While randomly looking over one of my older posts last night, I realized that the YouTube video that it was centered around had been removed, making it pointless. This is extremely annoying, not just for me but for any reader of that post.
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I missed a lot of these moves when they occurred. Even though the “copyright czar” position hasn’t been filled yet, it looks very much like Obama’s administration is little better on copyright issues than the previous administration.
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I’m not surprised, but I’m not happy: ‘Court Jails Pirate Bay Founders’.
I figured, given the amount of pressure brought to bear, that the court would use any means it could to find them guilty. I’m not sure they actually are guilty given the way the laws are written.
(Oh, and for anyone who wants to claim that their defense was to get away on a “technicality”: as my friend Deirdre used to say, all laws are technicalities.)
President Bush signed the “Pro-IP” Act yesterday, because despite everything else that’s going on, there’s still plenty of time to please the RIAA and MPAA by increasing statutory damages for infringers—apparently up from a capped $150,000 for a ten-song album to $1.5 million.
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For a long time, it’s really bugged me that certain copyright owners do all they can to keep their creations from ever entering the public domain while not acknowledging how much they owe to all the things that were floating around free in the culture before them.
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People who loudly condemn software (or music, or film) “piracy” often confuse the concepts of a) taking something from someone else and b) getting something for nothing. Their reasoning seems to be based on the idea that since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, if you get something for nothing, you must be stealing it.
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The DMCA is, as discussed two days ago, a piece of legislation with a rather broadly-reaching grasp. Particularly in giving copyright holders a lot of leeway in preventing the dissemination of “circumvention devices”. I suspect that certain approachs could exploit this latitude and make the absurdity of the law even more evident than it already is.
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In this entry I’m going to share a series of colored squares which it could be illegal for me to post.
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It’s worth spending the time to consider what licensing/copyright/usage terms to apply to one’s output, whether creative or otherwise. The default is copyright, which applies (at least in the US and the EU) as soon as one creates something. This means that the work is given the full range of legal copyright protections—regardless of whether they’re wanted or not.
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A few years ago, I wrote this article about mame.dk closing. (mame.dk was a site hosting game files for MAME, an arcade game emulator.) I get more email in reference to that article than, I think, anything else I’ve put up. Most of the email is in agreement with my viewpoint, and some ask for where one can get ROMs now (sadly, I have no idea). Last week I got a negative email, from “Mark”, and decided to post it and my reply.
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