Copyright is essential to the anti-copyright people

As I’ve been digging more and more into licensing issues surrounding free and open source software, I’ve been surprised at how much the free software movement, and the copyleft movement in general, rely on copy right to enforce their ability to undermine copyright.  David Post, blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy, made this point very well [...]

Settlement strategy subtlety

I listened to a CD of a CLE today Policing and Protecting Copyrights on the Internet, offered by Strafford.  The participants were David Young and Andrew Bridges, both very experienced copyright litigators.  The discussion briefly touched on Google’s recent settlement with the book publishing industry concerning Google Book Search. In a nutshell, Google had been [...]

Who Watches the Lawmen?

I’m not what you would call a comic book geek.  I respect the form and its fans, and I enjoy the stories when packaged in collections, but I never had the attention span to stick with anything published in serialized format. However, I just finished Watchmen.  Accordingly, I am psyched for the film, and have [...]

Text-to-speech: Amazon caves

There’s been a lot of interesting copyright controversies lately.  Given the economic realities of betting an entire business on a lawsuit with an uncertain outcome, though, the controversies almost never seem to reach a judicial determination of legality or illegality. Unsurprisingly, it looks like the controversy over text-to-speech in the Kindle 2 is going to [...]

Wil Wheaton is man enough to take on a disembodied electronic voice

First of all, Wil Wheaton is awesome.  I think I was one of the few people who didn’t greatly detest Wesley Crusher, so I had no great bias against him.  However, he won my heart as the Best Geek Ever in his Slashdot interview, when he related this tale: Once, I was working on a [...]

Authors Guild President on the “Kindle Swindle”

Continuing the back-and-forth over the new Kindle’s text-to-speech feature, Roy Blount Jr., president of the Authors Guild, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times.  Along with coming up with a snappy, derogatory catch phrase (is the “Kindle Swindle” an argument against unfairly exploiting authors, or the next dance craze?  you be the judge!), he [...]

Is Kindle’s text-to-speech a “public performance”?

Amazon recently released a new version of its Kindle E-book reader. Among the new features in the updated reader is the ability to have the reader perform a text-to-speech conversion to render the book in audio form. The Author’s Guild, however, was not amused: Some publishers and agents expressed concern over a new, experimental feature [...]

The definitive answer in the Obama poster debate

Stephen Colbert recently hosted a debate between David Ross, former Director of the Whitney Museum, and Stephen’s brother Ed, a partner at Kenyon & Kenyon who specializes in copyright.  This debate produced what I think is probably the definitive answer on how the Shepard Fairey copyright debate should come out. The money quote: STEPHEN: Who [...]

The Obama Poster Copyright Mess

One of the more interesting things going on in “popular IP” right now is the Shepard Fairey copyright dispute.  This has been blogged about and written about extensively elsewhere, but to sum up where it’s at right now: Mannie Garcia took a photograph of Obama. The AP (maybe) acquired the rights to the photograph from [...]