Author: mklang

The information load :)

How much information is too much? For those of us who are not in the actual courtroom we can follow the trial audio stream live while reading comments from live twittering and catching up on live bloggers all over the world. At the end of each day the analyists tear apart all the details and put them back together again.

So we can all gorge ourselves on information until we burst. This actually makes for a very interesting trial. Even if the actual questions were not interesting enough.

Some of the interesting bloggers are (in Swedish) Satmaran, Intensifier, Sundberg and in (English) TorrentFreak, Spectrial…

Posted on by mklang

The pirates King Kong defence

The Pirate Bay trial is into it’s fourth day and is being reported by bloggers, tweeters, reporters and commentators. It is almost impossible to miss this media event. This is also part of the problem since the trial itself has become larger than life and more interesting than the actual law. In reality the participants are less than exciting and the law plods along in its usual manner.

Things worth noting so far:

The prosecutor strangely decided to alter the charges (dropping copying and focusing on making available) – this is not uncommon but it was strange that it should occur on day two after a year of preparations. At the same time this doesn’t alter much even though it may importantly effect the damages that can be awarded.

The decription of the bittorent technology involved was badly explained. This is even more surprising as the prosecutors description of the facts should have been acceptable to all. Instead everyone is left with the impression that the prosecutor and his surrounding team is not tech savvy at all.

One of the defence lawyers used the “King Kong defence” when he stated that the prosecutor must show that the defendant has personally interacted with the copyright infringer. Even many users use aliases like King Kong and may well be in the jungles of Cambodia the prosecutor must show such personal interaction. This is a development of the Chewbacca defense.

kingkong

Posted on by mklang

Love and hate my job

Feeling decedant tonight slouching on the sofa watching tv, celebrating the completion of the initial part of my empirical research – I have completed empirical studies of a mailing list containing over 15 000 discussion threads over an eight year period. This work has been negative, depressing and very very very boring. This part of my work I really really hate. It’s not the results but the reality of the everyday grind that I hate.

The part that I like is the recognition. I was asked to be part of examination committee which was/is a major honor. And to add a cherry to this already great place is that I get to fly to Reykjavik, Iceland in March. I will not be there for a long period but I will be in Iceland! This is so cool and I am really looking forward to the trip.

Posted on by mklang

Lessig asks for help in Fairy defence

Lessig is asking for help in the Shepard Fairy/AP case. He writes on his blog:

As mentioned, the Fair Use Project at Stanford’s CIS is representing Shepard Fairey in his suit against the AP. To that end, we’d be grateful for some net-based knowledge. How many photos are there “like” the beautiful photograph that Mannie Garcia took (the one on the left; the one on the right is a CC licensed photo taken by Steve Jurvetson)? Can you send any examples to shep_use@pobox.com?

Also, please send any favorite examples of photos used as visual references for other works of art. We lawyers don’t know much, but we can learn pretty quickly.

Posted on by mklang

Pursuit of Efficient Copyright

Herkko Hietanen, project lead for CC Finland, has finished his PhD dissertation and it’s online (CC BY-NC-ND). The work is called The Pursuit of Efficient Copyright Licensing — How Some Rights Reserved Attempts to Solve the Problems of All Rights Reserved. Here are some extracts from the blurb:

This dissertation analyses the growing pool of copyrighted works, which are offered to the public using Creative Commons licensing. The study consist of analysis of the novel licensing system, the licensors, and the changes of the “all rights reserved” —paradigm of copyright law.
…
The study finds that the innovative Creative Commons licensing scheme is well suited for low value – high volume licensing. It helps to reduce transaction costs on several le¬vels. However, CC licensing is not a “silver bullet”. Privacy, moral rights, the problems of license interpretation and license compatibility with other open licenses and collecting societies remain unsolved.
…
The dissertation contributes to the existing literature in several ways. There is a wide range of prior research on open source licensing. However, there is an urgent need for an extensive study of the Creative Commons licensing and its actual and potential impact on the creative ecosystem.

This should be interesting and well worth reading.

Posted on by mklang

Librarything memes: loving useless data

Librarything has introduced some cool new functions to their already fun site. Well the site is fun for us book nerds!

It turns out 47% of my known authors are dead (195 dead, 173 live & 492 unknown) and 89,5% male (male 447, female 52 & 362 unkown) .

I just love this kind of useless data!

Posted on by mklang

The trial of the decade! Or maybe a non-event?

Tomorrow the long awaited file sharing/internet piracy trial will begin. The Times Online called it the Internet piracy trial of the decade. It’s the Pirate Bay website (or rather four men behind the site) that go on trial for enabling millions of internet users to make illegal downloads of music, movies, games and software. The courts will look into subjects like

– what is a link

– what is a search engine

– aiding criminal offences

Most of the stuff is interesting from a legal-technical point of view since the outcome will hardly have any effect on file sharing on the Internet. The most probably outcome will be a court “victory” for the copyright industry and an appeal to the next level. The case will move towards the inevitable Supreme Court trial. The whole affair should be very interesting and yet, in practical terms, not relevant the total amount of file sharing online. User may have to switch to another provider or service but most probably the Pirate Bay will remain online in some form.

The story so far on ars technica, Times Online, Guardian. Also take a look at the Pirate Bays own dedicated trial site The Spectrial.

To understand how big this is take a look at the torrent user statistics on a map in real time here. Killing a website like the Pirate Bay will not stop this.

Posted on by mklang

Protesting change

Journalists and photographers in the United Kingdom are preparing a protest on the 16th February. The object of their protests is a new law that allows for the arrest – and potential imprisonment – of anyone who takes pictures of police officers ‘likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’. If found guilty the result could be imprisonment for up to 10 years.

The Home Office argues that the Terrorism Act 2000 already makes it an offence to ‘collect or make a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’ and that the new law will not change anything. However, photographers fear that the Counter-Terrorism Act will, by explicitly mentioning constables, give more power to police officers to stop photographers, including press photographers, from taking pictures in public places.

Read more about this and how to participate at the British Journal of Photography.

Posted on by mklang