In the News

["Jack Boeve" <JBoeve@xxxxxxxx>]

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Blog: Conditions in Open Source Artistic Licenses Limit Their Scope. Discuss.
Posted by Dan Slater, Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/6j7ht8

Listen up techies! Judge Hochberg, of the Court of Appeals for the Federal
Circuit, gave code-heads a lot to chew on today with his ruling in Jacobsen v.
Katzer.

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Ray Beckerman urges defense lawyers to go after MediaSentry. By Rich "vurbal"
Fiscus, AfterDawn.com, August 13, 2008.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/15079.cfm

Ray Beckerman, the high profile defense attorney who has spent countless hours
battling RIAA lawyers in New York, has recently posted some advice to other
defense attorneys on his blog, Recording Industry vs. The People. In light of
the recent trend of judicial skepticism about RIAA claims he suggests that a
good offense may be the best defense right now.

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Texas man faces copyright infringement for music downloads. By Marilyn
Tennissen, Southeast Texas Record, August 12, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/5zygqk

An East Texas man didn't make it to "Paradise City" when he downloaded some
tunes from Guns N' Roses and other bands, but instead landed in court facing
copyright infringement.

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Blog: Wal-Mart: you can't scan century-old photos of your ancestors because
copyright lasts forever. Posted by Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, August 12,
2008.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/12/walmart-you-cant-sca.html

Tstamps sez, "I was in Spring Hill, Florida, visiting my grandparents, who
have all the family pictures of great grandparents and great-great
grandparents. Doing the good familial thing, I decided to take the albums and
scan the photos so that the rest of the family could see them. I only had one
day to do this, and the only place near them was Wal-Mart (the Supercenter by
highway 19). So I take the (sometimes) 100 year old photos to Wal-Mart and
begin scanning them on their machine.

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Blog: Government to increase online copyright penalty tenfold. OUT-LAW News,
August 12, 2008.
http://www.out-law.com/page-9341

The Government and the Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO) are consulting on
the plans, which would allow Magistrates' Courts in England and Wales to issue
summary fines of #50,000 for online copyright infringement.

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Blog: Should Copyright Law Change in the Digital Age? By Mark Glaser,
PBS/MediaShift, August 11, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/6jnx4z

This is the final part of my three-part email roundtable discussion looking at
the new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use of Online Video created at the
behest of the Center for Social Media at American University....In this final
installment, the discussion turns to legal options, and whether the copyright
law should be updated for fair use, possibly creating safe harbors for certain
types of work that would be shielded from lawsuits.

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Blog: Teenager gets damages reduced after copyright ignorance claim. OUT-LAW
News, August 11, 2008.
http://www.out-law.com/page-9339

A 16-year-old girl has successfully argued that she was too young to
understand that her copyright-infringing downloading of music was unlawful. A
US court said she will only have to pay $200 per song downloaded instead of
the $750 demanded in the case.

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Digital Crossroads: Painful as slander may be, don't turn service providers
into speech police. By Larry Magid, Mercury News, August 11, 2008.
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_10165561?nclick_check=1

When Congress voted for the Communications Decency Act of 1996, most members
thought it was just about pornography, says U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren. But one
section of CDA had much broader implications, the San Jose Democrat told the
Internet Education Foundation's second annual State of the Net Conference at
Santa Clara University last week.

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Blog: Olympic Copyright Cops Snuff Rogue Web Vids. Ian Paul, PC World, August
11, 2008.
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/007431.html

Broadcaster NBC spent much of Friday furiously trying to prevent computer
users in the United States from accessing streaming coverage of the opening
ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. Users were able to find streams and
downloads on foreign newsfeeds, YouTube and other sites like Justin.tv.

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Letter to the Editor: Redefining Digital Copyrights. By Gigi Sohn, New York
Times, August 10, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/5hr72s

To the Editor: "A Ruling May Pave the Way for Broader Use of DVR" (Business
Day, Aug. 5) misses the mark on the importance of the Second Circuit's finding
that Cablevision's remote DVR service does not violate copyright law.

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The Permission Problem. By James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, August 11, 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/6pfnto

In the second decade of the twentieth century, it was almost impossible to
build an airplane in the United States. That was the result of a chaotic legal
battle among the dozens of companies-including one owned by Orville
Wright-that held patents on the various components that made a plane go. No
one could manufacture aircraft without fear of being hauled into court. The
First World War got the industry started again, because Congress realized that
something needed to be done to get planes in the air.

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Blog: How Copyright Is Holding Back The Creative Class. By Mike Masnick,
TechDirt, August 8, 2008.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080808/0149051928.shtml

While not enough people recognize it, the real purpose of copyright law is to
provide an incentive for the creation of more content. The government felt
that there was a market failure, where not enough "content" would be produced
without a limited monopoly, and thus, copyright was born. However, that
happened back in the day when creating content wasn't easy.

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William Patry Copyright Blog returns! P2P Net, August 8, 2008.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/16663

Excellent news! William Patry is back online. Or he will be, probably by
tomorrow. Senior copyright counsel at Google, he decided to take his site
offline because among other things, "The current state of copyright law is too
depressing," he posted.

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In legal limbo between copyrights and wrongs. By Robert Levine, International
Herald Tribune, August 8, 2008.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/09/arts/girltalk.php

The D.J. Girl Talk has won positive reviews for his new album and news media
attention for its Radiohead-style pay-what-you-want pricing, and he is
scheduled to play a high-profile gig at the All Points West festival this
weekend in Jersey City, New Jersey. Not bad for an artist whose music may be
illegal.

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Blog: When the ghosts of songs equal copyright infringements. By John Newton,
P2P Net, August 8, 2008.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/16656

The Cartoon Network v CSC Holdings case is one of the most important, believes
Recording Industry vs The People's Ray Beckerman. It centres on the
much-criticized MAI case which held a copy existing only in Random Access
Memory can constitute unlawful 'copying' under the US Copyright Act. What!?
You read it correctly.

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Blog: Richard Stallman in Auckland: On copyright in a networked world. Foobar,
August 8, 2008.
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/5576

I just came back from Richard Stallman's lecture at the University of
Auckland. I was surprised by the amazing interest in his talk, the lecture
hall being entirely jam-packed full, people standing along the back and all
the way out into the hallway. I was lucky to be there early enough to get one
of the last few chairs.

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How copyright got to its current state (Patry blog ending). By Andy Oram,
O'Reilly, August 7, 2008.
http://news.oreilly.com/2008/08/how-copyright-got-to-its-curre.html

William Patry, one of the most respected online commentators on copyright, has
shut down his weblog. His parting observation is stated in the personal,
non-analystical style he liked to cultivate online, but it will serve as a
declaration of policy (as well as a cry of protest) among artistic and
technically creative people for some time to come: The Current State of
Copyright Law is too depressing.


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