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From Robert Darnton’s “Google & the Future of Books” (The New York Review of Books: 12 February 2009):
As the Enlightenment faded in the early nineteenth century, professionalization set in. You can follow the process by comparing the Encyclopédie of Diderot, which organized knowledge into an organic whole dominated by the faculty of reason, [...]
Posted on July 15th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Mark Gibbs’ “New Zealand gets insane copyright law” (Network World: 20 February 2009):
A law was recently passed in New Zealand that has created what many consider to be the world’s harshest copyright enforcement law. This insanity, found in Sections 92A and C of New Zealand’s Copyright Amendment Act 2008 establishes – and I am [...]
Posted on March 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Glyn Moody’s “The duplicitous inhabitants of Second Life” (The Guardian: 23 November 2006):
What would happen to business and society if you could easily make a copy of anything – not just MP3s and DVDs, but clothes, chairs and even houses? That may not be a problem most of us will have to confront for [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Richard Stallman’s “Transcript of Richard Stallman at the 4th international GPLv3 conference; 23rd August 2006” (FSF Europe: 23 August 2006):
Anyway, the term “intellectual property” is a propaganda term which should never be used, because merely using it, no matter what you say about it, presumes it makes sense. It doesn’t really make sense, because [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Tim Wu’s “On Copyright’s Authorship Policy” (Internet Archive: 2007):
On May 4, 2001, a one-man corporation named Bridgeport Music, Inc. launched over 500 counts of copyright infringement against more than 800 different artists and labels.1 Bridgeport Music has no employees, and other than copyrights, no reported assets.2 Technically, Bridgeport is a “catalogue [...]
Posted on November 26th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, law, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Tim Wu’s “On Copyright’s Authorship Policy” (Internet Archive: 2007):
On May 4, 2001, a one-man corporation named Bridgeport Music, Inc. launched over 500 counts of copyright infringement against more than 800 different artists and labels.1 Bridgeport Music has no employees, and other than copyrights, no reported assets.2 Technically, Bridgeport is a “catalogue [...]
Posted on November 26th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, law, tech in changing society | 1 Comment »
From Jonathan Handel’s “Is Content Worthless?” (The Huffington Post: 11 April 2008):
Everyone focuses on piracy, but there are actually six related reasons for the devaluation of content. The first is supply and demand. Demand — the number of consumers and their available leisure time – is relatively constant, but supply — online content — has [...]
Posted on October 12th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, law, technology | No Comments »
From Mark Sableman’s “Copyright reformers pose tough questions” (St. Louis Journalism Review: June 2005):
It goes by the name “digital rights management” – the effort, already very successful, to give content owners the right to lock down their works technologically. It is what Washington University law professor Charles McManis has characterized as attaching absolute “trade secret” [...]
Posted on July 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “A Speech Delivered In The House Of Commons On The 5th Of February 1841” (Prime Palaver #4: 1 September 2001):
The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax [...]
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “A Speech Delivered In The House Of Commons On The 5th Of February 1841” (Prime Palaver #4: 1 September 2001):
The question of copyright, Sir, like most questions of civil prudence, is neither black nor white, but grey. The system of copyright has great advantages and great disadvantages; and it is our [...]
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, law, on writing, politics, tech in changing society | Comments Off
From Mark Sableman’s “Copyright reformers pose tough questions” (St. Louis Journalism Review: June 2005):
Kembrew McLeod of the University of Iowa explained how as a graduate student he applied for a federal trademark registration on the phrase “freedom of expression” as a joke, not really expecting that even a green-eye-shaded trademark examiner would approve it. The [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Betsy Rosenblatt’s “Moral Rights Basics“:
The term “moral rights” is a translation of the French term “droit moral,” and refers … to the ability of authors to control the eventual fate of their works. An author is said to have the “moral right” to control her work. … Moral rights protect the personal and reputational, [...]
Posted on May 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Clay Shirky’s “File-sharing Goes Social“:
The RIAA has taken us on a tour of networking strategies in the last few years, by constantly changing the environment file-sharing systems operate in. In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now. With the RIAA’s waves of legal [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Scott Kleper’s “An Introduction to Copyfighting“:
I think a lot of people incorrectly assume that Copyfighters are people who believe that copyright should be abolished and that everything should be free. Copyfighters aren’t saying that all media should be freely distributed. We are saying that as consumers of media (film, television, software, literature, etc.) we [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From “Statement by India at the Inter-Sessional Intergovernmental Meeting on a Development Agenda For WIPO, April 11-13, 2005” (emphasis added):
“Development”, in WIPO’s terminology means increasing a developing country’s capacity to provide protection to the owners of intellectual property rights. This is quite a the opposite of what developing countries understand when they refer to the [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Financial Times” “James Boyle: Deconstructing stupidity“:
Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. …
Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Robert X. Cringely’s “Patently Absurd: Why Simply Making Spam Illegal Won’t Work“:
Software patents have become inordinately important for something that 25 years ago we didn’t even believe could exist. After several software patent cases had gone unsuccessfully as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, the general thinking when I got in this business [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From “NBC: iPod Boosts Prime Time“:
NBC’s “The Office” delivered a 5.1-its highest ratings ever-last Thursday among adults 18 to 49, a bump the network credits in large part to the show’s popularity as an iPod download. …
Such a connection between podcast success and broadcast ratings success is particularly significant because the NBC data is among [...]
Posted on March 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Edward Felten’s "DRM and the Regulatory Ratchet":
Regular readers know that one of my running themes is the harm caused when policy makers don’t engage with technical realities. One of the most striking examples of this has to do with DRM (or copy-restriction) technologies. Independent technical experts agree almost universally that DRM is utterly unable [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
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From Lawrence Lessig’s blog:
Here’s a reductio ad absurdum of folding in the face of copyright overclaiming: “While interviewing students for a documentary about inner-city schools, a filmmaker accidentally captures a television playing in the background, in which you can just make out three seconds of an episode of ‘The Little Rascals.’ He can’t include the [...]
Posted on October 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
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