The Library of Congress which oversees copyrights has issued six new guidelines (yahoo link here). One allows cell phone owners to break the software lock so that they can use the phone with a different service. Others let film professors copy parts of DVD's for educational purposes; allow blind people to use software to listen to copy-protected electronic books; let researchers test CD copy-protection technologies for security flaws or vulnerabilities; and permit breaking computer software and video games that require machines no longer available or computer attachments that don't function and can't be replaced.

These all seem modest but reasonable and harmless, though an occasional ox appears to feel gored.

Do lawyers have either a sense of humor or of proportion? In the latest example (NY Times link here), two employees did a private performance taking off on a U2 song, “One”, celebrating the merger of two banks. It turned up as a humorous (or awful) video on a website, Stereogum.com. The Universal Music Publishing Group had its lawyer post a cease and desist letter on the site for copyright violation.

One wonders if it would ever have been noticed after a few days.

Over on Freedom to Tinker there is a nice essay about an important discovery in the online game SecondLife. To briefly summarize: people can create and sell objects for "Linden Dollars" which can be traded in the real world for US Dollars. Someone has now built a copybot which can make exact duplicates of any object. It seems the "perfect storm" for the pro-IP crowd: surely the economy will collapse over night. (It does matter quite a bit whether the copybot can operate without or without the permission of the current owner of the object - it isn't clear to me from the essay which way it works.) If you want to know what will happen next, go read the 1958 Ralph Williams science fiction short story "Business As Usual During Alterations."

Turn your head and if the RIAA didn't do something ridiculous, the MPAA must have. Via Slashdot an article on TorrentFreak. A company preloads DVDs onto ipods then gives consumers the ipods and the DVD. That is, just doing commercially what would be perfectly legal under fair use to do for yourself. Plus - surely this increases the demand for legal movies. Smart move you big brains in the MPAA: sue the ones who are paying you money. One of the most important arguments against monopoly in my book: it empowers the stupid.

Via Tim Sullivan, an interesting article in Slate about a company specializing in collecting money from hip-hop artists who sample a few notes and play them repeatedly. While the issue of sampling in hip-hop isn't new - Larry Lessig has written about this extensively, for example, the article does have some interesting analysis of whether this makes any sense for fostering creativity.

Techdirt has an interesting discussion of patent law, suggesting that the test for whether an innovation is non-obvious needs to be clarified. So far, as a practical matter the only test is whether there is prior art and that is often hard to show, even when the invention seems all too obvious (link here).

In other words, the constitutional test for granting a patent--that the invention be new and non-obvious--is faulty in practice.

Hooboy - another DMCA triumph. From arstechnica via Matt Yglesias - A website somehow got advance notice of Best Buy's planned Thanksgiving sale prices and posted them on the internet. Best Buy forced them to take it down with a DMCA take-down notice. This is the chilling effect on free speech - facts are not copyrightable, so it is doubtful that BlackFriday could be successfully sued. But "Black Friday said, 'While we believe that sale prices are facts and not copyrightable, we do not want to risk having this website shut down due to a DMCA take down notice.'"

While we here at againstmonopoly.org are busy complaining about copyright, Larry Lessig is busy trying to do something about it. The Kahle vs. Gonzales case challenges the change from "opt-in" to "opt-out" copyright that was introduced in 1976. Except for a few authors and media firms who face less competition from existing work that is now "orphaned" and unusable by anyone, few people benefit from this change, so it has to be rated among the greater policy blunders of a Congress that has made a few. I'm doubtful that the courts will overrule a change in the law made in 1976 however stupid it might be - no doubt they will find some "infinity is really finite" way to parse the law. But I'm glad Lessig is pursuing this. He has a good post on some of the issues - just scroll past the beginning which is a not entirely comprehensible reference to a previous post until he starts talking about the justices and the questions they asked.

VoiceSignal Technologies has sued Nuance, maker of Dragon Naturally Speaking voice to computer screen software for patent infringement, as well as major retailers of the program. The suit alleges that Nuance violated VoiceSignal's patent covering the methodology for correcting errors in dictation software. (link here)

This case has the characteristic scent of a patent troll, seeking a payoff to settle out of court. Otherwise, why include the retailers in the suit. All that does is frighten them from selling the software and thus pressing Nuance to settle quickly.

The University of Alabama has sued a local artist for making a nice business from painting pictures of the university football team from photographs and selling them as paintings, photos thereof, and as logos on coffee mugs and other things. The university claims he violated the university's trademark rights, particularly its “famous crimson and white color scheme.” (link to article here)

The Times article (front page, yet!) makes clear how cloudy the law is here. Some courts have “tried to balance the rights of the owners of intellectual property against that of free expression. The cases, which involve a variety of legal theories, generally turn on whether consumers are apt to be confused about who produced the works in question and on whether artists managed to add something meaningful to the bare facts.”

Read the rest. Here we go again.