‘Happy Christmas’ in legalese
From an anonymous source on the Net.

Dear Friends

On advice of Counsel, and in view of our increasingly litigious society, we retained an attorney specialising in Greetings and Holiday law to write the following holiday greeting this year. The sentiments are our own.

WHEREAS the party of the First Part (hereinafter called the Wishor) acknowledges the existence of the Party of the Second Part (the Wishee):

Please accept, without obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, politically correct, prudently budgeted, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practised with the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of Wishee’s choice, but with respect for the religious/secular traditions of others, or (but not limited to) Wishee’s choice not to practise religious or secular traditions.

Also, may all Wishees and their families enjoy a financially-successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated celebration of the generally accepted calendar year 2003, but with due respect for the calendars of other cultures or sects, and having regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith, sexual preference, political party affiliation, choice of computer platform, or dietary preference of the Wishee.

NOTICE ++ NOTICE ++ NOTICE ++ NOTICE ++ NOTICE

By accepting this greeting, Wishee is bound by the following terms:

(1) This greeting is subject to further clarification or withdrawal.

(2) This greeting is freely transferable provided that no alteration shall be made to the original greeting and that the proprietary rights of the Wishor are acknowledged.

(3) This greeting in no way implies intent or promise by the Wishor to implement any of the wishes.

(4) This greeting may not be enforceable in certain jurisdictions and/or the restrictions herein may not be binding upon certain Wishees in certain jurisdictions, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the Wishor.

(5) Certain States in the United States or other Countries may restrict Wishee’s right to said greetings; it is the responsibility of said Wishees to verify the legality of such greetings within their jurisdiction. In no case shall Wishor assume responsibility for legality of the greeting in any jurisdiction.

(6) This greeting is warranted to perform as reasonably may be expected within the usual application of good tidings, for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first.

(7) The above warranty should not be construed as a promise of issuance of any further holiday greeting, which shall occur only at the sole discretion of the Wishor.

(8) Any reference or addendum to this greeting in Wishor’s handwriting to “the Lord”, ‘Father Christmas”, “our Saviour”, or any other festive figures, whether actual or fictitious, dead or alive, shall not imply any endorsement by or from them in respect of this greeting, and all proprietary rights in any referenced third party names and images are hereby acknowledged.

(8) By opening this greeting, Wishee implies acceptance of the terms and conditions enumerated within this greeting. If Wishee does not agree with the terms and conditions, Wishee should, at his/heer optioln, either destroy this greeting or write “Refused – return to Sender” on outer envelope and return by certified mail to Wishor, at Wishee’s own expense.

Creative Commons licensing issues

I’m planning to put this weblog into the Creative Commons system, but was wondering how to do so without appearing to claim rights on other people’s stuff that I quote and use. Thanks to Denise Howells for solving the problem by creating the necessary wording.

So is Peter Pan free or not?

Sobering excerpt from Larry Lessig’s Weblog:”Two weeks ago at the Creative Commons launch, I tried to sell the virtues of building rather than suing. The reality is that we need to do both. As Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society has announced, we filed a lawsuit last week to defend the right of Emily Somma to distribute a children’s book that builds upon the story of Peter Pan.

Peter Pan was created by Scottish playwright James M. Barrie (1860-1937). The character was born in a 1902 book called The Little White Bird and then developed into the play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, in 1904. In 1906, the section of The Little White Bird that originated Peter Pan was published separately as a book called Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Finally, Barrie turned his highly successful play into a book called Peter and Wendy in 1911.

All these works have entered the public domain in America. But because Barrie continued to produce works based on the Peter Pan story, the holders of those copyrights claim that there can be no derivative works using the Peter Pan character so long as those later works remain under copyright. (In England, by special law, the copyright for Barrie’s work is perpetual). Thus, the holders of Barrie’s copyright claim a perpetual right to control derivative works based on Peter Pan, even though the original work passed into the public domain.

Emily Somma, a Canadian, has written a wonderful children’s book, After the Rain, that uses some of the Peter Pan story, but for very different ends. Peter Pan, you might remember, is afraid of growing up. In Somma’s story, children rescue Peter Pan from this fear. Thus, like the best of derivative works, Somma’s story builds on the past, but does something different with it.

Yet Somma is now threatened with a legal action in the United States if she distributes her book in the United States, even though her work plainly builds on work that is in the public domain. This, we believe, is wrong. It is just one example of an important class of cases where current copyright holders demand the right to control the use of work that is in the public domain just because their work builds upon work that is now in the public domain.

Stay tuned for more news, or tune your reader to the CIS RSS feed for updates on the case. Peter Pan is already free. It’s time the law (and lawyers) to recognize it. “

I didn’t know about the ‘perpetual copyright’ on Peter Pan. Seems daft. Wonder how the publishers swung that one.

US universities try again on DMCA

Chronicle story. ” College groups are again asking the U.S. Copyright Office to allow scholars to bypass technological devices that restrict electronic access to copyrighted works.

In a letter to the Copyright Office, the groups say that a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, known as the “anti-circumvention provision,” needs to be revised to permit “fair use” of copyrighted material for research and teaching.

Researchers and scholars maintain that they must be able to bypass the access-control devices and view digital texts and images without fear of breaking the law. The groups note that academic users have long been able to view nonelectronic copyrighted material under existing fair-use provisions of copyright law.”

In-Room Chat as a Social Tool — an experiment by Clay Shirky and friends

Fascinating piece by Clay Shirky reporting what happens when you give participants in a group discussion a chat-room, the contents of which are projected onto a screen so that all meeting participants can read it. As ever with Shirky, the commentary is intelligent and judicious, and frank about both the pluses and minuses of the experiment. Two interesting points: from the photographs, it looks as though most of those attending the meeting were using Apple PowerBooks or iBooks (which indicates a non-representative sample); and the observation by Shirky and another participant, Steven Johnson, that the online Chat had “sucked the humor out of the discussion”. (The jokes were mostly in the Chat transcript, it seems.)

Wi-Fi goes mainstream

One of the (few) good things about 2002 was the way 802.11b networking took off. This BBC Online story confirms that by making the WiFi revolution one of its top stories in the end-of-year roundup. It also includes a link to Cantenna, a company that sells converted Pringle cans (see illustration above) as longer-range Wi-Fi antennae.

Breaking Windows — the Lindows suit
“NYT” story.

” Microsoft filed its trademark suit against Lindows.com, saying it was using a copycat name, and then asked the court for a preliminary injunction to halt quickly what it deemed an illegal practice by an emerging rival.

Nonsense, Lindows.com replied. ‘Windows’is a generic term, it said, first used more than two decades ago for software systems that could display programs or data in rectangular windows on PC screens. Lindows .com submitted declarations from expert witnesses and trade press articles from the 1980’s, when several software companies were offering desktop environments. They spoke of the ‘window wars’ of those years and had headlines like ‘Microsoft Does Windows.'”

Dan Gillmor’s review of a terrible year

Makes for bleak reading — the Bush regime’s sell-out to Microsoft, the fact that corporate sleaze and wrongdoing remains essentially untouched, the colossal erosion in civil liberties ‘legitimated’ by the ‘war’ on terrorism, etc. Dan says there are some upsides. Personally I don’t see any right now — with the possible exception of Open Source.

Jon Udell’s bookmarklet

A brilliant piece of programming — and an illustration of how innovation happens so quickly on the Net. After you’ve “installed” your bookmarklet in a browser, you can look up books at your local library (provided its catalogue system is run on some industry standard software). Let’s say you’re on a book-related site (Amazon, BN), and a book’s info page is your current page. (Specifically: its URL contains an ISBN. Choose a hardcover edition for best results.) You can click your bookmarklet to check if the book is available in your local library. The bookmarklet will invoke your library’s lookup service, feed it the ISBN, and pop up a new window with the result. This is what Web services are all about.

Broadband and movies: the reality

Most of the media industry seems to think that broadband is about delivering movies to couch potatoes. Some of the studios have now set up MovieLink to provide just such a service. This is what it’s like in practice. Quote:

“MovieLink boasts some 200 movies for rent. I chose Braveheart, which for some reason was much cheaper at $1.99 than most other selections, which were $3.99 to $5.45. I did get to watch the movie on my computer. But it was a struggle, and in that struggle one question kept nagging at me: Why the heck do the studios think they know how to provide me with a service like this?

MovieLink’s user interface for choosing movies is a mess. It’s modeled after the e-commerce systems pioneered by companies like Amazon.com. That means everything is presented in a hierarchy of categories: action, romance, Western, etc. There’s no method for searching actors, directors, or–oddly–even studios.

Worse, though, is the service. The data files are huge. At 952 megabytes, Braveheart took just less than five hours to download using our DSL line at home. Video-on-demand? Hardly. In the same time we could have made 20 roundtrips to our neighborhood Blockbuster. Then there’s the fact that MovieLink requires you to watch the movie within 24 hours of starting to play it or have it expire. Blockbuster lets you keep a movie for three to four days. Both, however, feature equally unfriendly help. As soon as I clicked the play button on my movie, MovieLink offered this: ‘Do you want to play Braveheart now? If you play Braveheart now, you must finish viewing it by Tuesday, 11/19/2002 2:56 p.m.'”