tagged w/ Copyright Laws
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California's building codes, plumbing standards and criminal laws can be found online.
But if you want to download and save those laws to your computer, forget it.
The state claims copyright to those laws. It dictates how you can access and distribute them -- and therefore how much you'll have to pay for print or digital copies.
It forbids people from storing or distributing its laws without consent.
That doesn't sit well with Carl Malamud, a Sebastopol resident with an impressive track record of pushing for digital access to public information. He wants California -- and every other federal, state and local agency -- to drop their copyright claims on law, contending it will pave the way for innovators to create new ways of searching and presenting laws.California's building codes, plumbing standards and criminal laws can be found... more
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That's probably okay with Barack Obama: Biden likely got the nod because of his foreign policy knowledge. The Delaware politician is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee who voted for the war in Iraq, and is reasonably well-known nationally after his presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008.
But back to the Delaware senator's tech record. After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden's bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it. That's probably okay with Barack Obama: Biden likely got the nod because of his... more
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brad62
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added this
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3 years ago
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As Mickey turns 80 this fall, the most beloved rodent in show business is widely regarded as a national treasure. But he is owned lock, stock and trademark ears by the corporate heirs of his genius creator, Walt Disney.
All signs pointed to a Hollywood ending with Disney and Mickey Mouse living happily ever after -- at least until a grumpy former employee looked closely at fine print long forgotten in company archives.
Film credits from the 1920s revealed imprecision in copyright claims that some experts say could invalidate Disney's long-held copyright.
As Mickey turns 80 this fall, the most beloved rodent in show business is widely... more
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Mygazines.com, which launched only last month, and is still currently in beta, has drawn the ire of at least one media company, Time Warner which says it is already looking into ways to get the site shut down.
The site, whose tag line is "upload. share. archive." is a place where users can upload and share digital copies of magazines while others can read, comment and even create their own "custom" magazines using their favorite parts of other magazines.
The site is entirely free and does not even include advertisements meaning the owners are not making a profit on the sharing of copyrighted content.
Time Warner, owner of Time and many other high profile magazines, does not like seeing their magazines posted for free, especially with the ad pages stripped out. Because the site actively encourages its users to share copyrighted materials, it can be held liable in the US but therein lies Time's problem.
Mygazines is registered in Anguilla and hosted by the infamous host PRQ of Sweden. PRQ is owned by the founders of the The Pirate Bay, the public torrent tracker that remains in full strength despite years of American companies trying to get it shut down.
Has Mygazines found its way around the jurisdiction of U.S. copyright law? For the most part it seems it has and even if the company is sued in the US, there is no way that anyone would show up to court.
The only way the magazine publishers can get the site shut down is to get Sweden to intervene of have VeriSign, which maintains the master .com database to get the site shut down.
For now though, Time's latest announcement and the subsequent news will surely bring more users to the site which already counts 16,000 active users. Mygazines.com, which launched only last month, and is still currently in beta, has... more
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Advocates of open source software have hailed a court ruling protecting its use even though it is given away free.
The US federal appeals court move overturned a lower court decision involving free software used in model trains that a hobbyist put online.
The court has now said conditions of an agreement called the Artistic Licence were enforceable under copyright law.
"For non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important but this is huge," said Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig.
" In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licences set conditions on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the licence disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer.
"This is a very important victory." ...read more after the jumpAdvocates of open source software have hailed a court ruling protecting its use even... more
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US Congress is currently debating legislation which will remove the penalty for copyright infringement if the creator of a work, after a diligent search, cannot be located. Libraries and archives are among the groups lobbying for the change to allow copying of so-called “orphan works”. The legislation would allow a rights holder who subsequently emerges to be paid the normal fee, but removes the currently costly statutory damages which rights’ holders can charge.
The term “orphan work” is used to describe situations in which an infringer of copyright decides that he cannot locate the copyright holder—usually the artist in the case of paintings and drawings. In a radical departure from existing law, the US Copyright Office has proposed that Congress grant infringers freedom to ignore the rights of the copyright holder.
The proposal goes far beyond current concepts of fair use, and, as explicitly acknowledged by the Register of Copyrights in a recent congressional hearing, it is not designed to deal with the special situations of non-profit museums, libraries and archives. Rather, it would give carte blanche to infringers even if they wished to exploit an artistic work for commercial advantage.
Under the proposed legislation, if a copyright holder finds out about an infringement after the fact, his only remedy would be to bring a lawsuit in federal court where a judge could order the payment of what he determines would have been paid by “a reasonable willing buyer and reasonable willing seller” before the infringement took place.
This is in sharp contrast to existing law where a copyright holder may obtain a halt to the infringement, the destruction of infringing copies, and damages that may be up to $150,000 for each work of art infringed. This would remove the deterrent that keeps piracy rates at a manageable level.
US Congress is currently debating legislation which will remove the penalty for... more
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Google was yesterday ordered to hand over the personal details of anyone who has ever watched a YouTube video.
The ruling - which has massive privacy implications for millions of internet users - was made as part of the search engine's legal battle with content provider Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.
Under the ruling, Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion (£820 million) in 2006, must hand over to Viacom its viewing log - which includes users' log-in information and their IP address, the code that identifies their computer.
Although the case is being contested in the U.S., legal experts warned last night that the ruling would almost certainly apply to YouTube users worldwide, including those in the UK. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an internet freedom campaign group, described the judgment as a ' setback' to online privacy rights.
[snip]
In one case, the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth had been viewed 1.5 billion times.
* * * * *
More at link.Google was yesterday ordered to hand over the personal details of anyone who has ever... more
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Is your seat belt on? Prepare to ruminate...it's gonna be a bumpy ride.
"In February, last year Comedy Central's parent company Viacom served YouTube and Google with a lawsuit seeking more than a billion dollars in damages. The crime? Copyright infringement. The company says that YouTube contained over 160,000 unathorized clips from programmes Viacom owns, including "South Park" and "The Colbert Report." In cases like this, the copyright issue seems clear, but there are other circumstances where the dividing lines are blurry. Video mashups that use multiple sources, lipsynching videos, and even clips where amateurs re-stage famous sketches, could all be on shaky legal ground.
"If you're using someone else's video, music or images, or even someone else's script without permission, then you could be infringing copyright," says Gavin McGinty.
"It doesn't particularly matter if the clip is short: "Copyright infringement is copying a substantial part of a work, either in a qualitative or quantitative sense," he says. "For example, you could put a five-second clip from "The Daily Show" in a video mashup. If that five seconds was the funniest part, that could be seen as substantial."
"The rule of thumb is, if you're likely to be able to spot the origin of the source material, then it's likely to be a substantial part. A valid defense may be 'fair dealing', which is similar but by no means identical tothe American concept of 'fair use'.
"Fair dealing enables you to use small parts of works for personal, noncommercial purposes. The classic examples are research and private study. That wouldn't normally cover posting video online, though. The American version, 'fair use', is so much wider than the UK version."
"In this case, it may depend on where a lawsuit is raised. "You have the issue that the content is accessible in any country in the world. Big media companies have clearance departments to make sure that everything shown in a work is cleared everywhere it's shown."
as gleaned from a recent "Future, Media with Passion" Future Publishing Ltd article
by Gavin McGinty
Technology and Commercial Lawyer at Pinsent Masons
www.pinsentmasons.com
imho this is currently a bigger issue than "climate change" with as many or more future ramifications for culture, creativity and the free expression of ideas.
other valuable resources:
http://freeculture.org/
http://www.lessig.org/
among others I'm sure =D Is your seat belt on? Prepare to ruminate...it's gonna be a bumpy ride.... more
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echoz
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added this
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4 years ago
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We need less corporate control of copyright. It needs to be put back in the people's hands.We need less corporate control of copyright. It needs to be put back in the... more
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TommyE
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added this
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4 years ago
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