Next year, a time bomb embedded in the Copyright Act of 1976 starts to detonate, as valuable copyrights fall back into the hands of artists who decide that they would prefer to own their songs, rather than allowing their label and publisher to keep selling them.
A harmless British hippie shot a video about something boring like making a salad from wild greens, and then uploaded it to YouTube. Shortly after, he was informed by YouTube that he was infringing on the copyrights of Rumblefish. The problem is, there’s no music in the clip. At all.
After playing a major role in defeating SOPA legislation, Reddit users decided to craft their own “Free Internet Act”, which, they hoped, could be used as a far more liberal replacement bill.
According to a bunch of geeks who mobilized from all corners of the digital world, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is has been masquerading for years as the pioneering mind behind email.
Patent trolls are the worst. Oh wait, no, out-of-control copyright crusaders, they’re the worst. In fact, the whole intellectual property system needs a total overhaul. But why? How did it come to this? Kirby Ferguson’s sublime Everything Is a Remix series comes to a conclusion with this really smart explanation of how the spirit of IP laws have been totally perverted by modern corporate culture.
US copyright laws are designed to protect the “fair use” of copyrighted content such as mash-ups and remixes — or they were, at least, until the advent of DMCA Takedown Notices. The Dutch government has taken notes on America’s IP failures and is reportedly looking to explicitly protect such DMCA fodder, much to the chagrin of the European Union.
In less than two weeks, jailbreaking your phone, your tablet or gaming console could become a crime. If the exemption to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act expires, what you do to your devices will again be covered under copyright law.
On January 12, UK company New English Teas found itself on the receiving end of a judgement passed by the Patents County Court. Its crime? Snapping an image of one of London’s iconic red buses against the backdrop of the House of Parliament and altering it to look pretty much like the photo above. Despite the snap otherwise being a completely original work, the court ruled it as copyright infringement.
This morning, a link to this fantastic article about copyright by Courtney Love popped up in my Facebook feed. It was published back in 2000, at a time before iTunes, when Metallica was fighting to destroy Napster, and yet it appears to be one of the most sobering, informative and logical contributions to the argument about copyright.
You’ve got to be kidding me. The US Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Congress can remove works from the public domain and re-copyright them in order to bring the the pieces into compliance with international copyright schemes. Yeah, because that doesn’t run completely against the spirit of copyright law or anything.
