Archive for February 2006
Copyright & OOP
“Falling out of print is a book’s natural fate. We can belatedly train ourselves to believe that this will happen to other people’s books. What’s hard is for writers to believe it will happen to their own.
“Consider, then, the duration of copyrights. Given the range of human lifespans and the extreme rarity of prepubescent authors, you can pretty much figure that by the time a 95-year copyright runs out, the author will be dead and gone, and any offspring will have reached their majority. Somewhere in there, copyright stops being about directly rewarding an author for his work. What’s left is an intangible time-travelling value: the hope of being read.
“This is why it pains me to hear respectable minor authors going on about how the extension of copyright to life of the author plus 70 years is a victory for the little guy. It isn’t, unless by “little guy” you mean the heirs of the author’s ex-spouse’s step-grandchildren by her third marriage.”
Making Light. The Life Expectancies of Books. Jan. 27, 2006.
See also:
John Goodridge. Poor Clare. Guardian. July 22, 2000. (“John Clare enthusiasts are up in arms over an American academic’s claim to own copyright of the poet’s works unpublished in his lifetime. John Goodridge reports on the battle over a great literary legacy.”)
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Digital Music Kills Compilation Cash Cow
“While current radio hits still dominate the digital music charts, classics like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and the Eagles’ “Hotel California” are regularly ranking among the 200 best-selling tracks on the Internet, a sign of their staying power even in the accelerated culture of modern pop music.
“Their popularity indicates that fans are flocking to online services like iTunes at least in part to pluck out celebrated oldies.
“But the popularity of such songs raises a troubling issue for the music business, which relies in part on the huge profits generated by greatest-hits collections. What if fans who might have paid for a full album of “the very best” of an established act instead choose to pay substantially less and simply buy the very, very best song?
Jeff Leeds. When All the ‘Greatest Hits’ Are Too Many to Download. The New York Times. Feb. 2, 2006.
(Editor’s Note: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper’s fee-based Archive.)
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Patent Office Revisits JPEG Patent
“Technology company Forgent Networks Inc. was served notice Thursday that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will re-examine the validity of its patent on a widely used compression method for storing digital photos and images.
“The patent deals with compressing digital video, and the company insists its techniques are the same ones used as part of the common compression standard known as JPEG, issued by the Joint Photographic Experts Group.”
Matt Slagle. Patent Office to Re-Examine Forgent Claim. Yahoo! News. Feb. 2, 2006.
See also:
U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Coding System for Reducing Redundancy (U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672). Oct. 6, 1987.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Copyright Office Releases Orphan Works Report
This Report addresses the issue of “orphan works,” a term used to describe the situation where the owner of a copyrighted work cannot be identified and located by someone who wishes to make use of the work in a manner that requires permission of the copyright owner. Even where the user has made a reasonably diligent effort to find the owner, if the owner is not found, the user faces uncertainty – she cannot determine whether or under what conditions the owner would permit use. … Concerns have been raised that in such a situation, a productive and beneficial use of the work is forestalled – not because the copyright owner has asserted his exclusive rights in the work, or because the user and owner cannot agree on the terms of a license – but merely because the user cannot locate the owner. Many users of copyrighted works have indicated that the risk of liability for copyright infringement, however remote, is enough to prompt them not to make use of the work. Such an outcome is not in the public interest, particularly where the copyright owner is not locatable because he no longer exists or otherwise does not care to restrain the use of his work.
The Copyright Office has long shared these concerns, and … was pleased that on January 5, 2005 Senators Orrin Hatch and Patrick Leahy asked the Register of Copyrights to study the orphan works issue in detail, and to provide a report with her recommendations. Also in January 2005, Representatives Lamar Smith and Howard Berman expressed interest in the issue and supported the undertaking of this study.
Our conclusions are:
- The orphan works problem is real.
- The orphan works problem is elusive to quantify and describe comprehensively.
- Some orphan works situations may be addressed by existing copyright law, but many are not.
- Legislation is necessary to provide a meaningful solution to the orphan works problem as we know it today.
We recommend that the orphan works issue be addressed by an amendment to the Copyright Act’s remedies section. The specific language we recommend is provided at the end of this Report.
U.S. Copyright Office. Report on Orphan Works. January 2006.
Updates:
The Patry Copyright Blog. Copyright Office Orphan Works Report. Feb. 6, 2006.
Public Knowledge. The Copyright Office’s way to Solve Orphan Works. Feb. 1, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Patent Office Eliminates Patents in Blackberry Case
“A preliminary ruling by the United States patent office on Wednesday further undermined legal claims by a company that has sought to shut the BlackBerry wireless e-mail device in the United States.
“Research in Motion, the Canadian maker of the BlackBerry, said the decision meant that the patent office had twice rejected all five patents controlled by NTP that are related to BlackBerry litigation. NTP is an intellectual property company based in Arlington, Va.”
Ian Austen. Ruling Aids Manufacturer of BlackBerry. The New York Times. Feb. 2, 2006.
See also:
Reuters. U.S. to Judge: Hold Off on BlackBerry Shutdown. News.com. Feb. 1, 2006.
(Editor’s Note: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper’s fee-based Archive.)
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Americans to Big Music: Sell a Better Product
Music executives love to blame illegal downloading for their industry’s woes. But, based on the results of a new nationwide poll, they might want to look in the mirror.
Eighty percent of the respondents consider it stealing to download music for free without the copyright holder’s permission, and 92 percent say they’ve never done it, according to the poll conducted for The Associated Press and Rolling Stone magazine.
Meanwhile, three-quarters of music fans say compact discs are too expensive, and 58 percent say music in general is getting worse.
Associated Press. Pirates: It Takes One to Know One. Wired News. Feb. 2, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Big Film Co-Opts File Sharing
“An ambitious experiment with selling big-studio movies over a file-swapping network in Germany may portend new kinds of online movie sales in the United States–and give Microsoft new allies in its battle with Apple Computer.
“Warner Bros. Home Entertainment said Monday that it would launch a peer-to-peer video download service in Germany beginning in March, using Bertelsmann-created file-swapping technology to sell movies online at the same time as they’re released on DVD.”
John Borland. Legal DVD Downloads To Hit U.S. Shores? News.com. Jan. 31, 2006.
See also:
BBC News. Warner Bros to Sell Movies on Net. Jan. 31, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
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