/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2009-11-19T14:17:50-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/11/19/veihld_assumptions.php It has been pointed out to me that I may have underestimated the impact of some of Lynn Viehl's hypotheticals in yesterday's Blink. Although the statement she posted is indeed a factual description of her income, the column surrounding it has several big "if"s in the middle that I glossed over on first read. First, she's confused about what qualifies someone for food stamps. Federal poverty guidelines appear to be based on adjusted gross income, not net income. Her AGI is well above poverty level even with just one book. Second, there's an assumption that this one-book-per-year gig is the... 74154@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2009-11-19T14:17:50-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/11/18/cognitive_dissonance_writ_large.php Nate Anderson provides extensive coverage of Michael Fricklas's talk at Yale Law. Fricklas is top legal attack dog for Viacom, and the headline on the ars piece highlights the lawyer's admission that the Cartel's jihad against its own customers was... well, a jihad, though he uses the word "terrorism" which is an equally emotionally laden term. Viacom, says Fricklas, isn't out to destroy fair use. Indeed, the company has won lawsuits and published Web sites based on fair use principles. It's just that, like the rest of the Cartel's philosophy, it wants your fair use to be on its terms... 74148@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2009-11-18T11:06:59-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/11/03/its_people_like_you_what_cause_unrest.php The shocking part about this whole thing is that now, ten years or more into the Copyright Wars, we still have such stupid people in positions of control. Take this week's example, Alan Wurtzel. This specimen of executivius fossilus cartellae works for NBC as, apparently, some president of some research of something. Whatever he's researching, it's certainly not television because Mr Wurtzel is shocked by the "completely counterintuitive" result that if you let people watch TV how and when they want.. surprise! they watch MORE of it. Give the consumer what he wants - clearly a new and revolutionary idea,... 74123@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2009-11-03T13:00:41-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/05/14/pay_to_play_may_come_to_broadcast_at_last.php No, I'm not talking about modern payola practices in radio again. I haven't bothered to keep up with it in the past few years but I'm convinced that it still goes on. Instead I've had it called to my attention that the US House of Representatives has taken a step forward in passing legislation that would force traditional radio broadcast stations to pay the Cartel for playing songs on the air. If you've been reading along for the last couple of years you know that cable and Internet radio stations have been required to pay (often very high) royalties for... 73873@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2009-05-14T14:58:21-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/05/14/real_dvd_monopolies_or_so_says_realnetworks.php Last year I made a passing note of a product called RealDVD that was supposed to let you burn a DVD onto a PC drive, with copy prevention software intact. I was sort of dubious that the product would amount to anything. Well, it appears to have amounted to (another) antitrust claim against the Cartel. This time, Real Networks is claiming that the MPAA and the studios - as well as the DVD Copy Control Association - have conspired to shut out Real and its product from any hope of copying DVDs. This is just the latest claim in what... 73872@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2009-05-14T14:49:00-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/04/20/copyfight_is_everywhere.php No, not this blog. We continue to trundle on in our small way. The lack of outraged emails telling me what an idiot I am is evidence that we're no longer much noticed. Copyfight issues, though. Those are everywhere. Two examples came across my radar this week. 1. Apparently, noted chef Emeril Lagasse made a stink on the show Good Morning America by claiming that one of its hosts "stole" a recipe of his. For, of all things, Dorito casserole. No, I'm not making this up. Seriously. As the blog post notes, you can't copyright a simple list of ingredients,... 73842@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2009-04-20T12:30:13-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/04/13/why_is_this_still_so_goddamn_hard.php Once upon a very long ago I wanted to hear a very specific song. I was at work, and was making a point to a coworker about how certain male and female voices went together. This duet was part of the point I was making, but I didn't have it at hand. Had someone said "Give me a buck and I'll give you a copy of that song you can play on your computer" I would have cheerfully handed over my USD and been pleased at the exchange. Instead, one of my coworkers pointed me at Napster, and sure enough... 73829@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2009-04-13T15:43:32-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/03/20/is_silence_the_price_of_patents.php I've written in this blog about the drug industry before, most emotionally in regards to the dangers to life posed by intellectual property restrictions in copying AIDS medication. I've also noted that drugs, which rely most heavily on patent protection, tend to lead to higher-quality patents than we see issued in the software field. Patents, unlike copyrights, have not had their term of exclusivity repeatedly extended. Thus, drug companies are continually faced with the expiration deadlines of patents on huge money-making drugs. Sometimes they resort to frivolous lawsuits to keep generics off the shelf. Other times, it seems, they just... 73798@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2009-03-20T14:11:45-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/01/07/copyright_owners_contributing_to_the_destruction_of_their_own_property.php Everyone else is writing about Apple's iTunes music store going DRM-free. Which is, I admit, an interesting move. It's also interesting that they're moving to a 3-tier pricing scheme, after about six years of the Cartel nagging them to break the 99-cents-for-anything barrier. But like I said, everyone's writing about that. So instead I want to blog about something else. I want to blog about how Roger Ebert, who makes no small amount of money himself from copyrighted works, ended up writingDon't the copyright owners realize they are contributing to the destruction of their property by removing it from knowledge?... 73675@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2009-01-07T15:56:40-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/12/31/are_resales_killing_publishing.php In a column published by the NY Times this week, David Streitfeld puts forth the proposition that the highly available, highly interconnected nature of the online book reselling market is killing book publishing. New-in-print brick-and-mortar retail has been under pressure at least since Amazon started its first Web site. The economics of book publishing have also been sagging since Reagan-era tax reforms that made carrying inventory unprofitable, and the costs of paper, ink, and transport keep going up. But I had not considered that the ease of finding a cheap used copy would have that big of an impact on... 73666@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2008-12-31T13:37:59-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/12/31/why_proprietary_locked_media_are_bad.php Microsoft gets the faceplant this time, but it could just as easily have been iPods: Gizmodo reports (as do many other sites) that Zune 30MB models have all started locking up and requiring a hard reset. This should be a clarion warning that using proprietary hardware or software (DRM) to restrict peoples' ability to manage their legally owned content is a bad plan. We are all at the mercy of whatever bugs and bad business plans lie behind these locks. (I'm as guilty as anyone else, sad to say. I use iTunes for storing and organizing the files ripped from... 73665@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2008-12-31T13:04:44-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/12/29/quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes.php I am what you might call an amateur comics geek. I don't subscribe to titles when they appear in issue form, but I do love my collections and graphic novels. And I'll defend to the death the proposition that Moore's Watchmen is hands-down the best graphic novel, ever. The story is complex, multi-referential, and darkly thought-provoking. It deconstructs not just comics themselves, but the entire notion of a superhero, while reflecting on the real world darkness of the near-apocalyptic parts of the mid-1980s. It's the kind of thing that innately resists the simplifications and streamlining that come with moving comics... 73661@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2008-12-29T11:46:04-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/12/19/riaa_declares_jihad_over_isps_to_slap_wrists_for_now.php Ars trumpeted the headline as "RIAAStock 08 Peace & Music" but I think that's a bit overblown. Still, it's a surprising turn of events. After years of grinding trench warfare and tens of thousands of lawsuits, the RIAA has worked out a deal with the major ISPs to have them do the enforcement, voluntarily. ISPs will get notices and, using their own internal data, map the target IP address to a user. That user then gets a "knock it off" warning from the ISP. Penalties are coming, make no mistake, but they're not here yet. CNET posted a copy of... 73658@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2008-12-19T14:40:37-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/12/05/rebellyon_amanda_palmer_and_roadrunner_records.php We're used to understanding (maybe more than the general public does) the degree to which the modern record-making system is a slave enterprise. The artists are indentured and their work is wholly owned by the labels. The labels can promote or not, arrange tours or not, front money or not, and generally have full and complete ownership of the created product. What we sometimes forget is that the labels also own the public image of that artist. Not just the "how do you look" but also "how do you dress on stage" and "how do you talk to the media... 73639@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2008-12-05T16:46:24-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/11/28/euros_put_cost_to_people_on_patent_lawsuits.php While researching the previous entry I came across this item: European regulators put out a report today accusing drug manufacturers of costing consumers EU 3 billion by using patent lawsuits to keep generics off the markets. Back in January, the EU Competition Commission staged raids on at least nine major drug companies, seeking evidence on restrictive business practices, and then another round of "surprise inspections" earlier this week. There will also be public hearings today. The report so far is preliminary, with a final draft due in mid-09, with language like this:a variety of tactics are used to delay or... 73630@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Markets and Monopolies 2008-11-28T10:50:05-05:00