The author of this blog, James Robertson, passed away in April 2014. This blog is being maintained by David Buck (david@simberon.com).
How can you tell that a business has reached RIAA/MPAA levels of stupid? When the trolls arrive:
Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money
That strategery worked so well for the RIAA...
Technorati Tags: stupidity
Who is actually served by today's copyright laws? Witness this example, where author Tony Woodlief explains why he didn't use a song lyric to head a chapter of his book:
When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label's parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry's songs.
I love Joe Henry, but the price was too high. I replaced him with Shakespeare, whose work (depending on which edition you use) is in the public domain. Mr. Henry's record label may differ, but it's not clear that his interests —or theirs—are being served here. Were they concerned that readers might have their thirst for Mr. Henry's music sated by that single lyric? Isn't it more likely that his lyric would have enticed customers who otherwise wouldn't have heard of him?
The main problem is that the copyright mavens don't think that far ahead. They think they'll always get the license fee; it doesn't occur to them that the more likely result (as seen above) is that they'll get nothing at all.
Technorati Tags: law
I just had to laugh when I saw this:
In a new editorial published in Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet (English translation), the party says that it hopes to host the Bay from servers located within the Swedish Parliament to take advantage of parliamentary immunity. The plan relies on 1) The Pirate Bay agreeing to it and 2) Piratpartiet's performance in the upcoming September elections.
While it sounds clever, it also puts the servers at the mercy of electoral results. You have to admit though - it's a fascinating work around :)
It's getting to the point where I'm wondering whether copyright law has any value at all. Witness this idiotic proposal from Germany:
It looks as if publishers might really be lobbying for obtaining a new exclusive right conferring the power to monopolise speech e.g. by assigning a right to re-use a particular wording in the headline of a news article anywhere else without the permission of the rights holder.
I can see it now - the literary police swooping in and shutting down a blog for malicious reuse of a sentence. If sentences can be copyrighted, are there any limits at all? The only "positive" from this is that it reassures me that North America does not have a monopoly on stupidity with respect to copyright law....
Technorati Tags: stupidity
France enacted a "three strikes" law for digital copyright violations, so one of the ISPs there started offering a service (2 euros a month) to sit on user PCs (Windows only) and monitor for p2p activity. That's when the stupid started to pile up. The application periodically pings a server for updates - people looking into it found out that it's a Java servlet listening. However:
Nothing too out of the ordinary there except that all information is not only being transmitted in the clear but all information on that server is public (via http://195.146.235.67/status), meaning that every user had their IP addresses exposed to the public. But it doesn’t stop there.
It gets worse - hackers can apparently use the client apps to inject malware onto end user systems. This is what happens when you decide to solve a "problem" (p2p copyright violations) with complex "solutions".
That server doesn't seem to be accessible anymore, but go ahead and read the story - it's just too funny in a pathetic kind of way.
Today must be the day for piles of stupid. I see that the RIAA expects Limewire to cough up - wait for it - $1.5T $150B
Now it looks as though one Kelly M. Klaus (right) of Munger, Tolles & Olson, yet another RIAA posse, wants Wood to order LimeWire owner Mark Gorton to pay $1,500,000,000,000 [ed: $150B] for 200,000,000 alleged downloads, at $750 per.
Where does a dumb figure like $750 per song come from? never mind the obvious - most trading of music doesn't cost anyone money, because the people engaged in large amounts of file sharing weren't going to pay under any circumstances. The rest (the vast majority) who grab a handful of songs probably end up buying more after figuring out whether they like an artist or not.
But never mind all that - the going price for songs on the net ranges from $0.79 - $1.29. Where the heck does $750 come from? I'm afraid it comes from somewhere the sun never shines...
Of course, they wouldn't be publishers if they didn't also lust after robust DRM measures, which might explain why they're not roundly supporting the readily available EPUB format. It has DRM options, but perhaps they're not gnarly enough for the dudes responsible for bringing us the psychological horror of the Twilight series. We still don't like the suggestion that the people, Amazon primarily, who popularized this market should just open it up out of the goodness of their own hearts -- maybe we would if publishers ever showed themselves capable of doing similarly noble things.
Really, that about sums it up. If they want a standard, what's wrong with ePub?
Seems that after the RIAA decided to stop shooting itself in the face repeatedly, suits dropped back down to more normal levels:
New federal copyright infringement lawsuits plummeted to a six-year low in 2009, the year after the Recording Industry Association of America abandoned its litigation campaign against file sharers, court records show
With luck, the RIAA will just shrivel up and die...
Pirating is a lot more complex than the folks at the RIAA and MPAA would have you believe. Sometimes, it's about getting around the idiotic region restrictions. Sometimes it's about getting convenient access to something you already own in a somewhat inaccessible form. Heck, sometimes it's about getting your own stuff. Read what Peter Serafinowicz has to say on the subject - it's pretty interesting, and makes it clear that these issues are anything but simple.
Technorati Tags: torrents
Ahh, the perverse world of "intellectual property - Sony just shutdown Beyonce's YouTube site for "piracy". How an artist could be pirating their own music is an exercise left to the insane. INtellectual Property law has moved from farce to utterly absurd...
| Previous | Next | (57 total) |
