Tag: Copyright

Conventional wisdom about the SCO/IBM dustup is that it demonstrates a serious flaw in the open-source model – an asserted lack of “quality control” on open-source code that leaves end users open to potential copyright and patent infringement suits. If any pimply-faced teenager can contribute code to open-source projects, how can you be sure that…

Larry Lessig writes: We have launched a petition to build support for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don’t, the work passes into the public domain. Historical estimates would…

The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a prominent industry group, has announced the results of its annual study of copyright compliance by business software users. According to BSA, 39% of business application software, worldwide, was infringing in 2002. This is down from a high of 49% in 1994. The U.S. was the most law-abiding country, with…

Big copyright owners have apparently had some degree of success in their efforts to flood file-sharing networks with decoy files, thereby frustrating users’ attempts to find copyrighted works. Conventional wisdom is that file-sharing systems will institute some kind of reputation-feedback system to help their users determine which sources tend to offer real files and which…

The RIAA has settled its lawsuits against four college students, dropping the suits in exchange for a payment of between $12,000 and $17,500 from each student. The settlements did not require the students to admit any wrongdoing. The students had been accused of direct infringement (for allegedly offering copyrighted files directly from their own computers)…

Eric Rescorla, in response to my previous entry on music economics, offers an analysis of the politics of copyright. Roughly speaking, there are two camps working to loosen (or at least prevent tightening) of intellectual property. For lack of better words let’s call them Idealists and Pragmatists. The Idealists really don’t want to have any…

In today’s Daily Princetonian, Josh Brodie reports that an “announcement” will be probably made today regarding the RIAA lawsuit against Princeton student Dan Peng. Reading between the lines, it appears the predicted announcement probably involves some kind of settlement of the case.

Many reports are circulating about the RIAA’s use of instant-messaging features of Kazaa and Grokster to send warning messsages yesterday to users of those systems. Conventional wisdom in blogland seems to be that this will have little if any impact on users’ behavior. I disagree. Consider this excerpt from Amy Harmon’s New York Times story:…

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy points to Terry Fisher’s data on where the $18 paid for a typical music CD goes: $7.00 to the retailer, $1.50 to the distributor, $9.31 for record company expenses (including performer and composer royalties of $2.85), and $0.19 for record company profit. Kerr comments: I understand that the record…

Judge Wilson’s opinion, dismissing the music industry suit against Grokster and Morpheus, contains few surprises beyond the result itself. Judge Wilson ruled, essentially, that although some users of the defendants’ P2P software used the software to infringe copyrights, this infringing activity was beyond the control of the defendants. Unlike Napster, these defendants had no active,…