Copyright Notice: We don't think much of copyright, so you can do what you want with the content on this blog. Of
course we
are hungry
for publicity, so we would be pleased if you avoided plagiarism and gave us credit for what we have written. We
encourage you not to impose copyright restrictions on your "derivative" works, but we won't try to stop you. For the legally or statist minded,
you can consider yourself subject to a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Here's the first trailer for a promising new documentary by lawyer-philosopher David Koepsell and filmmaker Taylor Roesch (I was interviewed for it as mentioned here). Vimeo;
Over the last 20 years, the United States Patent and Trademark Office has been issuing patents to universities and private companies on raw human genes. One company or university is given a legal monopoly over a molecule that is inside every human being and many other animals. This documentary explores the legal, ethical, and clinical ramifications of human gene patenting.
The Economist has two articles this week of interest to IP critics. The first addresses detecting what the article calls piracy link here. It cites a new way to do the deed using a scan of all the frames in a video to tell whether the "copy" is really a copy. It hyperventilates," The technology is said to have an average detection rate of 96% and a low rate of false alarms: a mere five per million, according to tests by the ISO. It can detect if a video is pirated from clips as short as two seconds. And an ordinary PC can be used with the system to scour through 1,000 hours of video in a second."
The problem with that is whether the portion "detected" as a copy is really piracy. The article totally ignores whether fair use would allow the "copy."
More important would be the temptation to redefine piracy as any "copy" which included more than some arbitrary percentage of the original. Under that doctrine, one may foresee the final end of fair use by defining it so narrowly that none would be legal. That could end up, for example, outlawing all satirical take-offs and other indisputably legitimate uses of original material.
The second Economist article discusses open access to the internet and net neutrality link here. It has an interesting account of the long history of the legal doctrine of common carrier status.
It concludes, "America's regulatory approach has left much of the country with a cable monopoly for truly fast broadband access. The single largest reason given for failing to purchase broadband access in America is price, and many non-adopters are stymied by hardware fees, a lack of billing transparency and the extra cost of bundled services that providers often add to internet access. The FCC's current plan to ask last-mile providers to subsidise rural service, and to ensure equal treatment of packets of information is a mild intervention by global standards. America's modern-day common carriers should count themselves lucky."
This weekend, my copy of Fredrik Colting's "60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye" arrived in the mail. I had to order it from Europe, because its currently banned here in the U.S.
The courts are still considering the question of keeping the ban in place, but for now, it remains banned, and the Appeals Court has strongly hinted that a fair use defense will likely fail.
I have added this to my growing collection of books that have been banned in the U.S. When I read them, I feel like the way Guy Montag must have felt while secretly reading his banned books in "Farenheit 451".
My collection also includes Alice Randall's "The Wind Done Gone", which subsequently became available in the U.S., though I had acquired my copy during a time when it was still banned under court order.
Herbert W. Armstrong's "Mystery of the Ages" remains banned in the U.S. The background as to how that came to be can be found here:
It still seems surreal for me to have to come to grips with the fact that courts are in the regular habit of banning works of literature in the U.S., and the notion that there are places in the world more free than my own country in terms of allowing people to read what they want to. I had always equated book banning with fascist regimes, not my dear grand U.S. of A. But alas, these lines have now been blurred. Such is the natural result of the extreme copyright regime that the legal system has imposed upon us.
I have never understood people who become justifiably apoplectic when the government bans books at the behest of a political party in power, but then remain silent (or even offer their support) when the same government power bans books at the behest of private corporate interests. The end result is the same. A free mind who wishes to explore creative works and form artistic judgments on them is prevented from doing so by force of law.
Rather than openly exercise my free mind in a free society, I am forced to become Guy Montag - effectively having to find Underground Railroad societies in order to obtain books I want to read, and hoping that the Firemen do not come knocking on the door to take away my possessions and burn them at the behest of authors who have long since perished.
UPDATE: As the comments section has revealed, the copyright owner of "Mystery of the Ages" eventually sold its rights, allowing the work to be distributed again after being banned for more than a year. Again, this is another instance of my acquiring a copy of it while it was banned. More details of how they tried to keep it banned for some time are revealed here:
The key point is that distribution became available again not as a matter of right, but only because the prevailing plaintiff in the case changed its mind in allowing distribution to go forward (in accordance with the wishes of the author who actually wrote it).
Glenn Thorpe draws our attention to a good article about the role of patents in video codecs. The brief story: video codecs are used to compress the storage of videos. Camcorders use codecs to record, and video devices use codecs to playback. This is about the use of codecs to record. The big players - including most camcorder makers, Apple and Microsoft - record using codecs that are encumbered by patents. In particular the license allows the recording that is made with the codec to be used for "personal use and non-commercial use" only. I'm dubious of the legality of this - perhaps some of our patent lawyers can comment on this? But regardless the threat of a lawsuit it there: if you were to shoot a film using a camcorder and sold the film and made a lot of money (not that likely - but then again there is Witch Mountain) you can be pretty sure you would get sued.
The bottom line: the patent holders on parts of video compression technology are trying to use their patents to tell us what we can do with content we create using their recording devices.
The "copyright" industry consisting of a technologically obsolete Hollywood studios; music recording companies; and publishers of books is minuscule . To protect this pipsqueak industry, the Obama administration proposes both through the Department of Justice and the ACTA to impose draconian steps that will threaten many other not so pipsqueak industries, including the IT industry. Michele and I have pointed out the problem before. Finally the rest of industry has realized the threat - here is a report report on the magnitude of the industry that depends on "fair use."
