David Brooks had an interesting column earlier this week in which he asked, “Why aren’t there more liberals in America?” According to Gallup Poll numbers, about 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, versus 36% moderate and 21% liberal. This strikes Brooks as a bit of a puzzle, since the financial crisis and the economic downturn [...]

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Another thing I picked up while auditing a publishing course over the break was the statement by an instructor that “If you don’t copyright your manuscript, it is in the public domain.”
Obviously, this is incorrect on a number of levels, and again illustrates how difficult copyright law is to understand even for people who are [...]

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I’ve been auditing a magazine writing/publishing course run through my local rec center over the break, partly for fun and partly to find out how professional and semi-professional writing teachers who are not copyright lawyers understand the nature of authors’ rights.
I wasn’t necessarily surprised at the number of inaccuracies in the lecture on copyright law.  [...]

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Back in October, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell explained the economics of video games as his company sees it. The Geekwire article is worth the read. For now, I’ll point out that he admits “We don’t understand what’s going on” and uses the language of co-creation of value, which I happen to believe is the current [...]

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OK, that title is a riff on a line from The Player. I loved it when the film came out and still do. It says so much of nothing, but captures a vibe that persists. Yet again it seems the film industry is in trouble, or rather doldrums. The Times reports that this year’s box [...]

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The House Judiciary Committee held a markup hearing today on the Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261, the bill that is quickly shaping up to be this year’s big copyright battle. I’ve written two prior posts on the bill, Part I and Part II.
This is a good opportunity to recap where I came out at [...]

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I feel like I’m scooping Jacqui here, since she’s the Madisonian Twilight expert, but I was so bothered by the recent district court decision in the Bella’s Jacket Brouhaha that I’m chiming in on the intersection of intellectual property and teen vampires.
Twilight is probably part of basic 21st century cultural literacy, so I’ll presume [...]

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This is the second post in a series looking at the Stop Online Piracy Act. In Part I of this series I looked at Section 102 and concluded that it was largely unobjectionable. Section 102 essentially provides the DOJ with supplemental provisional remedies it can use against sites that are violating U.S. criminal laws but [...]

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Many IP profs watch legislation, and we write about the way proposed laws are good or bad or wise or imprudent. I think the way the IP and online space are going will require more on the technology side. For example, the recent debates on the PROTECT IP Bill and SOPA had some interesting comments [...]

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The tech blogosphere is abuzz with discussion of yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261. (Mainstream news sites seem not to have noticed; the New York Times website front page mentions the impending sale of Yahoo, but not SOPA.) A good deal of that discussion refers to SOPA [...]

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“[2] It is undisputed that Liberty Media is a distributor of lawful, albeit hardcore, pornography, and the Motion Picture is itself hardcore pornography. Notably, it is a matter of first impression in the First Circuit, and indeed is unsettled in many circuits, whether pornography is in fact entitled to protection against copyright infringement. Copyright protection [...]

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Why should copyright law and policy care specially about the interests of professional creators and artists, as a class of people distinguishable from amateur creators and artists, from “ordinary” consumers and users, fans, and so forth, and from the mass of undifferentiated creators, re-mixers, and transformers?
This question has been lurking in the back of my [...]

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Analog: The Resurrection is coming to a store near you. At least it looks that way. The Times reports that vinyl is making a comeback. I happen to have a fair amount of vinyl from when I saved up to buy LPs as a kid. But now companies like Goota Groove are among about 20 [...]

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From the Shanghai Daily News:
A HONG Kong design student’s tribute to Steve Jobs that generated a buzz online following the death of the co-founder of Apple last week is not original, the teenager said yesterday.
Jonathan Mak, 19, said he was not the first to come up with the design that fits Jobs’ silhouette into the [...]

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But as the IPKat reports, quoting a press release announcing a new judgment from the European Court of Justice,
A system of licences for the broadcasting of football matches which grants broadcasters territorial exclusivity on a Member State basis and which prohibits television viewers from watching the broadcasts with a decoder card in other Member States [...]

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Does anyone know anything about IP rights (or lack thereof) in the jigsaw puzzle industry?
My son has recently become enamored with 3D puzzles and is currently working on a world globe like this one.  So I was wondering if the jigsaw puzzle companies typically assert any IP rights in these creations.  Obviously images on puzzles [...]

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The NYTimes carried a number of pieces recently about surging interest in terminations of transfers of copyright interests, as the window of opportunity for terminations of rights executed just after the current Copyright Act took effect, in 1978, opens.  A lot of popular music released in the late 1970s is still commercially valuable today (who [...]

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This morning as I was being ordered by my four year old to put on her Little Mermaid video, she explained to me:  ”Mommy, you don’t copy this DVD or you go in jail.”  I’d say the content industries’ message is getting through loud and clear.

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Pitchfork has an article about the Tesla Orchestra, a group of people looking to share their love of Tesla coils by using them to play musical tracks.  Tesla coils, to refresh your memory of high school physics class, are disruptive discharge transformer coils that shoot out bolts of electricity.   In its Open Spark Project, The [...]

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From the WSJ blog “Digits” comes this note about the growth of video mashup art and its grudging but growing acceptance by rights owners. EFF’s Corynne McSherry is quoted:  ”‘Companies are realizing, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes all too slowly that, … you can’t fight new technologies,’ she says. ‘You need to adjust your business model to what’s [...]

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