COPYCENSE

CopyCense Clippings: Week of July 17, 2006

• Jessi Hempel. Friendster’s Patent Possibilities. BusinessWeek Online. July 14, 2006. When Friendster gets a patent on social networking (No. 7,069,308), it’s a sign it has gone completely establishment. (The back story on how this came to be also is available online.) And of course, others are rushing to claim they already have a separate patent in this space. How can one patent personal connections and contacts?
• Marguerite Reardon. Skype Protocol Cracked? News.com. July 14, 2006. Chinese engineers apparently have reverse engineering the Skype VoIP code, potentially cheating the eBay division out of a huge market. Where’s the DMCA when you really need it?
• Renee Boucher Ferguson. U.S. Senators Launch RFID Caucus. eWeek. July 14, 2006. Thought RFID was dead? Think again. Wal-Mart has made a sizable investment in the technology, which means much of American retail already has followed that lead (or will soon). But if these sessions contain nonsensical babble along the lines of what we heard recently from Sen. Ted Stevens, we’re all better off just getting the presentation directly from Wal-Mart executives. They’d have a better shot at explaining the technology than some of these Luddite members of Congress.
• Red Herring. Gracenote Frees Lyrics. July 13, 2006. Gracenote, the company responsible for the CDDB database that grabs track and album titles from the Internet whenever you play a CD, has contracted with several music publishers to let the company provide commercial song lyric services over the Internet. We wonder what will happen to sites like pearLyrics? Further, Ars Technica asks a great question: particularly in light of this deal, how does fair use apply to song lyrics?
• Ars Technica. RIAA Loses In File Sharing Case. July 13, 2006. … And Big Music has to pay plaintiff’s attorneys fees, too. How about them apples?
• Ryan Singell. MySpace Kills Internet Tube Song. Wired News. July, 13, 2006. Senator Gone Wild site pulled from YouTube, then mysteriously reinstated, with the Rupert Murdoch-owned site claiming it erroneously invoked a Section 512 DMCA takedown. WashingtonPost.com‘s Frank Ahrens does a nice job of parsing out this one as well. Should we have technology-ignorant individuals heading committees that determine legislation about the Internet? We actually advocate that copyright and other technology law matters be adjudicated by a special court by judges with special training and background, since it is so evident that too many judges and Congressman simply have no clue about the technology they’ve affected with damaging court decisions and half-baked legislation.
• Elinor Mills. Google Joins OpenDocument Group. News.com. July 12, 2006. More evidence that OpenDocument is gaining steam.
• Ed Foster. A License to Audit. InfoWorld. July 11, 2006. The venerable Ed Foster looks at software audits, how software companies decide on when to have them, and how they effect software buyers.
• Los Angeles Times Editorial Board. We Aren’t All Pirates. LATimes.com. July 10, 2006. With increasing regularity, the Los Angeles Times has been skewering Big Entertainment over its copyright policies, legislation, and business practices. In fact several of the comments have been posted by the paper’s Editorial Board, which is shocking — yet refreshing — for the largest paper in Hollywood’s hometown.
• Fred von Lohmann. YouTube’s Balancing Act: Making Money, Not Enemies. The Hollywood Reporter Esq. July 10, 2006. EFF’s senior lawyer on the copyright implications of YouTube.
• Eric Lai. Microsoft Shifts ODF Stance. Computerworld. July 10, 2006. If you’re an information professional and you haven’t been following the OpenXML/OpenDocument tiff, shame on you. All that’s at stake is the continued move of applications from the desktop to the Web. This is Web 2.0.
• Charles Cooper. Have Patent, Will Sue. News.com. July 10, 2006. Never heard of Acacia? Neither had we until we read this story. Apparently, it’s the alleged patent “trolls” we haven’t heard of that can be the most dangerous.
• BusinessWeek Online. So Much Fanfare, So Few Hits. July 10, 2006. What happens or is delivered after the buzz of a new, non-search Google offering dissipates? BusinessWeek answers “surprisingly little.”
• Roger Vincent. ‘Sanitizers’ of Home Video Lose in Court. LATimes.com. July 10, 2006. When YouTube started out, several writers commented about how the service would never get big because much of the video being posted was from Big Content, and therefore subject to copyright claims and potentially expensive litigation. From a legal standpoint, they said, it was a legal slam dunk. Curiously, the same conclusion wasn’t made when it was discovered that CleanFlicks and other businesses were making unauthorized derivative works out of the existing movies. The federal court opinion (.pdf) confirms the apparent.
• Declan McCullagh. FBI Plans New Net-Tapping Push. News.com. July 7, 2006. It seems data retention (and surrender) isn’t enough for the Feds. Now they’re seeking to require ISPs to create wiretapping hubs for surveillance and force makers of networking gear to build in backdoors for eavesdropping. And where, exactly, is Congress? Have we completely surrendered the notion of “checks and balances”?
• Kane Farabaugh. Atlanta Group Buys Martin Luther King, Jr. Archives. VOA News.com. July 3, 2006. The other shoe drops on the King papers auction, and the collection will not be sold by Sotheby’s for the estimated $15 to $30 million. Instead, the collection was purchased by a group of Atlanta leaders, including Mayor Shirley Franklin and former Mayor Andrew Young for $32 million. The collection will be housed at Morehouse College in Atlanta, King’s alma mater. Apparently, the sale hasn’t quieted a longstanding debate over copyright to that collection, particularly since it seems that copyright to the papers remains with the King family, which has been aggressive in foreclosing all unexcepted uses (including quotations) that don’t involve a license fee. Also, here’s an irony: Morehouse is part of a consortium of colleges called the Atlanta University Center (AUC). One of the member colleges of this consortium, Clark Atlanta University, ran one of the Southeast’s best known graduate library science programs until it closed in 2005. Now, neither AUC nor the Atlanta region has graduates from a nearby accredited library science school from which it can get archivists to preserve the King collection. (For a further examination of the Clark library school closing, please see Risa Mulligan’s paper.)

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