Should ISP's drop copyright scofflaws?

Here's an interesting bit of news from the New York Times yesterday: British government officials are considering legislation that would require Internet service providers (ISP) to pull the plug on customers caught participating in illegal filesharing. French President Nicolas Sarkozy put forth a similar proposal a couple of years ago in France.

It's not clear whether either country will proceed with such an approach to piracy, and I'm sure that, if lawmakers get more serious about pursuing such a measure, there will be very fierce opposition.

Anyone think something like this would go over in the U.S.? Please feel free to comment below.

Les Paul, the only person to be inducted to both Rock and Roll and Inventor's Hall of Fames

Les Paul, the great jazz/pop guitarist and inventor of the modern solid body electric guitar passed away on August 13th. Paul was 94 years old.

Paul's musical performance career began in the 1930's playing jazz and country music on the radio and touring with a popular dance orchestra. During that period, he began to tinker with guitars and amplification. At the time, electric guitars were a relatively recent innovation, and the guitars available on the market were "hollowbodies," structurally similar to acoustic guitars. Paul found that the tone was weak and the guitars were prone to feedback.

“I was interested in proving that a vibration-free top was the way to go. I even built a guitar out of a railroad rail to prove it. What I wanted was to amplify pure string vibration, without the resonance of the wood getting involved in the sound." Les Paul, quoted in a nice profile on Gibson's website.

That railroad rail evolved into the first solid body electric guitar, Patent No. 3,018,680.

Paul continued tinkering with sound recording and technique over the next 7 (!) decades, always pushing the envelope in terms of both his equipment and his playing style. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 the National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2005.

Flickr takes down photo, steps into censorship debate

Last week, popular photo-sharing website Flickr removed a Photoshop-altered image of President Barack Obama from the creator's page, citing a violation of copyright law and, therefore, a violation of Flickrs terms of use.

College student Firas Alkhateeb "Jokerized" a portrait of Barack Obama, taken from an October 2006 Time Magazine cover, using Photoshop. After another person borrowed the image for a postering campaign in Los Angeles and the image began to get some attention, Flickr removed the image from its servers. According to an LA Times profile last week, Flickr contacted Alkhateeb to tell him that the image was removed because of "copyright-infringement concerns."

Flickr's actions have prompted much criticism, drawing cries of censorship from bloggers and newspaper editorialists alike.

The photograph of Obama is protected by copyright, but folks' objection to Flickr's action has centered on fair use. Fair use, as the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center's website explains, is"a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials forpurposes of commentary and criticism." One significant exception to copyright law is that, under fair use, people can copy a portion of a protected work for the purpose of parody.

The authors of the pieces I've linked to within this post are in a much better position that I am to weigh in on the debate, but I'd recommend having a look at these summaries of parody cases compiled by Richard Stim and try to decide for yourself: was the Obama/Joker image copyright infringement or parody? Interesting stuff...

Re-Mix Culture on Wisconsin Public Radio

To the Best of Our Knowledge is a great radio show from Wisconsin Public Radio (it's syndicated, and you can hear it in San Francisco on both KALW and KQED) that has sort of a magazine format -- they'll address a topic from various angles with a few segments over an hour.

On Sunday evening, I found myself taking my time washing the dishes while I listened to their hour-long discussion of what folks call Re-Mix (or remix) culture.

In the program, DJ Spooky and The World Famous Audio Hacker talk about mashups; Lawrence Lessig makes a plea for reforming copyright laws that, he argues, make an entire generation feel like criminals; and Jason Bittner, an editor at CassetteFromMyEx.com, talks about that site's adventures in bringing the previous generation's remix format to the Web.

It's fun listen, highly recommended!

Fun with public domain

Public domain may be making your summer more fun and you may not even know it.

I've heard from someone I trust in these matters that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is an excellent read. (The critic in question is an avid reader who counts zombie stories and Jane Austen novels among her top three literary genres. The other one is contemporary Shojo Manga.)

The novel in question, for the uninitiated, is an adaptation of Jane Austen's 1813 novel of manners that has won over many hearts and minds in countless undergraduate literature classes and PBS productions. Much of the plot, characters, and tone are very similar to Austen's. Just, with zombies. Oh, and ninjas.

So, why is OK for Seth Grahame-Smith to knock off Austen's work?

Pride and Prejudice was published almost 200 years ago, which puts it squarely in the public domain. That means that there's no prohibition against reprinting, copying, or, in this case, repurposing Austen's work. (That also means that the book can be made available online, in its entirety, for free.)

Generally speaking, any work published in the U.S. prior to 1923 has entered the public domain. There are some other ways that works enter the public domain, too. Copyright owners can dedicate books to the public domain, for instance, which is pretty rare. Because of the way the law was written earlier in the 20th Century, works published between 1923 and 1964 had to have been renewed in the 28th year after their publication. If the copyright owner failed to renew, the works entered Public Domain. (Stanford University Libraries have created a searchable database of copyright renewals that's available here.)

Unfortunately, legal protection for sound recordings was treated different during much of the 20th Century, which means that, under current law, we won't see public domain sound recordings until the second half of the 21st Century, at the earliest. So you can probably scrap your plan to record "The White Album with Werewolves" or "Milestones with Mummies."

However...Don Juan with Dinosaurs? Yes. Great Gatsby and Goblins? Almost, but not yet.

Another beaut

This one's from Apple.

Special thanks to my neighbor for the tip.

Giddyup!

The best patent I've seen this week. Particularly the drawing.

Small business IP rundown from NY Times

The New York Times ran a nice little intellectual property primer last week, which you can read here. It's nicely written, with an accessible question-and-answer format and plenty of real-life experiences to highlight concepts. Worth a read!

Senate confirms new USPTO chief

On Thursday, Senators on the Judiciary Committee warmed up for that other confirmation vote by unanimously approving the nomination of IBM Intellectual Property boss David Kappos to be the head of the Patent and Trademark Office.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Kappos has pledged to streamline the patent application process, improve the quality of granted patents, and crack down on piracy and counterfeiting. Kappos also inherits a 770,000 application backlog.

Copyright fee changes

FYI for you creative types: the Copyright Office is now going to greater lengths to discourage you from using paper forms to register your works.

New fees went into effect on August 1, with paper filing fees starting at $50 for Form CO, which you fill out using a computer, then print and out and mail. Basic registration using paper that you fill out by hand is up to $65!

For $35, most works of authorship can be filed electronically. This fee is actually lower than the old basic filing fee from before electronic filing became available, which was $45.

I'd say that should be incentive for just about anyone to use the online registration system. If you're in the neighborhood, please feel free to drop by the Government Information Desk to get more information about online registration.

If you or someone you know needs help learning to use a computer, the library's got you covered with regular free computer basics classes. Visit sfpl.org and click on "Classes" to get an up-to-date listing of classes.

On an unrelated note, and, again, if you're in the City (whether physically or in spirit), join in the fun and check out this year's One City, One Book selection, Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst.

“Playing with games in this way is not a game, it is criminal”

Thus spoke an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent when asked to comment on the arrest yesterday of an Orange County man accused of modifying video game consoles to enable them to play pirated games.

Wired reports that 27 year-old Matthew Crippen was arrested by Homeland Security officers and charged with violating US copyright law. He allegedly charged customers a hundred bucks to "jailbreak" their consoles, meaning he would circumvent coding in the consoles that prevented people from playing illegally copied games.

Have a look at the story for the details. For the purpose of this blog, two elements of this arrest highlight interesting characteristics of 21st Century copyright law enforcement.

Since the consoles were (presumably) legally purchased by Crippen's customers, weren't they the property of the owners? Why can't they tinker with their own video game consoles?

In 1998, Congress passed The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which expanded the control that copyright owners had over their property. That controversial legislation altered Title 17 (which contains U.S. copyright law) to include a prohibition of "circumvent[ing] a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." If the manufacturer of an electronic product (video games, CDs, DVDs, software, etc.) includes in the product coding that prevents unauthorized copying, it is against the law for consumers to tinker with that code in order to circumvent the copyright protection.

You can probably imagine that this is a controversial law. If you're interested, here are some resources for further reading:

Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center: A top-notch collection of resources, and a great place to start.

Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy and, specifically, the Freedom to Tinker blog.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, right here in San Francisco.

Copyright Office: Section 12, plus full text of Title 17.

The American Library Association has some resources available here.

And, finally, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency site with information about intellectual property. This last one brings us to the other point of interest regarding Crippen's arrest, which is: Why was he arrested by Homeland Security officers?

According to their website, the Cyber Crimes Center division of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, both of which are under the Department of Homeland Security, investigates intellectual property violations. Here's a blurb from their website:

The CCS has encountered thousands of web sites based in the United States, as well as foreign that are engaged in the sale of counterfeit merchandise (including music and software) via the Internet. The CCS continues to work closely with the National IPR Coordination Center, the Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) at the DOJ, and industry representatives to identify web sites responsible for the sale of the counterfeit items.

They are not the only agency that investigates intellectual property cases; depending on the type of intellectual property, the Department of Justice, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Commerce, and the Postal Service may conduct an investigation. In fact, these agencies all cooperate at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center.

If it sounds complicated, that's probably because it is. Traditionally, intellectual property rights have been enforced by the owner. That is, as the owner of a copyright, patent, or trademark, it was generally up to me to bring infringers to court.

Two related things seem to have happened over the last two decades to change that. First, the Internet seems to have facilitated intellectual property infringement by making communication (and file sharing, graphics production, black market sales, etc.) easier. Second, Congress passed the DMCA as a response to new methods of infringement. The agencies mentioned above have all been called upon to investigate intellectual property cases.

Which brings us back to the question: Why Immigration? I'm not sure, but probably because they got the tip -- according to the AP, from the Entertainment Software Association -- and, since it does fall into their mission, they acted upon it.

You can find more information about Federal efforts to stop piracy at StopFakes.gov.