole thing started with a photoshop disaster, reproduced here so you can see what we're talking about. The wholescale massacre of peoples' images for advertising purposes is well documented. You can go to YouTube and find a hundred videos showing Photoshop "makeovers" - one of the best is the "Dove evolution". But the gist is that anytime you see a model (almost always female) in a magazine, on a billboard, or any... 74088@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2009-10-07T08:47:05-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/06/21/a_win_too_far.php Almost everyone, including the Cartel's own lawyers, appears publicly shocked by the USD 2 million verdict returned against a Minnesota mother whose fight against the RIAA has been something of a rallying point in the war the labels have waged on their customers. The Jammie Thomas retrial was expected (at least by people on the reasonable side of the fence) to produce some kind of verdict that would indicate the general public's (as represented by the jury) disdain for asking someone to pay $222,000 for sharing 24 songs. To be fair, she probably wasn't the one who shared the songs,... 73943@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2009-06-21T05:54:49-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/05/29/not_satisfied_with_copying_policy_canadian_thinktank_copies_verbatim.php This kind of thing is too good not to snark about, so excuse me for a moment. According to Matt Hartley's story in Toronto's Globe And Mail online site, the Conference Board of Canada got caught plagiarizing. Why is this funny? Well, the reports (plural, three of them) that had to be withdrawn were supposed to be giving the Ottawa government advice on how to update Canadian copyright laws. So, yes, the Board copied its copyright reports. But wait, it gets better. Who did they copy from? Apparently, they copied from a Cartel lobby group, the International Intellectual Property Alliance.... 73904@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2009-05-29T14:54:48-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/09/04/google_backs_up_on_chrome_eula.php Well, that didn't take long. Google has admitted that putting Clause 11 into its EULA was a mistake. Frankly, it's a cut-and-paste error as I had guessed. As reported in a number of places (see, for example, CNET). Google has pulled the unnecessary language. It was never clear to me how Google planned to capture any of the customer's data from general use of Chrome in the first place. One thing that is pretty clear is that Google will store auto-suggest and search-box info, along with the originating IP address. I'm sure Google has its own business purposes for this,... 73529@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2008-09-04T09:16:11-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/09/03/google_chrome_and_copyright.php I'm filing this under "IP Abuse" because I'm starting to think Chrome, Google's new wonder-browser, is a tool for (potential) copyright abuse. I was first tipped to this by Edward Champion, who blogs under the title "Reluctant Habits." In a post dated September 3, he picks apart the Chrome EULA and does not like what he sees. In essence, Google has applied the same EULA that it uses for Gmail to everything you put into the Chrome browser. What, you never read the gmail EULA? You do realize it gives Google copyrights in your email, right? Yeah, it does. Anyway,... 73527@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2008-09-03T09:41:08-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/05/30/who_pays_mediadefender_to_disrupt_peer_to_peer_networks.php Could it be? Say it with me. That'd be... The Cartel. OK, so I'm not about to start a new career as a singer-songwriter. Which is probably good since I'd probably be foolish enough to give away my own recordings of my own performances for free and if I used BitTorrent for that then I could be the one getting DoSed. But that's in the hypothetical future. Here in the real present, it's a company called Revision 3. This company uses BitTorrent to distribute its own high-quality digital shows. This past weekend they were subjected to a SYN-flood attack that... 73343@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2008-05-30T14:38:15-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/02/15/as_the_cartel_turns.php 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... 73116@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2008-02-15T11:19:05-05:00