mediageek

Category: intellectual property

  • Bipartisan Hostility Towards Your Rights To Record and Enjoy Satellite & Net Radio

    Sure, it looked like a new day in Congress with the Democrats taking over. This past weekend’s National Conference on Media Reform definitely reinforced that notion as it pertains to media ownership and internet freedom. But the entertainment industry and copyright cartel are a whole different she-bang. Too many entertainment industry liberals are way to…

  • Macrovision Trying To Plug the Analog Hole with a Suit, Attacking Our Fair Use Rights

    I don’t know how I missed this story. The CamcorderInfo blog alerts me that Macrovision has sued Sima Products, which manufactures so-called video enhancers that do a pretty good job of fixing Macrovision’s analog copy protection scheme. Using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act as its weapon Macrovision won a preliminary injunction against Sima back in…

  • #2 Music Download Service Has No DRM

    It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about eMusic. I was a customer for a few years when it was a monthly-subscription fee for all-you-can-download MP3s from independent and minor labels. I quit in 2003 when eMusic changed hands and went to a limited download model. But this year I decided to resubscribe after noticing…

  • OH, the Tubes! or, Why I Don’t MySpace.

    Thanks to everyone’s fake anchorman, Sen. Ted Steven’s tubular understanding of the workings of the Internets is gaining much more popular recognition. Now the NY Times has taken note, as well as the LA Times, and the Washington Post. But one blogger apparently got his MySpace account temporarily suspended because he posted a parody song…

  • One Step Closer to the Demise of the Record Button?

    In addition to the votes for LPFM and against net neutrality, the Senate Commerce Committee voted in favor of an amendment creating the broadcast flag for both radio/audio and TV/video. If you haven’t heard already, the broadcast flag would allow all content producers to effectively disable the record button on any digital device you own.…

  • Bit-Torrenting TV Shows — Why Do It?

    No Media Kings interviewed one man responsible for releasing a significant quantity of series TV shows onto Bit Torrent to find out why. It’s an interesting read: If you try to approach file-sharing the way I do, it is a library. A library exists to provide copyrighted materials to the general public without purchasing, pending…

  • Mark Hosler: Creative Commons is “the Sierra Club of Intellectual Property, Negativland is more like Earth Firsters.”

    There’s a nice short video interview with Mark Hosler of Negativland at Minnesota Stories talking about the Creative Commons approach to copyright and what he sees as problems with it. Actually, it’s more of a Hosler monologue than an interview, but pretty concise and informative nonetheless. I didn’t know this, but apparently Negativland helped come…

  • Senators Discuss Plugging the A-Hole

    Public Knowledge’s Policy Blog has a rundown summary of today’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the Broadcast Flag. According to PK Sen. John Sununu was the hero of the day, questioning why Congress needed to interevene and noting that other technologies, like VHS videotape, flourished without government mandated protections. If there wasn’t a consensus on…

  • Vinyl and the Death of our Cultural Heritage

    In the last couple of months I’ve been discussing what I’m calling the death of our culturual heritage due to obscene copyright laws. In some ways, it’s worse than I even thought — and I’m both pretty cynical and informed. There are thousands, if not millions of recordings that were issued on vinyl LPs but…

  • The Copyright Cartel’s A-Hole Is Nothing New

    The “analog hole,” that is. In all the pre-holiday, end-of-semester rush I missed the introduction of new copyright legislation to address the so-called analog hole. That hole refers to the fact that most current copy-protection technologies only get in the way of digital copies, limiting CD copying and ripping to MP3, or copying DVDs, for…