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Is There Really An Idea/Expression Dichotomy In Copyright? (03 July 08:57) |
| Copyright system defenders often trot out the commonly accepted wisdom that copyright does not protect "ideas" and that there's an important "idea/expression" dichotomy, where it's only the ... |
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How Does Offering Free Content Insult Those Who Pay? (03 July 08:03) |
| It's interesting to see the logical pretzels that certain business execs will twist themselves into to defend a poor business model against one that customers enjoy much more. Take for exam... |
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The Myth Of Original Creators (03 July 07:04) |
| We recently wrote about how many different sources Shakespeare used in writing King Lear, some of which he apparently copied verbatim. However, it seems quite likely that what Shakespeare d... |
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Morons In A Hurry Can Raise Their Glasses Of Glenora Whisky Proudly Again (03 July 06:18) |
| What is it with the silly food related trademark battles we keep hearing about lately? First there were Idaho potatoes, then lettuce, and now whisky. You see, the Scotch Whisky Association... |
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Why Is It So Difficult To Understand The Difference Between A Platform And A User? (03 July 05:29) |
| In the US, thanks to safe harbor rules in the DMCA and the CDA, courts will often toss out misdirected lawsuits that go after a service provider for the actions of a user. To be honest, I'v... |
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Oh Look, Citizen Journalists Can Do Real Investigative Reporting (03 July 04:07) |
| The newspaper people will tell you that if they are obliterated by the evil internets one of the big loses will be investigative journalism. If it hadn’t been for those gritty investi... |
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Canadian TV Station Selectively Issuing Copyright Takedowns? (03 July 03:14) |
| A couple people have sent in this story, where the Canadian TV station Business News Network is apparently issuing takedowns on certain videos that are clips from BNN shows. The copyright c... |
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Judge Tosses Out Lori Drew Ruling (03 July 02:11) |
| The Lori Drew verdict finding her guilty of computer hacking because she may have broken MySpace's terms of service (without even having read them) was a classic example of prosecutors tryin... |
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New Jersey Politician Adds Most GPS Devices To Driver Distractions To Ban (03 July 01:29) |
| We've pointed out time and time again how silly it is for politicians to run around trying to ban each and every driver distraction, rather than just focusing on beefing up laws for reckless... |
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Blizzard The Latest To Kill Features, Call It An Upgrade (03 July 12:34) |
| A bunch of folks have been sending in variations on the news that Blizzard has killed off LAN support for StarCraft II. The Buzz Saw points out that Blizzard seems to be taking the same old... |
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Even More eMusic Features Disabled? (02 July 11:46) |
| This is really unfortunate. eMusic used to be a great example of how treating customers right and with respect and trust could win over more customers -- but in the last month or so, it see... |
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Another City Caught Lowering Yellow Light Times To Catch More Red Light Runners (02 July 10:41) |
| It's been shown repeatedly that redlight cameras don't appear to make intersections any safer, but they do act as a nice revenue generator for cities. In fact, at times it's such a tempting... |
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District Court Bans 'Catcher In The Rye' Sequel; Since When Did The US Ban Books? (02 July 09:23) |
| Last month, we wrote about a lawsuit from JD Salinger over an attempt to publish a "sequel" to Salinger's famous Catcher in the Rye written by Fredrik Colting under the pseudonym JD Californ... |
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Jammie Thomas Decides To Appeal Constitutionality Of $1.92 Million Damages Award (02 July 08:00) |
| As we speculated earlier this week, given the silence from the Jammie Thomas camp since the $1.92 million verdict against her, we assumed she was gearing up for an appeal -- and that's now b... |
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Taiwan Regulators Tell Dell It Must Sell Mispriced Monitors At $15 (02 July 06:21) |
| Ever since e-commerce began there have been stories of mispriced items -- and following that, stories of the mad rush to buy the mispriced product (especially when it involves misplaced deci... |
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The Real Problem For The Music Industry Is... Interest Rates? (02 July 04:41) |
| Cybeardjm points us to a story from Billboard about a claim from the head of PRS in the UK, noting that the real problem with the music industry today is low interest rates. You see, the wa... |
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Forget Suing Google, Now It's Craigslist That's A Target For Misplaced Lawsuit (02 July 02:34) |
| It's been quite common for companies to sue Google when a competitor puts up an ad that references their own trademarks. This is misguided in any number of ways: first, as long as the ad it... |
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Tehran Bureau Shows That If There's A Need, Reporting Will Get Done (02 July 12:26) |
| The rallying cry of newspaper old timers who insist that "reporting" will die off if newspapers go away, but that ignores the fact that, if there's a true need, reporting will find a way. A... |
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Google Quietly Kills Off Its Commentary Feature For News (02 July 10:25) |
| Back in 2007, Google released a feature for its News service that let folks comment on news stories. However, there were some weird quirks to it (eg. you had to be somehow involved in the n... |
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Insider Trading Suspected In The Pirate Bay Sale (02 July 08:24) |
| The whole story of the supposed sale of The Pirate Bay gets odder and odder as more news comes out. Beyond the questionable business model the new owners are discussing, now comes the news ... |
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Latest Thing To Blame On Google? Koi Thieves (02 July 06:47) |
| It seems these days you can try to blame just about anything on Google. The latest? Koi thieves. Yes, the highly sought after colorful fish are apparently disappearing at a higher-than-no... |
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A Brief History Of Intellectual Property In China And India (02 July 05:15) |
| This is the second post in a series of posts looking at the question of intellectual property rights in both China and India. We'll be adding new posts to this series each week for the next... |
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Copyright Insanity: The Need To Get Licenses Just To Demonstrate A Legal Point (02 July 04:04) |
| Over at Against Monopoly, Alistair Kelman, points out yet another quirky problem with copyright law. He's discussing a book by Ron Rosen, who was the attorney for famed composer John Willi... |
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Intuit Pays $120 Million 'Don't Sue Us' Tax To Intellectual Ventures (02 July 02:50) |
| It's no secret that I have tremendous problems with Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures, which many have described as the world's biggest patent "trolling" operation. The company has ra... |
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The Pirate Bay's New Owners: Service Providers Will Pay Us, We'll Pay Users (02 July 01:40) |
| One of the things that got a lot of attention with the announced sale of The Pirate Bay to GGF was the claim that the new owners would launch new business models that would compensate copyri... |
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Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell And A Look At Free (02 July 12:27) |
| Malcolm Gladwell is an interesting guy. He's an amazing writer and storyteller -- perhaps the greatest storyteller of this generation. And, as such, he's amazing at taking complex ideas or... |
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Turns Out It's Not Sex Discrimination To Get Fired For Looking At Porn Sites (01 July 11:12) |
| Eric Goldman alerts us to an appeals court ruling finding against a guy who claims that his firing was gender discrimination after the hospital he worked for found that he had been surfing p... |
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Brill's Pipedream: 10% Of Current News Consumers Will Pay (01 July 09:58) |
| There's a pretty simple rule of thumb in figuring out if a new business doesn't know how to approach its market. It's when it claims something along the lines of "well, this is an $x billio... |
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If You Don't Want People To Know About Stuff, Maybe Don't Put A Press Release On Your Website With The Info (01 July 08:42) |
| Reader jprlk alerts us to the amusing news that Carleton University apparently put a press release on its website with all of the details concerning an upcoming visit by the Emperor and Empr... |
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RIAA Wins Layup Against Usenet.com (01 July 07:09) |
| When the RIAA first sued Usenet.com, we thought it could make for an interesting case. After all, you could make a decent argument that there are a ton of non-infringing uses of Usenet. Ho... |
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Football Player Threatens To Sue Impostor On Twitter (01 July 05:24) |
| When Tony La Russa sued Twitter because there was a user impersonating him on the site (though, clearly labeled as being fake), we pointed out that La Russa was targeting the wrong party. A... |
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Amazon Cuts Off Affiliates In Hawaii And Rhode Island... Who Else Wants To Try? (01 July 03:01) |
| Last week, Amazon decided to cut off North Carolina affiliates due to proposed legislation that would have affiliates (really, advertisers) be considered as local "employees" for the sake of... |
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Infamous Niro JPEG Patent Smacked Down Again (01 July 12:17) |
| Lawyer Raymond Niro, for whom the term "patent troll" was apparently first coined, has been known to use the fact that he represents a company called Global Patent Holdings (GPH) to his adva... |
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Wait, Wasn't The Internet Killing Journalism? (01 July 10:16) |
| Yet another data point to suggest the predicted "death of journalism" that we keep hearing from the old school newspaper guys is a bit overblown, online news publisher Talking Points Memo ha... |
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By Limiting What Athletes And Journalists Can Do, Sports Leagues Are Stifling Their Own Growth (01 July 08:15) |
| In a world where the traditional lines of "journalism" are becoming increasingly blurred, Justin Rice, over at the Nieman Journalism Lab, discusses how the "media tables are turning in the w... |
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China Tries To Ban Virtual Gold Farmers (01 July 06:27) |
| The "dark underworld" of online economies is the supposed "gold farmers" often found in countries like China, where people are working in sweatshop like conditions, "playing" video games to ... |
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Be Part Of A Webinar Discussion On Enterprise Knowledge Management (01 July 05:18) |
| Sun and Intel are interested in holding a webinar around the topic of Enterprise Knowledge Management for their site, MidMarket Innovators. They are looking for experts to be featured ... |
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The Ridiculous Copyright Situation Faced By Academics Who Want To Promote Their Own Research (01 July 04:15) |
| Ed Kohler points us to a long, but fascinating blog post, by Stuart Shieber, a CS professor at Harvard, discussing the somewhat ridiculous copyright situation that many academics deal with i... |
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Interview With A Patent Troll... Which Skips The Key Questions (01 July 03:08) |
| Aaron Martin-Colby points us to Good Magazine's softball interview with Erich Spangenberg, considered by many to be one of the more successful "patent trolls" or "non-practicing entities" ou... |
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Class Action Lawsuit Filed Over Bogus Laptop Battery Length Claims (01 July 01:59) |
| Has anyone ever actually bought a laptop where the battery length claims were anything close to what you actually got? I know I haven't. I tend to read online reviews from various testers ... |
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Jammie Thomas Not Willing To Settle Yet... Acccording To The RIAA (01 July 12:49) |
| How badly do you think the RIAA wants Jammie Thomas to settle? Since the verdict came down, the organization has done everything it possibly can to distance itself from the $1.92 million ve... |
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Taiwanese Collections Society Tells Singer He Can't Post His Own Music (30 June 11:42) |
| William writes in with the following tale:
"The Taiwanese music performance and copy right society called MUST, which is similar to the PRS in Britian, has send a take down notice to a pop... |
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Forget Video Games, Why Aren't Politicians Complaining About Chess? (30 June 10:36) |
| President Obama is the latest in a rather long line of politicians to start calling out video games as being something that is bad for kids and should be taken away from them, as encourageme... |
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Microsoft, Yahoo And Real Sued For Failing To Get All Necessary Licenses For Music Stores (30 June 09:25) |
| Want to know just how incredibly confusing and impossible copyright law has become? Just take a look at this lawsuit, filed yesterday by some music publishing companies against Microsoft, Y... |
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Schaumburg Dumps Redlight Cameras After They Show No Safety Benefit (30 June 08:07) |
| We've seen it in a few other places, but reader Don Gatza let's us know that Schaumburg, Illinois is the latest city to dump its redlight cameras. The city found that, despite promises to t... |
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What Happens To All That Personal Data Clear Holds? It's Unclear (30 June 06:37) |
| I have to admit, there was one part of the "Clear" airport "fast pass" program created by Stephen Brill that I never fully understood. In order to join Clear, you had to submit all sorts of... |
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News? Or A Violation Of Privacy? (30 June 04:49) |
| Two separate stories crossed my desk recently, that both raise some interesting questions in today's internet age. The first was concerned about whether or not a newspaper in South Carolina... |
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The Pirate Bay Has Been Bought By A Public Company [Updated...] (30 June 02:38) |
| Details are a bit scarce at this point, but Martin alerts us to the news that The Pirate Bay has apparently been sold to a public company for 60 million SEK (about $8 million US) -- at least... |
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Tricking People With Fake Content Isn't Good Advertising (30 June 11:52) |
| One of the things that gets people upset when we talk about advertising being content, and content being advertising is that they think this means advertisers tricking users into viewing the... |
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L'Oreal Keeps Trying: Appeals French Ruling Against eBay (30 June 09:54) |
| It appears that L'Oreal just refuses to give up. The company has sued eBay in a bunch of different countries trying to get a court somewhere to admit that eBay is somehow liable for actions... |
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