In the News

["Jack Boeve" <JBoeve@xxxxxxxx>]

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Blog: Turnitin wins important victory in fight to combat plagiarism (and
the bloat of copyright). By Georgia Harper, (c)ollectanea, March 23,
2008.
http://tinyurl.com/2zn4u2

To the relief of many a high school, college and university
administrator, Turnitin's system for helping teachers identify possible
cases of plagiarism got a pass from the judge earlier this month. AV v.
iParadigms (District Court, Eastern District of Virginia).

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Blog: Supreme Court Asked to Weigh RIAA Legal Fee Flap. By David
Kravets, Wired Blog Network, March 24, 2008.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/supreme-court-a.html

The U.S. Supreme Court was asked Monday whether defendants who beat a
Recording Industry Association of America copyright case are entitled to
legal fees.

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Compromise bill is in tune with serious law on music. The
Tennessean.com, March 24, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/29a4ac

State legislation hammered out over the illegal downloading of music and
movies on college campuses appears to strike the right tone in its
approach to a relentless problem. A proposed bill would call upon
colleges and universities in the state to ratchet up the heat on
students who have been stealing music and movies.

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Blog: Pirates may face a flawed attack. By Simon Tsang, Sydney Morning
Herald, March 24, 2008.
http://blogs.smh.com.au/mashup/archives/random_access/017693.html

Last week, the Daily Yomiuri Online reported that four of Japan's
largest internet service providers agreed to do something about pirated
material being distributed across their networks. However, the twist is
the ISPs themselves won't be doing any of the monitoring.

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Blog: Why Your e-Books Are No Longer Yours. Posted by kdawson,
Slashdot.com, March 22, 2008.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/22/2150244

Predictions Market sends us to Gizmodo for an interesting take on the
question: when you "buy" "content" for Amazon's Kindle or the Sony
Reader, are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when
you download, or are you buying a book?

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Blog: Students School David Pogue on the New Copyright Morality. By
Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired Blog Network, March 21, 2008.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/03/students-school.html

In his recent speaking engagements, the New York Times' David Pogue has
run a demonstration involving asking the audience questions about
whether various digital copying activities are morally wrong. Normally,
as he proceeds towards the examples that are increasingly illegal, more
audience members raise their hands to indicate their moral objection.

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Software group lobbied on copyrights. CNN Money/AP, March 21, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/2q9zz6

The Business Software Alliance, the principal global
copyright-enforcement watchdog for the commercial software industry,
spent $1.7 million in 2007 to lobby for greater copyright enforcement
and other issues.

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The LSE's Freetard fiasco. By Andrew Orlowski, The Register, March 21,
2008.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/21/lse_music_debate/

I've been to some strange events in my time reporting for El Reg. But
yesterday at the London School of Economics I saw one of the most
disturbing of all. If you thought people don't behave in real life like
they do online, think again. Here were all the most unpleasant aspects
of online behaviour - ignorance, rudeness, groupthink, and a general
sneering moral superiority - but made flesh. By the end, it had
degenerated into farce. So what was it all about?

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Press Release: Judge Dismisses Copyright Infringement Complaint Against
iParadigms, Provider of Turnitin.com. EarthTimes/PR Newswire, March 20,
2008.
http://tinyurl.com/2yzr3s

A Virginia judge has issued a summary judgment regarding his dismissal
of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by four high school students
against iParadigms over the use of the students' written works in the
Turnitin plagiarism detection service.

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Blu-Ray Disc's BD+ Copyright Protection Technology Defeated Completely.
By Anton Shilov, X-bit Labs, March 20, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/yv6n2g

Even though copyright protection technologies are meant to exclude
possibilities of copying, they do so for a limited time only. Throughout
the rest time of their lifespan such technologies usually annoy those
customers who acquired their content fairly. Less than a year after
finalization the BD+ copyright protection scheme has been completely
defeated, claims a software firm.

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Blog: Dead Guys Sound Off On Copyright. By Matt Ransford, PopSci.com,
March 20, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/yp9ety

Long before DRM-cracking and Creative Commons, thinkers like Gutenberg,
Kant and Locke started the freedom of information debate. A new site
archives their really old ideas

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Blog: Cable chief: Let us 'experiment' with our networks. Posted by Anne
Broache, CNET News.com, March 20, 2008.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9899366-7.html

With discontent still festering over Comcast's admitted slowing of
file-sharing uploads, the cable industry's chief on Thursday set out to
do a little damage control. Kyle McSlarrow, president of the National
Cable and Telecommunications Association, said he's "amused" that in all
the coverage of the Comcast-BitTorrent spat, no one's talking about the
cable industry's role in getting high-speed Internet service to millions
of American households and, by extension, enabling online applications
and services to take off.

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Press Release:  Myxer Launches PROTECT Copyright Protection Program for
Rights Holders. EarthTimes/PR Newswire, March 20, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/26wap4

Myxer, the leader in ad-supported mobile content, today announced
details of its PROTECT program, a powerful framework designed to address
the concerns of copyright holders in the emerging new mobile economy. As
one of the mobile industry's leading service providers, Myxer is working
proactively with content owners, such as record labels, film and
television studios, to give them unprecedented visibility into and
control over the flow of content through the Myxer platform.

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Panellists Outline Strategies On Exceptions And Limitations To
Copyright. By Kaitlin Mara, Intellectual Property Watch, March 20, 2008.
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=973

An event at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) last
week brought some key actors in copyright and related rights to discuss
the value of limitations and exceptions and to present a recently
released study describing an international instrument on limitations and
exceptions.

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Do The Monster Mash. By Charlie Devereux, CNN. March 17, 2008.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/03/12/danger.mouse/

When Brian Burton, a little known DJ operating under the name of Danger
Mouse, released "The Grey Album" in 2003, he brought to mainstream
attention a new form of musical genre made possible by the advance of
modern technology and the Internet. He also inadvertently sparked a
debate about record labels' monopoly of music ownership.

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Sweden Pursues Illegal File-Sharers. By AP, March 14, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/2z32uo

Swedish courts will soon be able to force the country's Internet
providers to produce information on suspected file-sharers in a move to
crackdown on piracy, the culture and justice ministers said Friday.

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Higher-Education Groups Urge Federal Lawmakers to Oppose File-Sharing
Measure. By Andrea Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 12,
2008.
http://tinyurl.com/yuad8h

A coalition of 13 higher education groups is urging education leaders in
Congress to reject a provision in the Higher Education Act approved by
the U.S. House of Representatives last month that would require colleges
to buy computer tools to detect student music and video piracy and to
offer students subscription-based music services.

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Can Someone Give Michael Eisner A History Lesson On Copyright And
Patents?  Techdirt.com, March 11, 2008.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080311/190606504.shtml

Michael Eisner gave an interview at SXSW on Tuesday (with Mark Cuban
acting as the interviewer). While he discussed a variety of things, at
one point he was asked about copyright issues and he responded with a
strongly pro-copyright statement.


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