/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2012-02-07T17:27:31-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/02/07/cuckoos_nest.php (sorry I couldn't resist that one). Cuckoos, you may know, sometimes lay their eggs in other birds' nests. Now industrial giant Honeywell is accusing 2011 start-up darling Nest Labs of having laid a virtual cuckoo's egg by producing a product that violates at least half a dozen Honeywell patents and may infringe on other companies' designs as well. Nest Labs got a lot of publicity for its release last October of a "learning" thermostat - a digital device that uses a number of techniques to regulate your home's heating/cooling use in more intelligent ways, saving you on energy costs. Nest... 75439@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2012-02-07T17:27:31-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/01/26/apples_evil_sabotage.php Right, I did promise (at least if you're reading me on Google+) another update on the Apple vs e-books situation. Last week ZDNet published a couple of... shall we say... strongly worded columns on Apple's behavior with its iBooks. The columns, by Ed Bott, are titled respectively "Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement" and "How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books." Gotta love a guy who doesn't mince words. What Bott and lots of other less-vitriolic writers are up in arms about is Apple's iBooks 2.0. I mentioned this little gem a couple days ago with... 75408@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2012-01-26T15:50:21-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/01/24/apple_jumps_into_ibooks_with_hobnailed_boots.php What started with gushing fanboy squee about Apple's iBooks Textbooks and iBooks Author has devolved into crankiness and upset as people realized what was in the fine print. Seems that if we're reading the iBooks EULA correctly then if you make something with it you're agreeing to sell that created work through the iBooks store only. You can still give it away anywhere, except of course iBooks only produces content in a proprietary format readable only on Apple devices. And of course selling through Apple's store means forking over 30% to Apple for the privilege of doing so. Never mind... 75398@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2012-01-24T12:41:43-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/01/12/joe_konrath_claims_usd_100000_ebook_profits_in_jan.php Joe Konrath writes the blog "A Newbie's Guide to Publishing". In yesterday's post, called simply "$100,000", he lays out his facts and figures to support his hundred K in profits (not sales, mind, you that's profits) on his self-published e-books on the Kindle platform. He is, naturally, happy to crow about how much he's making on books that major publishers rejected but the deeper points here are what I want to dig into. For one thing, Konrath is actively managing his sales, with data gathering and experimentation around good pricepoints. For himself the sweet spot seems to be about USD... 75376@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2012-01-12T14:10:20-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/30/its_not_just_ebooks_movie_prices_suck_too.php Roger Ebert has a column up this week with his top 6 reasons why movie theater attendance is plummeting. Hint: piracy isn't on the list, though the ease of getting movies in the home via services like Netflix is. No, once again it's the same deadly duo: high prices and bad customer experience. Prices on both tickets and concessions are sky-high and people seem not willing to pay for it, given that they're likely to have to sit in a crappy theater with an aisle down the middle, deal with obnoxious teenagers and compulsive texters, and have their in-theater options... 75355@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2011-12-30T14:03:19-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/29/still_more_on_ebook_prices_and_complaining.php After what seemed to be a more-or-less throwaway remark about how he was tired of readers griping about e-book prices, Scalzi this week devoted a fairly lengthy column entry to the topic. The immediate focus of his ire is a blogger posting under the name of Janet on dearauthor.com, and in particular her entry called "The Entitled Reader". Janet, in her turn, seems to be peeved at being called 'entitled' and to feel that readers - particularly readers in the SF/F genre - have relationships with the authors through which they express their feelings about the authors' works including the... 75354@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2011-12-29T12:41:44-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/28/gillmor_on_the_ebook_pricing_swindle.php Oh look it's been 20 whole days since I wrote something about the ungodly mess that is e-books this year. TL;DR version: nothing has changed, physical books are still better, you can go now. The source for this rant is +Dan Gillmor's column in the UK Guardian titled "The great ebook price swindle". In it, Gillmor points out that greed and arrogance (he forgets to mention utter terror) have led publishers to adopt a collusive (and possibly illegal) agency pricing model. The result being that e-book prices jumped 30-50%. The result is, as Gillmor says, "a terrible deal for the... 75351@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2011-12-28T14:24:19-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/22/will_drugs_ip_ever_change_not_if_johnson_johnson_gets_a_say.php Last time I touched on this issue I noted that we still needed alternative strategies to manage IP around life-saving medicines. Doctors Without Borders/MSF has been working on a plan to try and break the logjam, called a "patent pool". The concept of the patent pool is simple: rather than asking any one pharma company to forego its profits while its competitors don't play along, the pool asks all companies with patents on relevant medicines to contribute their patents to licensing arrangements in the pool. The pool's managers license the patents as a portfolio, and distribute any returns to the... 75345@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2011-12-22T15:05:54-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/19/can_legitmix_remix_copyright_hint_no.php Audioporn Central, my current favorite new-music site, pointed to a new music business site just entering "artist alpha" with the goal of legitimizing sales of DJ sets, remixes, and the like called "Legitmix". The theory is interesting but I can't see it working on a practical scale. Still, let's take a look. The idea is that the creator who uses sampled music (DJ, producer, cover artist, etc) would not sell or distribute their work directly. Instead they'd go to Legitmix and upload their work, then identify the samples used in it. Legitmix encodes the work into a distributable file that... 75338@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2011-12-19T16:58:11-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/19/bt_jumps_on_the_sue_google_bandwagon.php FOSSPatents is rapidly becoming my go-to site for everything related to European patent shitstorms. Yesterday's blog entry recounts how British Telecom is suing Google over, approximately, everything. BT alleges that Google's services - everything from Maps to Google+ - violate half a dozen patents that BT owns. FOSS includes a scribd link to the complaint and pointers to the six patents in the USPTO system. The patents themselves are old, and dense, and very broadly written. My extremely un-lawyerly opinion is that Google is indeed violating the patents as written, which means that either they pay up or they get... 75337@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2011-12-19T14:20:42-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/15/mediashift_just_slightly_misses_the_mark.php Jenny Shank at Mediashift has a column that starts off with the interesting title "The Trouble With Gifting an E-Book". She's right: e-books make much worse presents than regular books, but sadly she misses many of the important reasons why. Shank's column is a lovely bit of nostalgia about the personalization of gifts and the feel of the physical book. All true and good, but really kind of missing the mark. Let me tell you why e-books are lousy gifts: Books are one-size-fits-all. Unless your reader needs a large-print or Braille edition, a book is a book is a book.... 75333@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2011-12-15T10:21:14-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/06/zdnet_apple_is_in_worldwide_patent_war.php In last week's long ramble I wrote that nobody seemed to be saying clear things on what Apple was up to. Ask and ye shall receive, I guess. Today +Dan Gillmor pointed to a "Patent Absurdity" column by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on ZDNet. Vaughan-Nicols is pretty damned clear: Apple is engaged in a world-wide war on Samsung and Android in an attempt to drive them out of, and monopolize, the tablet space. There are at least nineteen related lawsuits happening in nine different countries as Apple tries to use its patent portfolio to bludgeon competition out of the marketplace. No... 75314@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2011-12-06T16:22:26-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/01/another_problem_with_paywalls_and_drm.php The canonical discussion of access-control mechanisms such as paywalls and DRM is that people ought to pay for stuff. That's not a wholly ridiculous idea; I've repeatedly asserted that creative people ought to get paid for what they do. The problem? How do you know who has and who has not paid, particularly when you present your content in multiple ways on multiple platforms? This was brought to my attention by a column written by usability expert Jakob Neilsen. Neilsen critiques the Wall Street Journal's iPhone app for its confusing user interface. In particular, the app appears to be asking... 75303@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2011-12-01T18:27:27-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/11/23/you_didnt_think_you_owned_that_ebook_right.php Over at Boingboing, Cory has a post up about the latest round of e-book land-grabbing in this case a dispute between Penguin and Amazon about terms related to sale and lending of e-books. The two companies are spatting and, as usual, it's the end readers (in this case, mostly library patrons) who are getting shafted. You can follow the Boingboing post and its link to the ALA site for the latest sand-throwing childishness. I thought it was ironic to read this Boingboing post right after I read a comment here from reader Dan T on yesterday's item, where he points... 75291@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2011-11-23T10:46:27-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/11/21/two_new_fights_in_online_music.php I've been somewhat deliberately avoiding writing about online music of late because it's all still depressing me. Still, I wanted to note in passing two stories that aren't yet formally connected but soon may be. First, there's a breezy guide from Dan Kantor on Gigaom on how to buy music now. As I noted some time ago, the ability to stream music to wherever you are from 'cloud' music services is taking over from the purchase of downloadable tracks, just as those downloads took over from the purchase of plastic platters. Kantor's guide focuses on issues such as format, chiding... 75287@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2011-11-21T19:00:06-05:00