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Copyright and Cyber Law
Yochai Benkler on the new open-source economics
The Onion Router
Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.
Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.
The Copyright Grab
The Clinton administration, through its white paper on intellectual property, is proposing a wholesale giveaway to its supporters in the copyright industry – at your expense.
The eight interrelated parts of the white paper’s agenda intend to:1. Give copyright owners control over every use of copyrighted works in digital form by interpreting existing law as being violated whenever users make even temporary reproductions of works in the random access memory of their computers;
2. Give copyright owners control over every transmission of works in digital form by amending the copyright statute so that digital transmissions will be regarded as distributions of copies to the public;
3. Eliminate fair-use rights whenever a use might be licensed. (The copyright maximalists assert that there is no piece of a copyrighted work small enough that they are uninterested in charging for its use, and no use private enough that they aren’t willing to track it down and charge for it. In this vision of the future, a user who has copied even a paragraph from an electronic journal to share with a friend will be as much a criminal as the person who tampers with an electrical meter at a friend’s house in order to siphon off free electricity. If a few users have to go to jail for copyright offenses, well, that’s a small price to pay to ensure that the population learns new patterns of behavior in the digital age.);
4. Deprive the public of the “first sale” rights it has long enjoyed in the print world (the rights that permit you to redistribute your own copy of a work after the publisher’s first sale of it to you), because the white paper treats electronic forwarding as a violation of both the reproduction and distribution rights of copyright law;
5. Attach copyright management information to digital copies of a work, ensuring that publishers can track every use made of digital copies and trace where each copy resides on the network and what is being done with it at any time;
6. Protect every digital copy of every work technologically (by encryption, for example) and make illegal any attempt to circumvent that protection;
7. Force online service providers to become copyright police, charged with implementing pay-per-use rules. (These providers will be responsible not only for cutting off service to scofflaws but also for reporting copyright crime to the criminal justice authorities);
8. Teach the new copyright rules of the road to children throughout their years at school.
http://www.vh1.com/artists/news/511079/01111999/verve.jhtml
Originally, The Verve had negotiated a licence to use a sample from the Oldham recording, but it was successfully argued that the Verve had used ‘too much’ of the sample.[5] Despite having original lyrics, the music of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” is partially based on the Oldham track, which led to a lawsuit with ABKCO Records, Allen Klein’s company that owns the rights to the Rolling Stones material of the 1960s. The matter was eventually settled, with copyright of the song reverting to ABKCO and songwriting credits to Jagger and Richards.
“We were told it was going to be a 50/50 split, and then they saw how well the record was doing,” says band member Simon Jones. “They rung up and said ‘we want 100 per cent or take it out of the shops’, you don’t have much choice.”[6]
Steal this Look
Pieces of work
the original
Joy Garnett painting
Alexander Kosolapov Molotov Cocktail Remixed Art
The article
http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol4_No2_ip_garnett.htm
The painting is very similar to the original artwork but it is used in completely different setting and context. Its debatable who is right or wrong with fair use.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/17/sweden.piracy.jail/index.html
This case is very interesting, it revolves around the torrent website called Pirate Bay. Four men behind a Swedish file-sharing Web site used by millions to exchange movies and music have been found guilty of collaborating to violate copyright law in a landmark court verdict in Stockholm.
When To Take On Facebook, American Idol Or Virgin Mobile In An IP Fight
Here is another interesting article. The case of Amit Jaipuria, founder of GizaPage, which is based in Bangalore, India. Amit believes he owns the second patent in the world in the social networking space (the first being the “six degrees” Weinreich patent which was bought by LinkedIn in 2002-03). In early 2000 (well before Friendster, Myspace, Facebook and Twitter came into existence), he had an idea for creating an online social network for professional networking. He filed a provisional patent in India and then started the process for filing in the U.S on July 11, 2001. Five years and three “non-final rejections” by the US Patent Office (USPTO) later, Amit was granted Patent 7047202 in May 2006 titled “Method and apparatus for optimizing networking potential using a secured system for an online community”.
What the The Statute of Anne is ?
he Statute of Anne in 1709 was the first real copyright act, and gave the author in the new state of Britain rights for a fixed period, after which the copyright expired. Internationally, the Berne Convention on 9 September 1886 set out the scope of copyright protection, and is still in force to this day. Copyright has grown from a legal concept regulating copying rights in the publishing of books and maps to one with a significant effect on nearly every modern industry, covering such items as sound recordings, films, photographs, software, and architectural works.
The Statute of Anne was limited to “books,” i.e., literary works. For existing works, “authors or their assigns” were granted the exclusive right of publication for 21 years from the effective date of April 10, 1710. For new works, the right ran for 14 years from the date of publication; the author, if living at the expiration of such term, was granted the privilege of renewal for 14 more years. Due to a belief that “many Persons may through Ignorance Offend against this Act,” protection for the original, but not the renewal term, and, of course, penalties, were conditioned upon entry of the title of the work in the register books of the Stationers Company before publication as evidence of ownership (but, importantly, no longer in the name of a member of the Company). Somewhat later, as a further security to the general public so that “none may offend through ignorance of the copyright,” a provision for notice of entry in the register books of the Stationers Company was required to appear on every copy of the published work. Assignments of rights had to be similarly {Page 12} recorded. These requirements kept the Stationers Company involved in the administration of rights, and became an unfortunate precedent for our registration system.
Joy Garnett painting