/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2009-11-09T10:45:45-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 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 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/12/17/riaa_continues_to_backtrack_on_2005_statements.php Back in 2005, the Cartel argued in front of the Supreme Court admitting in part that it was legal to rip one's own CDs. They've regretted that ever since and have hemmed and hawed about it. Now they're in open (court) denial, claiming precisely the opposite. Props to PATNEWS's Greg Aharonian who pointed to an online PDF of an RIAA brief in Atlantic Recording Corporation et al v Pamela and Jeffrey Howell. If you scroll forward to page 15 of the brief you find language asserting that the Howells converted their own recordings (presumably CDs) to MP3 format and in... 72951@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2007-12-17T12:07:20-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/09/04/sfwa_shoots_dmca_shotgun_hits_self_and_innocents_too.php Cory Doctorow (himself an SF author), reports in his boingboing blog that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) has begun to send takedown notices to sites that post unauthorized copies of SFnal works. Problem 1: SFWA isn't the copyright holder in any of these works. It's a trade union of writers and sometimes acts on their behalf. It's not clear to me that SFWA has DMCA takedown rights here. Problem 2: SFWA's list was hastily constructed and either not checked or poorly checked. As a result the target site, scribd.com, was told to take down a much... 72662@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2007-09-04T15:20:34-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/08/09/dont_mess_with_my_negotiations_pretty_please.php Remember when I commented that I expected to hear from Markey on the SoundExchange-Webcaster royalty negotiations? Well, he doesn't appear to be issuing official statements right now, but the two senators who introduced the Internet Radio Equality Act have had some words on the matter. Specifically, Senators Brownback and Wyden said[W]e will not allow the minimum fee issue to be used to force an agreement that mandates DRM technology and fails to respect the established principles of fair use and consumer rights. Laudable sentiments, though it's unclear to me how exactly they plan to not allow such a thing. In... 72573@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2007-08-09T13:27:20-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/07/19/when_is_a_reprieve_not_a_reprieve.php If you've noticed that non-commercial Web radio in fact did not die last Sunday you might be thinking "Ah, a reprieve." Well, yes and no. It is true that SoundExchange, the entity charged with collecting the Cartel's blood money, did offer better rates at the last minute. As Eric Bangeman wrote, it appeared that having Congressman Markey call the parties to sit down at a roundtable had some effect. Naively one might think that SoundExchange would rather deal than fight, particularly not wanting to get into a public fight over Congress's proposed "Internet Radio Equality Act." Those who got the... 72504@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2007-07-19T15:07:07-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/06/22/clear_channel_are_scumsucking_bast_oh_you_knew_that.php A couple years back I wrote a few bits about the rampant payola going on in corporate radio. Clear Channel was a major party in the scam and eventually pled out. As part of the deal they are supposed to give free air time to independent artists, presumably to make up for these artists being shut out by the pay-for-play scheme. However, "free" is a word that Clear Channel doesn't seem to understand. In order for artists to get their submitted MP3s into consideration, they have to sign away all rights to the track. To Clear Channel. Forever. According to... 72438@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2007-06-22T09:05:53-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/06/15/vikings_reindeer_aurora_borealis_and_cute_blond_girls.php Also, lax copyright laws, laissez-faire law enforcement and LOTS of bandwidth. Anyone? "What is Stockholm?" Correct! Once upon a time, the Cartel made a big noise and destroyed Napster (1.0). I pointed out then that people shared music before Napster and would do so long after it shut down. Points to me for stating the obvious. Now Andy Greenberg is trying to state the same obvious truth in respect to the sharing of movies and other digital media. His story for Forbes highlights the boasts of BitTorrent repository ThePirateBay.org, which trumpets the many benefits of being hosted in a non-US... 72406@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2007-06-15T13:08:10-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/05/15/this_is_almost_funny.php I can't tell what's stupider or more boring: Microsoft's patent saber-rattling or AG Gonzales putting out an joke of a bill proposing a crime of "attempted piracy". Microsoft is clearly conducting another of its FUD campaigns and the fact that they've gotten some name companies to go along just makes it more depressing. Don't get me wrong, I'm reasonably sure that there's a violation or twelve in open-source projects. With the state of software patents today you pretty much can't write any program without violating someone's patent on something. But as usual MSFT is blowing it out of proportion and... 72307@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2007-05-15T15:35:19-05:00