copyright
DMCA made a little more rational!
Jailbreaking and dvd ripping now legal!
http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/26/technology/iphone_jailbreaking/index.htm
An argument for copyright protections, or against the copyright system as a whole?
Art can transport us to new places, help us understand more what it is to be human, help us empathize with our fellow beings, and help us understand our society in new ways. For some of these goals, but especially the last one, an effective tool for hundreds of years has been to take an existing popular work and modify it, in a way to make people look at it in a different way and think about the original differently, but also to think about society differently through the lens of what the original meant. Older examples can be found in classical music, with composers using existing melodie
Mardi Gras Copyrights?
Interesting dilema involving copyrights and photography in New Orleans
"Knowing that there are few legal protections for a person who is photographed in public — particularly one who stops and poses every few feet — some Mardi Gras Indians have begun filing for copyright protection for their suits, which account for thousands of dollars in glass beads, rhinestones, feathers and velvet, and hundreds of hours of late-night sewing."
ACTA Update
More revelations about the top-secret new copyright treaty that's being worked out behind closed doors:
Example of stupid copyrights...
It's 70 years after the original Australian children's song came out, and a small snippet can't be used as part of a pop song talking about Australia??? If we'd always had these laws, half of classical music wouldn't exist, as it often includes sections of other pieces (e.g. Mahler 1, 3rd movement, Carnival of the Animals, variations on a theme by Paganini, ...)
http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Music/02/04/down.under.kookaburra/index....
Wrong take on intellectual property
The author is all over the place, equating any kind of sharing and collaboration (software, music, video) as a anti-individual, mao-ist, anti-capitalist cancer. He writes against "the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual ...
Boo for copyright extensions...
"It's nearly the end of 2009. If the 1790 copyright maximum term of 28 years was still in effect, everything that had been published by 1981 would be now be in the public domain — so the original Ultima and God Emperor of Dune and would be available for remixing and mashing up.
Secret copyright treaty leaks
I hope this isn't really where things are headed...
- * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
So which is it? Product or license?
When people wanted to backup their DVD's so that little Johny didn't destroy the latest Disney video, companies sued with the argument that when you break a plate, you have to buy a new one (product). Ok, so they want laws that apply to product to apply to software and other media? Nope...
More copyright stuff, from UK
Good article talking about copyright and the industry's campaign to say copyright infringment is theft. I was thinking about this last night when I was watching Gran Torino, or trying to... they make you sit through about 10 minutes of copyright warnings and ads for crappy movies (doom, t3, etc...), with the menu button disabled so you can't skip. Talk about a disencentive to pay for content... pay $15 and be treated like a criminal, or download for free and enjoy your movie without the crap.
