Intellectual Property Law

What Happens to Comics When Newspapers Cut Back?

Posted on February 02, 2009
Jeph, the writer of the webcomic "Questionable Content" has a long and thoughtful post on his LiveJournal about the unfortunate rift between comic artists who are working for print syndication and those who are working for online publication. Jeph starts from the blog post by Neil Swaab that paints online comic artists as merchandisers first and artists second...

Clay Shirky Predicts Media for 2009

Posted on January 12, 2009
Shirkey has a few specifics and a few generalities in his "Year Ahead in the Media" piece on guardian.co.uk. Nothing hugely surprising - more newspapers will stop printing, magazines (specifically specialty publications) belong online, DRM for television shows is a disaster, and print-on-demand for books will flourish...

NiN Giving It Away

Posted on January 08, 2009
A friend of mine who's a fairly rabid Nine Inch Nails fan noted that Reznor has recently put out a lot of raw video footage from the current tour onto BitTorrent. This is in addition to anyone's ability to get a legal download of the entire new album just by visiting nin...

Copyright Owners Contributing to the Destruction of Their Own Property

Posted on January 07, 2009
Everyone else is writing about Apple's iTunes music store going DRM-free. Which is, I admit, an interesting move. It's also interesting that they're moving to a 3-tier pricing scheme, after about six years of the Cartel nagging them to break the 99-cents-for-anything barrier...

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Watchmen Judgment Posted

Posted on January 02, 2009
The PDF of Judge Feess' ruling on the motions for summary judgment by Fox and Warner Brothers can be found online. I was surprised at how readable-to-a-layperson the document is. It appears that Fox's claim is nothing new, that an option for buying out Fox's rights existed for years and was never exercised, and finally contains a very interesting footnote on testimony not given and why a certain lawyer's advice may have been detrimental.

Are Resales Killing Publishing?

Posted on December 31, 2008
In a column published by the NY Times this week, David Streitfeld puts forth the proposition that the highly available, highly interconnected nature of the online book reselling market is killing book publishing. New-in-print brick-and-mortar retail has been under pressure at least since Amazon started its first Web site...

Why Proprietary, Locked Media Are Bad

Posted on December 31, 2008
Microsoft gets the faceplant this time, but it could just as easily have been iPods: Gizmodo reports (as do many other sites) that Zune 30MB models have all started locking up and requiring a hard reset. This should be a clarion warning that using proprietary hardware or software (DRM) to restrict peoples' ability to manage their legally owned content is a bad plan...

IP and Me at Arisia 2009 (Jan 16, Cambridge MA)

Posted on December 30, 2008
I just got my panel schedule for Arisia 2009, one of the big local science-fiction cons. As in past years there will be panels on things of interest to fans, including intellectual property. At the moment it looks like I'll be on a panel Friday night on the "Future of Intellectual Property" that will also have Richard Stallman as a participant...

Venue Matters

Posted on December 30, 2008
Where a case gets heard can be as important as what's argued in court. Two items this week are bringing this lesson home: In the first case, the RIAA got its wrist slapped for pre-emptively trying to appeal in mid-trial. As Nate Anderson points out, you can't generally do that without the judge's permission, and in this case Judge Davis is not in a favor-granting mood...

CBLDF Asking for Support from Creators

Posted on December 30, 2008
It's that time of year, when every charitable organization and good cause is asking people for donations. Earlier this year I mentioned the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund's efforts to protect the rights of adults to view creative material, even if it is a bit edgy...

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

Posted on December 29, 2008
I am what you might call an amateur comics geek. I don't subscribe to titles when they appear in issue form, but I do love my collections and graphic novels. And I'll defend to the death the proposition that Moore's Watchmen is hands-down the best graphic novel, ever...

RIAA Declares Jihad Over; ISPs to Slap Wrists (for now)

Posted on December 19, 2008
pa href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081219-no-more-lawsuits-isps-to-work-with-riaa-cut-off-p2p-users.html"Ars trumpeted the headline as "RIAAStock 08 Peace Music"/a but I think that's a bit overblown. Still, it's a surprising turn of events...

Support the EFF

Posted on December 17, 2008
pEFF has an amusing song/cartoon riffing on the "12 Days". It's a fund-raiser, obviously, and it references several of the things Copyfight cares about./p pobject classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="500" height="402" param name="movie" value="http://w2...

Teach Your Kids to Break the DMCA

Posted on December 15, 2008
Neil Gaiman pointed to Gever Tulley's 2007 TED talk on "5 dangerous things you should let your kids do". As a parent who wrestles almost every day with what I should and should not let my kids do I found the concept interesting. And there, near the end of the talk, Tulley just flat out says "teach your kids to break the DMCA"...

Creative Commons Turns 6 (NYC Party, Dec 16)

Posted on December 15, 2008
Sorry for the last-minute-ness of this. I just got a mail saying the event has moved to a larger venue to handle the bigger than expected crowd: Creative Commons' Birthday and Salon NYC Come celebrate CC's 6th Birthday and our December Salon Host: For Your Imagination / CC Date: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Time: 7:00pm - 10:00pm Location: For Your Imagination Loft Street: 22 W...

AC/DC Idiots?

Posted on December 10, 2008
Opinionated Canadian blogger Scott Feschuk has a column lampooning AC/DC for striking an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart. The aging Oz hard-rockers are hardly the first to strike this kind of deal. Given how influential big-box retailers have become in the dwindling world of physical platter sales it's not a big surprise that artists would go where the sales are...

Rebellyon - Amanda Palmer and Roadrunner Records

Posted on December 05, 2008
We're used to understanding (maybe more than the general public does) the degree to which the modern record-making system is a slave enterprise. The artists are indentured and their work is wholly owned by the labels. The labels can promote or not, arrange tours or not, front money or not, and generally have full and complete ownership of the created product...

Continuing on the Morality Theme

Posted on December 02, 2008
Neil Gaiman has a long, and cogent discussion in his blog today about the Christopher Handley case. I generally agree with what Gaiman has written. I think popular speech doesn't need defending. It's the edgy, unpopular, icky stuff that needs defending because that's what people will attack...

Euros Put Cost (to People) on Patent Lawsuits

Posted on November 28, 2008
While researching the previous entry I came across this item: European regulators put out a report today accusing drug manufacturers of costing consumers EU 3 billion by using patent lawsuits to keep generics off the markets. Back in January, the EU Competition Commission staged raids on at least nine major drug companies, seeking evidence on restrictive business practices, and then another round of "surprise inspections" earlier this week...

Immoral Patents, or So Say the Europeans

Posted on November 28, 2008
On Friday, the EPO (European Patent Office) upheld an earlier decision rejecting a patent application from the University of Wisconsin-Madison' Alumni Research Foundation in the US. The patent was for stem cell technology, and it was rejected because the process disclosed in the patent apparently required the use or destruction of human embryos...

Right to Own, Right to View

Posted on November 25, 2008
In this blog I spend most of my time on the production side of the issues - talking about business models, distribution, artist compensation, and so on. Once in a while it's important to remember that there are also complimentary rights - your right to own materials produced by creators, for private viewing...

RIAA v. Joel Tenenbaum: The Fleet is in Motion

Posted on November 24, 2008
Almost a year ago, Eric Bangeman wrote a piece on ars pointing out that the Cartel has somehow managed to avoid noticing that students at Harvard share music files, too. Despite its widespread and very public campaign of suing its under-25 customer demographic, the RIAA seemed unwilling - some would say scared - to take on Harvard...

An ASCAP for Books

Posted on October 28, 2008
Pending approval by the court, it appears that Google has worked out a deal with US book publishers. Google published an announcement of the deal in its blog and the story has been in most of the major media. The deal is primarily focused on books that are still under copyright, but no longer in print...

Lala Land?

Posted on October 23, 2008
My brother sent me an invite to sign up for the music streaming service "Lala". According to their promotion it's all kosher with the Cartel. You play a stream in your Web browser in a Flash plug-in (like Pandora and Last.fm). I'm not terribly inclined to sign up for another service and was wondering if anyone had any experience with these guys? They apparently have software that scans the music on your disk and adds songs it finds there to your online collection so you can stream them from the lala site into any browser...

PvP vs The Cartel

Posted on October 22, 2008
The PvP comic usually centers around gaming and related topics (the characters work at a game-reviewing magazine) but today's strip shows they didn't learn the lesson Deborah Gregory learned the hard way.

Law Enforcement Seizes Biker Gang IP?

Posted on October 22, 2008
I'm tempted to file this under "weird IP stories you don't expect to read" but I don't have a category for that. Buried at the very bottom of the AP story on the Feds busting up the Mongols biker gang appear the following paragraphs:U.S. Attorney Thomas O'Brien has asked for an injunction that would seize the Mongols' trademarked name...

Business Models Blog Series Concludes

Posted on October 20, 2008
The "Business Models for Artists" series I noted a few days ago has now concluded. The series ended up being less about actual models and more about methods for enacting a model once you've got one.

McCain Can't Win on Song Front Either

Posted on October 17, 2008
Not content with getting into legal troubles before, McCain's camp has decided to get itself chastised by yet another 80's rocker, at least according to this MTV Newsroom piece. No idea if they're using a general license again or just appropriating.

Maybe Art Isn't A Business

Posted on October 16, 2008
Seth Godin has a post on his blog warning that maybe art should be - or must be - for its own sake, or for the sake and enjoyment of the artist creating it. Godin is arguing against the idea that you should take what you love and turn it into a business...

21st Century Business Models for Artists

Posted on October 16, 2008
A friend who is trying to figure out how to make something like a living as an independent writer/creator pointed me to the first entry in what promises to be a blog series. The authors are somewhat known as authors and creators themselves, and the series will culminate in a business-model paper...

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