Thank goodness for Monster Cable. No, really. I mean, every cause needs a poster child, right? And the poster child for the excess of ownership in this country is, without a doubt, Monster Cable, which has sued everyone from a blue jeans maker to a mini-golf operator to the Boston Red Sox and their attempts [...]
Got an interesting press release today: the National Consumers League surveyed people about their DVD habits and desires, and found that nearly everyone who responded to the survey thought backing up a DVD to a computer ought to be an inherent and obvious right. From the release: According to the survey, 90 percent (and 93 [...]
I truly cannot believe that the Authors Guild is sticking to the untenable and astounding proposition that the Kindle 2 is infringing on authors’ copyrights because it includes a text-to-speech function. In an op-ed in the New York Times today, Authors Guild president Roy Blount says that the “quite listenable” text-to-speech audio on the Kindle [...]
If you work in any sort of media at all (or you’re a small winery in the Olympic peninsula), you’re well aware that the Olympics Committees of the world are unbelievably rabid enforcers of trademarks related to the Games. But now, “trademarks related to the Games” is starting to include national anthems, numbers, and common [...]
On Thursday, Tennessee became perhaps the first state in the nation to adopt legislation aimed at forcing universities to police their own networks for pirated media. The Tennessee legislation mandates, according to this News.com article: “any higher education institution in the state, whether public or private, to develop and enforce a policy that prohibits its [...]
Oh, how embarrassing. I missed World IP day. I missed my opportunity to hold an event that could “increase public understanding of what IP really means, and to demonstrate how the IP system fosters not only music, arts and entertainments, but also all the products and technological innovations that help to shape our world.” This [...]
According to TorrentFreak, Neil Berkett, incoming CEO of Virgin Media, says he’ll happily slow down the Internet traffic of any media provider who doesn’t pay him a tidy little premium. In fact, he told the Royal Television Society’s Television magazine that if the BBC and and other public broadcasters don’t pay up for timely delivery [...]
Wired reports on a professor who’s suing one of those companies that repackages and sells student notes, claiming the notes themselves infringe on the professor’s copyrighted lectures. Note that the professor is not claiming that students who take notes are infringing–that, his lawyer very reasonably points out, is certainly fair use. University of Florida professor [...]
This story right here is what I like to call “blogging gold.” Only a week or so after I became aware that Deutsche Telekom had not only trademarked the color magenta, but was also actively bigfooting companies that had the temerity to put magenta in their logos, DT has gone after Engadget Mobile. (Thanks to [...]
UPDATE: Original post is now below; Dean emailed back to say, “HBO did in fact broadcast the series John Adams with the same TiVo copy protection that I emailed you about earlier.” This is the first instance I know of in which TiVo is allowing copy protection restrictions to be applied on non-VOD or pay-per-view [...]