COPYCENSE

“Countries whose lack of functional copyright law has jeopardized their membership in WIPO have touted open source as the inexpensive alternative that will allow them to comply with copyright while living within their means. Yet free software doesn’t come free — it has strings attached: the strings of copyleft, strings being pulled via a license written with a strong U.S. copyright enforcement landscape in mind.

“The bottom line is that free software lives and dies by the sword of copyright law — and the sword outside the U.S. and Europe is not very sharp. Enforcing free software licenses in the U.S. is hard enough. We all know that noncompliance is rampant in the U.S., though this is due less to defiance or malfeasance than to inattention, poor record keeping, or suspecting that some of the more opaque licenses were actually written by Chinese students who learned English from an official cultural-revolution-era phrasebook.

“So, who will enforce the GPL in India? Or in China? Or in Russia? In lieu of enforcement, do we really expect voluntary compliance in nations where copyright law is a nod and a wink?”

Heather Meeker. Only in America? Copyright Law Key to Global Free Software Model. TechNewsworld. May 16, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

The idea of being able to play your music anywhere, on any device, has become a cliche without quite coming to pass. Viewed from a distance, this looks like one of technology’s greatest failures. If you’re acquainted with Orb, Sling Media, or MP3Tunes — all of which fulfill that promise to some degree — you’ll know how close we are to this goal. But for every breakthrough, it seems, there’s yet another setback.

“Look a little closer, and we see that for the most part it’s not the fault of the basic technology components. The networks are in place, the hard drives are big enough and the processors are fast enough for “audio everywhere”. And all are fairly affordable to a critical mass of the market, although the cost we bear is undoubtedly higher than it was in the analog era.

“Politics and greed are the problems.”

Andrew Orlowski. Digital Music Nirvana Isn’t Impossible, It Just Takes Longer. The Register. May 12, 2006.

See also:

Andrew Orlowski. File swapping MSPs — The Future of Digital Music? The Register. Aug. 26, 2005. (Interesting analysis of the overall costs of playing digital music.)

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“Like no other corner of American popular culture, baseball communicates in numbers. From .406 (Ted Williams’s 1941 batting average) to 755 (Hank Aaron’s record home run total) to countless digits bandied about water coolers every morning, statistics convey ideas and images that, even overnight, become inseparable from the players to whom they belong.

“This relationship between players and numbers, so often romanticized, is now being stripped to its skeleton in a lawsuit with considerably wider ramifications. While the dispute focuses on fantasy baseball — in which millions of fans compete against one another by assembling rosters of real-life major leaguers with the best statistics — a real legal question has arisen: Who owns that connection of name and number when it is used for such a commercial purpose?

“The dispute is between CBC Distribution and Marketing Inc., a company in St. Louis that operates fantasy sports leagues over the Internet and the Internet arm of Major League Baseball, which says that anyone using players’ names and performance statistics to operate a fantasy league commercially must purchase a license. CBC counters that it does not need a license because the players are public figures whose statistics are in the public domain.”

Alan Schwarz. Baseball Is a Game of Numbers, but Whose Numbers Are They? The New York Times. May 17, 2006.

See also:

U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Missouri. C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing, Inc. v. Major League Baseball Advanced Media, L.P. (Complaint for Declaratory Judgment). (.pdf) Feb. 7, 2005.

Martha Stark. This I Believe: Numbers Don’t Lie. National Public Radio. May 15, 2006. (Martha Stark is the first African-American woman to serve as New York City Finance Commissioner.)

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“The recording industry is suing XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. for copyright infringement over a new portable radio that offers iPod-like features.

“The lawsuit, filed yesterday in New York, is the latest escalation in a battle between major record labels and satellite radio providers over whether the satellite companies should pay more for giving subscribers the ability to compile music libraries. To stay competitive with Apple’s iPod and similar products, XM and Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. recently introduced radios with recording features. XM’s Inno and Sirius’s S50 allow subscribers to record as much as 50 hours of broadcast music, or search for songs by particular artists.

“XM and Sirius pay the labels for the right to broadcast music and have argued that the right to record music for personal use is included under that.”

Annys Shin. Music Labels Sue XM Over Recording Device. WashingtonPost.com. May 17, 2006.

See also:

Ars Technica. Music Industry Sues XM Radio for Offering Device Capable of Recording Music. May 17, 2006.

EFF Deep Links. Record Labels Sue XM Radio. May 17, 2006. (“Journalists covering the parade of copyright lawsuits arising out of new technologies often make the mistake of examining only the facts surrounding the individual disputes, rather than recognizing that they represent a coordinated strategic effort by the entertainment industry to change the copyright law jurisprudence that applies to everyone. Court rulings, after all, continue to cast a legal shadow long after the technologies involved have disappeared –just consider the Supreme Court’s 1984 Betamax ruling.”)

EFF Deep Links. Transmission + Reproduction != Distribution. February 27, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“Sim Wong Hoo’s strategy was simple and bold: Attack Apple Computer’s iPod business by competing on price, features, and flexibility — without the need to be tied down to Apple’s iTunes Music Store for songs purchased online.

“His Singapore-based Creative Technology produces digital music and media players that in a straight, feature-by-feature comparison are arguably better than the iPod. The problem is, it doesn’t sell that many. Creative is losing money, in part because of unsold inventory of MP3 players. Meanwhile its stock is down more than 63%, from a high of $15.82 in January, 2005.

“So what does Creative do to fight back? It’s suing Apple in a U.S. court over a patent that it says Apple’s player infringes.”

Arik Hesseldahl. Creative Technology Takes on Apple. BusinessWeek Online. May 17, 2006.

See also:

Simon Aughton. Creative’s Apple Suit Deemed Desperate. PCPro. May 17, 2006.

BBC News. Creative Wins MP3 Player Patent. May 30, 2005.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.