Thursday, May 03, 2007

Google rejects Viacom's copyright claims

Google rejects Viacom's copyright claims
by JEREMY KIRK
Macworld UK, publication date: 2 May 2007
"A cornerstone of Google's defense will be the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which has safe harbour provisions that relieve carriers and hosting providers from responsibility for copyright offences as long as they remove the material.

'By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom's complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression,' Google said in its response."

Lawyers: The True Beneficiaries of Copyright Law

Lawyers: The True Beneficiaries of Copyright Law
by ELIOT VAN BUSKIRK
Epicenter (Wired blogs), publication date: 2 May 2007
"The executive told me that between regional coding issues, copyright protection such as HD-DVD, the webcasting royalty rate debate, and everything else going on with copyright these days, the best thing to study right now would be copyright law, because it's going to take a whole generation of lawyers to unravel this mess."

Copyright and scientific papers

Galactic Interactions : Copyright and scientific papers
by ROB KNOP
Galactic Interactions (Science blogs), publication date: 1 May 2007
"Scientists do not need, and indeed should not have, exclusive (or any) control over who can copy their papers, and who can make derivative works of their papers.

The very progress of science is based on derivative works! It is absolutely essential that somebody else who attempts to reproduce your experiment be able to publish results that you don't like if those are the results they have. Standard copyright, however, gives the copyright holders of a paper at least a plausible legal basis on which to challenge the publication of a paper that attempts to reproduce the results— clearly a derivative work!"

EU presses China for 'results' in WTO talks over copyright piracy

EU presses China for 'results' in WTO talks over copyright piracy

EUbusiness, publication date: 2 May 2007
"Commission spokesman Peter Power said the EU had joined the US case against China at the World Trade Organisation as an observer, as several other countries had done."

SPARC Open Access Newsletter issue #109

SPARC Open Access Newsletter issue #109
by PETER SUBER
SPARC Open Access Newsletter, publication date: 2 May 2007
"There is a rising awareness of intellectual property issues in the general public, rising impatience with unbalanced copyright laws, and rising support for remedies by governments (legislation) and individuals (CC licenses). Copyright laws are still grotesquely unbalanced, and powerful corporations who benefit from the imbalance are fighting to insure that the laws are not revised in the right direction any time soon. But in most countries an aroused public is ready to fight to insure that they are not revised in the wrong direction either, something we haven't seen in the entire history of intellectual property law.

However, this only guarantees that the content industry will have a fight, not that users and consumers will win. Just last week (April 25) we lost the first-reading vote in the EU parliament on the Second Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED2). But at least there was significant opposition and the bill has not yet been adopted.

...

Some lazy students believe that if something is not free online, then it's not worth reading. This has never been true. However, it's gradually becoming true and those who want it to become true can accelerate the process. Those who want to live in a world where all peer-reviewed journal literature is free online are themselves growing in numbers and will soon have the power in universities, libraries, learned societies, publishers, funding agencies, and governments to bring it about. "

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Geeks Will Not Be Silenced: Breaking: Digg Riot in Full Effect Over Pulled HD-DVD Key Story

Geeks Will Not Be Silenced: Breaking: Digg Riot in Full Effect Over Pulled HD-DVD Key Story
by MATT BUCHANAN
Gizmodo, publication date: 2 May 2007
"The power of Web 2.0 is in full effect over at Digg, where users are revolting over Digg's decision to pull a story (that netted over 15,000 diggs) and reportedly boot a user for posting the HD-DVD AACS Processing Key number, which would allow someone to crack the copy protection on an HD-DVD."