Rob Reid’s Copyright Math at TED2012: the claimed effect of entertainment piracy to US economy is larger than value of most of our agricultural output.
April 13, 2010
The Reward For Re-Discovering Archive Collections
Documentarians spend most of their time digging up materials that few people know exist. They frequent basements and dark storage rooms, endure conversations with crazy collectors, and typically develop vitamin-d deficiency and light sensitivity in search of what they need. Their reward for finding the material? A bill from the original creators (the ones who [...]
March 31, 2010
DRM Evils: Now Comic Fodder
Brad Colbow does some good looking design and an occasional comic. He isn’t the first to address DRM woes in comic form, but his comic is one more public cry for rationality. And continuing that cry is this from an unnamed source, originally published at geekologie.com.
March 30, 2010
Scott Smitelli On Hacking YouTube’s Content ID DRM System
Scott Smitelli uploaded a total of 82 test videos and received 35 Content ID emails in the name of science: testing YouTube’s Content ID system. He reversed the audio, shifted the pitch, altered the time (without changing pitch), resampled (pitch and time), added noise, messed with the volume, chunked it up into pieces, and fiddled [...]
December 23, 2008
YouTomb Tracks Takedowns On YouTube
YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made [...]
October 15, 2008
xkcd Against DRM
I think Richard M. Stallman would agree with xkcd: DRM is evil. It’s bad for both customers and content creators — even Hilary Rosen and Steve Jobs have their doubts about it.
October 18, 2007
Stupid Trademark Law
September 19, 2007
Four Years Of Music Industry Lawsuits & Madness
Marketplace reminds us the storm of RIAA lawsuits began in September 2003. In that time they’ve sued a thousands of people, and most lawyers apparently advise those caught in the madness to simply roll over and take it. But Tanya Andersen, a 41 year old disabled single mother didn’t. After years of litigation (and mounting [...]
July 26, 2007
iPhones Around The World
A long time ago somebody started the Newtons Around The World gallery, and it came to symbolize the love we Newton users had for the little device as well as our geeky pride. The trend seemed to continue with iPods Around The World, and now iLounge wants to start a gallery for the iPhone. I [...]
May 22, 2007
A Fair(y) Use Tale
From The Chronicle: Copyright law, a constant thorn in the sides of scholars and researchers, is generating a lot of public discussion this week, thanks in part to a new 10-minute video that parodies the law. “A Fair(y) Use Tale” has been downloaded from YouTube about 145,000 times since it was posted online Friday. The [...]
April 23, 2007
Claims of Prior Art In Verizon/Vonage Patent Infringement Case
Vonage has been saying Verizon’s patent claims are overly broad for some time, but now people have dug up some prior art. One of the patents Verizon is complaining about is #6,104,711, what they call an “enhanced internet domain name server.” In short, it’s all about linking phone numbers to IP numbers, and Jeff Pulver [...]
April 23, 2007
The High Cost Of Innovation: Vonage’s Patent Woes
Vonage will be in court again tomorrow defending itself against Verizon’s claims of patent infringement. The innovative VoIP company had lost the trial and was ordered to pay $58 Million in damages in early March, when a jury found them to have violated thee of seven related patents held by Verizon. Vonage appealed of course, [...]
March 7, 2007
The True Spirit Of Copyright
I wrote to C|Net, owner of TechRepublic and Builder.com, asking if I could quote their Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming in an issue of Library Technology Reports journal on open source software for libraries and got the following canned response: Thank you for your interest in including CNET content on your website. [...] There would [...]
April 4, 2006
“I Hate DRM” And Other Projects To Preserve The Digital Artistic Commons
People hate DRM. It prevents law abiding folks from enjoying the music and movies they’ve purchased, and it does little to prevent crackers from making illegal copies.
In response, somebody’s created I Hate DRM, “a site dedicated to reclaiming consumer digital rights.”
And on the content creator’s side: Creative Remixes For The People.
March 18, 2006
Can Actors Sell Their Digital Clones?
Alan Wexelblat in Copyfight poses a question from a reader about the future of entertainment:
what rights do you purchase/license/contract for in creating such a reproduction of a real person? Rights to the “likeness?” Performance rights? Do either of these cover things the actor never physically did or said? Is there an exclusivity clause? There are clearly some issues around the ownership of a character, if that character has appeared before (e.g. Connery’s Bond) but usually the character rights reside with the studio. But if you want the Connery Bond instead of a generic James Bond you also have to incude Connery in the deal, as well as whatever studio or estate has the Bond character rights.
February 3, 2006
Libraries vs. DRM
Within minutes of each other, two friends from separate corners of the world sent me a tip about the following: Slashdot pointed to this BBC News that talks about the ill effects of DRM on libraries. What’s DRM? It’s that “digital rights management” component of some software and media that supposedly protects against illegal copying, [...]
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