Archive

Posts Tagged ‘copyright’

The morning coffee, sex, fashion and bananas

March 15th, 2010

Stigler’s Law of Eponymy, attributed to Robert Merton, is a fantastic thing.

An interesting essay on fashion and copyright, courtesy of guest bloggers Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman at Freakonomics.

A discussion on the difficulty of defining exactly what sex is. The best part of it? 23% of those questioned who were male and over the age of 65 did not consider a penis penetrating a vagina to meet their definition of “sex”. Now I’m curious, readers — what is the bare minimum for you to consider something to be sex?

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The morning coffee and a future full of super heroes

February 8th, 2010

Living in the future, as we do, we are sometimes confronted by bizarre questions, such as “is it ethical to clone yourself and harvest the organs?” Today we are forced to contemplate a future in which we are all Spiderman.


(from Joseph Zohn)

Take a photograph in Seattle, be sued by an artist who was commissioned to create art in a public space. We at the Big Bad Blog wonder why he has not sued Google — the sidewalks in the area are clearly visible in Google Street View.

Those of you who are saddened by your inability to read a Neil Gaiman book while simultaneously watching Doctor Who episodes can now rejoice — you will not have to choose between them, for a forty-five minute span in 2011.

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The morning coffee would welcome being paid in gift cards

February 5th, 2010

A California judge finds himself in a little bit of trouble this week. After agreeing to a plea deal that would see his clients be paid in gift cards instead of cash, the judge ordered that the lawyers $125,000 payment should also be paid the same way. The decision has (unfortunately) been overturned, and there is a little less justice in the world today.


(Photo of the annual Tough Guy race, by Michael Regan)

Ah, Twitter — the new CEO resignation engine.

Easy come, easy go — the website Awkward Stock Photos has been removed from the Internet, following a DMCA claim from a stock photo website.

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Copyright madness

February 1st, 2010

When it comes to copyright, the world simply seems to have gone insane.

The UK music industry thinks it loses £200 million each year to piracy. So the UK government is now trying to push through a new set of regulations that would cost £500 million to implement. Which not only does not meet the most basic of cost-benefit analyses, but also would force an estimated 40,000 people offline due to the additional costs that would be passed on to consumers.

Meanwhile, my ISP has promised to start to spy on everything that I download. I cannot recall agreeing to allow them to do this.

But copyright issues in music are old news; the new battle is in books. Book publishers have now realized that many avid readers are now e-book readers, with more to follow on the iPad — now they are beginning to jump into the copyright act. Using the same sorts of measurements that the music and movie industries use, they are claiming to lose $3 billion a year to online piracy. A more interesting analysis takes the same methodology and applies it to libraries, finding that American libraries “cost” the publishing industry nearly $1 trillion every year.

This, of course, demonstrates how silly the claims are. Once one takes into account that those who violate copyright by downloading music, books, or movies are also the industry’s biggest customers, expenditures like those being made in the UK are revealed for being complete farces — rather than protecting profits, it takes away the ability for customers to discover the material in the first place.

There are interesting and sane views out there. Go To Hellman outlines the benefits of library sharing of books. Cory Doctorow discusses the possibility of creating an intelligent copyright system, rather than a one-size-fits-all system that doesn’t work.

None of that intelligent thinking is likely to be finding its way into the Anti-Conterfeiting Trade Agreement, however. The public, of course, is not allowed in on the multilateral negotiations — but big business is. What is sure to emerge are a set of rules to make the demise of the pre-Internet model as painful as possible for consumers and new start-ups, rather than a set of rules that still make sense given the technology available.

And yes, almost all of this has happened during the first 31 days of 2010. And there is no sign that anybody will adopt a system that has any chance of working anytime soon.

(Image from 917press)

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