September 1, 2006
Next Up: Rewards for Tips Leading to the Identification of Verb-Conjugating Infringers
Microsoft is pretty aggressive in defending its intellectual property, so we’d all better pray that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office doesn’t grant a recent patent application by the software giant. It seems that Microsoft has applied for a patent that covers…verb conjugation. Mike at TechDirt brought this to our attention, which put him in mind of The Onion’s satirical piece on Microsoft patenting 1s and 0s. Clearly before Microsoft reaches that point it has many other patent applications to consider. Say, for example, patents on subject-verb agreement, split-infinitives and misuse of personal pronouns.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:32 AM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2006
Barney Loves...His Attorneys
Purple dinosaur Barney is easily offended, lacking a sense of humor. At least that’s how the fun-to-mock children’s character comes off in his attorneys’ threatening cease-and-desist letters. EFF has joined the fight of a man, Stuart Frankel, who is asking a federal court for a declaratory judgment that he has the right to post a parody of Barney on his personal web site.
Frankel has taken this extreme step because since 2002 he has been receiving cease-and-desist letters from the company that produces Barney and Friends, Lyons Partnership. Lyons’ attorney Matthew Carlin keeps warning Frankel that Barney is copyrighted and that if Frankel doesn’t take down the web page, Lyons will sue. Worse, Lyons, through Carlin, keeps threatening to report Frankel to his ISP for posting material that infringes on Lyons’ copyright.
Although Frankel has sent responses to Lyons via his own attorney, arguing that fair use under the copyright laws protects his parody, Lyons keeps sending the same threatening letters — directly to Frankel himself no less, despite the fact that he’s represented by counsel.
Frankel is not alone in being subject to Lyons’ legal harassment. Barney’s most famous legal case: suing an individual sports mascot, “The Famous Chicken,” over a parody used in the mascot’s performances.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:25 PM | Comments (0)
August 20, 2006
Ode to the Patent Code
Yehuda Berlinger has followed up on his copyright-code-in-verse with the U.S. patent code in verse.
Our own personal favorites:
Sec. 12
Libraries also
Get copies each year
They make for good doorstops
Or so I do hear
Sec. 104
If you come from outer space
The rules aren’t dismissed
Apparently this applies to
The lawyers who wrote this
and last but not least
Section 117
If you’re dead, your estate
Might on patents insist;
Wait, if you’re dead, how
Are you reading this?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:24 PM | Comments (0)
July 7, 2006
Ode to the Copyright Code
There’s almost nothing in the law that awakens the sleeping poet in us, but if federal law sparks anybody’s rhyming muse, that’s OK with us. A particularly helpful and welcome bit of federal code verse comes from Yehuda Berlinger, who has (and we kid you not) set the entire U.S. Copyright Code to poetry. Every single section.
Here are sections 105 and 106 from Yehuda’s opus:
105
Nothing the government
Makes is copyrighted
But they can buy copyrights
At K-mart sales, red-lighted
106
The owner exclusively
Can perform or display,
Copy, derive, or market
But do not dismay (see 107)
Our favorite, however, is section 405:
405
Before Berne’s convention
And without copyright notice
Infringement was as innocent
As a butterfly on a lotus
Hat tip to Boing Boing.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:14 PM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2005
Pro File Sharing Campaign: CDs Make Crappy Presents
Via Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection, a strange little campaign by something called the RIAA Radar: CDs make crappy presents. The site features photos, faked IM chats and snippets from a pre-adolescent girl. Her basic ‘tude is that, well, CDs make crappy presents. She says things like “I got that on the computer, like, two months ago” and “My friend already made me a CD of that.” We presume this wicked little site is satire, but it’s hard to tell what, exactly, is being skewered. In any event, the RIAA Radar is a tool that allows users to download and swap music not produced by the litigious RIAA member companies.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 17, 2005
Next Big Copyright Issue: Dead Bodies
Courtesy of On the Commons blog comes news of a copyright fight brewing over the posing of…corpses. Yes, that’s right, there is a copyright suit pending in Florida claiming ownership in the positions of dead bodies. The suit is between two rival firms that specialize in what is apparently a huge international craze in exhibiting cadavers, some of which are partially dissected. (One exhibit in Germany allegedly generated $200 mil. in revenue from 17 mil. visitors). An attorney for the plaintiff said in a St. Petersburg Times article said:
“The copyright issue at stake is not the material used for the display but what the rights holder has done with that material to create something new. A music composer has copyright protection for his music, not for the individual notes; a photographers has a copyright for the image, not the photographic paper. It’s not a dead body that’s being copyrighted, it is the work that is made from it.”
(While the Internet is replete with photos from these bizarre exhibitions, we chose to use an innocuous public domain illustration from Gray’s anatomy to illustrate this entry. Plus, we don’t want to tangle with these people when it comes to intellectual property.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:11 AM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2005
Stop Stealing Movies or We'll Give You Nightmares
Movie studios in Japan have developed an intriguing method for halting unauthorized film distribution. Japan’s equivalent of the MPAA, the JIMCA, has produced a series of anti-piracy spots that are shown in movie theaters. These spots are, to say the least, disturbing and just…weird. The latest, found here, features a beautiful young woman, crying black tears, whose head turns into a skull against a backdrop of burning film stock. At the same time she undergoes this transformation, she’s uttering spooky, enigmatic phrases such as “Important Things Will Be Destroyed.” Let’s hope the JIMCA has enough funds in its coffers to pay for the psychotherapy of movie-goers who have viewed these spots. (Thanks to Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:57 AM | Comments (0)
July 21, 2005
Teen Boys Go Blind by Downloading Music
Another entry for our bad metaphor files, courtesy of 
New Media Musings. At the Always-On Summit, billionaire, film financier, HD network owner and sports team mogul Mark Cuban had the best line of the conference according to J.D. Lasica (click on the photo of Cuban, snapped by Lasica one minute after first meeting him).
Mark Cuban had the best line of the conference. He said of telling young people not to pirate music or movies: “It’s like trying to tell a 12 year old boy that he’s going to go blind.”
Say what? Okay…now we get it. It took a minute.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 7, 2005
Best Use of the Term "P*ssing" in Connection with Wi-Fi
My, how we have grown to love the colorful, yet well-written, tone of all the blogs we follow. Over at Doc Searls’ new IT Garage, our eye caught a catchy headline: So Using Somebody’s Wi-Fi at the Curb is Like Pissing in Their Flowers? What Doc is referring to is the case of Benjamin Smith, who was arrested in Tampa for catching a free ride on somebody’s unencrypted Wi-Fi connection.
The St. Petersberg Times’ article contends that Smith used his laptop to “hack” into the Wi-Fi network. Doc’s response:
“… hack into”? Near as I can tell, this guy was busted just for using something a citizen offered for free, like… a lamp by a driveway. Does there have to be a difference? You can commit crimes using somebody’s porch light too.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 15, 2005
Tell Me Again, Daddy. How Do I Strip The Copy Protection From This Film?
Proving that the good old days of father-son bonding around the toolbox are gone for good, J.D. Lasica draws attention to last week’s New York Times piece on Make magazine. To Lasica, Make, a magazine that offers DIY technology tinkering tips, harkens back to “a time when we were co-creators of our products.”
Lasica also worries that the tinkering skills he will pass on to his son are, well, kind of strange, compared to the car-fixing, garage workshop tips handed down by his own father.
I remember watching my dad tool around with short-band radio and spend weekends under the hood of his car. What tinkering skill sets will I pass along to my 6-year-old? At the moment, the best I have to offer is, alas, a set of tools in the Darknet that I can point him to, given the widening disconnect between our laws and the kinds of things people want to do with digital technology.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 13, 2005
I Steal Because I'm Too Lazy To Hunt For My CDs
Courtesy of Furdlog, the most spacey list of reasons for unauthorized audio file-sharing we’ve seen so far. A site called “The War Against Silence” seems to be nothing more than faux poetic, “deep” letters to the record industry from file-sharers explaining why they steal music. Our favorite entry from someone who downloaded an album from a group called Orchestra Baobab:
And at least once, I admit, I have stolen from you for mostly no fault of yours. I think there is a copy of this record somewhere in our house. Possibly we have only Pirates Choice, not this, and possibly it was all a dream and we don’t own either. We had all of Belle’s African dance music out when we were working on our wedding soundtrack last summer, and after that we’re not sure what happened. Belle’s theory is that I re-shelved them in my collection, and now they are lost. This is a subjectively reasonable guess, since from her perspective CDs go magically from my current-rotation crate by the window, where one can easily be found among a dozen or two, into my shelves, where the act of searching for one among thousands tends to become overwhelming long before the collection’s internal organizational structure has a chance to explain itself. I, on the other hand, both understand my shelving and know how hopelessly out of character it would be of me to put a CD that isn’t in my database onto my shelves. My best competing theory is that she misplaced this record somewhere, which is subjectively reasonable because she doesn’t even have a database, and obviously people who do not keep databases are the sort of people who lose things.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 7, 2005
Perhaps We're Lazy, But We'd Rather Just Go Out And Buy The CDs
The Canadian Recording Industry Association lost a court fight to uncover the identities of file sharers, which means that record producers in Canada will have a hard time suing infringers.
This turn of events prompted Declan McCullagh to propose a unique pleasure cruise, file sharing-style:
[Anyone want to join me in chartering a ship on Lake Ontario, complete with satellite-based Internet access and a *big* cache? We’d pick up American passengers in Buffalo, NY and head north. Once we enter Canadian territorial waters a few minutes later, the Net connection would be turned on, and the passengers could do whatever they liked with the bandwidth. While Kazaa’ing and BitTorrent’ing would not be encouraged, it would not be prohibited, and of course Canadian law seems to say downloading music is legal. Or perhaps we’d head north from New York City to Newfoundland. Bon voyage! —Declan]
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 31, 2005
Yeah, But Would the Cops Pull You Over for Violating the Broadcast Flag?
Thomas Hawk’s post entitled More Crap from the MPAA lambasts an MPAA-written “perspective” on the broadcast flag published by CNET. Hawk tells the studios to give up the fight and “embrace the future.”
Look, many Americans think the speed limit is a good thing. They like it. When cars come barrelling down my street and my kids are outside playing I think the speed limit is a good thing. When I’m on the vast stretch of lonesome highway between San Francisco and L.A. I think it’s a bad thing. But either way I don’t want some lawmaker trying to mandate that cars made be crippled and have a maximum operating speed of 65 miles per hour. Nor do most Americans. And likewise, I don’t want my technology crippled so that I can’t do whatever the hell I want with it, when, where, and with whomever I choose.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 27, 2005
Sisyphus Battles the Hydra
Is there something about Hollywood’s fight against P2P that brings out the Greek mythologist in all of us? Rob Hof from Business Week’s TechBeat talks about the futility of the legal crackdowns on sites such as EliteTorrents in this post entitled “BitTorrent Crackdown: Battling the Hydra.”
It’s hard to blame the movie studios for wanting to shut down those BitTorrent sites that let people download pirated movies. And in this case, they succeeded. But I can’t help but think that for every network they shut down, many more will sprout up. And with the folks behind BitTorrent releasing a search engine for these torrents, they’re going to get easier to find. Can’t the entertainment industry find a way to harness this technology rather than trying in vain to to hack it to pieces? Ideas?
It’s funny that Hof evoked the 100-headed monster from Greek mythology — remember the Hydra would always grow a replacement head if one were to be cut off. When we first read of the Feds shuttering EliteTorrents, what came to our minds was Sisyphus, the ancient Greek king who, myth has it, was doomed to perpetually roll a huge stone up a steep hill, only to have it tumble down when he finally reached the top.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 25, 2005
Who Cares About Filibusters? I Want My MTV!
Courtesy of Techdirt, Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker has an item about an exchange between Mike Goodwin of Public Knowledge and Rick Lane VP of Government Affairs at News Corp. Felten, who in turn is citing a National Journal Tech Daily item, said that Goodwin warned about the incompatibility among TV devices posed by the broadcast flag. Lane’s response: “Compatibility is not a goal.”
Felten takes umbrage at Lane’s seeming insensitivity to the needs of consumers and warns:
The most dangerous place in Washington is between Americans and their televisions.
No truer words have been spoken.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 20, 2005
Some People Have Way Too Much Time on Their Hands
This is no joke. Courtesy of Copyfight, something called the IP Justice League of America has been established. What does it do? It produces "the only comic book of international super-star INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY POLICY super heroes!" The artwork on the site's inaugural page shows the debut issue with Jack Valenti [is this a slight to Dan Glickman?] on the cover with the following side-bar caption:
Can the IP Justice League save Wil Wheaton from super-villain Jack Valenti? Will they defeat his evil army of psycho culture pirates!? Whose side is Avril Lavigne REALL [sic] on?? STAY TUNED!!!
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:08 PM | Comments (1)
May 17, 2005
Foster First, Quash Later
Courtesy of TechDirt, we hear that Macrovision has a really cool business strategy. According to recent patent filings highlighted in the Constitutional Code blog, Macrovision has patented both a P2P system and a technology to stop P2P copying. If Macrovision's P2P platform takes off, who's in a better position to help halt all the resulting file sharing? Wish we'd thought of it.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:28 PM | Comments (0)
May 13, 2005
Would Joe McCarthy Have Hated the Broadcast Flag?
Interest group Public Knowledge claims to have obtained draft legislative language circulated by the Hollywood studios to redress the loss of the broadcast flag. According to the Blogosphere, Hollywood is seeking to control all digital TV functions by granting the FCC "authority to adopt regulations governing digital television apparatus necessary to control the indiscriminate redistribution of digital television broadcast content over digital networks."
Despite the ambiguous nature of the rumored proposed statutory language, or perhaps because of it, paranoia is running high among anti-broadcast flag believers. Our favorite take, however, comes from Cory Doctorow, who says:
"Hollywood -- whom the Republican Congress already mistrusts as a bunch of crazy commie perverts -- is proposing to mushroom a federal agency into an entity that will have to regulate every single contractual relationship between every single digital television tech supplier, and every device that can be used to receive a digital TV signal, which means every PC."
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:15 PM | Comments (0)
May 9, 2005
But How Do You Really Feel About it Dan?
Dan Gillmor doesn’t mince words when it comes to the (for now) demise of the broadcast flag. Here’s what he has to say:
“Now the entertainment cartel will have to get its wishes the old-fashioned way. It will have to attempt to verbally bludgeon or buy enough members of Congress to get an actual law passed, as opposed to the end run it pulled with its friends at the Federal Communications Commission, which enacted a rule giving the cartel what it wanted.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:41 AM | Comments (0)
