Copyfight

Now THAT's Funny!

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:45:45 -0500

Remember how I said that the EFF weren't being sufficiently sarcastic in covering the Cartel's revelations about PVRs? Right, well, sometimes you do get good sarcastic commentary on the Web and today's helping is dished up by Cory over at boingboing.

He savages Rupert Murdoch for being the antiquated fossil he still is, someone who not only fails to understand the modern interlocked Web-centric methods of information distribution, but also someone who fundamentally opposes the very notion of fair use and seems to think if he just hires enough of the right lawyers he can make it go away.

OK, making fun of Rupert Murdoch is sort of shooting fish in a barrel but damn we need more funny stuff in these Copyright Wars.

In An Effort to Prove They Cannot Learn

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:23:47 -0500

...the Cartel are once again attempting to use law and regulation to control your home entertainment experience. Funny, it seems like just yesterday I was ranting about how they had stupidly misunderstood the value of PVRs. Oh, right, sorry, that was two days ago. Can't expect busy high-paid media executives to remember things for two whole days.

So (with a hat-tip to Boingboing again for the alert) I direct your attention to Public Knowledge's latest attempt to keep the Cartel from driving the home entertainment experience off a cliff. The details are long and boring - what you need to realize is that they are requesting permission to shut off part of your home entertainment system, whenever they think it's a good idea.

Of course, you'd have to buy all new equipment to comply with this. The straightjacket and compulsory eyes-open technology will no doubt be included, to ensure you're actually watching what and when they want.

Please, take a moment to read over Public Knowledge's suggested comments, make them your own (or write your own) and submit them.

It's People Like You What Cause Unrest

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:00:41 -0500

The shocking part about this whole thing is that now, ten years or more into the Copyright Wars, we still have such stupid people in positions of control. Take this week's example, Alan Wurtzel. This specimen of executivius fossilus cartellae works for NBC as, apparently, some president of some research of something.

Whatever he's researching, it's certainly not television because Mr Wurtzel is shocked by the "completely counterintuitive" result that if you let people watch TV how and when they want.. surprise! they watch MORE of it. Give the consumer what he wants - clearly a new and revolutionary idea, and one that a whole network's research department was unable to come up with. Simply shocking!

Sorry, dear readers, but even making fun of these idiots has gotten old for me. I'll just post the links and you can go read and nod your head sagely because we - you, me, all the rest of the readers here - have known this forEVER. And I bet we don't draw Mr Wurtzel's salary, either.

New York Times piece explaining how the Cartel has discovered that yet another technology (in this case the PVR) is benefiting their business.

EFF Deep Links it, with insufficient sarcasm (if you ask me).

Obligatory back-link to two weeks ago when I pointed out the difference between the fossils (as nicely summarized by Nate Anderson) and the very with-it and hip Warren Ellis.

Yet Another Study Showing That People Who Download The Most (free stuff) Actually Buy The Most. This one is sure to be ignored as well, as the UK continues it's pell-mell course toward copyright extremism. Boingboing! has been doing a fabulous job tracking this particular idiotic trend as well as related efforts by the EU to define war as peace, hate as love, and make darkness the standard.

Pandora in the NY Times

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:11:43 -0500

Earlier this week the Times Magazine online published an extensive piece on Pandora, a service I've used for several years and started paying the premium for a year or so ago. Surprisingly, it looks like Pandora might actually turn a profit this year, due in large part to a popular iPhone app. This despite 50% of their revenue going to copyright fees.

New Technology -> New Art

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:41:14 -0500

Sort of a case-in-point contrast to Nate Anderson's post, boingbong! highlights what are probably the first Google Wave mash-ups.

As I said last time, mash-up isn't really the right word to use here, but we still don't have better language so it's what I'll use for now.

In Their Own Words

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:37:31 -0500

I wanted to point to two very different published items, both of which bring thought to bear on the current state of the Copyright Wars.

First, Nate Anderson - who has been doing stellar work in the trenches of this slogfest for several years, primarily at ars technica - published a piece called "100 years of Big Content fearing technology". This gem simply puts together things that the Cartel have spewed as they dug in their heels and fought kicking and screaming against every innovation of the last century. We all know about Jack "Boston Strangler" Valenti's insane rant before Congress, but did you know that John Philip Sousa penned a screed against the gramophone?

The Cartel did manage to kill DAT (Digital Audio Tape) by convincing Congress to impose onerous fees but their success in suppressing other advances has been less. And everywhere they failed, they made money. If this makes any sense to you, then you are not like me.

Warren Ellis, for some months now, has been publishing an online Web comic called "Freak Angels." It appears approximately every week, for free, on Fridays. And like many who publish online for free, Ellis makes money from associated sales of merchandise including hardcopy versions of the comics. In today's "Interlude" page, he notes that the preceding strip, which ends in something of a cliff-hanger, is the end of what will be printed in Volume 3. And he has some amused comments about how some of his fans respond to the different availability of the free and for-pay print editions. It's an interesting contrast to the men that Anderson quotes.

Dear Ralph Lauren - Choose Your Targets Carefully

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:47:05 -0500

Actually that probably should be addressed to Ralph Lauren's lawyers, but in theory they're acting on behalf of the company, so we get to mock R.L., Inc.

The whole thing started with a photoshop disaster, reproduced here so you can see what we're talking about. The wholescale massacre of peoples' images for advertising purposes is well documented. You can go to YouTube and find a hundred videos showing Photoshop "makeovers" - one of the best is the "Dove evolution". But the gist is that anytime you see a model (almost always female) in a magazine, on a billboard, or any other advertising medium, she's been styled, made up, and then digitally altered so as to bear very little resemblance to how she actually looks. There are interesting Copyfight issues here about what is an original and what is a derivative work in this chain of illusion, but that's not what we're here to talk about.

No, instead I want to talk about how stupid a corporate lawyer can be. You see, that image there on the right? That's a Photoshop disaster. The retouching techniques have been taken so far that the person has ended up looking like a cartoon. If you search the blogosphere for "lollipop head" and "ralph lauren" you'll get a wad of scathing commentary on just how badly the image has been distorted. In fact the image was up on the "Photoshop disasters" blog for a while until they got a DMCA takedown notice and they or their ISP caved to it. (Interestingly, the top photoshop disaster currently shown is almost exactly the same disaster done to Brad Pitt, whose head and shoulders are grotesquely out of proportion to his hips and legs in the Edwin Jeans ad.)

Then a DMCA notice landed on boingboing's ISP. Dear lawyers, don't do that. Because not only will you not get your stuff taken down by doing that, you'll get mercilessly mocked. Which you roundly deserve. Copyfight salutes Boingboing's ISP for ignoring this threat and proffers a hat-tip to Cory for reminding us that sometimes humor is the best defense.

Dilbert Has a New Line of Business

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:50:08 -0500

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-09-09/. But... trademark? Everyone knows patents are more profit(eer)able.

Won't Someone Please Think of the Children

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:51:35 -0500

My wife pointed this one out to me. It's a couple years old but the message is sadly accurate.

The assertion is that kids - today's learners, tomorrow's adults - want to be able to create, consume, revise, remix, and share. Where are the 21st century technologies, teachers, and most importantly the 21st-century thinkers who will teach them how?

(And because I'm into shameless promotion of things I think are good causes, check out Donors Choose where you can find school projects (in America at least) that teachers have put together and are seeking funding to make happen.)

The Cartel Swallows Marvel - IP Contention Ensues

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:58:36 -0500

The geek news sources have been abuzz the past few days with the news that Disney acquired Marvel. The mainstream press is focused on the financials, of course, but I couldn't help but think about the implications of trying to find and corral all the Copyfight-related interests at play here. Marvel of course was first known for comic books but as its characters gained popularity a huge variety of other interests spun off.

I imagine many readers have seen the movies (the success of which I think were a prime motivator in the acquisition) but there are also numerous TV shows featuring the licensed characters as well as more merchandise than you can imagine. Everything from cheap T shirts and Halloween costumes to mega-million theme park rides can be found with the Marvel logo somewhere And all of those items were produced by companies other than Marvel itself, under a variety of licensing schemes, many of which overlap in one character. The company that makes the Spider Man movies is not the same one that makes the Spider Man pajamas my kids love so much. Each has some variety of licensing rights that it now will have to (re)negotiate with the Disney empire.

Marv Wolfman has an excellent post raising a number of intellectual property and competition issues. He notes that some of the existing Marvel deals are with companies like Universal and Sony, which directly compete with Disney in areas such as movies and theme parks. And as Patrick Goldstein points out in the LA Times story, Disney is a manufacturing empire with "merchandising assembly lines" that will likely bring it into cooperation or competition with a wide array of former Marvel licensees.

(props to nerdcore.de for the Mickey/Wolverine mash-up image.)

UK Photogs Get A Chance

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 06:37:46 -0500

Photographer Not A Terrorist appears to have gotten the attention of the relevant UK authorities. A new post on their Web site indicates that the British Home Office has issued new advice on how the anti-terrorism laws should be applied in the case of photographers doing their jobs. Now let's see what impact this has in implementation.

Typekit Promises to Unravel Font-Linking Rights

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:20:54 -0500

First, a bit of background - bear with me here. It's an ongoing frustration for Web designers to try and get the things that show up on peoples' screens to look like what the designer wants. I vividly remember going to visit a customer who complained that my product looked terrible on her screen and discovering that she had somehow jiggered her Web browser settings to map the colors I had chosen into some hideous chemical green and pink.

For most of the history of the Web, designers have fought to take back control of the appearance of their product through techniques such as embedding text in images or using other technologies such as Flash that permit much more rigid and detailed settings than most browsers' HTML. Unfortunately these technologies tend to produce bad user experiences by being inaccessible to blind users, taking a long time to load, requiring constant updating of plug-ins, and so on. Over the past few years, the evolution of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) has allowed designers to do more of what they want without locking up their content. Most critically, freeing text makes page indexing more accurate, which helps findability.

One of the more recent additions to the CSS arsenal has been the ability to link to a specific display font. Without such links the designer is at the mercy of whatever fonts are loaded into the user's browser. Depending on the browser is at best an imperfect solution as fonts may be missing or have bugs in them. If you want your HTML-encoded text to be properly read everywhere by everyone, the best bet is to say "render it in THAT font" and then test the heck out of it to make sure it works.

Unfortunately, even linking to just the font you want may not work. Many fonts - even those that are supposed to be released for free use - do not contain correct licensing terms for redistribution. In comes Typekit, with a promise to provide fonts with a consistent license arrangement. It does depend on using JavaScript to access their library and request the fonts, which is a small drawback, but the ability to design Web content without tripping over more DRM is a big payoff.

(Full disclosure: Jeffrey Veen and I overlapped in time at the MIT Media Lab. I did not speak to him for this article.)

Untangling the "Civil Rights for Musicians" Debate

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:10:56 -0500

A week or so ago, I noted that the debate over this proposal (to make broadcast radio pay the same sorts of fees that Web radio has to pay) was getting more confusing. Today Matthew Lasar at ars technica posted a long entry that examines the issue in depth. This is well worth a read, not least because Lazar puts the issue in terms of "big content versus big radio", arguing there may be no good guys at all in this fight.

A Win Too Fair

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:59:40 -0500

At least that's what the DoJ thinks is fair, according to papers it has filed in the Jammie Thomas punitive damages debacle. Yes, certainly Congress intended low-income students and single moms to be ordered to pay USD 2 million because... um, because something. Well, the DOJ seems to think that huge damages are deterrent. Which we can clearly see from the massive drop in file-sharing that has taken place since Congress passed this law in 1999. File-sharing has gone down in the last decade, right? That's what deterrence means, right?

"We are pleased that our sock puppets who have completely taken over the DoJ agree with us on this case" the RIAA barely managed not to say out loud.

The Struggle to be Noticed

Posted by Alan Wexelblat — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:53:09 -0500

It has been said many times, but it bears repeating once more: the biggest threat to most new artists is not copying, but obscurity.

I've been watching the struggle as one of my favorite new acts - the steampunk band Abney Park - works through the difficulties of getting themselves, and their unusual musical approach - noticed. They don't fit any radio or categorization format I'm aware of. They do mix in elements of industrial, but they also do old-style sea shanties, which doesn't make them consumable by the usual radio stations that play industrial.

Unlike writers, who can organize things like an Interstitial Arts book publication and join in the effort to publicize themselves, the band seem to be going it mostly on their own. They've played a number of conventions - steampunk cons mostly - and related festivals.

And in addition, they're giving it away. Almost every song they do is up on YouTube and other sites. If you prefer a direct feed you can subscribe to a blog (LiveJournal) at: http://community.livejournal.com/abneypark - and get fresh live vids of songs that aren't even released yet. According to numbers I've seen there, at least one of their vids has over 100k hits on YouTube.

Still, I'd venture to guess that most folk don' t know about Abney Park and I'm certain there are thousands upon thousands of other great bands out there all needing exposure and ways to connect to people who will love what they do. We so desperately need ways to help these creative types, and not more ways to lock up content.