Smalltalk with James Robertson

You have to love the copyright suit between Viacom and Google - especially now that this response from Google has been made public:

"Viacom alone has uploaded thousands of videos to YouTube to market hundreds of its programs and movies, including many that are works in suit," Google wrote. "Given the broad scope of marketing, YouTube could not be charged with knowledge of infringement (.pdf) merely because it came across a video that was clearly from a professionally produced television show or movie."

Peronally, I thought the whole safe harbor thing was enough of a defense, but lawyers do like to add layers and layers of complexity to an otherwise simple situation - otherwise, how would they collect enormous hourly fees?

Meanwhile, I find it highly amusing that Viacom's marketing department was busy undermining the coporate case because they actually understood something about promotion :)

Technorati Tags: law

Like a zombie that just won't drop no matter how many bullets get fired into it, the government keeps pushing ACTA. The good news is that the EU has shot this atrocity down, so maybe - just maybe - some sanity will prevail in this space. So long as the RIAA and MPAA have money to pass around, I rather doubt it, but one can hope.

Consider the insanity of what's going in in the UK - open WiFi is being effectively banned, because all hotspot owners are going to be required to keep logs (as if they were ISPs) of all accesses. Right - because on the super-fast (cough) connections at the typical coffee shop, I'm sure that tons of pirating is going on:

"This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in," Edwards said.

"Even if they password protect, they then have two options -- to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small cafe"

The stated goals - prevention of copyright infringement - just make no sense. The big pirating is simply not happening on open WiFi hotspots. What's next - a rule that all users of a hotspot (even a home one) need to be registered?

Technorati Tags: law, stupidity

The more I read about ACTA, and the other things that the RIAA, MPAA, BSA (et. al.) are up to, the more I realize that they want us to live in a thinly gilded cage of severely restricted choices. Consider:

University of Edinburgh law lecturer Andres Guadamuz wrote a blog entry this week highlighting some particularly troubling aspects of the IIPA's 301 recommendations. The organization has condemned Indonesia and several other countries for encouraging government adoption of open source software. According to the IIPA, official government endorsements of open source software create "trade barriers" and restrict "equitable market access" for software companies.

Right. Where "trade barriers" means "wahhhhh - these people have choices!". That's not what they want; they want a future of locked down content controlled by a small group of cooperating vendors.

Technorati Tags: drm

Unless Macheist has Gruber's permission (which sounds doubtful, but who knows) - how is this not a copyright violation:

The team behind MacHeist has just launched "DaringFireballWithComments.net" a website that mirrors Gruber's site with, you guessed it, comments.

There's also the possible branding infringement, although that would imply that Gruber applied for a trademark. Either way, it smells wrong to me. This is the same tactic that spammers use to build link farms. They could have accomplished the same thing with SideWiki...

Technorati Tags: sleaze

Rogers Cadenhead goes into depth about the loss of a dead friend's online works - the friend's heirs don't have any interest in letting the material be archived. Their reason's aren't what interests me here - it's this:

For works created on the web, however, the only thing keeping them around is an active publisher or a copyright license that permits others to reprint the material. A copyright holder who wanted a web site to disappear completely could take it offline, demand its removal from all archives and never allow republication. Leslie's work will not begin passing into the public domain until 2065.

Think about how far out that is - no one who knew the person he's talking about will be around then. The lesson here, to me, is simple: the term for copyright is just too long. As it stands now, copyright law protects the interests of the big players, and works against the interests of the rest of us.

Technorati Tags: law

Mark Bernstein notes that we can't freely transfer most software (he uses OS X as an example, but most commercial software works the same way). He then asks:

But you can use TextEdit (which comes with Mac OS X) to write a text file, which you can save, copy, and sell without further obligation to Apple.

Question: how do we know we can do this? Where is it written?

Similarly, how do we know, when buying a typewriter, that its manufacturer doesn't acquire some rights to whatever we produce with the typewriter?

Excellent question. Copyright law is the legal answer, but never mind that; consider how Copyright law has been twisted of late...