Category: intellectual property

A Norwegian Court ruled that the teenager that created the DeCSS program that decrypts DVDs so that they can be played on computers running Linux was not committing piracy, contrary to the claims of the US movie industry. Read more in reports from the BCC and the AP (via Wired). It’s nice to see some…

A News.com article reports: “Digital conversion will put radio under the purview of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a controversial 1998 law that some believe has greatly expanded the powers of copyright holders. ” In short, this means that when broadcasting in digital a traditional brodcast station indeed may have to pay royalties to the…

Let’s go back eleven years, to 1991. Like now, the recording industry was in a pitched battle over piracy. Only then, the ship was called “home taping,” not mp3. Digital audio tape, which would allow for bit-perfect copies of CDs, was threatening to land stateside from Japan, and blank audiocassette sales were through the roof.…

Lawrence Lessig has posted his own lucid thoughts about how things went arguing the Eldred case in front of the Supreme Court. His best hint for the interpretive exercise known as “Supreme Watching” is this: “Lots of people have made tons of noise about what the court asked questions about and what it did not…

A exhibition of “illegal art” that appropriates other art and cultural clutter, like corporate logos, is coming to NYC and Chicago. Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age is sponsored by Stay Free, an excellent zine-cum-magazine that focuses on issues of intellectual and artistic freedom within a hyper-private-corporatized society. Wired News has an…

Today is the day that Larry Lessig, Eric Eldred and co. make arguments in front the Supreme Court in favor of hacking back the most recent extention of copyright law that keeps the very first appearance of Mickey Mouse (amongst millions of works) out of the public domain. At stake is the future of our…

To whit: “Hoping to end the online trading frenzy that has plagued the music business, the movie industry is hunting down digital film swappers and getting their Internet service cut off.” — You know, just where do all those movies that are still in theaters and traded on file-sharing networks come from? A good part…

Virtual communitarian Howard Rheingold pens an essay on the ‘Smart Mobs’ — the ad hoc networks of individuals using technology to coordinate their actions, be it by cell phone, text messaging, Internet. He correctly identifies the source of ongoing technology struggles and the conflict between people’s desire to use technology to create and build and…

SiliconValley.com asks “Whatever happened to fair use?” and provides a nice overview of the issues at play between the record industry, which wants to control exactly when and how you listen to their product, and the listener, who just wants to pay $15 and be left alone to listen, rip and burn that CD however…