In The News

["Jack Boeve" <JBoeve@xxxxxxxx>]

--------------------------
Blog: The wisdom of the 14 year copyright term. By Georgia Harper,
Collectanea. January 1, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/24goky

I have read a number of things lately that reinforce the idea that
copyright terms should be shorter to optimally promote the creation of
new works.

--------------------------
Study rethinks online video copyright. By Alex Woodson, The Hollywood
Reporter. January 3, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/249et9

A new study found that many uses of copyrighted material in online
video, including mash-ups and satire, are legal and could be endangered
by new censorship practices. The study, "Recut, Reframe, Recycle:
Quoting Copryighted Material in User-Generated Video" was conducted by
American University professors Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi and
looked at thousands of videos on 75 online platforms.

--------------------------
Blog: YouTubers aren't necessarily breaking copyright laws. By Ellen
Lee, Technology Chronicles. January 2, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/2y6aqm

YouTube creators aren't necessarily breaking copyright laws even if
their clips borrow from copyrighted music, movies and television shows,
researchers at American University said. Researchers at the school's
Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and Center for
Social Media reviewed hundreds of videos on YouTube, MySpace and other
Web sites, and concluded in a report released today that the clips, in
most circumstances, could be ruled legal under "fair use" laws.

--------------------------
RIAA Behaving Badly; Let's Cut Their Copyright Privileges. By Alexander
Wolfe, Information Week. January 2, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/2256th

Innocent consumers are being bothered by another round of the record
industry behaving badly, via more lawsuits and anti-copying threats.
This time, though, I've got a solution. We should do what we do to
children who misbehave: Take away their privileges. Here's the deal.

--------------------------
Blog: Copyright Kills Amazing Music Project. By Steven Kinsella,
Mises.org. January 2, 2008.
http://blog.mises.org/archives/007606.asp

A very cool project has been killed by copyright. According to
Wikipedia, "The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) was a
project for the creation of a virtual library of public domain music
scores, based on the wiki principle."

--------------------------
Congress Proposes to Enhance IP Enforcement and Penalties. By George
Pike, Information Today. December 31, 2007.
http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=40519

Just before the holiday recess, the U.S. House of Representatives
introduced and held hearings on the Prioritizing Resources and
Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act, H.R. 4279. The
proposed legislation would substantially increase criminal and civil
penalties for copyright infringement, eliminate the registration
requirement to pursue criminal penalties, and create a White House-level
executive position to lead the fight to protect U.S. intellectual
property interests.

--------------------------
Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use. By Marc
Fisher, Washington Post. December 30, 2007.
http://tinyurl.com/275vks

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years
since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from
record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the
decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.
Now...the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step
further...the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has
legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

--------------------------
Down the Pan?  By Julie Mackintosh, Sunday Herald. December 29, 2007.
http://tinyurl.com/249q5l

Time runs out for everyone in the end, even the boy who wouldn't grow
up. Tomorrow, European copyright will expire on classic children's novel
Peter Pan, 70 years after the death of its author JM Barrie. The lapse
of copyright is nothing new. Literary, artistic or musical work created
by anyone who died before 1937 has already lost legal protection, but
Peter Pan is a stand-out case.

--------------------------
Blog: Copyright 'Allah'. By Ali Eteraz, The Guardian. December 29, 2007.
http://tinyurl.com/276wxe

I just read that a Catholic newspaper in Malaysia is not being allowed
to refer to God as "Allah" as it has always done. I guess the government
thinks that Muslims have a monopoly over the word. The Church has, quite
appropriately, sued the government for this absurd pronouncement,
arguing that the word "Allah" is merely an Arabic word for God, which
has been used by members of many faiths, long before Islam was even
founded.

--------------------------
Egypt ponders bill to copyright the pyramids. By CBC News. December 28,
2007.
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/story/2007/12/28/egypt-copyright.html

Egypt might seek out copyright on its antiquities, from the pyramids to
scarab beetles, in an attempt to collect royalties from the creation of
replicas, an official said Thursday. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's
Supreme Council of Antiquities, has proposed the copyright measure as
part of a new law before the Egyptian parliament that would also crack
down on antiquities smuggling.

--------------------------
Blog: So 2007 was the year of abandon... By Georgia Harper, Collectanea.
December 27, 2007.
http://tinyurl.com/2gxdaq

... Abandoning DRM anyway (Warner's Entire Digital Music Catalog For
Sale on Amazon as MP3s). With this announcement on Wired news, we learn
that 3 of the 4 majors have now concluded that sales of mp3s
(unprotected tracks) will likely expand the digital music business more
effectively than DRMd tracks. Duh. Sony/BMG is still not so sure. What
does it take?

--------------------------
Blog: Readers Respond to the Debate Over Responsible Downloading. By
David Pogue, New York Times. December 27, 2007.
http://tinyurl.com/22oo4b

I recently wrote about how, in one of my talks, I walk the audience down
a garden path of hypothetical copyright-morality situations. The point
is to illustrate how many shades of gray there are, in the law and in
people's ethical compasses. And I noted that when I recently posed the
same series of questions to a college audience, I was never able to find
the young people's morality threshold. Digital music and movies, they
clearly felt, are made to be shared. The outpouring of reader responses
has been astonishing. You should read them at Pogue's Posts; it's a
complete course in current attitudes toward digital copying.

--------------------------
The generational divide in copyright morality. By David Pogue, New York
Times. December 20, 2007.
http://tinyurl.com/23nwhw

I've been doing a good deal of speaking recently. And in one of my
talks, I tell an anecdote about a lesson I learned from my own readers.
It was early in 2005, and a little hackware program called PyMusique was
making the rounds of the Internet. PyMusique was written for one reason
only: to strip the copy protection off of songs from the iTunes music
store.

--------------------------
California Startup Claims to be 'YouTube for Documents'. By VentureBeat,
WRAL TechWire.com. December 26, 2007.
http://www.wral.com/business/local_tech_wire/venture/story/2219394/

Scribd, the fast-growing site that lets you post documents online, has
launched two free programs, one to let high-volume publishers organize
and market their content, and another to allow educational institutions
to store and share information securely online. The company, which calls
itself the "YouTube for documents," says it has over 4 billion words
contributed and 10 million unique visitors per month.

--------------------------
Creative vigilantes.  By Daniel Smith, Boston Globe, December 23, 2007.
http://tinyurl.com/252amq

Magicians, chefs, and stand-up comics protect their creations without
the law. What they can teach lawyers - and Congress - about the future
of intellectual property.

--------------------------
==========
(C)ollectanea Blog. Collected perspectives on copyright.
http://chaucer.umuc.edu/blogcip/collectanea/
Center for Intellectual Property, UMUC