Category Archives: Intellectual Property

Teaching done right

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Cory Doctorow has been teaching an undergraduate course at the University of Southern California called ‘PWNED: Everyone on Campus is a Copyright Criminal’. The class was open to anyone on or off campus, and lectures were podcasted. The students edited a class blog and were expected to improve Wikipedia posts relevant to the class. For the end of semester, each student turned in a final project that related the course material to their lives and major areas of study.

In this post Cory highlights some of the projects. “From the class discussions and one-on-ones”, he writes,

I knew I had a really amazing bunch on my hands, but I was absolutely gobsmacked by the incredible quality of the final projects. From founding a record label to conducting public polls to writing guidelines for journalists to interviews and classroom materials, my students did me better than proud.

I encouraged my students to do work that would be of use to the world at large. I hate the idea of the usual college final paper, which the student doesn’t want to write, the prof doesn’t want to read and no one else wants to ever see. Instead, I challenged them to produce useful work that the world could benefit from, and they met and exceeded the challenge…

Worth reading in full. Wonderful stuff. Cory is a genius.

The Proper Care And Feeding Of Fools, Internet Edition

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Doug Stewart is not amused by the Digger’s revolt over the AACS DVD key.

To put it frankly, the actions of the digg community are idiotic. They are not “brave”. R3 was not “censoring” their “speech” and the infantile kicking of the ox goad that resulted was ludicrous in the extreme. “Brave” users seeking to stick it to the MPAA “Man” would have posted the offending string on their own blogs and thus exposed themselves to potential litigation, rather than dragging an unwilling digg into the fight. If they seek the destruction of the community they take part in, I can think of no quicker route than to get the creators sued into oblivion.

So well-played, diggers. You managed to make Slashdotters seem principled and Farkers seem reasonable by comparison. Dunces.

Digital Restrictions Management

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This morning’s Observer column…

DRM was in the news because of EMI’s unexpected announcement that, starting next month, it will sell its stuff on iTunes in two flavours: one is the standard, DRM-crippled variety; the other a premium version with higher audio quality and without DRM.

The announcement came as a bolt from the blue, though I suppose that if anyone had spotted Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, going through Heathrow they might have suspected that something big was afoot. Mr Jobs does not normally descend to earth for anything as mundane as another company’s press conferences. But there he was on the platform, alongside EMI’s chief executive, Eric Nicoli. Selling digital music DRM-free is the right step forward for the music industry, intoned Steve. EMI has been a great partner for iTunes and is once again leading the industry as the first major music company to offer its entire digital catalogue DRM-free…

EMI sees the light?

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From BBC NEWS…

Music giant EMI is taking software locks off its digital music sold via download sites such as iTunes.

The “premium” versions of EMI tracks will lack the digital locks common to songs available via many online sites.

The move is significant because most download sites currently try to limit piracy by restricting what people can do with music they buy.

Apple’s iTunes store will start selling the EMI tracks in the “premium” format in May, with other services to follow.

Smart move. I’ll pay extra for DRM-free tracks and I suspect many other consumers will too.

Forty years ago today…

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…Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released. Peter Blake, the artist who did the cover, was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. He was asked if anyone had refused to allow their image to be used. “Yes”, he replied, “Mae West. She said ‘What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club band?'”.

What a dame! She left a legacy of quotes that rivals Dorothy Parker’s. For example: “Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.” And: “I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.” And: “Good sex is like good bridge. If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.”

She agreed in the end to appear on the album cover — but only after all four Beatles had written to her individually.

The very model of a modern creative society? I don’t think so

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This morning’s Observer column…

[Tom] Lehrer is famous for many things, but chief among them is his famous observation that ‘satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize’. The song of his that I like most is ‘The Elements Song’, in which he recites the names of all the elements of the periodic table at high speed and without fudging a syllable, while at the same time playing a stirring piano accompaniment of what he described as ‘a barely recognisable tune’. It’s an astonishing performance and it resides happily on my iPod.

The other day, I chanced on a link to a lovely piece of Flash animation (see it for yourself here), in which a chap named Mike Stanfill took the Lehrer soundtrack and visually added the names of the elements in a witty – and technically very demanding – way. My first reaction was pure pleasure. My second thought was that this provides a good object lesson for understanding the current debate about intellectual property in a digital age…

Later… Adam Hodgkin pointed out a lovely Lehrer song about the virtues of plagiarism!

Viacom, YouTube and Joost

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This morning’s Observer column…

Think of it as mud-wrestling, but at a higher level. Viacom is suing Google for a billion dollars because YouTube (which Google purchased a while back for $1.6bn) continues to host clips of Viacom’s video properties. The documents launching the suit express moral outrage wrapped in three coats of prime legal verbiage. The gist, however, is clear: nasty bully Google is getting rich on the back of poor little artists and the companies that support them…

Microsoft stakes claim to moral high ground; audience dies laughing

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Ho, ho! From today’s New York Times…

SEATTLE, March 5 (Reuters) — The Microsoft Corporation, the software giant, has prepared a blistering attack on rival Google, arguing that the Web search leader takes a cavalier approach to copyright protection.

In remarks prepared for delivery on Tuesday to the Association of American Publishers, the associate general counsel of Microsoft, Thomas Rubin, argues that Google’s move into new media markets has come at the expense of publishers of books, videos and software.

Mr. Rubin’s comments echo arguments at the heart of a 16-month-old copyright lawsuit against Google brought by five book publishers and organized by the Association of American Publishers, an industry trade group.

“Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people’s content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and I.P.O.s,” said Mr. Rubin, who oversees copyright and trade-secret law.

“Google takes the position that everything may be freely copied unless the copyright owner notifies Google and tells it to stop,” Mr.Rubin said. Microsoft, he said, asks the copyright’s owner for permission first…

Danny Sullivan has posted a nice dissection of Microsoft’s high-minded cant.