folder_open iconRIAA Not Sharing Settlement Money With Artists

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/62
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) February 2008

“Various artists are considering lawsuits in order to press for their share of the estimated hundreds of millions of dollars the RIAA has obtained from settlements with services such as Bolt, KaZaA, and Napster. According to TorrentFreak’s report on the potential action, there may not even be much left to pay out after monstrous legal fees are taken care of. The comments from the labels all claim that the money is on its way, and is simply taking longer due to difficulties dividing it all up.”

Source: Slashdot 

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folder_open iconProposed Bill in Tennessee Penalizes Schools for Allowing Piracy

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/61
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) February 2008

An anonymous reader brings us an Ars Technica report about a proposed bill in Tennessee which would require state-funded universities to enforce anti-piracy standards. The universities would be forced to “track down and stop infringing activity” or risk losing their funding. The U.S. Congress requested last year that certain universities do this voluntarily. Quoting: “Efforts taken by universities thus far to deter and prevent piracy have had mixed results. The University of Utah, for instance, claims that it has reduced MPAA and RIAA complaints by 90 percent and saved $1.2 million in bandwidth costs by instituting anti-piracy filtering mechanisms. However, the school revealed that their filtering system hasn’t been able to stop encrypted P2P traffic and noted that students will find ways to circumvent any system. The end result, some say, will be a costly arms race as students perpetually work to circumvent anti-piracy systems put in place by universities.”

Source: Slashdot 

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folder_open iconUniversity of San Francisco Law Clinic Joins Fight Against RIAA

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/60
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) February 2008

“The RIAA’s litigation campaign has met resistance from the academic community before, but now it’s been taken to a whole new level: the defense of RIAA victims who are not part of the college community. First the University of Oregon lashed out on behalf of its students, then it was the University of Maine’s Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic on behalf of its undergrads. Now, the University of San Francisco School of Law has taken the fight a giant step further. Its Intellectual Property Law Clinic’s attorneys-in-training, working under the supervision of law professors, are going to bat against the RIAA by helping outside lawyers to defend their clients, pro bono. They reached out 3000 miles to get involved in Elektra v. Torres and Maverick v. Chowdhury, two cases going on in Brooklyn, NY, against non-college defendants. Two of the law students in the USF’s legal program assisted in the research and preparation of briefs in these cases, opposing the RIAA’s motion to dismiss the defendants’ counterclaims. Thousands of honor students throughout United States law schools, most of them digital natives who actually understand the legal fallacies and technological missteps the RIAA is taking, and who can’t wait to expose them, make a pretty good resource for the poor and middle class people trying to defend these cases.”

Source: Slashdot 

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folder_open iconTime To Abolish Software Patents?

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/59
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) February 2008

“Has the time come to abolish software patents? Fortune columnist Roger Parloff reports on a new campaign called End Software Patents, which he views as ‘attempting to ride a wave of corporate and judicial disenchantment with aspects of the current patent system.’ Ryan Paul of Ars Technica writes that the purpose of the campaign is to ‘educate the public and encourage grass-roots patent reform activism in order to promote effective legislative solutions to the software patent problem.’ The campaign site is informative and targets many types of readers, and it includes a scholarship contest with a top prize of $10,000.00. We’ve recently discussed the potential legal re-examination of software patents.”

Source: Slashdot 

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folder_open iconControl At Any Cost: Copyright vs Christian Rock

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/copyright_vs_christian_rock
Posted by cmpilato | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) February 2008

Reader C. Michael Pilato sent us this story...

I've known about the terms "copyright" and "trademark" for as long as I've been able to read cereal boxes at the breakfast table. But I didn't became aware of copyright and the surrounding issues until I was in college. Sadly, our introduction wasn't all handshakes and smiles.

I play the guitar. I started teaching myself how to do this in high school, when my primary taste in music was so-called Christian rock. I carried my interest in the guitar with me into college at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where I developed a second love affair – with the Internet.

At some point early in my college days, someone introduced me to OLGA, the Online Guitar Archive. OLGA had the straightforward goal of providing a single location where guitarists of all shapes and sizes could download and contribute plaintext files that described how to play particular pieces of classical or popular music on the guitar. I gathered while traipsing around through newsgroups and such that OLGA was pretty popular with amateur guitarists like myself. There was only one small problem with OLGA from my perspective – it didn't have much music from the bands I listened to. So, I decided to dedicate a portion of the web-accessible disk space allotted to me by UNCC to host a site like OLGA, but dedicated to contemporary Christian music (CCM). And with just a handful of transcriptions I'd done myself (and also submitted to OLGA for inclusion there), and some severely lacking website design skills, I began the CCM Guitar Music Archives.

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folder_open iconThe Semantics of File Sharing

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/57
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) February 2008

“The LA Times has published an opinion article about the legal semantics and analogies of file sharing. The article includes arguments from those who believe file sharing is theft and those who strongly disagree. As it points out, the common analogies to theft are often incomplete or inaccurate. The author states, “balancing the interests of content creators against the public’s … is a much more complicated task than erecting a legal barrier to five-fingered discounts.” He recognizes that it is not a trivial concept, and that the clamoring from both camps about definitions and moral boundaries will dictate how businesses and users function in the future.”

Some comments from others:

  • I break into your house and nick your Transformers DVD, at worst I’d probably go down for 30 days, unless I’m haibitual. Small fine probably. The charge will be breaking and entering, theft etc… I download Transformers from you instead, we BOTH face tens of thousands of dollars in fines, and many years in jail.
  • One of the very goods point TFA makes is that this argument from the industry associations is not helping them because it’s so clearly false. It really is a sophism, and by persisting with it they are effectively saying that either they think we are idiots or they are idiots. Either way the argument ultimately hurts their position.
  • Any time you find weasel words and bad analogies going unchecked, follow the money trail. This isn’t about artist’s rights. If anyone gave a crap about that there’d be an uproar about unfair record contracts and middle men getting all the money.
  • This article gives a surprisingly nuanced and fair overview of the issues at hand. We’ve been over these things a million times on Slashdot, of course. Still, it’s encouraging to see the greater public getting their heads around what really is a complex issue.

Source: LA Times - The Semantics of File Sharing
Source: Slashdot

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folder_open iconCourts May Revisit Software Patents

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/56
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) February 2008

“It looks like the courts may finally be gearing up to overturn the ruling that opened the floodgates for both software and business model patents. It’s been nearly ten years since the US courts decided that business methods were patentable and that most software could be patentable — and we’ve all seen what’s happened since then. With all the efforts to fix the patent system lately, it appears that the court that originally made that decision may be regretting it, and has agreed to hear a new case that could overturn that ruling and restore some sanity to the patent system.”

Source: Slashdot 

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folder_open iconPresenting at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing Conference

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/tools_of_change_2008
Posted by kfogel | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) February 2008

I'll be giving a talk at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York City next week: Beyond Numbers: Gatekeeper Effects and Just-in-Time Publishing, on Tuesday, February 12th, at 2pm; conference details here. The talk is on the commercial potential of on-demand publishing of freely-licensed material, even as a storefront business model, and how it could mean a richer and more participatory experience for readers, authors, and booksellers.

Another way to get at it is with this question: what economic arrangements would help ensure that publishers spend their energies on publishing, instead of on today's contradictory combination of publishing and the prevention of publishing? The latter is what happens when publishers exercise copyright to prevent others from publishing certain things (such as fan fiction and other derivative works), and it's still considered a normal part of the business — like a hospital that somehow thinks its job is partly to cure its own patients and partly to make patients at other hospitals sicker.

The conference as a whole looks excellent. Naturally, there will be a lot of attendees who are, to say the least, not in complete agreement with QuestionCopyright.org's mission. But this conference attracts people in the publishing and bookselling industry who are looking for new ideas, and who fully understand that the old monopolies, enforced as they were by technological constraints, are going away. I'm looking forward to talking with them, and seeing many of the other presentations there.

I'll put up the slides to the presentation as soon as they're ready, and link to them from here.

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