Copyright

Fear as a business model

Moby has commented on the recent verdict against file-sharer Jammie Thomas has been found guilty and ordered to pay some $1.92 million in damages for illegally “making available” 24 songs in her KaZaA shared folder. That’s $80,000 per song!

Musician and electronica genius Moby (I only just found his blog/journal) writes:

punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business. maybe the record companies have adopted the ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ approach to dealing with music fans. i don’t know, but ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ doesn’t seem like such a sustainable business model when it comes to consumer choice. how about a new model of ‘it’s better to be loved for helping artists make good records and giving consumers great records at reasonable prices’?

i’m so sorry that any music fan anywhere is ever made to feel bad for making the effort to listen to music.

the riaa needs to be disbanded.

Like many others Moby has put his finger on the main weakness on protecting intellectual property through lawsuits. You are either suing and pissing off your best fans or beating up (relatively) innocent bystanders in order to scare others… Isn’t this jailhouse logic? Beat someone up to gain respect?

Playing Moby loudly in the office as a tribute to his good sense and taste… also I like the music…

Posted on by mklang

Copyright in fossils

Some early morning copyright humor from Norway via Olav Torvund‘s blog. Apparently the researcher who found the fossil Ida, Jørn Hurum wants to hold copyright in the fossil (in Norwegian). A quick reminder of what we are talking about here, from the Guardian:

Ida is believed to be the most complete primate fossil ever discovered. She is 95% intact and so well preserved that her tissues, hair and even her stomach contents are visible. By comparison, the much more recent fossil “Lucy” from Ethiopia is only 40% complete.

And for what noble cause does this academic want copyright? Well he tells the newspaper that he wants the exclusive right to put the image on caps, t-shirts and childrens soft toys.

Statements like this should make us copyright speakers think! With all the noise about copyright in society today many people, even highly educated people, just don’t get copyright. They don’t understand how it works today even less why some groups argue that it does not work today.

Hopefully Jørn Hurum and the Museum of Natural history will read Olav blog or be informed by someone else that copyright expires 70 years after the creators death… and may be a tad difficult to apply to a 47 million year old corpse.

Posted on by mklang

Blade Runner & Copyleft

OMG! From the Creative Commons blog:

Ridley Scott, the famed SciFi director of the classic Blade Runner will be producing a new web series based on the film released under our free copyleft license. The series will is initially slated for web release with the possibility of television syndication and will be a project by Ag8.

Read more about the project at the New York Times, on Ag8’s Purefold page, or join up on the FriendFeed discussion.

Posted on by mklang

Wikipedia goes Creative Commons

The Wikimedia Foundation board has approved the licensing changes voted on by the community of Wikipedia and its sister sites. The accompanying press release includes this quote from Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig:

“Richard Stallman’s commitment to the cause of free culture has been an inspiration to us all. Assuring the interoperability of free culture is a critical step towards making this freedom work. The Wikipedia community is to be congratulated for its decision, and the Free Software Foundation thanked for its help. I am enormously happy about this decision.”

Read all about it here.

Posted on by mklang

Pirate Bay trial just got dirty

The Swedish Radio went digging for information about Tomas Norström the judge in The Pirate Bay case and found a few unpleasant facts about the judge:

He is a member of the Swedish Association for Copyright a society for spreading knowledge about, and developing the legal field of, copyright. He has worked for Stiftelsen .SE the organisation responsible for Swedens top-level domain name. Monique Wadstedt, the film companies representative during the Pirate Bay trial also worked there. Finally he is on the board of the Swedish Organisation for Industrial Design Protection.

So I would prefer to praise a judge for taking an interest in copyright law so that takes care of his membership in the association for copyright. That he worked for the same organisation as one of the lawyers involved in the case may need some explaining – what did he do there? when did he work there? what was his relationship to Monique Wadstedt?

The final one is more damning he is on the board for an organisation working to strengthen the protection of industrial design and also copyright – this is not good.

How impartial can a judge be? Should his interest in specific legal topics be seen as a negative or a positive if he is chosen to preside over a case. Naturally he should have taken up this with his supervisor prior to the case. Nomatter what, the focus is moving away from law to poltics. – the trial just got dirty.

Posted on by mklang

Pirate Bay Guilty

The Stockholm court found all four defendents guilty. One year in prison and 30 million kronors in damages. This is a very stiff sentence by Swedish standards. Let the discussions begin…

Posted on by mklang

TGI Friday with high anticipation

Can you feel the excitment in the air? It’s happening tomorrow. Yes it is Friday and the weekend weather is looking great but thats not what I am talking about. Tomorrow the courts will present their ruling for the Pirate Bay Case. It promises to be an interesting read.

Posted on by mklang

Wikipedia to vote on change from GNU FDL to CC BY-SA

Sorry for the horrible abbreviations in the title!

Wikipedia is in the process of deciding to go from using the GNU Free Documentation License to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license. One of the reasons for this move is that the GNU Free Documentation License is less flexible to use for wikipedia. More information from the Creative Commons blog:

A community vote is now underway, hopefully one of the final steps in the process the migration of Wikipedia (actually Wikipedias, as each language is its own site, and also other Wikimedia Foundation sites) to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license.

This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons — until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.

To qualify to vote, one must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15. Make sure you’re logged in to the project on which you qualify, and you should see a site notice at the top of each page that looks like the image below (red outline added around notice).

licensing update site notice

Click on “vote now” and you’ll be taken to the voting site.

For background on the migration process, see Wikimedia’s licensing update article and the following series of posts on the Creative Commons blog:

Here’s a great “propaganda poster”, original created by Brianna Laugher (cited a number of times on this blog), licensed under CC BY. See her post, Vote YES for licensing sanity!

Indeed, please go vote yes to unify the free culture movement!

Vote YES! For licensing sanity!

Posted on by mklang

Why numbers don't mean much – file sharing in Sweden

Presentation is everything. Shame that the truth may interupt an otherwise nice story. The Guardian was not alone among international media commenting on the implementation of IPRED (Directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights) in Sweden. The article entitled Swedish internet use plummets after filesharing curb introduced began:

Internet traffic in Sweden – previously a hotbed of illicit filesharing – has fallen dramatically following the introduction of a law banning online piracy.

Lets begin with some of the obvious errors. The “hotbed of illicit filesharing” is a strange thing to call Sweden. We have a high Internet/broadband penetration and the Pirate Bay was launched and maintained by Swedes but there is no way that a county with 9 million inhabitants could be at the top of the file sharing list?

The fact that TPB was launched in Sweden does not mean that its users are Swedish or in Sweden – this is basic stuff – so did the writer want to increase the sensationalism in the article or doesn’t he understand how the Internet works? Check out this map of TPB users around the world.

TPB Tracker Geo Statistics
The statistics is now based on unique users connected per minute! Should provide alot more accurate data.
Keep in mind that a torrent client usually only connects to the tracker once every 15-20 minutes.

The next problem is that the measurements of the 30-50% drop in traffic (depending upon who you read) seems to be that the measurements where taken from a much too small sample and the drop mirrors a similar drop on the measured servers occurring at the same time last year (Sources in Swedish here).

Yes, there are file sharers in Sweden and yes one of the most popular torrent trackers was founded in Sweden. But the files are uploaded and downloaded from all locations across the world and a large dip in traffic may mean a number of things. Having said that there is no doubt that a number of users turned of their file sharing when IPRED entered into force – but only to begin searching for anonymity tools. It is extremely likely that the users who stopped file sharing will return since there is still no viable legal alternative.

Posted on by mklang

More images in the commons

The Creative Commons blog writes about 250,000 images recently donated to Wikimedia Commons, a sister project of Wikipedia.

The images, part of the German Photo Collection at Saxony’s State and University Library (SLUB), are being uploaded with corresponding captions and metadata. Afterward, volunteers will link the photos, all available under Germany’s ported CC BY-SA 3.0 license or in the public domain, to personal identification data and relevant Wikipedia articles. The collection depicts scenes from German history and daily life.

As a bonus for the donating library, the metadata supplied by the German Photo Collection will be expanded and annotated by Wikipedia users, and the results will be seeded back into the collection’s database.

The donation marks the first step in a collaboration between SLUB and Wikimedia Germany e.V., the pioneering Wikimedia chapter who faciliated a similar 100,000-image-strong cooperation with the German Federal Archives last December.

Creative Commons license Creative Commons Attribution Creative Commons Share Alike

This file is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License.

Posted on by mklang