Tag Archives: Intellectual Poverty

TV station uses copyright law to erase embarrassing broadcast

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“A San Francisco Bay Area television station that became world famous for a humiliating gaffe during a news broadcast about a deadly plane crash is apparently trying to erase the event through copyright law.  While Campbell and the station quickly issued an apology, that did not stop clips of the broadcast from flooding video-sharing sites and social networks. But the Fox TV affiliate has arrived at a novel solution to its embarrassing moment: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires Web sites to remove copyrighted material at the copyright holder’s request.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57594987-93/tv-station-taps-copyright-law-to-erase-embarrassing-broadcast/

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Documentary producers sue music company over copyright to ‘Happy Birthday To You’

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“‘Happy Birthday to You’ is the subject of a fresh US legal dispute, with a production firm claiming the tune’s copyright owner has no exclusive right to the most popular song in the English language. Good Morning to You Productions (GMTY) has filed suit in a federal court in New York against Warner/Chappell Music demanding that the government declare invalid its copyright over the song, saying it belongs in the public domain. The lawsuit also demands the return of ‘millions of dollars of unlawful licensing fees collected by defendant Warner/Chappell pursuant to its wrongful assertion of copyright ownership of the song,’ the 26-page suit says.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/14/documentary-producers-sue-music-company-over-copyright-to-happy-birthday-to-you/

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Evangelization vs. Copyright

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“Brandon Vogt really liked the new papal encyclical but noted that the Vatican only made it available in HTML. So he worked to convert it to PDF, epub, Mobi, and more, and then he gave away these formats on his website.  Whoops. Both the Vatican and the USCCB wrote to demand a takedown. Clearly, Vogt was ‘stealing from the Pope’ (really? I don’t think making other formats available causes the text to be mystically removed from the Vatican website). Also, he was accused of ‘violating the civil law.’  Multinational copyright enforcement is a legal invention of the late 19th century. It serves to block the light of truth. This is a great example of that.”

http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2013/07/evangelization-vs-copyright.html

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If Nook goes bust, will your e-books survive?

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“This leaves Nook customers with a big problem. If Barnes & Noble stops production on all Nooks, experts says, Nook owners would have a hard time moving their libraries. In fact, customers are already grappling with that very issue on online forums. The reason: Most e-books carry digital rights management software, or DRM, which prevents them from being pirated, passed on to third parties or, in this case, transferred onto another device by the same consumer. Currently, downloading e-books onto one device and even trying to read or access them on another can be a time-consuming and complicated endeavor.”

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/if-nook-goes-bust-will-your-e-books-too-2013-07-11

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How long copyright terms make art disappear

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“Copyright is a type of censorship—in this case, it suppresses the dissemination of books caught in the copyright ‘black hole’ as a result of the combination of copyright terms, the orphan works problem (which is a result in part of the lack of a requirement for copyright registration formalities and renewal requirements).”

http://c4sif.org/2013/07/how-long-copyright-terms-make-art-disappear/

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Sticky Thoughts: The Market, Not The Government, Gave Us Super Glue

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“It was the competitive market that finally gave the product life, but first it had to struggle through an incredible array of barriers, from disincentives to monopoly grants to regulatory restrictions. What might have helped people at daily life since the 1940s took a half a century. Part of that time passage is inherent in the market process, but much of the rest of it was due to intervention.  It was not science as such that made the difference. It was science given flight by market forces. At each stage of its development, the market was there, encouraging, prodding, guiding, and leading to the light, despite all odds.”

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/sticky-thoughts

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France will no longer cut off Internet for illegal downloading

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“The French Ministry of Culture announced Tuesday that people who illegally download copyrighted works off the Internet no longer have to fear being disconnected for a year under the nation’s controversial anti-piracy law, formally named the High Authority of Diffusion of the Art Works and Protection of the Rights on the Internet (HADOPI).  The loss of HADOPI’s disconnection provision is more than just a victory for French socialists — it’s a defeat for U.S. industry groups, which fiercely lobbied prior French administrations to adopt harsh punitive measures against anyone who shares copyrighted content.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/09/france-will-no-longer-cut-off-internet-for-illegal-downloading/

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Federal judge orders Secret Service to release files on Internet activist Aaron Swartz

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“U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued her ruling in response to a lawsuit filed by Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen, who is investigating the reasons for the heavy-handed prosecution that spurred Swartz to commit suicide. Swartz, who helped create the first RSS protocol at age 14 and co-founded the popular websites Reddit and Demand Progress, was charged in 2011 of stealing data from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after he accessed a secure database of academic papers. Prosecutors threatened him with up to 30 years in prison, and Swartz committed suicide by hanging in January, at just 26 years old.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/09/federal-judge-orders-secret-service-to-release-files-on-internet-activist-aaron-swartz/

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Boston University sues Apple claiming it stole professor’s 1997 idea

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“Theodore Moustakas, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University, published a patent for ‘highly insulating monocrystalline gallium nitride thin films’ in November 1997  The patent is set to expire in 2015. Boston University has not made a comment as to why the university chose this time to file on Mr. Moustakas’ behalf.  BU has asked Apple to halt the sales of the iPhone 5, iPad, and MacBook Air, and has asked for damages. Apple has sold more than 100 million iPads and 55 million copies of the iPhone 5.”

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/2013/0705/Boston-University-claims-Apple-stole-professor-s-idea

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Douglas Engelbart, inventor of computer mouse, dies at 88

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“Engelbart arrived at his crowning moment relatively early in his career, on a winter afternoon in 1968, when he delivered an hour-long presentation containing so many far-reaching ideas that it would be referred to decades later as the ‘mother of all demos.’ Speaking before an audience of 1,000 leading technologists in San Francisco, Engelbart, a computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), showed off a cubic device with two rolling discs called an ‘X-Y position indicator for a display system.’ It was the mouse’s public debut.  He never received any royalties for the mouse, which SRI patented and later licensed to Apple.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/03/douglas-engelbart-inventor-of-computer-mouse-dies-at-88/

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