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Copyright Considered Harmful

January 21, 2014 21:24:45.897

It's come to this:

Wearing Google Glass recently proved perilous for a movie patron in Columbus, Ohio. On Monday, The Gadgeteer posted a frightening story apparently from a member of the Glass Explorer program. An hour into watching Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit wearing his prescription version of Glass, he said, he'd been abruptly pulled from the theater and interrogated at length by "feds," who accused him of attempting to pirate the movie by recording it.

Exactly who is benefiting from the current system of copyright enforcement?

posted by James Robertson

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Content ID Goes Full Bozo

December 18, 2013 16:53:36.320

You never want to go full bozo....

This one's via Twitter and there appear to be more and more like it, with creators seeing their own work deemed by YouTube's copyright bots as the property of someone else.

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posted by James Robertson

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The Copyright Wars Go Viral

December 12, 2013 7:07:36.187

Just because the efforts to pass stupid laws through Congress have failed doesn't mean that the RIAA and MPAA have given up - they just leaned on YouTube, and the results can only be defined as "going the full stupid". YouTube's new "content protection" scheme is flagging content right left and center - check out Angry Joe's rant - which may not be safe for work without headphones, is spot on:

Meanwhile, Google is showing the fine sensitivity to their users that they've become known for:

"As ever, channel owners can easily dispute Content ID claims if they believe those claims are invalid," added the spokesperson.

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posted by James Robertson

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Copyright Considered Harmful

August 29, 2013 18:20:16.000

Well, this has to be the best example I've seen lately as to why copyright law is so utterly absurd:

Yesterday, August 28th, 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous speech, “I Have a Dream”. If you live in the US, you’ve probably heard of this speech. You’ve also probably never read it, heard the audio, or seen the video in its entirety. Unfortunately, the speech is under copyright, and will remain so until 2083. As a result, it is illegal to republish under most circumstances.

We are well past the point where copyright law does anything beyond empowering rent seekers.

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posted by James Robertson

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Content Kings Want to PWN You

May 27, 2013 19:59:33.797

It's getting to the point where you can't even try to satirize the copyright holders - Cory Doctorow quotes the insanity that they want:

While not currently permitted under U.S. law, there are increasing calls for creating a more permissive environment for active network defense that allows companies not only to stabilize a situation but to take further steps, including actively retrieving stolen information, altering it within the intruder’s networks, or even destroying the information within an unauthorized network. Additional measures go further, including photographing the hacker using his own system’s camera, implanting malware in the hacker’s network, or even physically disabling or destroying the hacker’s own computer or network.

Let them have this, and give the Feds what they want with Calea, and you might as well just get rid of your firewall and port blocking rules.

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posted by James Robertson

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Copyright Law is Insane

December 2, 2012 13:29:08.310

You would think that something written by Robert Frost (1874-1963) would be public domain, right? You would be mistaken - the Frost estate is running around enforcing copyrights. How exactly does Frost benefit from this? How does anyone?

The amazing thing is that the same congress critters who tell us that we need a high estate tax will go ahead an extend copyright out for decades (it's now life of the author + 75 years). I guess some pigs are more equal than others. if you build up a small restaurant business, say, it can get mostly taken away when you die. Write a few books that sell well? Your heirs will be set for life.

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posted by James Robertson

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Satire Imitates Life

November 11, 2012 15:38:04.657

Next time you have a few friends over to watch a movie, unhook the Kinect from your XBox - the copyright fascists are about to start doing headcounts. The sad part about this is, back in 2006 there was a satire written about that:

In November 2006, a site named BBSpot wrote a story about how the MPAA lobbied for home theater regulations, arguing that a home theater in your living room allows your friends to not buy their own DVD:
“Just because you buy a DVD to watch at home doesn’t give you the right to invite friends over to watch it too. That’s a violation of copyright and denies us the revenue that would be generated from DVD sales to your friends,” said [MPAA spokesman] Glickman.

It seems that you just can't make stuff up when it comes to copyright law. Microsoft just patented that idea:

Microsoft has filed a patent for a technology that would let Kinect detect how many people are consuming content at a given time [...] would monitor how many people are in the room when a game or piece of entertainment is being displayed and “take remedial action” if the number of user-views licensed is exceeded, according to the patent application.

It's at the point where you're not sure whether we should laugh,or cry.

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posted by James Robertson

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Could Google Be Less Helpful?

October 27, 2012 1:29:50.897

This morning I got an email from Google, telling me that a video had been flagged for copyright violation. I went to the page they gave me for information, and found this enlightening statement:

Visual content administered by: FFT

The video in question is a screencast (one I did years ago, actually), showing VisualWorks controlling iTunes. I have no idea who "FFT" is, but there's no way that this video violates any copyright of theirs.

The larger question I have is, who the heck is "FFT"? If Google is going to listen to validity free copyright yelling, the least they can do is tell us who it is that's making the claim.

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posted by James Robertson

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Let Them Eat Dialup

May 4, 2012 12:34:46.451

It's not enough that the music and movie industries want to make us suffer through idiotic DRM schemes; they aren't too sure about fast internet at all:

MPAA spokesperson Howard Gantman told Bloomberg that although Google Fiber "could be a great opportunity for consumers whose access to creative content is often hampered by slow speeds," we should look to the example of South Korea, in which "the home entertainment marketplace was decimated by digital piracy," which was enabled by speedy Internet.

What I suppose they really want is a broadcast only internet, where upload speeds are throttled to something that can handle url requests only...

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posted by James Robertson

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Germany Thinks YouTube is Omniscient

April 21, 2012 12:16:17.022

Here's how stupid copyright battles have gotten:

"YouTube must take measures to prevent violations in future," said GEMA's lawyer Kerstin Baecker. "The court has clearly rejected the argument that YouTube as a host is not responsible for users' content."

That sounds reasonable until you sit back and consider reality: how can any company possibly install filters that are aware of all copyrighted material - especially given the fact that new material is being created all the time, and the backlog of extant material is so large as to be effectively infinite. It's simply not possible to do what is being asked here.

If this kind of thing holds up, then no site that accepts user generated content - Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, blog servers (etc. etc) can safely operate. Ultimately, this makes it very clear as to what the content industry wants to see happen: they want the net reduced back to a broadcast only thing, akin to TV and radio.

posted by James Robertson

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