NewsTrust - Copyright - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Technology should help us share, not constrain us

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Richard Stallman - Apr. 18 (Opinion) - Companies like Amazon can control the way we use the ebooks we buy. Instead let's build a publishing model based on freedom I love the detective novel The Jehovah Contract , and I'd like everyone else to love it, too. I have lent it out at least six times over the years. Printed books let us do that. I couldn't do it with most commercial ebooks; it's not allowed. And if I felt like telling the publishers to take their evil rule and stuff it, the software in e-readers has digital restrictions management – malicious features that restrict access, so it simply won't allow it. And the books are encrypted in such a way to force you to use that malicious software. Many other habits that readers are accustomed to are not allowed for ebooks. With the Amazon Kindle, for instance, you're not allowed to buy a book anonymously. Kindle books are typically available from Amazon only, and Amazon doesn't accept cash so users must identify themselves. Thus Amazon knows exactly which books each user has read. ...

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MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Popular Mechanics - Dec. 21 (Opinion) - The U.S. Congress is considering the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). MythBuster Adam Savage says that if these sweeping pieces of legislation pass, the U.S. will join the likes of China and Iran in censoring the Internet.

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Senators announce Internet death penalty bill

Thu, 12 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - May. 12 (Opinion) -

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The Google Books settlement should teach the company humility. It won't

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Siva Vaidyanathan - Mar. 23 (Opinion) - Google has been humbled. For a company with the audacity to make "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" its mission statement, it takes a lot to take Google down a peg. But yesterday federal Judge Denny Chin did just that. He ruled—after more than two years of study and debate—that the elaborate new used-book store that Google had designed in collaboration with the most elite authors and publishers could not stand. Or, at least, Chin ruled that the methods Google chose to build this massive digital bookstore, now called Google Books, was improper.

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What do we want copyright to do?

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Cory Doctorow - Nov. 23 (Opinion) - A recurring question in discussions of digital copyright is how creators and their investors (that is, labels, movie studios, publishers, etc) will earn a living in the digital era. But though I've had that question posed to me thousands of times, no one has ever said which creators and which investors are to earn a living, and what constitutes "a living".

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Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Trip Gabriel - Aug. 02 (Statement) - Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

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The court was right to side with YouTube over Viacom.

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Farhad Manjoo - Jun. 25 (Opinion) - In March, I criticized YouTube's founders for their apparent disregard for copyright law during the site's first few years of operation. Internal e-mail messages that were released as part of a billion-dollar lawsuit that Viacom filed against Google, which owns YouTube, suggested that the founders "were aware of a lot of infringing content on the site but decided to ignore much of it in order to keep YouTube growing," I wrote.[more ...] Google - YouTube - Viacom - Copyright - Lawsuit

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Obama's & ACTA, changing US copyright law.

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Jack Goldsmith, Lawrence Lessig - Mar. 29 (Editorial) - The Obama-backed trade agreement that would alarm the Framers should also shock us.

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Journalistic Shoplifting

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Clark Hoyt - Mar. 06 (Editorial) - ZACHERY KOUWE, a Times business reporter for a little over a year, resigned last month after he was accused of plagiarizing from The Wall Street Journal. An internal review of his work turned up more articles he said he was shown four containing copy

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Joe Biden's pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record.b

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - By Declan McCullagh - Aug. 24 (Opinion) - By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET's Technology Voters' Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.

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How Much Should Design Cost?

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Treehugger - By Lloyd Alter - Aug. 11 (Interview) - The architectural profession is broken in the single-family house biz; the vast majority of people live in houses that were built by developers from generic plans. The number of houses designed by architects to suit the needs of specific clients is negligible. It is also expensive; a small house can take as much time to design as a very big one, and as much time as a much more profitable commercial job that doesn't require client meetings on evenings and weekends.

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"Intellectural property" is a silly euphemism

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Cory Doctorow - Feb. 21 (Opinion) - Fundamentally, the stuff we call "intellectual property" is just knowledge - ideas, words, tunes, blueprints, identifiers, secrets, databases. This stuff is similar to property in some ways: it can be valuable, and sometimes you need to invest a lot of money and labour into its development to realise that value. ... But it is also dissimilar from property in equally important ways. Most of all, it is not inherently "exclusive".

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ISPs new role in network control

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

BBC News - By Michael Geist - Jan. 29 (Opinion) - With the industry gradually admitting that locking down content does not work, it has now dangerously shifted toward locking down the Internet.

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Universal's Open MP3s Will Be Watermarked

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 05:20:38 -0700

Wired - By Eliot Van Buskirk - Aug. 13 (Opinion) - When asked whether Univeral's MP3s would be embedded with unique identifiers, a spokesperson for the company said that the files will contain a watermark containing a number that could be used to identify the track on a P2P network, and that the watermarks are the "standard" type included with DRM-ed versions of the songs.

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How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM Are Beating Up The American Economy

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:21:20 -0700

InformationWeek - By Cory Doctorow - Jun. 14 (Opinion) - The United States traded its manufacturing sector's health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rust belt. The United States bet wrong. America needs new, realistic trade policies, columnist Cory Doctorow says.

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Criminalising the consumer

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 07:31:03 -0700

Economist - Apr. 27 (Editorial) - IS IT legal to make a copy of that DVD you've just bought so the family can watch it around the home or in the car? In one of the most watched copyright cases in recent years, a judge in northern California ruled last month that copying DVDs for personal use was legal, given the terms of the industry's licence and the way the copies were made.

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Congress Must Make Clear Copyright Laws To Protect Consumers

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 08:15:37 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Walter S. Mossberg - Mar. 22 (Opinion) - Here comes another in the long line of lawsuits between media companies and Internet companies over who gets to distribute content. This time it's Viacom, the enormously rich owner of properties like Paramount Pictures and Comedy Central, suing Google, the enormously rich owner of YouTube. The issue: Viacom wants to get paid more than Google wants to pay it for all of those fuzzy, two-minute clips from programs like "The Daily Show" that users post to YouTube. The companies tried to negotiate a deal, but the talks failed, so Viacom is suing for $1 billion.

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Lawsuit aside, the point is -- content is king

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 08:53:29 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By Tim Goodman - Mar. 16 (Opinion) - Figuring out whom to root for in the battle between Viacom and YouTube is pretty simple, particularly if you own a computer: Turn it on and play. YouTube, with its library of archival television and music clips and its array of user-generated video oddities, is one of the truly great gifts of an invigorated, inventive Internet. That Viacom is suing -- for a chilling $1 billion -- the former startup now owned by Google is likely to give YouTube devotees the willies. All those cool clips -- potentially gone.

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