January 8, 2013
Sony Issues Dylan CDs to Extend Copyright

Two spokesmen for Sony confirmed that the set was legitimate, its bootleglike appearance notwithstanding. They explained that the point of the release was to keep the recordings under copyright protection in Europe, where the laws are in flux. Currently, recordings can be copyrighted in Europe for 50 years, a much shorter term than in the United States, where recordings made since 1978 will remain copyrighted until 70 years after the death of the last surviving author.
Fuck everything.

3:04pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-dllxbH_gpk
Filed under: Intellectual Property Law bob dylan 
January 7, 2013
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2013?

  • The first issue of MAD magazine
  • Minority Report, by Philip K. Dick
  • Diamonds are Forever, by Ian Fleming
  • My Fair Lady, by Alan Lerner
  • Look Back in Anger, by John Osborne

And that’s just five of the books. 1956 was a pretty good year for movies, too: DeMille’s Ten Commandments remake, High Society, Giant (James Dean’s last film), Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That was the year of “Roll Over Beethoven” and “In the Still of the Night”, along with “I Walk The Line” and “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Love Me Tender”.

God, I’d kill for a vid mashup of High Society and The Philadelphia Story. (Which, in fairness, you could do legally, based on the recent DMCA exemption for fair-use vidding.)

Like I said last year: “I believe that life-plus copyright terms, as established in Title 17 of the United States Code, damage our culture, in the macro and micro sense of the word. Our society is poorer for it, and the art that we can create is poorer. Life-plus copyright terms diminish us, as people, as artists, as a community of Homo sapiens.”

And this year it’s worse: in January 2012, the Supreme Court decided Golan v. Holder, declaring that Congress has the right to remove works from the public domain.

Some days, it’s really hard to believe in the system.

1:12pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-dllxbCaph7
Filed under: Intellectual Property Law transformative works 
August 14, 2012
Copyright in an Augmented Reality

There’s basically nothing I do not love about this outline of Brian Wassom’s recent presentation on copyright in an augmented reality. I love living in the future as much as any sci-fi fangirl, as much as any tech geek, and I especially love that my intellectual property dorkery gets to come out to play when people make amazing toys.

[We w]ill see a lot of digitizing of real objects in digital space. Mere dimensional shifting is not expression. Meshwerks v Toyota (CA10 2008) established this…[we are a]lso likely to see avatars of real human people. Are these l]ikewise not copyrightable? What about as databases, as one author suggested following Meshwerks? Not [a] hypothetical — companies are dealing with this right now.
Interaction with the physical world is what makes AR unique. So will it alter the meaning of “public display and performance”?

11:50am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-dllxRP8UXh
Filed under: Intellectual Property Law augmented reality we live in the future 
February 21, 2012
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5:31pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-dllxGoo3EH
Filed under: Intellectual Property Law dmca nearlyfreespeech.net 
January 28, 2012
"It is not an automagical process on a level playing field, Mr. Coulton, Mr. Gaiman. You know this. It doesn’t take away from your art or your success to acknowledge that you are embedded in a system ginned up to send people just like you straight to the top. 'Make good stuff and make it easy for people to buy it' is so simplistic as to be grossly insulting. People have been making good art and trying to make it easy for people to buy it since the dawn of time, and it’s no accident that somehow, weirdly, it’s straight white folks, mostly men, who still keep ending up succeeding at it! Every single movement of independent music, art, and literature has foundered on the level of distribution (remember when Caroline went under? and every other zine distributor or independent record distribution company?). The internet is not going to magically solve this any more than desktop publishing or the postal service did, because it is embedded in the very same system."

meganwest:

maura:

FUCKING PREACH IT MIKKI. 

THIS.

(Source: neil-gaiman, via meganwest)

6:30am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-dllxFVFj4N
Filed under: privilege not how it works this is how it works Intellectual Property Law la la la I can't hear you 
January 6, 2012
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012?

Some answers, in no particular order:

  • The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years, Thomas Mann, trans. Denver Lindley
  • The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis
  • Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
  • Inherit the Wind, Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee
  • The Body Snatchers, Jack Finney
These are only a few of the famous texts; there’s a lot of film and television and music that also falls into this category. I believe that life-plus copyright terms, as established in Title 17 of the United States Code, damage our culture, in the macro and micro sense of the word. Our society is poorer for it, and the art that we can create is poorer. Life-plus copyright terms diminish us, as people, as artists, as a community of Homo sapiens.

6:30am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-dllxELcg73
Filed under: intellectual property law transformative works 
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