Ireland’s largest ISP, Eircom, will reportedly start blocking its customers from accessing file-sharing sites, solely at the behest of the music industry. According to the Sunday Business Post, the Irish equivalent of the RIAA, the Irish Recorded Music Industry, has been threatening the country’s ISPs with legal action if they don’t do the same. And [...]
Oh, no, the worst has occurred! A woman created knitting patterns based on the monsters in Doctor Who, and other people knitting up those monsters and posting them on eBay. And it’s simply got to stop! Well, something’s got to stop, anyway. Let’s dig in, shall we?
The BBC has threatened legal action against a 26-year-old [...]
Ok, here’s the deal. Everyone needs to stop paying any royalties on “Happy Birthday,” wait to get sued by Warner Music, and when they come after one of you, start a giant class-action lawsuit based on the findings of one Robert Brauneis of the George Washington University law school. Those findings, in a nutshell? [...]
It appears that Wikileaks, most recently in the news after a Swiss bank got it briefly shut down for revealing “trade secrets,” is now drawing the copyright-related ire of the Church of Scientology. Wikileaks says it is “developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis,” and says it hopes the risks of [...]
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 Michael [...]
TiVoStephen posted this comment here on the blog in response to the last update about the lockdown of the HBO John Adams miniseries, and I wanted to draw it to your attention (and thanks so much, Stephen, for responding here!):
“I’m Stephen Mack, Director of Operations at TiVo. It has recently come to our attention that [...]
A lot of sources reporting this weekend on how a U.S. House of Representatives panel killed of a particularly gnarly section of the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act currently making its way through the halls of Congress.
That part is true, and, as much as some of the elements of this law [...]
If there’s anything that could undermine my sympathy for the Scrabulous guys, it’s the looming possibility of their own greed. Hasbro and Mattel came off like the bad guys when they went after the makers of Scrabulous, the little Facebook app that could, and demanded that the Indian brothers who created the game shut the [...]
A European Union official is proposing extending music copyrights from 50 years to 95 years, the same as the U.S. EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy says artists who recorded songs in the 1950s or 1960s are in now in danger of losing what could be “their sole pension.”
That’s kind of an interesting question: on the one [...]
Frequent listeners to the Buzz Out Loud podcast will know that I often refer to something called a “culture of ownership” that I think is pervasive in our society (particularly U.S. society) at this particular point in history. People often ask me to expand on this concept, and I thought this blog might be a [...]