/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2010-10-21T12:50:22-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/10/21/woff_proposal_looks_set_to_solve_web_font_issues.php I've written before about the way that intellectual property and sharing concerns have held back the use of different typographic styles on the Web. It looks like the long impasse may be about to end. A Copyfight reader sent me a pointer to an entry in The Economist's Science & Technology section on a budding compromise in the font stalemate. The WOFF (Web Open Font Format) - a W3C working draft at this point - is a proposal mostly from Mozilla and a couple of font houses. The proposal avoids complicated cryptographic or other digital lock technology in favor of... 74726@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2010-10-21T12:50:22-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/07/20/ccc_promoting_its_rightslink_tool_upgrade.php The Copyright Clearance Center sent out a blurb announcing that they've upgraded their Rightslink tool, a set of software and services that is designed to help creators figure out what they want to license, to whom, and on what basis. There are a variety of tools that creators need if they're going to get their content out inside of a for-pay infrastructure. I'm not in the business of promoting one tool over another but I'm happy to list resources and encourage users to share their experiences.... 74586@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2010-07-20T10:57:34-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2010/05/27/typekit_bad_language_and_good_fonts.php Last August I wrote about Typekit, which was supposed to help us untangle some of the mess around licensing and use of fonts on the Web. Then a friendly reader pointed me to a story about Typekit on Readable Web. In the blog entry from March, Richard Fink points out some clear evidence that Typekit either isn't working as designed or is putting up misleading copyright information. Fink uses the word "fraud" but in the comment back and forth with Typekit's Jeffrey Veen, Fink admits that he may be guilty of unnecessary hyperbole. Veen's defense, that he (and Typekit) don't... 74498@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2010-05-27T09:35:18-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/08/19/typekit_promises_to_unravel_fontlinking_rights.php First, a bit of background - bear with me here. It's an ongoing frustration for Web designers to try and get the things that show up on peoples' screens to look like what the designer wants. I vividly remember going to visit a customer who complained that my product looked terrible on her screen and discovering that she had somehow jiggered her Web browser settings to map the colors I had chosen into some hideous chemical green and pink. For most of the history of the Web, designers have fought to take back control of the appearance of their product... 74028@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2009-08-19T09:20:54-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/08/11/source_linking_back_from_browser_copypaste.php I can't decide if this is cool, creepy, or both. Best if you do the experiment yourself to see what's on, so follow these steps: Go to http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205737/Man-killed-shards-glass-hurling-girlfriend-shop-window.html. In your browser (I've tried in Firefox and others report it works in IE, Chrome, and other desktop browsers) select a passage of text, say a paragraph, and "Copy" it. Bring up a text editor such as Notepad on a PC or similar (even works in Emacs) and Paste using whatever operation that editor uses for pasting text. Now if you're like me and my friends you see the text that you... 74011@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2009-08-11T15:42:15-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/03/18/reverse_image_search.php This is billed as pure tech, but its use in tracking material, possibly copyrighted material, are obvious: TinEye, a reverse-image search. The idea is that you upload a picture to it and it tells you where else on the Web it has seen that picture. One obvious use would be sourcing material - I have this picture, who might it have come from - and another would be finding people who are using your images. Imagine a widget that would let you feed a full Flickr stream or Picasa album to it, rather than trying to upload one image at... 73791@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2009-03-18T13:56:32-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/03/02/newspapers_are_laughably_expensive.php Amid the mourning for the death of yet another paper, an interesting bit of back-of-envelope math. First, though, the Post has it completely right - newspapers screwed the pooch and are killing themselves as a result. As good a paper as the Rocky Mountain News was - and by all accounts it was first class - it could not change the basic fact that people are no longer relying on newspapers for... well, "news." As the social concept of what it means to be up to date and informed changes, the medium has to change. Evolve or die. Which brings... 73763@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2009-03-02T13:36:50-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/09/23/burn_dvd_to_hard_drive.php I got a pointer to a forthcoming program from Real, to be called RealDVD, that is supposed to be the first legal way to rip DVDs to hard disk. It's kind of that, kind of not. Of course, we've had DVD rippers forever; the problem is that they're technically a no-no, since they tend to strip off the copy protection. The question of whether or not this is a legal backup copy of software you legally own is best left for another time. RealDVD leaves the copy controls in place by, effectively, locking your copy to the hard drive onto... 73549@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2008-09-23T12:46:08-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/06/18/the_21st_century_version_of_the_copyright_notice.php I had a nice chat last week with Mike O'Donnel of iCopyright about their new service for small and independent publishers. The company has a large for-pay service that is used by large publishers, including news wires, to track the digital progress of copyrighted materials and they're reusing some of that technical infrastructure for the new offering. O'Donnell noted that previous attempts to let individuals control how their intellectual property is used, particularly Creative Commons, lack a number of useful features. iCopyright is promoting itself as an alternative that is free to small-scale creators, and supported by advertising and partner... 73379@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2008-06-18T15:22:09-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/06/13/tracking_the_trackers.php The CS Department at University of Washington have released a report with this title reporting on an investigation of copyright enforcement as it currently exists on P2P networks. The report's site contains a summary of the report's findings, a downloadable PDF of the full report and an online FAQ describing their research methods and key findings. I haven't digested the full thing yet, but the three basic conclusions are stated pretty bluntly:Anyone can be framed for copyright infringement. The remote and automated generation of complaints shifts the burden significantly onto the accused to prove their innocence.In addition to malicious framing,... 73367@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2008-06-13T14:18:06-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/03/31/google_advanced_search_adds_licensing_info.php Riffing on the same theme as compfight, Google has added a feature to its advanced search that lets you find Web pages with explicit usage rights as a search parameter. The parameter lets you specify a few combinations of free to use, share, and modify. Unfortunately, the feature is buried by default under a collapsed page region. It's one click to expand, but I wonder if many people - even advanced search users - will go that extra step. Most searchers I know are in a hurry to get results. The search form provides a link to an explanation of... 73190@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2008-03-31T05:49:28-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2008/02/14/like_youtube_for_business_documents.php Earlier this week I had a chat with Jason Nazar of docstoc.com. The company had contacted me a while back suggesting the chat. They're a beta-level software startup dealing with professional, legal, and business documents. I was initially dubious that there was a Copyfight angle to this story. As Nazar himself pointed out, there's not a lot of illicit traffic on the P2P nets in business content, particularly when compared to the volume of entertainment-oriented content (music and movies primarily). That said, docstoc does have some points of interest for this blog, particularly in thinking about new business models that... 73114@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2008-02-14T16:23:16-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/12/21/cartel_makes_pc_world_bad_behavior_list_again.php Yardena Arar has a piece in PC World this month titled "The 7 Most Annoying Developments in Software". The premise is that software has developed into a serious annoyance, which isn't far wrong in my experience. The story begins with "The Antipiracy Inquisition" and moves from there to DRM. Unfortunately Arar doesn't go much beyond the surface annoyances to talk about why these developments have happened and how they became so widespread. The result is an amusing and light piece, quickly read and probably just as quickly forgotten.... 72968@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2007-12-21T14:45:51-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/09/19/attributor_fair_use_and_the_opposite_of_drm.php Last Friday I had a phone conversation with Rich Pearson and Matt Robinson of Attributor, a Redwood City, CA, startup. The nominal reason for the call was that Attributor announced this week that it has signed up Reuters as its second big customer using the company's content-tracking platform. In actuality, we had a wide-ranging conversation on the company's products and philosophy. People who've been reading me for a while will know that I feel we desperately need new business models - the old dinosaurs aren't going to survive. Attributor wants to make the case that they provide a technology platform... 72690@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2007-09-19T14:16:16-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2006/06/20/disabling_digital_cameras.php Georgia Tech is touting some new research for its film industry sponsors on ways to disable digital cameras in small spaces, such as movie theaters. I'm reasonably confident that by the time this makes it into commercial production the camera technology will have gotten smarter and pirates will be able to hide their cameras from simple scanners. However, more troubling is this as evidence that the Cartel hasn't swayed from its "we are the law" mentality. Remember, these are the guys who tried to get their Congressional sock puppets to pass a law allowing them to break into and cripple... 60605@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Tech 2006-06-20T15:45:37-05:00