Archive for February 2006
CopyCense Returns Tuesday, February 21
CopyCense will not publish on Monday, February 20, 2006. We will resume our normal publication schedule on Tuesday, February 21, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
NYC Loses Copyright to Ground Zero Photos
“A budding filmmaker that FEMA found in the yellow pages used his taxpayer-funded video of the smoldering World Trade Center ruins in a documentary featuring topless women chatting about their breasts.
“Provided with unique access in an NYPD helicopter, Gregg Brown was flown by cops over the restricted air space of Ground Zero daily for eight months beginning on Sept. 15, 2001, capturing countless hours of grim video while snapping 30,000 photographs.
“Red-faced officials at the city Department of Design & Construction concede that the stunning, gut-wrenching material was supposed to belong to the people who paid for it — the citizens of New York and the nation. But Brown, who was ultimately paid up to $302,000 in federal 9/11 disaster recovery funds, refused to sign a prepared agreement ceding ‘title and ownership’ to the city.”
Greg B. Smith. Shameful Abuse of 9/11 Footage. Daily News. Feb. 11, 2006.
See also:
Meredith McKeown. Gregg Brown’s Photographic Odyssey. LIFE. No date.
Gregg Brown. Above Ground Zero. No date.
Updates:
Greg B. Smith. WTC Pix Snafu Not My Fault. Daily News. Feb. 14, 2006.
Attribution: CopyCense first learned of this story via a post in The Trademark Blog, edited by Marty Schwimmer.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Copyright As DRM Antidote
“Copyright holders today increasingly find their rights and responsibilities dictated not by the explicit words of the copyright statute, but instead by the powers and limitations of what has come to be known as “digital rights management” technology. In this ten-page magazine-style piece, I consider how copyright law should respond.
“My argument proceeds in two basic steps. First, I argue that, while DRM might represent a powerful restriction, the constraint will never be Orwellian. Second, if all this is true, then DRM simply makes copyright law look a lot like every other area of legal endeavor. Put differently: as I show in the piece, criminal law, trade secret protection, First Amendment jurisprudence, and indeed every other legal regime is today implemented through a combination of powerful public mechanisms and less costly but weaker private ones. DRM, I argue, simply brings copyright law into the fold.”
Douglas Lichtman. Defusing DRM. SSRN. Feb. 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Big Publishing Uses DRM Like Big Entertainment
“As technology affects publishers of all kinds, it is interesting to see how the publishers adapt to the changing environment. The primary challenge lies with the ease of making digital copies of works and the implications that has for the application of copyright law. Laws like the Digital Millienium Copyright Act in the US, which enforce technical restrictions on making copies, are well-known and are primarily associated with the music and film industries. However, due to the market failure of e-books, technological change has not been as quick to affect the print medium.
“Nonetheless, print publishers still sell some e-books and it is increasingly common to see electronic editions of books published on CDs, DVDs or online. So it is relevant to explore what print publishers think of copyright in the digital age. Not surprisingly, the commercial print publishers hold a very similar philosophy to their counterparts in the video and audio sectors.”
Roy Bixler. Digital Copyright Issues in Academic Publishing. Groklaw. Feb. 5, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
DRM as CRAP
If you’ve been following any of the news regarding the now draft version 3 of the GNU General Public License, then you also know by now that the Free Software Foundation and its leader Richard Stallman are looking to prevent the mashing up of GPL’d software with digital rights management (DRM) technology.
Even though it’s a scourge that lives at the intersection of technology and entertainment — one that could severely limit our freedom to listen to or watch the content we pay our hard earned money for using the device of our choice — most people are simply turning a blind eye every time DRM gets mentioned. It’s not a very sexy acronym. There’s no shock and awe. The DRM cartel likes it that way. They don’t want any groundswell of opposition to interfere with their plans to control your horizontal and the vertical. No, this is not Outer Limits science fiction. This is the real deal.
To wake people up, I’ve come up with a new acronym for DRM: CRAP.
Between the Lines. FSF’s Stallman Pitches New Definition for C.R.A.P. Feb. 14, 2006.
See also:
Groklaw. Reactions to the GPLv3 Draft and a GLPv2-v3 Comparative Chart. Jan. 17, 2006.
Updates:
Peter Galli. Questions Still Abound Over GPL 3. eWeek. Feb. 15, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Big Music Doublespeaks on Downloading CDs to iPod
“It is no secret that the entertainment oligopolists are not happy about space-shifting and format-shifting. But surely ripping your own CDs to your own iPod passes muster, right? In fact, didn’t they admit as much in front of the Supreme Court during the MGM v. Grokster argument last year?
“Apparently not.”
EFF Deep Links. RIAA Says Ripping CDs to Your iPod is NOT Fair Use. Feb. 15, 2006.
See also:
U.S. Copyright Office. Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies — Joint Reply of Association of American Publishers, et al. (.pdf, 550 KB) Feb. 2, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Publishers Should Praise Google Book Search
“Google’s new Book Search promises to save writers’ and publishers’ asses by putting their books into the index of works that are visible to searchers who get all their information from the Internet. In response, publishers and writers are suing Google, claiming that this ass-saving is in fact a copyright violation.
“When you look a little closer, though, you see that the writer/publisher objections to Google amount to nothing more than rent-seeking: an attempt to use legal threats to milk Google for some of the money it will make by providing this vital service to us ink-stained scribblers.”
Boing Boing. Why Publishing Should Send Fruit-Baskets to Google. Feb. 14, 2006.
Updates:
Xeni Jardin. You Authors Are Saps to Resist Googling. LATimes.com. Feb. 23, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
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