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I recently bought a copy of the new book by professor Neil Netanel called Copyright's Paradox. From what I've heard and seen so far, it looks like a well-balanced book that explores what's good and what's bad about copyright. It's on the stack of books to read, so I haven't had a chance to dig into it yet (and might not for a few months at this rate). However, Netanel has been blogging a bit about the book over at The Volokh Conspiracy blog, and reader David Puglielli wrote in to ask if I had any thoughts on his latest post, where he discusses copyright as an "engine of free expression." This is...
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Back in March, Bell Canada started traffic shaping the internet traffic that passed over its network without telling its reseller partners. This was a pretty big deal, as many of the ISPs who resell Bell Canada DSL promise to their customers that they don't do any kind of traffic shaping. Those resellers complained to Bell Canada, who responded by saying too bad, recognizing that those resellers had nowhere else to go. Some of the reseller ISPs complained to Canadian regulators who have now sided with Bell Canada, allowing the company to keep on traffic shaping. The regulators basically said that the ISPs have been unable to show how they're being harmed by...
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If you haven't followed the "MP3 blogging" scene, it's grown quite big over the past few years, to the point that most folks (including the record labels) have effectively turned a blind eye to the copyright questions it raises (for once, this is a good thing). In many cases, record labels even treat some of the best music bloggers similar to the way they've always treated radio DJs -- sending them promo CDs and trying to get "air time." Most music bloggers don't ask for permission before blogging songs (some have policies saying they'll take down a song if any musician complains). However, over on an NPR blog, one of the bloggers has been putting together "mixes"...
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A new study points out the rather unsurprising fact that the number of "hyperconnected" individuals is growing. The definition of hyperconnected is anyone with seven or more connected devices and nine or more applications on those devices (though, it's not entirely clear how they define an "application" since it seems to include certain websites. Apparently 16% of people surveyed fell into that camp. Another 36% are in the "increasingly connected" group that counts those who connect via at least four devices and uses six or more applications. To be honest, this seems like an odd way of defining connectivity. If I had a really good "all-in-one" device meaning that I wouldn't need that...
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You just knew that the whole Yahoo/Microsoft deal wasn't really over and done with, right? Rumors started spreading yesterday that billionaire investor and professional "shake things up" guy Carl Icahn was going to put forth his own slate for the Yahoo board (after buying up a bunch of shares in the company) which would allow him to create a board that would sell the company off to Microsoft. Those kinds of rumors don't just magically come out of nowhere, so it should come as no surprise that it looks like, indeed, Icahn will be putting forth his own list of potential board members. As plenty of people have noted, this ought to be fun...
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Every year around this time, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) comes out with a report, put together for the BSA by IDC, about software "piracy" statistics. Every year, since 2004 I call them out on how misleading many of the stats are (or, more specifically, I jokingly refer to the BSA as Bogus Stats as Always). At times, even IDC, who puts the report together for the BSA, has admitted that the BSA has tended to misrepresent the results -- and yet IDC keeps putting together the report every year. The good news, honestly, is that over the past few years, we've seen a changing trend in the coverage of the reports on these...
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William Patry points us to a court ruling in Australia that says, in effect, that television program guides are copyrighted material and anyone producing their own program guide needs to license that information from the TV networks. On this, it would appear that Australian law differs from US law, which doesn't consider factual information by itself to be copyrightable. However, the Australian ruling basically found that program guide information isn't quite "factual" information, but "created." Thus the copyright is on the creative decisions the TV network execs made in choosing when to show each show (yes, they're apparently serious about this). If that sounds a bit extreme (and a bit ridiculous), you're not...
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And here we go again with rumors about questionable DRM tactics involving Microsoft and NBC Universal. Just days after a (later denied, after first being confirmed) report that Microsoft was going to put a "copyright cop" into Zune devices, users of Microsoft's Vista Media Center were upset to find that they were unable to record certain NBC Universal television shows earlier this week. Instead, they received error messages reading: "Restrictions set by the broadcaster and/or originator prohibit recording of this program." That would suggest, at the very least, that Microsoft's Media Center does allow content broadcasters to block shows from being recorded -- even if it turns out that they didn't block these particular...
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A couple months ago, in discussing The Streisand Effect with a reporter, the reporter asked if I thought lawyers would one day be accused of malpractice for not informing their clients of the potential implications of demanding some content be pulled off the internet. While I doubt it will reach the point of malpractice, it certainly does make you wonder what some lawyers are thinking when there are such clear examples of what happens when you try to suppress material online. Earlier this year, the lawsuit that brought plenty of new attention to the concept of The Streisand Effect was when a Swiss bank, Julius Baer, convinced a judge to shut down the site Wikileaks for...
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There was a story last week that got a lot of press about how the FBI discovered that the military was using a ton of counterfeit technology equipment, including thousands of fake Cisco routers. Dan Wallach has an excellent writeup looking at the security implications of what happened. From the description, it certainly doesn't sound like any of the equipment was found to include any kind of questionable technology for spying, but the point is that it would have been easy enough if someone had wanted to do so. Basically, the background is that while the government only buys equipment from approved vendors, those vendors can subcontract out the actual tech purchases to anyone.
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You may recall Bridgeport Music as a company that claims to own the rights to various musical compositions and has a long history of suing anyone who samples even the tiniest bits of that music. The worst part is that there are very serious questions concerning whether or not it really has the rights to much of the music it claims to control. George Clinton, for example, claims that Bridgeport used forged signatures to get control over his catalog. A recent Bridgeport case may be interesting for a different reason, though -- one that shows how the record labels have no problem contradicting themselves when on the receiving end of a copyright infringement lawsuit. ...
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Back in January, we wrote about how best selling author Paulo Coelho was happily pirating his own books via BitTorrent, noting just how much it was increasing sales. Since he couldn't initially convince publishers to go along with it, he set up a site that pretended it was from a fan giving away various translations of his book, even though it was really run by him. He admitted it in a speech in January that got his efforts a lot more attention. TorrentFreak has checked in with Coelho to see how things have gone since he admitted to pirating his own books. Not surprisingly, the increased attention has helped drive even more sales...
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The press is happily covering the news that some journalists are launching a new (paper) magazine called "Dispatches" by focusing on the supposed "contrarian" nature of the operation: it's focused on print, rather than the internet (though it will have an internet presence), and it's only going to publish once per quarter. The folks behind the magazine say they're trying to slow things down a little, and will focus on providing better analysis than the rapidfire approach of internet reporting. That makes sense -- but it's hardly new. Plenty of other press outlets have done the same thing -- and, realistically, the analyst business is based on this same premise (just with the idea that...
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The recording industry hasn't had much of a strategy for dealing with the changing marketplace over the past decade (and, no, I don't consider lashing out and suing music fans as a "strategy"), so far be it for them to start now. That's why it's amusing to see articles about how the recording industry honchos are now betting on a new generation of mobile phones to save them. Funny how that works. This is the same group of executives who will claim that the phones themselves have no value without the music -- and yet here they are hoping and praying that the devices will save their industry.
But the real problem...
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Last month, we wrote about how MySpace had won its case against Sanford "Spamford" Wallace -- the infamous 1990s "Spam King" who (despite losing many court battles and owing millions in fines) simply can't seem to give up his obsession with scammy marketing techniques. The win was a default judgment, mainly because Wallace simply disappeared and stopped responding to court requests. Today, a judge ruled on the punishment, officially awarding MySpace $234 million from Wallace and his associate Walter Rines. Given Wallace's disappearing act (which he's done in the past as well) it's unlikely that MySpace will ever see a dime of the money, but that hasn't stopped the company from touting this as...
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There's been plenty of controversy over ISPs using companies like Phorm and NebuAd to effectively sell your clickstream data to advertisers by inserting "more targeted" advertising into your regular surfing. If you haven't been following the controversy, these systems work by watching everything you surf online at the ISP level, and compiling a profile in order to serve ads on other pages. In other words, if you surf a website about golf, your ISP records this and then when you're later reading technology news, the ISP may inject an advertisement about golf. Beyond questions raised over the legality of such things, there are many questions raised concerning how such systems violate privacy. There have...
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I'm generally a fan of Craigslist, and think that people all too often blame the company for things it didn't do. However, I'm still having trouble understanding Craigslist's position in the legal battle it's now having with eBay. After getting sued by eBay for unilaterally changing eBay's ownership percentage, Craigslist has now countersued eBay for a laundry list of things, including: "unlawful and unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, deceptive passing-off, business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and breaches of fiduciary duty." That's quite a list, but it doesn't respond to the key point of eBay's lawsuit: did Craigslist break the law in changing eBay's ownership percentage?...
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Nathan Myhrvold may not have done much of note yet with Intellectual Ventures, but he sure is good at getting press attention. It seems to come in waves, too, with multiple stories popping up all around the same time. So, after last week's Malcolm Gladwell-penned story on Myrhvold that accidentally made the case for why Intellectual Ventures isn't needed, PC World is running an unintentionally hilarious interview with Myrhvold, where he says some of the most ridiculous things, and the interviewer doesn't call him on a single one. When asked whether or not there's a patent litigation "crisis" Myrhvold notes: "If I compare the number of lawsuits to the number of patents...
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There's an interesting lawsuit coming out concerning the popular online shoe store, Zappos, that has built up a large business in part by being extremely focused on providing an excellent customer experience. DSW is a large shoe retailer with many brick and mortar stores and also (not surprisingly) an e-commerce operation (Update: the e-commerce part just launched recently, which has many thinking that this whole event appears to be something of a reverse Streisand Effect situation, where it's suing Zappos to get media attention). Late yesterday, DSW filed a lawsuit against Zappos, charging the company with infringing on DSW intellectual property. What was odd, though, was that DSW never contacted Zappos at all --...
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You may recall a couple weeks ago that a judge set new rates to be paid to ASCAP by AOL, Yahoo and RealNetworks. ASCAP represents the songwriters, and those three companies and ASCAP could not agree on licensing terms for music streamed online. While ASCAP ran around touting the (somewhat made up) $100 million owed, there was plenty more in the decision that deserved discussion. At last week's San Francisco Music Tech Summit, I got into an interesting discussion with a few folks who had read through the 153 page decision thoroughly, and noticed a variety of problems. You can read the whole decision (pdf) yourself, if you want, but there are...
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