In the News

["Jack Boeve" <JBoeve@xxxxxxxx>]

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Blog: Congressman Lessig? By Georgia Harper, Collectanea, February 18,
2008.
http://tinyurl.com/2cuhuw

Lending credibility to the idea that Lessig may run for Congress in a
special election to replace the late Congressman Lantos on April 8 (less
than 2 months from now), he reportedly is "away with my family this
weekend to think things through..."

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Media Giants Harmonise Over Online Copyright. By Guardian Unlimited,
February 19, 2008.
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/179030.html

A coalition of nine of the world's leading media companies today struck
a cooperation pact aimed at cracking down on people who infringe
copyright on the internet - with Google conspicuously absent.

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Blog: Media Industry to Lobby Against Higher Copyright Fees. By Zena
Olijnyk, FP Trading Post, February 19, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/yp4s8p

Lobbying efforts are heating up as executives at Canadian radio
companies brace themselves against the prospect of paying a huge
increase in copyright fees.

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Canadian authors get short end of copyright collective stick. By Nate
Anderson, Ars Technica, February 18, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/27dfwm

Copyright collectives are supposed to make it easy to go straight. If a
university wants to make photocopies in most parts of Canada, for
instance, a single license from a nonprofit group called Access
Copyright will take care of the legal issues. Businesses, government,
and universities pay into the group, which then redistributes the money
to publishers and authors. But where does the money go?

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Blog: Verizon: Copyright infringement may be good for busines. By
Preston Gralla, ComputerWorld, February 18, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/266ywc

Has Verizon decided that copyright infringement will help its bottom
line? In a backhanded way, the company seems to be saying that sharing
copyright-infringing video files on its network could, in fact, be good
for its business.

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Russia improves copyright law. By Nick Holdsworth, Variety, February 18,
2008.
http://tinyurl.com/28k9tn

Russia is making gradual progress on increasing and improving the
protection of intellectual property, a key European audiovisual industry
body said Monday.

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EU commissioner wants to extend copyright to 95 years. By Rich Fiscus,
Afterdawn.com, February 18, 2008.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/12957.cfm

Much like songwriter and Congressman Sonny Bono did in the U.S. several
years ago, EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy is championing an extension
to copyright terms.

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File 'sharing' or 'stealing'? The semantic debate over whether copyright
infringement is theft. By Jon Healey, LA Times, February 18, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/2n7czt

A few days ago I came across an Op-Ed submission that called for file
sharing to be decriminalized. The editors here decided not to run it,
but it intrigued me for a couple of reasons.

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Studios Sue Google-Backed Chinese P2P Site Xunlei. By Rafat Ali,
PaidContent.com, February 17, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/2a3nun

The Motion Picture Association, which includes six movie studios, has
filed copyright infringement suits in China against Shenzhen Xunlei
Networking Technology, a popular P2P file sharing service.

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When pop culture tributes become copyright infringements. By Dan
Bischoff, Star-Ledger, February 16, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/ysvmmj

Recently the 71-year-old artist and heir to the Johnson & Johnson
fortune has begun a series that he calls "American Icons," depicting
famous images from Americana, like the sailor kissing the nurse in Times
Square at the end of World War II, or "Forever Marilyn," Johnson's
three-dimensional bronze of Marilyn Monroe standing on the subway grate
from "The Seven-Year Itch."

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Gil's challenge: Reconciling counter-culture with copyright. By Roberto
Rocha, The Gazette, February 16, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/ypszjw

Looking at Gilberto Gil, it's not hard to see how he can be at once a
politician and a touring music star. It's not that Gil can wear a suit
and sport long, greying dreadlocks. It's not that he makes millions from
album sales and product endorsements while saying of cultural investors,
"you know how greedy they are." It's because this dual role is the only
way he can reconcile the great divide of the 21st century: the people's
hunger for free culture on the Internet and the artists who make a
living from it.

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Gigs & Bytes: The Big Disconnect. By PollStar.com, February 15, 2008.
http://www.pollstar.com/news/viewnews.pl?NewsID=9418

Could it really be this easy? Ever since college kids started putting
digitized music tracks on public FTP servers, the recording industry has
been relying on legal might, bluster and intimidation to protect its
music from illicit Internet distribution....But another method for
stopping illicit distribution of copyright works is now gaining
traction.

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Threat Of Jail Time Increases Respect For Copyright, Microsoft Says. By
Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek, February 13, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/2wrgug

Teens appear to be willing to curtail illegal downloading when told they
face fines or jail time. This finding, among many in a survey published
by Microsoft on Wednesday, is the basis for the software company's new
campaign to teach teens respect for intellectual property rights.

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Business coalition opposes harsh copyright reform. By CBC News, February
13, 2008.
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2008/02/13/tech-copyright.html

A who's who of powerful companies and business associations have banded
together to push for less restrictive copyright reform, driving a stake
into the heart of the federal government's argument for its new
copyright bill.

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Survey: teens rely on parents to teach them about copyright. By Jacqui
Cheng, Ars Technica, February 13, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/2fgzgo

Nearly half of all teenagers have no familiarity with copyright laws and
don't feel that the same type of punishment is necessary for illegally
downloading media from the Internet as other types of theft.

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Report: Three-strikes copyright enforcement may come to UK. By Eric
Bangeman, Ars Technica, February 12, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/22fcxs

A French copyright enforcement initiative has made its way through the
Chunnel to the UK, and British ISPs less than thrilled about it. Should
ISPs and Big Content prove unable to come to an agreement on their own,
the UK parliament will reportedly soon consider legislation that would
mirror France's planned "three strikes and you're offline" approach to
copyright infringement, one that would cut off Internet access to repeat
copyright infringers.

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Blog: Columbia Law School, Fair Use Symposium. By Georgia Harper,
Collectanea, February 10, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/2dotl2

The symposium appears to have been a very heady thing, with lots of
theorizing. Not a lot of nuts and bolts stuff here, but very, very
thoughtful analysis of both theory and function.

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A Tight Grip Can Choke Creativity. By Joe Nocera, New York Times,
February 9, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/yv998y

On Friday, a lawyer named Anthony Falzone filed his side's first big
brief in the case of Warner Bros. Entertainment and J. K. Rowling v. RDR
Books. Mr. Falzone is employed by Stanford Law School, where he heads up
the Fair Use Project, which was founded several years ago by Lawrence
Lessig, perhaps the law school's best-known professor.

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