“Copyright Infringement and Me”

The Editor of the magazine Cooks Source prints the entirety of an author’s article without clearing it with her. The author asks why this happened, and the editor tells her that she should be glad it got printed at all. The editor’s response is batshit, and actually contains this sentence:

But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it!

Cooks Source, predictably, has a Facebook page. Let them know how you feel about this.

US Library of Congress: Copyright Is Destroying Historic Audio

From the you’re-telling-us dept.

The report also highlights the problems posed by the rather complicated history of US copyright law. “All U.S. recordings, both commercially released and unpublished, created before February 15, 1972, are protected by a complex network of disparate state civil, criminal, and common laws,” the study explains. The consequence is that all sounds recordings made before 1972 will have their copyright expire in 2067 – 95 years after the placement of these recordings under federal protection in 1972. This means that the oldest sound recordings in the US dating from 1890, will only enter the public domain after 177 years.

Turning down Netflix

Netflix refuses copyright holder’s request to stream her film without DRM. Nina Paley (the filmmaker) owns the film outright. There are no rights issues whatsoever. I believe the issue here is related to this culture we have where we assume everyone is a criminal. It’s actually more work for Netflix to let people watch a movie without digitally encrypting it than it is to just encrypt everything. I doubt Netflix’s service was designed to even support sending a movie in the clear, without DRM. It’d probably cost them tens of thousands of dollars to modify it.

Either that, or Netflix thinks their job is protecting copyright holders from themselves. Must be hard, knowing what’s best for everyone.

Court Jails Pirate Bay Founders

I’m sure the appeals process will be long:

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.

They were also ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

I feel that their attitude didn’t help them with the judge. Google still indexes millions more torrent files than TPB ever could. Why no attack against them? See also: Wired’s coverage.