/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2013-05-15T15:17:05-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/05/15/compulsive_looking_and_lack_of_copyrights_at_museums.php Museums are somewhat infamous for trying to stop people taking pictures of famous paintings on display. Some museums forbid flash photography with the argument that thousands of flashes would inevitably damage works that are often carefully hung with special lighting and protective surfaces. But, really, stopping me taking a snap of a modern steel sculpture? What's going on there? According to Carolina A. Miranda at ARTnews what's going on may be that the museum doesn't hold the copyrights or permissions that would allow people to make copies. This isn't such a big deal when people are taking holiday snaps for... 76419@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2013-05-15T15:17:05-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/05/09/patent_trolls_for_the_little_guy.php I've long held an ambiguous regard toward patent monetization entities (aka non-producing entities, aka patent trolls) here at Copyfight. It's clear that some NPEs are picking on small fry in an effort to generate some quick cash. But there's another side to the story. In today's CorporateCounsel Lisa Shuchman tells the story of a patent monetization entity - CopyTele Inc.- that is trying to help the little guy stand up against a deep-pockets potential infringer, in this case Microsoft. On the surface CopyTele looks like a typical NPE, asserting a couple of encryption-related patents against Skype, which Microsoft owns. CopyTele,... 76406@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2013-05-09T14:45:26-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/05/01/video_game_development_game_ironic_piracy.php According to gamesindustry industrial, Greenheart Games's experiment has gotten quite the response. The experiment was run with a game called "Game Dev Tycoon" which is about running your own development studio. On release day, Greenheart not only put up legitimate copies but a "cracked" version on a popular torrent site. Unfortunately for those who took the torrented free version over the for-pay legal version, the crack disguised a hidden logic bomb. Those who played the cracked version found that their in-game studios constantly went bankrupt due to piracy. People complained about it on various gaming boards and got a large... 76382@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2013-05-01T13:03:17-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/02/23/sony_will_not_block_used_games.php Despite some apparent language translation issues, Eurogamer is confidently reporting that the just-announced Sony PS4 - their next-generation game console - will not block people from playing used games. If you read my lengthy yard-sale post earlier this month, I discussed how the new consoles coming out - Microsoft are apparently debuting theirs at E3 - have been rumored to have functionality that would hamper the playing of used games. Sony, despite having been granted a recent patent in this area, appear not to be doing that. The money quote is: "[gamers] purchase physical form, they want to use it... 76233@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2013-02-23T08:57:29-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/01/14/pledgemusic_is_this_the_new_business_of_making_music.php It's certainly their motto. A musician acquaintance pointed me to this site, which is attempting to be musicians' platform of choice for promotion and production of sponsored content. The site has many similarities to Kickstarter and other crowdfunding efforts, but appears to be focused on a specific narrow slice of the business model: getting music and related content produced. The site works with artists to construct projects around a specific deliverable such as an EP, an album, or a concert film. Backers can sign up at various levels, and there are rewards associated with pledge levels. Unlike Kickstarter projects don't... 76135@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2013-01-14T09:12:29-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/01/14/pledgemusic_is_this_the_new_business_of_making_music.php It's certainly their motto. A musician acquaintance pointed me to this site, which is attempting to be musicians' platform of choice for promotion and production of sponsored content. The site has many similarities to Kickstarter and other crowdfunding efforts, but appears to be focused on a specific narrow slice of the business model: getting music and related content produced. The site works with artists to construct projects around a specific deliverable such as an EP, an album, or a concert film. Backers can sign up at various levels, and there are rewards associated with pledge levels. Unlike Kickstarter projects don't... 76135@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2013-01-14T09:12:29-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/10/23/hathitrust_copyright_and_electronic_library_media.php I wanted to take a separate blog entry to talk about HathiTrust. This is related to the previous entry about Google Books, in that the actual case in question was not a suit against Google itself, but was instead the case known as Authors Guild v. HathiTrust. HathiTrust is the online resource formed by several libraries to hold the digital editions of books created from Google's scanning. HathiTrust uses these scanned book copies in several ways, including allowing searches against them and providing the electronic sources to vision-impaired users who can't access the printed copies. HathiTrust does not pay anyone... 75956@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2012-10-23T13:04:01-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/10/19/myrvold_patents_tech_review_flubs.php MIT's magazine Tech Review generally does better than this, I promise. But in their story on Nathan Myhrvold's recent patent on DRM for 3D printing, they really got it wrong. Let's start with the facts: the patent (#8,286,236 in case you want to look it up) is for a copy-blocking system (DRM) for (some) files used by (some) 3D printers. It will no more "prevent 3-D printer piracy" (by which they mean the use of a 3D printer to create an object that might have IP protections) than any other DRM system has prevented copying. Which is to say, not... 75947@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2012-10-19T13:35:35-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/09/05/gaming_drm_piracy_and_the_price_of_working_in_pr.php The price of working in PR is that sometimes you have to sit there and get grilled for bad stuff your employers have done. Witness the shellacking that the gaming blog "Rock, Paper, Shotgun" handed to Ubisoft this week. To understand why this is A Big Deal, let me back up a couple steps. First, everyone agrees that piracy in gaming is a huge problem. Game publishers hate having their titles pirated - it's bad on all platforms but apparently worst on PCs. Pirated titles mean people just don't pay for games and people who didn't pay end up consuming... 75848@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2012-09-05T11:56:35-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/08/29/who_writes_your_documentary_films.php To be clear, I want to talk about documentary films, often released by major studios. "Real" real life, not reality TV or other obviously scripted stuff. A documentary film that claims to portray events from the real world may soon carry a 'writer' credit, begging the question "who wrote reality?" According to Tom Roston's piece for the NY Times last week, the idea of a documentary writer is being pushed by the Writer's Guild, a union for writers of film and television. The Guild's actions appear to be worrying some makers of documentaries, who are concerned that the appearance of... 75840@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2012-08-29T14:53:01-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/06/04/trade_publishers_have_virtue.php Or so says Cory Doctorow in his latest Publisher's Weekly column. As I noted in the earlier blog post about Scalzi's DRM-free Redshirts, one of the important things that needs to happen is simple communication between the creative side and the consumer side. Doctorow's post argues that trade publishers should be diving into that conversation with the news that 'Hey, we're good guys here!' The problem is that the face of corporate IP is the Cartel - the RIAA and the big music business, and Hollywood studios that do everything in their power to obscure how much money they make... 75684@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2012-06-04T12:00:36-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/06/04/john_scalzi_enters_the_tor_drmfree_waters_with_cautions.php Over on his Whatever blog, John Scalzi posted about "The DRM Thing and Redshirts". Redshirts is his latest novel, for which he's just embarked on the book tour and which has just gone out in e-book form. (Cover image shamelessly nicked from his site.) Although the Doherty imprints, including Tor books, are not scheduled to be DRM-free until the end of July Scalzi asked for his book to be DRM-free from now and so it is. Scalzi is quite active on the nets and pretty tech-savvy, so he understands that DRM itself isn't a barrier to anyone but the casual... 75683@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2012-06-04T10:24:41-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/05/31/legitmix_enters_beta_model_unchanged.php Last December I took a look at the artist alpha of Legitmix. The company (which appears to be in Ottawa) aims to change the way mixes and rights payments are handled. As things stand now, the person (usually DJ/producer) who produces a track that incorporates material from others is theoretically responsible for obtaining the licenses to all the source material. What Legitmix aims to do is shift that work to the end consumer. Instead of distributing a raw MP3 file of your mix, you'd distribute a Legitmix digital package that listeners would unpack and then obtain all the permissions for... 75675@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2012-05-31T15:33:27-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/05/24/google_extends_its_transparency_report_to_copyright.php Today Google posted on its blog an update to how it talks about transparency. For about two years it has published its Transparency Report in an effort to give people some insight on issues such as search availability, removal of content due to government requests, and even Google's own traffic analyses that indicate when IP packet flow to its servers may be under deliberate disruption. Such disruption can be prima facie evidence that a government or other entity is trying to prohibit people from reaching Google sites or searching Google content. The new news is that the Transparency Report will... 75660@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2012-05-24T15:04:36-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/05/21/drew_wilson_and_the_science_of_file_sharing.php We've been here before, but never so comprehensively: actual real science indicates that the Cartel's claims about both file sharing and the legal responses to it are bunk. Hokum. Bad science. Bad conclusions drawn from bad research that was slanted toward a foregone conclusion. What Drew Wilson over at ZeroPaid has done in this past month is lay out in painstaking extensive detail just exactly what's wrong with the Cartel's propaganda-masquerading-as-science. The link above takes you to his conclusion piece and from there you can link back to the individual stories. It's a lot of reading, particularly if you want... 75650@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Use 2012-05-21T11:53:40-05:00