Monday, February 07, 2005

Harry Potter Author to Sue US Army Over Copyright? (Ernest Miller). According to the Times Online, Harry Potter author JK Rowling is considering copyright charges against the US Army for a possibly satirical/possibly parodic version of her characters used in the heavily-illustrated offical US Army magazine Preventive Maintenance Monthly (Rowling fights US army over Harry Potter). Read the offending issue here: Preventive Maintenance Monthly - May 2004 [PDF -Massive Download]. Note page 2 and page 18+ of the PDF. via How Appealing [Copyfight] 8:29:51 PM    comment []

Most e-mailed NYT article is 2 months old. Most e-mailed NYT article is 2 months old: While I don't have the time to cite the specific posts, Doc Searls has often used the NY Times archives (and their cost-wall approach) to explore the value of what he refuses to call "content." One aspect of their archives not subject to the costwall (just the registration requirement) are the reviews and articles appearing in the Sunday Books section. This means that for some reason I have missed, this two month old article regarding the best books of 2004 has hit today's list of the "most e-mailed NYT stories." [rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog] 8:29:36 PM    comment []

As Piracy Battle Nears Supreme Court, the Messages Grow Manic. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a pivotal case pitting copyright holders against the makers of file-sharing software. By TOM ZELLER Jr.. [NYT > Business] With the Supreme Court scheduled next month to hear a pivotal case pitting copyright holders (represented by MGM Studios) against the makers of file-sharing software (Grokster and StreamCast Networks), some participants are putting their message machines into high gear. But winning hearts and minds - of teenagers, consumers and lawmakers - has never been a simple matter. "It's hard for two reasons," said Rick Weingarten, the director of the Office for Information Technology Policy at the American Library Association, which has been exploring ways to strike a balance in the copyright and antipiracy messages being aimed at young people. "Copyright law is not the easiest thing to explain, and it's hard to put a bumper sticker on it," Mr. Weingarten said. "But, you're also talking about the future, and it's hard to explain to a consumer that there could one day be a lot of restrictions on what you can do with new technology." One side must make people care about obscure technological innovations that they say will be stifled by legislative action or an adverse Supreme Court ruling. The other side battles the image of greedy corporate profiteers and the perception that freely downloading copyrighted works is something other than theft. Good roundup, engaging interplay in the article, good quotations. 6:21:49 AM    comment []

Is God Registered to Vote?. Jim Wallis believes that religion and morality are as much a part of a liberal value system as a conservative one. He argues that conservatives in America have hijacked the language of faith while liberals have largely ignored it. [WNYC New York Public Radio] 6:11:55 AM    comment []

RIAA Sues Dead People (Donna Wentworth).  . . . In fact, the RIAA doesn't usually meet much resistance to its round-'em-up-and-shoot lawsuits. As this Daily Texan article reports, it can usually skip right to the good part: collecting the settlement fee: It was an ingenious plan: Lawyers would pay around $200 in court fees to subpoena an ISP into revealing the owners of a list of IP addresses the RIAA had accumulated. Before November, the RIAA was able to gather around 50 identities per subpoena. Assuming each person received a letter with a phone number to a similar settlement center, and each person decided to pay a little now instead of a lot later by settling, and each person settled for the then-average $3,000, then for $200 the RIAA could make an easy $150,000. I can count on at least a few Copyfight readers to respond with, "So what? Isn't copyright infringement illegal? Someone has to pay for the damage infringement is doing to the record labels -- why not the people accused of the crime?" Jim Griffin has been talking this over with the folks on the Pho list, and his response is both sensible and well-articulated: We license all manner of uncontrolled use of music, but not this. ...Why not admit [it's] impractical and inefficient to control these songs one by one? Why not acknowledge the $20,000 iPod is not a business model? Licensed or unlicensed is the question, and if not, why not? Sound recording companies are paid nothing by radio broadcasters. They've built multi-billion-dollar businesses without paying those whose sound recordings they use. Are they they pursued by record companies? Of course not. Legal, no license necessary. Is anyone beating the hallways of Congress seeking to make them pay? Is anyone litigating this case through the courts? Of course not. Why pick on the powerful and wealthy? There was a time the stink was about copying discs, but that was before Sony and Universal took Roxio ownership and leadership. After that, it was all about peered sharing, even though disc copying delivered the recipient of the process a perfect copy of that available for sale. Better to chase teen-agers, better to sue old women, better to berate the individual user, all of whom are paying far more today for media through multiple flat-fee, all-you-can-eat buffets than they ever paid before. Only the sound recording companies cling to their pursuit of this notion of control and calling those who do not comply thieves, and in doing so they leave billions on the table that should be divided fairly amongst creators and rights holders. There's no question that P2P-enabled copyright infringement is a problem. But the lawsuits have not, and will not, solve it. It's time for a better way forward. [Note: this post was expanded from a shorter, now-deleted post published on Feb. 5th.] [Copyfight] 6:11:52 AM    comment []

Ebadi-Sahabi, 2005. I just came up with -- I obviously believe -- a brilliant idea for the upcoming presidential election in Iran which I will post about it in Persian soon: Shirin Ebadi for president and Ezzat Sahabi for vice-president. Don't preach me about the impossibility of women running for president based on the Iranian constitution. I already know that. But constitutions are flexible based on how judges (and in this case the Guardian Council) interpret them. I'm really excited about this and going to start pushing it as much as I can. Maybe it suddenly happens, who knows. To me, it's really a win-win situation. They either allow them to run in which case they absolutely win, or they won't get the Guardian Council's ok, which is very bad for them now after this tremendous amount of global pressure. Any thoughts? [Editor: Myself (English)] 6:10:29 AM    comment []

'The Fundamental Principles of the European constitution' a collaborative blog about the European Union Ratification process. 25 post grade students from 25 coutries are collecting and centralizing press articles from their respective countries. [Smart Mobs] 6:06:46 AM    comment []