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So many acronyms, so much time. A Daily Texan story from last Friday addressed the MPAA going after filesharers on Internet2, just like the RIAA. Ah, the spread of fear.

The Associated Press is going to charge online licensing fees. Some news outlets already purchase stories from the AP, but now every newspaper will need to license the content to post online. Now we’ll just need to wait and see if a) there is an overall increased cost to the news entity, and b) how these costs will affect the consumer.

Saw this story at Sivacracy– DeAngelo Bailey v. Marshall Bruce Mathers III, a/k/a Eminem Slim Shady [PDF] was decided in favor of Eminem. A person that Eminem mentioned in his lyrics as a guy who bullied him when he was a kid sued Eminem, and basically lost because as it turns out, although the song most definitely (and obviously) exaggerated events, the guy really was something of a bully when he was a kid.

Public School Proselytizing is troubling in several respects. I can’t agree that the books in question should be removed from the library without really understanding what’s going on at the school. What I do believe is that the manner that the book is being provided- at least the Journey to Japan book, in an accelerated reader program- seems entirely inappropriate given the bias in the book, particularly if, as noted, there is no context provided with the book. If the book was a regular part of a library collection, that is different. Then we have to look at how and why the book was acquired…

Saw the RIAA/Internet2 story on BoingBoing, Freedom to Think and a few other places. It’s not a shocker that the RIAA is suing more colleges for trading over Internet2, and as Felten notes, it’s not suprising that the RIAA could access the Internet2.

I’m willing to bet, though, that many students have no idea that they’re using the Internet2 to fileshare. Use of the Internet2 is transparent to them, at least here at UT. Judging at the very least from people to work from me and past students, it’s not something that many of them think about, or have even been told about. The Internet2 is just part of the Internet, “maybe the faster” part that we get here at the University, a couple have said. Most of our students are surprised to find out that some of their data is being transferred over the Internet2 when they connect to other universities- we have them use traceroute and watch for the Internet2 Abilene network in one of their assignments.

There’s a bit of a strange story in the Daily Texan today about the RIAA/Internet2 lawsuits. It notes that the RIAA would like to include subscription file sharing services in student tuition. I wonder how well that idea would go over?

Like the RIAA/MPAA educational materials and many college and university copyright policies, the story doesn’t really provide enough information… “Sherman said the lawsuits were intended to educate the public, and students in particular, that file sharing without permission is legally risky. Copyright infringement carries a minimum penalty of $750 per item, Sherman said, but the RIAA routinely settles the cases at far less, in the $3,500-$4,500 range. ” It’s all true, but the RIAA education always pushes the legal risk without truly educating about legal uses of P2P software. I don’t think they can call what they’re doing education. Of course, the article is very clear that the RIAA is all about the fear. The ending is particularly unusual, with quotes from Eric Garland of BigChampagne (who tracks P2P usage for the industry, according to the article):

Suits can only be brought against people who not only share their music but also allow downloaders to browse their files freely – something most peer programs now configure against automatically.

“The industry is picking off easy targets,” Garland said.

Everyone at the University can download the entire history of music without any fear of litigation, he said.

“You can be immune right there in your dorm room.”

I find that odd for several reasons, not the least of which that it isn’t entirely correct. That someone who works for the industry would make a statement like that is surprising, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it was taken out of context given some of our previous experience with the paper. But the statement could also lead to a false sense of security- even if the student’s directory isn’t browsable, people can certainly use packet sniffing, bandwidth and network monitoring to find out if someone was sharing files with many of the popular P2P file systems. I knew they were targetting people who shared a lot of music, but I thought they collected information using more sophisticated means.

Here’s a strange and somewhat disturbing case:
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/04/05/140248.php

It appears that New York common law expands copyright for sound recordings that, under federal law, are no longer protected. It’s disturbing for a number of reasons. For one, now people must think about a host of other issues whenever they use a work, even if it is no longer protected by federal copyright law. That was difficult enough before this decision, and that difficulty has now grown. Now we’ll have to wait until a case of digital and/or online infringement is brought to suit.

Will any court or law recognize the value of the public domain?

http://madisonian.net/archives/2005/04/05/limiting-software-licenses/

Here’s an interesting article about contracts and the legality of EULAs. I haven’t had the chance to get through it yet, but it looks very interesting at first glance.

Pat Galloway’s course, INF 392K – Problems in Permanent Retention of Electronic Records currently has a very interesting project in which they are attempting to create a digital institutional repository, likely using DSpace.

I sat in on part of the course this morning because I was interested in the copyright issues associated with the project. The project is not only going to digitaize the School of Information web site, but also wishes to digitize faculty information, including publications.

Here are just a few of the questions that were raised:
1. Can a faculty member sign over typical fair use rights or the right to archive their work?
2. How does the existence of such a contract affect section 108 exemptions?
3. Does the section 108 exemption apply to institutional repositories such as this that are not necessarily associated with the official UT Libraries or other traditional archival institutions?
4. In issues of joint authorship, what kinds of permissions are necessary from the authors before including their works in such a repository, when the secondary author may not have a connection to the institution? (This became more of an ethical question than a legal question.)
5. Is placing a document online in this manner “publication” for purposes of evaluating exclusive publishing contracts?
6. What kinds of authorization restrictions need to be made available for this type of archiving, and does a “born digital” object have different requirements then a digitized object?

There were more, but those are a start.

Quite the contrary, actually…
English PDF of Japanese P2P study

Wow. If you have a lot of time on your hands, this trademark and copyright case about mall company Taubman”, about a Website about a mall here in Texas, is an interesting read. I started reading it expecting it only to take a few minutes, and here I am about an hour and a half later…

In a nutshell: Guy made a website about a mall. Company sued for trademark infringment. Along the way, company’s lawyers were really lame. Guy wins (with help from Public Knowledge).
The end.

The story is also a very good example of what a pain in the ass some civil procedure is, and how a person absolutely has to have a lawyer when they’re sued like this- which IMHO, sucks.

I’ve got some copyright related observations that really don’t affect us, but that I find interesting. In one of the modules I listed several characteristics of information in cyberspace (relatively) unique to cyberspace. These characterstics included the ease of creating, sharing, and changing information. As P2P demonstrates, there are obvious effects of copyright in cyberspace due to these characteristics. Here’s another effect of these characteristics: because our information changes so often, when we say © 2005 on our web site, well, a lot of that material could be © 2004, © 2003 or even earlier. Those original words were copyrighted when they were first expressed. However, there might not be a copy of those original words in a form that people can find, and it would be difficult if not impossible to separate the original expression from the derivative expression. With copyright terms being as long as they are, and digital media having a shelf life as short as it is, that probably isn’t a problem. Yet. In the far future, if we can figure out a way to preserve digital information in such a way that it exists as long as copyright exists- which right now is flat out not going to happen in 99.9% of digital materials- it will be difficult to prove when these ideas were first expressed in copyrightable form.

Senator Orrin Hatch to head IP Committee in Senate

I find that bit of news disturbing. Senator Hatch is a very strong IP proponent, in my opinion to the detriment of the public and the authors themselves (in favor of the entertainment companies). He has also proposed truly terrible laws- parts of the Induce Act and the truly awful suggestion that the music industry should be able to destroy consumer PCs (and if they were mistaken in their targets, oh well.)

Very interesting relase from NCSoft about the Marvel/ NCSoft suit… It appears the judge has thrown several of Marvel’s claims. I’m interested in where this case is going. There are trademark and copyright infringement claims here, and I really want to see how the decision handles the overlap.