Managing Rights Management

EFF's Anti-DRM Crusade

Let me be direct: Cory Doctorow and EFF's anti-DRM temper tantrum get it mostly wrong. There is probably no effective DRM that will make them happy. Ever. That's their right, of course. In this posting, they claim that Sun's Open Media Commons initiative to create non-infringing, royalty-free rights management implementations... Read more →

Apple / Sony among those sued over DRM

AppleInsider has another apparent scoop. According to Kasper Jade, Apple and 4 other music download companies are being sued by Ho Keung Tse of Hong Kong for allegedly infringing US patent 6,665,797. The Abstract is on the continuation. There are two possibly interesting facts about this patent. The first is... Read more →

Music Industry Worried About CD - Burning

[tip 'o the hat to Dave Farber's IP list]. According to this NYTimes article, the music industry is becoming increasingly concerned about CD-burning as an abuse of their intellectual property. Snippets: ''CD burning is a problem that is really undermining sales,'' Bainwol said in an interview prior to speaking before... Read more →

GPL Revision DRM - Not

Gavin Clarke's useful article in The Register describes the process the Free Software Foundation intends to use in revising the GNU General Public License. Snippets: Security will also be a focus, as Moglen [FSF general counsel Eben Moglen] said GPL would address what he called "computers users can't trust" or... Read more →

Sharing - The New Strategy In Wireless Content Protection

Dow Jones says, Cellular News reports, that DRM-enabled content sharing will be a big driver of industry growth. Snippets: Content for cellphones is becoming an increasingly important aspect of the wireless business. As voice matures, carriers consider media such as ring-tones and video clips their new cash cow, with industry... Read more →

Music Performers: Who Owns The Rights?

Who owns which rights (and where)? This is the topic of a UK-published article by Sally Ramage. Covering much ground, this useful article also features an extensive bibliography that may be helpful to those reading up on the topic. Her conclusions: There is more protection for performers than there ever... Read more →

Cold DRM Wind Blows Up North

P2pnet.net has an article by Contributing Editor Russell McOrmond arguing against the use and legal legitimation in Canada of Technical Protection Measures (TPMs), which include content protection and identity management. Snippets: I’m strongly opposed to legal protection for TPM being added to copyright but I do, however, support legal protection... Read more →

Michael Rosen on Lessig

San Diego-based attorney Michael M. Rosen comments on the culture of free and Larry Lessig. Worth a read. Snippet: First, Lessig spends much of his time rehashing many of the usual canards about intellectual property rights. He contends that "[n]o society has ever imposed the level of control that the... Read more →

A Canadian Anti-DRM Viewpoint

P2PNet.com has a provocative article by Russell McOrmond titled Control Through DRM attacking rights management. Snippets: The most heated debate in digital copyright today centers on Digital Rights Management (DRM). Most people commenting on DRM do so from the interpretation offered by those selling it: that it gives copyright holders... Read more →

Appeals Court Blocks Broadcast Flag

According to the Associated Press and other sources, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C., District today ruled that the FCC had overstepped its bounds in requiring the so-called broadcast flag to be recognized by TV sets. The actual appeals court decision is here [PDF file, 34... Read more →

Moral Rights of Authors - Again

An earlier blogicle here noted that US copyright law does not recognize the moral rights of authors, which in most commercially important countries prevents someone from altering a copyrighted work without the permission of author. Citing our earlier posting, Art Hutchinson raises additional points: What needs 'double clicking' here are... Read more →

A Nigerian Point of View

allAfrica.com has published an article entitled "Data Protection, Storage, E-Government And Nigerians" by Tayo Ajakaye. Amoung the points: So what happens in a country like Nigeria where such a law is just not there, what are the dangers to which people are exposed? Odufuwa [Fola Odufuwa, CEO of eShekels, a... Read more →

Clearplay and the Moral Rights of Authors

One of the ideas in copyright in most countries other than the United States is referred to as the moral rights of the creator or author. Moral rights include the right to maintain the integrity of the work. This aspect of moral rights has not been implemented in US copyright... Read more →

Another WIPO Perspective

Open Democracy has an article with a perspective on the recent WIPO meetings reported earlier on this site here. Read more →

Lawyer Defends Online Speech, Rights

EFF attorney Kurt Opsahl was interviewed recently by K. Oanh Ha of the San Jose Mercury News. The conversation addresses the P2P downloading case known as Grokster and related issues. [Tip o' the hat to Doug Isenberg's Gigalaw.] Snippets: Kurt Opsahl got hooked on cyberlaw in 1997 when he took... Read more →

French court bans DRM

According to an article on p2pnet.net, a French court has banned the use of DRM technologies. Comments from any readers on that side of the pond would be appreciated. Snippets: In a decision sure to reverberate loudly throughout the international music industry, France's Paris Court of Appeals has decided embedding... Read more →

Copyright Wars: The View From Ithica

The Cornell Daily Sun covered Prof. Tarleton Gillespie's recent lecture, "Why You're in the Trenches of the Copyright Wars." Gillespie says, among other things, that when a consumer buys a DVD, "the film is held for ransom and locked until the person says, I'll play it under your rules." Ransom....... Read more →

Students put colleges in copyright war

The STLToday.com site (St. Louis Post Dispatch) has a long story written by Joel Currier on copyright issues on campus. Snippets: Universities are finding themselves trapped at the center of a bitter battle over bandwidth - caught between the entertainment industry's crusade to end copyright piracy and tech-savvy students' casual... Read more →

BBC TV Experiments with Creative Commons License

The Guardian has an article reporting that BBC TV will experiment [not available prior to Wednesday] with Internet distribution of archival content beginning this Wednesday using its IMP player and the Creative Commons license. Snippets: The BBC, Channel 4, the British Film Institute (BFI) and the Open University have joined... Read more →

Legal Battle Brews Over Texts on Electronic Reserve

A posting on Dave Farber's "Interesting Persons" list of an article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education indicates that trouble is brewing between publishers and university libraries. Snippets: Publishers are objecting to an electronic reserve system at the University of California in which libraries scan portions of books and... Read more →

Happy P2P Day

Today is the day the Supremes hear oral arguments regarding P2P networking and copyright infringement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's MGM vs. Grokster resource page is a good place to begin to better understand what is at stake and for whom. Yesterday's NYT's coverage is here. Read more →

The Future of Music – DRM

I’ve been reading David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard’s The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution. This book should be read by anyone interested in the music industry. I agree with a lot of what they have to say about the challenges now faced by the music industry.... Read more →

CEA Panel Focuses On Consumer Rights

The Consumer Electronics Association published a press release describing activities at CEA's IP and Creativity Conference. The release says in part: INDUSTRY LEADERS AND POLICYMAKERS FOCUS ON PROTECTING CONSUMER RIGHTS AT CEA'S NEW IP AND CREATIVITY CONFERENCE Congressman Boucher and CEA's Shapiro Call on Industry To Continue the Fight to... Read more →

Software Patents vs. Copyright

Heather Meeker, an attorney at the international law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP, and a specialist in intellectual property transactions for software and other technology clients. She has written a very useful article on the software / copyright kerfuffle published here by LinuxInsider [tip o' the hat to Gregory Aharonian's Patent... Read more →

Lessig's Online Publishing Experiment

The Mercury News is reporting that Prof. Larry Lessig has opened the process of updating his 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Further nudging outward the boundaries of online publishing, Stanford University Professor Larry Lessig will put his 1999 book ``Code'' online today and invite Internet users to... Read more →

P2P Covered On News Hour

The News Hour ran a segment on the legal cases regarding P2P software before the Supreme Court. The video is here. Read more →

Legacy DRM

Campus Technology magazine has an article by Terry Calhoun of the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP, www.scup.org) that addresses challenges facing universities in digitizing some of their print holdings and putting the digital versions online. The context is the December 14, 2004 Google announcement regarding cooperation with universities... Read more →

DRM-enabled Fair Use

Prof. Pasi Tyrvainen at the University of Jyväskylä has written an article on "Concepts and a Design for Fair Use and Privacy in DRM" published in the February issue of D-Lib Magazine. The article is well worth reading. [Some background material on Fair Use can be found at various places... Read more →

Scientific American Copyright

The February issue of Scientific American includes Scientific American: Beyond the Big © Copyright becomes "no right to copy". Chief among the interesting aspects is what one has to do to get the link shown just above. The web page with the article has a menu that includes the item... Read more →

EFF End User License Agreement Press Release

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) issued a press release and white paper calling attention to the dangers of EULAs (End User License Agreements). The release says in part: San Francisco - Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a white paper warning consumers about how they can be harmed by... Read more →