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We've discussed in the past how copyright isn't really "property" at all, and trying to compare it to regular property leads to all sorts of confusing problems. Take, for example, this lawsuit, found via Michael Scott, over who owns the rights to thousands of songs. The actual mess is a bit complex, but as you read through it, you realize that we're dealing with the emperor's new clothes in the form of copyrights. A bunch of different people are arguing over who owns a totally made up thing, with different people simply claiming to own it, and leaving it for the courts to figure out. Here's just a snippet of the mess...
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Brad Hubbard writes "I regularly read a blog called "Knock Off Wood" -- a site where a woman teaches readers how to build various designer-looking pieces of furniture at home for a lot less. It's the best kind of "maker" site - someone who is passionate about crafting, freely sharing their passion with a community of readers and everyone learns a little something. So when Williams Sonoma, Inc (owner of Pottery Barn and West Elm among others) sent them a legal nastygram, the owner of the site was entertained more than anything."
The company is alleging both trademark and copyright violations -- though it's difficult to see either one holding up. Unfortunately the...
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Wireless Ink was a company that I remember getting some buzz back in the 2005/2006 timeframe... and then they dropped completely off my radar. Honestly, I had thought they had gone out of business. So I was a bit surprised to see them suddenly pop back up with a patent (of course) and a lawsuit against both Google and Facebook, claiming infringement because both companies allow users to access social networking tools via a mobile phone. Seriously. Does anyone honestly (honestly, really) think that without this patent, no one would have ever figured out how to let people access a social network via a mobile phone? The patent itself (7,599,983) was...
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Earlier this year we noted this was likely, but now it appears that Rep. Howard Berman is getting ready to introduce an "Internet Freedom Bill," that would limit how US companies could operate in "internet-restricting countries." Now, we've already pointed out that it's odd to see politicians pushing such bills when the US itself is pushing to restrict the internet in similar ways -- but it's particularly ironic with Berman. In supporting this new legislation, Berman notes: He's trying to figure out "what's the most effective thing we can do to help people in countries where the government is" seeking to restrict Internet freedom. But, here's the thing. Howard Berman, who...
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You may have seen some of the rather popular videos by Common Craft, which has built a rather large following based on these videos about technology and social media using paper diagrams on whiteboards. What the videos are really good at is simplifying things in a way that's easy for people to understand. For example, the video, Twitter in Plain English has received nearly 1.7 million views and is often sent around to people who are trying to understand Twitter.
Like most viral video efforts, the videos are hosted on YouTube, which makes them easy to embed and share. Except, apparently, that's not working within Common Craft's business model. An anonymous...
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A few years back, I wrote about why we had found full text RSS feeds to be much more powerful and useful than truncated RSS feeds. The reason that many sites push truncated feeds is the belief that it will force people to click through, and the ads on the webpage are worth a lot more than the ads found in RSS feeds. But it's a short-sighted view. Because what it's really doing is trying to push readers to do something that they don't want to do. Many of them use RSS readers because it's a more convenient way to organize and read the news they want. And, we found that by making life...
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Just a couple of months ago, I wrote about something that I thought was really impressive by Thomson Reuters. A Reuters blogger wrote a blog post on his official Reuters blog questioning Reuters itself after rumors started spreading that the company had spiked an article after pressure from the article's subject. Now, the two stories might cancel each other out in some way. Spiking a story based on pressure from the subject is bad, but allowing an employee to publicly question the action on a company blog shows an openness that I thought was impressive.
However, with the release of Reuters' new social media policies, it looks like the blogger, Chris...
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Netflix, of course, received tons of attention and (apparently) a lot of valuable research, with its Netflix prize competition, that allowed anyone to take a bunch of Netflix data and try to improve on Netflix's ranking algorithm. Of course, whenever you're dealing with "anonymized data" there are questions about whether or not it can really be anonymous. In nearly every case, someone figures out how to "re-nonymize" at least some of the data. And, of course, that also happened with the original Netflix Prize data. This was especially troubling for Netflix because of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), 18 USC 2710, a special law that was passed after Supreme Court nominee...
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The entitlement some people feel because someone else had a somewhat (but not really) similar idea to what they had, and then actually executed on it better, is really astounding. For years, we've seen people claim that various filmmakers, TV producers and authors had "stolen" their ideas and sued over it. These lawsuits almost never get anywhere. In almost every case, the similarities between the stories are marginal at best, and clearly were developed independently. It's just that the creator of the less-well-known work is jealous of the success of whoever came up with a better version that got a lot more attention.
Apparently, those kinds of lawsuits are now...
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Not too long ago, we wrote about a bizarre situation where a UK newspaper was caught flat out making up a story that was completely wrong. It had interviewed an American professor whose findings were the exact opposite of what the newspaper wanted to print, so it just pretended his research said what they wanted it to say. And, now, reports have come out about how the Daily Mail, one of the more popular UK tabloids, published an article by a supposed "child protection expert," all about the evils of Facebook, detailing how he "posed as a 14-year-old girl" and: "Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered...
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Late last year we noticed that Apple seemed to be getting needlessly (and at times ridiculously) aggressive over its trademarks in Australia. There was the software developer who had a product named iPodRip, which had been around for years, which Steve Jobs suddenly decided needed to change its name. When the developer pleaded directly to Jobs, Jobs replied "Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal," which is amusing since the Beatles once tried to force Jobs to change the name of Apple -- and to him it was a big deal. Then there's the lawsuit against Macpro, a company that's been in business for 26 years -- since before Apple even had...
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You gotta love the MPAA for the sheer Hollywood brashness of two recent press releases, that the Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro decided to compare and call the MPAA on its blatant dishonesty. The first press release, from back in December, was all about how the internet and file trading were killing the industry: Yet our industry faces the relentless challenge of the theft of its creative content, a challenge extracting an increasingly unbearable cost. Now, we already knew that wasn't true, and were among those who pointed out that the industry had just experienced its best year at the box office ever. And, of course, that's what the second press release was about.
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TorrentFreak has an article about how Ari Emanuel, brother of Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and the "inspiration" for Jeremy Piven's "Ari Gold" character in the show Entourage, is claiming that he's talking to President Obama about implementing a three strikes law in the US. While I'm sure he's talking, I'm at least somewhat confident he's not getting very far. Almost everyone I've spoken to on various sides of this debate agree that a blatant three strikes law in the US is unlikely to get very far. Now, something like ACTA might put pressure on ISPs to adopt a three strikes rule, and Emanuel's buddies in Hollywood still think that they can...
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jprlk was the first of a few of you to send in the news that the Canadian Booksellers' Association is apparently so afraid of competition from Amazon, that it's asking the government to block the company from building a distribution center north of the border. Apparently, they're relying on some ridiculous rules about "foreign ownership," which is really an excuse to screw Canadian citizens by making things more expensive by limiting competition. The "moral" claim (one we've heard before in other contexts) is that Amazon shouldn't be allowed in Canada because it "won't promote Canadian authors" enough. Of course, the real reason they're afraid is that Amazon will likely be cheaper, which would...
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Update: As lots of folks are pointing out in the comments, this appears to have been included by some third party or disgruntled employee or something, rather than Energizer itself. Energizer has recalled the products and is investigating. Apologies for suggesting that this may have been intentional on Energizer's part. The original post follows: Someone, who prefers to remain anonymous, alerts us to the news that Symantec has discovered that a USB battery charger from Energizer installs a dangerous rootkit after installing the required driver. You would think that legit companies would know better than to install a secret rootkit after the Sony rootkit fiasco from a few years back. This particular...
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There was some hubbub earlier this month when sex columnist Violet Blue discovered that one of her old columns for the SF Chronicle had been altered by the Chronicle's online site, SFGate.com. She was upset that the changes implied the article said the opposite of what it actually said -- and found it odd that, beyond that, all the links and comments were missing, and the story was now spread out over several pages. This resulted in some investigations, with venture capitalist Tim Oren pointing out that this appeared to be the work of a company called Perfect Market, a well-funded startup (funded, in part, by the Tribune Company), who had partnered with...
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The book publishing business really does seem to be going through the same process that the recording industry went through not so long ago. That is, it's crying about all the doom and gloom. Layoffs are rampant, and there are all sorts of concerns about how the industry is going to survive. Yet, as with the music business, if you step back and look around, you realize the actual book business is thriving. Jason Pinter has written up a post pointing out that this is, perhaps, the most exciting time, ever, for book lovers. That's because a lot more people are talking about and reading books, and there are all sorts of exciting...
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scott mc laughlin alerts us to an interesting blog post from the composer Kyle Gann, discussing his feelings on posting musical scores as free PDFs online. Gann does this happily, but a publisher he was speaking with was upset that this created "unfair competition." Gann doesn't find the argument convincing in the slightest, and explains why he feels that having his scores available for free online greatly outweighs any money he might make from having them professionally published by a publisher: For me, trying to make money off of scores is just a dubious proposition. The amount I might make seems trivial compared to the wider distribution I get from having interested musicians be...
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Turkish courts have been really quick to ban various websites for flimsy reasons. A few years ago it went back and forth a few times before banning YouTube entirely, just because of a juvenile video on the site. However, it's now been nearly two years since the last YouTube ban was put in place, and it hasn't been lifted. Apparently, a bunch of Turkish reporters are now realizing how bad this looks for Turkey, and are asking the country to fix things and reinstate YouTube. Apparently, there have been numerous blog protests in the past, but now mainstream reporters are taking up the cause as well. We as Turkish technology journalists have...
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Two years ago, we noted that Brazil had asked the WTO for permission to ignore certain US patents and copyrights as a retaliation against the US's refusal to abide by a WTO ruling. This is, of course, typical of the US. When the WTO sides with the US on certain issues, you see the US and industry lobbyists go nuts about how those countries need to capitulate due to "international obligations." But when the WTO rules against the US, the USTR has a long history of ignoring the ruling or even pretending (falsely) that it "won." Given that most countries can't do much if the US just ignores the WTO, there's been a new...
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