Posted on March 15th, 2010 by Administration
You’ve got nine days left to file comments for Victoria Espinel, the Obama administration’s new copyright enforcement czar, and her department’s inquiry on how the US should best enforce copyrights. Given that the president himself has spoken out in favor of the secret and sinister Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (a.k.a. ACTA — a punishing copyright treaty [...]
Filed under: copywrong | No Comments »
Posted on February 21st, 2010 by Administration
UVEX, the ski goggle manufacturer, got a nastygram from an Olympics Committee IP lawyer, forbidding them from using any images, or even mentioning, that gold medal winner Lindsey Vonn uses their equipment.
So UVEX turned to verse:
Blonde Who Uses Our Stuff Wins Downhill (Last Name Rhymes With “Bonn”)
There once was a lawyer from the IOC,
who called [...]
Filed under: copywrong | No Comments »
Posted on January 22nd, 2010 by Administration
Critical Commons has created its own entry in the great Hitler in the bunker remix meme. Steve Anderson sez, “The video is also promoting the fair use advocacy site Critical Commons, which is a fair use advocacy and media sharing site, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This is currently the most radical media-sharing site on [...]
Filed under: copywrong | No Comments »
Posted on January 7th, 2010 by Administration
Bad news, Netflix customers: Warner Bros. and Netflix have just made an agreement to delay all new release rentals by 28 days so people will keep buying DVDs. Or, as is more likely, turn to piracy.
The upside of the deal is that Warner is offering up more movies for streaming on Netflix to make up [...]
Filed under: copywrong, drm sucks | No Comments »
Posted on December 27th, 2009 by Administration
From the Chinese pirate masters of the non-sea-faring variety comes… Ylmf OS! Not happy with pirating Windows XP itself, these creative Chinese have gone one step further and hacked Ubuntu to look exactly like Windows XP. Why have they moved to Ubuntu? Because their previous release, a pirate version of Windows XP itself, is being [...]
Filed under: copywrong, linux, micro$oft, pir8, pwned, ubuntu | No Comments »
Posted on December 23rd, 2009 by Administration
Microsoft is going to have to pay some obscure company $200m, who patented custom xml, which Microsoft uses in Word 2007
Filed under: copywrong, micro$oft | No Comments »
Posted on November 2nd, 2009 by Administration
A new British independent poll conducted by Ipsos Mori concluded that the people who do the most illegal downloading also buy the most music. This is in line with many other studies elsewhere and is easy to understand: people who are music superfans do more of everything to do with music: they see more live [...]
Filed under: copywrong, drm sucks, pir8 | No Comments »
Posted on October 28th, 2009 by Administration
Today, EFF is launching our new ‘Takedown Hall of Shame’ project, which collects the worst and most shameful examples of bogus DMCA takedowns. We’ve got everything from the recent Ralph Lauren takedown to Michael Savage’s attempts to silence critics to a video NPR tried to remove just last week!
“Free speech in the 21st century often [...]
Filed under: copywrong | No Comments »
Posted on October 22nd, 2009 by Administration
Celebrate the launch of Windows 7 by illegally downloading your very own copy!
Filed under: copywrong, howto | No Comments »
Posted on October 16th, 2009 by Administration
The British ISP TalkTalk has produced a compelling case against the government’s plans to disconnect whole households from the Internet if the copyright industry accuses them — without proving anything in court — of three acts of infringement. TalkTalk picked a random street in North London and showed that 23 of the households in that [...]
Filed under: copywrong, riaa sucks | No Comments »
Posted on September 21st, 2009 by Administration
The RIAA has updated its Music Rules! school program — which contains blatant falsehoods about copyright. The new version asks kids to act as unpaid PR staff: “Take your campaign a step further by contacting the editor of your community newspaper or the director of your community cable television station to see if you can [...]
Filed under: copywrong, riaa sucks | No Comments »
Posted on September 14th, 2009 by Administration
Few people are as qualified to write a book about the copyright wars as William Patry: former copyright counsel to the US House of Reps, advisor the Register of Copyrights, Senior Copyright Counsel for Google, and author of the seven-volume Patry on Copyright, widely held to be the single most authoritative work on US copyright [...]
Filed under: books, copywrong | No Comments »
Posted on September 9th, 2009 by Administration
Microsoft tried to auction off some patents that they claim relate to Linux. Patent trolls could have bought them. Instead Open Invention Network (OIN) got them. Why would Microsoft wish to get rid of 22 patents that it presumably could sue Linux over? Let’s try to imagine what might have happened.
Let’s pretend you are [...]
Filed under: FTW, copywrong, free open source software, linux, micro$oft, news | No Comments »
Posted on September 8th, 2009 by Administration
In a Calgary Herald op-ed, Kris Kotarski talks about the fundamental conflict between modern copyright enforcement and privacy, noting that in the pre-Internet days, “it was conceivable for copyright laws to be enforced in a manner that did not bring the state to anyone’s doorstep.” Whereas today, the entertainment industry has arrived at a consensus [...]
Filed under: copywrong, privacy | No Comments »
Posted on August 27th, 2009 by Administration
Let’s take a look at the $1.92m fine Jammie Thomas faces for downloading 1700 songs and compare it to the penalties for other crimes in America (valuing jail time at $50,233, the median US household income in 2007):
Child abduction: Fine of $25,000 and up to three years in prison, which can be accounted as $50,233 [...]
Filed under: copywrong | No Comments »
Posted on August 13th, 2009 by Administration
The Photographer Not a Terrorist campaign is a new British organization devoted to helping photographers whom the authorities have busted or harassed for being potential terrorists, kidnapping innocent photons with deadly light-sensors.
They’ve got a “bust card” explaining your rights to you and the officers you interact with, as well as a sticker/poster design and a [...]
Filed under: copywrong, privacy, ugh | No Comments »
Posted on August 13th, 2009 by Administration
I4i, which mainly makes software for drug and defense companies, obtained the patent for a “customized XML” tool in 1998. XML is a specialized alphabet that can capture any kind of computer file as a regular text.
Microsoft started using XML as an alternative way to save Word files in Word 2003 and made it the [...]
Filed under: copywrong, lulz, micro$oft, news | No Comments »
Posted on August 3rd, 2009 by Administration
I think it could be quite humorous to extract an easily recognizable quote from some extremely litigious rights holder, submit it to the AP’s incredibly stupid application and get permission from the AP clearly stating that they own the copyright AND have given you permission to use it.
Let the fun begin.
There is NO excuse for [...]
Filed under: copywrong | No Comments »
Posted on July 31st, 2009 by Administration
High school student Justin Gawronski is suing Amazon for deleting his Kindle copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, because in so doing, they messed the annotations he’d created to the text for class (the annotations say things like “remember this paragraph for class” but the paragraph in question has been deleted)…
The case is intended to become a [...]
Filed under: copywrong, drm sucks | No Comments »
Posted on July 30th, 2009 by Administration
Last week the world watched in wonder as Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party transformed a familiar and predictable tradition into something spontaneous and just flat-out fun. The video, set to R&B star Chris Brown’s hypnotic dance jam “Forever,” became an overnight sensation, accumulating more than 10 million views on YouTube in less than [...]
Filed under: copywrong, google, youtube | No Comments »
BeautyandBoost.com
Ruby on Rails blog
