COPYCENSE

“[A] good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value. If it starts to pursue paying customers — which doesn’t seem that outlandish at this point — then I guess we’ll all know the extent of the desperation. Investor, beware.” — The Motley Fool.

Alyce Lomax. We’re All Thieves to the RIAA. The Motley Fool. Jan. 2, 2008. The Fool, along with several other news outlets, reported the erroneous information that the RIAA argued ripping to CD is copyright infringement, an error we caught and explained in our Dec. 11 edition of Clippings. The key portion of this post is an investment Web site’s advice to readers to divest themselves of stock holdings in the four multinationals that include record companies among their holdings. If investment industry officials no longer have faith in your business model, that’s fatal.

(Editor’s Note: Copycense editors originally commented on this article in the Jan. 8, 2008, edition of Copycense Clippings, and it was a Quote of the Week selection.)

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Mike Elgan. I Want to Live in a Surveillance Society. Computerworld. Jan. 3, 2008. We’ve heard before the argument that one of the the best ways to limit privacy violations is to subject everyone (including government and law enforcement officials) to the very same surveillance they seek to impose on citizens. This article expresses a related view, namely when we discuss privacy and security, we should pay as much attention to keeping public what should be public as we pay to keeping private what should be private.

(Editor’s Note: Copycense editors originally commented on this article in the Jan. 8, 2008, edition of Copycense Clippings.)

Copycense™: Incisive IP.™

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Catherine Holahan. Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM. BusinessWeek. Jan. 4, 2008. This may have been news four years ago. Now it’s merely a reminder that the executives running the music labels are clueless. Meanwhile, Wired asks whether Sony’s downloads will be with or without watermarks.

(Editor’s Note: Copycense editors originally commented on this article in the Jan. 8, 2007, edition of Copycense Clippings.)

Copycense™: Incisive IP.™

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The Wired Campus (Chronicle of Higher Education). Bucking Music Piracy Accusations at the U. of Washington. Jan. 2, 2008. Another sign that universities increasingly are reversing their former stance on file sharing lawsuit subpoenas, which reflexively shuttled requested information to the RIAA’s local counsel. As the file sharing lawsuit campaign becomes less pro forma, we wonder when local counsel (which the RIAA uses to file these lawsuits) begins to balk at accepting the work because the litigation sucks up too many resources from their respective practices.

(Editor’s Note: Copycense editors originally commented on this article in the Jan. 8, 2008, edition of Copycense Clippings.)

Copycense™: Incisive IP.™

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