shouting loudly

FreePress has a good bit of info and some easy actions to bust payola.

So my friend Siva was recently on the Daily Show. It’s pretty funny. Not Stephen Colbert funny–and certainly not Jon Stewart funny–but maybe Rob Cordry funny. The best part is watching Siva play along, like he’s sooo offended. He totally gets it the whole time and plays a good straight man. I don’t think he’ll [...]

Described on CNet here. It describes an ACM report that is availabe here. Scary stuff.

CNet has a downright frightening story about the copy controls bundled with the new DVD formats. When the first high-definition DVDs finally hit shelves this spring, a mad scramble may ensue–not for the discs themselves, but to figure out what computers and devices are actually able to play them in their full glory. Unraveling the [...]

I’m really embarrassed to be 10 days behind on this post, but here’s a link to the Public Knowledge white paper on network neutrality.

Kembrew McLeod, one of the contest’s three judges, personally asked me to spread the word. Here’s a blurb from the contest website: This is a contest for artists to mix audio tracks under 4 minutes which use provided voice samples from Ben Franzen and Kembrew McLeod’s forthcoming film, “Copyright Criminals.” Samples from the film include [...]

Straight from the Public Knowledge “In The Know” mailing list: The latest report from the National Institutes of Health on the public access program shows, once again, that the voluntary approach to having researchers post their papers online isn’t working. Between May 2, 2005 and Dec. 31, 2005, a grand total of 1,636 peer-reviewed articles [...]

Check this out. And US entertainment lobbyists wanted to ban peer-to-peer technologies because they might induce piracy. Every new technology is the end of the entertainment industry as we know it–until the entertainment industry finds a way to capitalize on it. Previous end-of-the-world technologies that were assailed by media companies include the player piano, the [...]

I’m on a custom email news list from CNet. If you follow information & tech law at all, I highly recommend it. I get IP, privacy, and media law stuff, and it’s usually 2-5 stories a day. Today, it was maybe 10 stories, and a much higher proportion than normal were privacy related. This increased [...]

If you’re like me, you probably know a wee bit about intellectual property law, and you’d like to know more, but you don’t really have time to research it much. Fortunately, for folks like us, there’s always the funnybooks. Keep your eyes open this spring for a comic about fair use (to be available free [...]