] Jack Valenti, the chairman of the Motion Picture
] Association of America for 38 years, said on Tuesday that
] he would step down in the next few months.

I'm sure that there will be plenty of rejoicing about this in the geek community. Valenti's name has come to mean copyright maximalism in the computer scene. I think it is wrong to celebrate his retirement. You can rest assured that the Motion Picture Association's interests are not selected by Valenti, and they'll continue to press forward with their agenda. I don't agree with Valenti about most things. Who'll replace him and what they'll do is as yet unknown in these circles. However, thoughout this debate Valenti has carried himself with a certain amount of honor which is unusual in these times. He has always given his opponent room to be heard and shown respect for everyone's right to an opinion. We'll be quite lucky if he is replaced by someone with similar character.

Valenti Says He Will Leave Motion Picture Association

] From the first U.S. copyright statute in 1790 until the
] Copyright Act of 1976, the U.S. had a conditional
] copyright system that limited copyright protection to
] those who took affirmative steps to claim it.
]
] Our tradition of conditional copyright stands in stark
] contrast to what we have today — an unconditional system
] that grants copyright protection whether or not an author
] desires it.

This is excellent. Lessig is back in court. This time he is arguing that by ending the requirement that copyrights be registered, Congress created an undo burden on first amendment activities by requiring a speaker to "clear" any copyrighted content in cases where the author has not explicitely reserved any rights and/or is not available.

The concept of orphaned works is one of my personal problems with the copyright law. If you're not going to publish a work, and it has been published in the past (its not a secret), I ought to be able to redistribute it. If I cannot, then people simply have no way of accessing the work, whether legally or not, simply because you don't think its in your financial interest to publish it and you're not going to lift a finger to release it into the public domain. I've run into several instances in the past when I've tried to access works of technical or philosophical interest and found myself unable to access them because they are copyrighted, out of print, and my used book store (Amazon) can't find a copy. Its bullshit.

That having been said, I do not understand how it can be unconstitutional for Congress to allow unregistered copyrights for American authors but legal for them to allow unregistered copyrights for forgein authors in compliance with a treaty. The rights which are claimed to be infringed here are not those of domestic copyright holders, but of domestic speakers who wish to use those copyrighted works. Such an infringement must still exist in the case where the original author is forgein.

Seems like international treaties should not supercede the Constitution, and if we agree to something which is unconstitutional we need to go back to the table and renegotiate it, or create an amendment. Otherwise national executives could collude to create agreements which undo domestic constitutional protections without going through a proper domestic amendment process.

Lessig and Copyright renewal...

] More generally, in the realm of physical production,
] where scarce resources are critical inputs, each
] additional unit of output is usually more costly to
] produce than the previous one; that is, production, at
] least eventually, is characterized by increasing marginal
] cost. By contrast, in the realm of conceptual output,
] much of production is characterized by constant, and
] perhaps even zero, marginal cost.

Greenspan raises the idea that intellectual property laws may not be properly fitted. This is awesome. I've been writing about this for years. Most people just don't get it. Now I have a reference that will make people shut up and think.

FRB: Speech, Greenspan--Intellectual property rights--February 27, 2004

] Tuesday, February 24 will be a day of coordinated civil
] disobedience: websites will post Danger Mouse's Grey
] Album on their site for 24 hours in protest of EMI's
] attempts to censor this work.

Well, not exactly, but lots of people are turning their web pages grey.

I didn't find this until just this morning and I don't have time to tweak up the site code. However, if you re-recommend this meme others are more likely to read it.

Grey Tuesday

] If big pharma price-discriminates rationally, it
] guarantees the following query from some representative
] in some committee hearing: "How come a hospital in Lagos
] spends $1 for this pill, but the local Catholic hospital
] in my district must pay $5,000?" And, of course, in the
] Inquisition that is congressional testimony, there is no
] effective way to answer such a question.

Wired 12.02: Lessig says access to drugs in the third world not an IP issue

] When you use Weed's software to buy a Weed file and then
] share the file with someone else who buys it, you'll earn
] a payment based on the sale price.
]
] 20% of the sale price goes to you, 10% of the price goes
] to the person who shared the file with you, and 5% goes
] to the person who shared the file with that person.
]
] 50% of every sale always goes to the artist or publisher
] who owns the song. The remaining 15% goes to Weed.

This is interesting. Nice things about this:
1. You get to try everything before you buy it. Its always free once. That is much better then itunes. I don't always know if I really want to buy a song. Once I've grabbed it off the warez network there is no longer a reason to buy it as a file.

2. You are financially incented to re-recommend songs to friends.

It is unfortunate that this is a Windows only.

Of course, somewhere in middle America some stupid adult is going to end up throwing a fit because there are kids dealing weed.

Weed

] Thus, at least according to this court, the more uncommon
] (and provocative) the context of the remixing, the less
] likely it is legal. Of course, this raises the question
] of how new contexts can ever become legal. Presumably, at
] some point in history, no one framed art. Then the first
] person came along and put a painting in a frame. Under
] the theories in Mirage and Munoz, that person would have
] been historically guilty of copyright infringement
] because the context of their remix was uncommon at the
] time.

This article is interesting and also deeply troubling. Apparently recontextualization of someone else's artistic work is a copyright infringement EVEN IF YOU PAID for the copy that you are recontextualizing unless there is a specific fair use exception. This is copyright law preventing artistic expression for no financial reason, but strictly to prevent expression.

LawGeek: We fought the Kuleshov effect and The Law won?

] Intel's Grove derides such patent holders for showing
] little interest in producing goods with their inventions
] in favor of demanding licensing fees from others. "We
] call them trolls," he said.
]
] Acacia's patents lay dormant for 10 years, until the
] original company was bought out by some of its minority
] investors. Management is now making it one of many
] companies specializing in the business of generating
] money from patents, rather than using them to develop
] products directly.
]
] Robert A. Berman, general counsel for Acacia, said that
] many inventors and companies don't have the
] sophistication, expertise or money to commercialize their
] inventions.

The idea that software patents hurt innovation is becoming more mainstream (now that the FTC has made a statement about it).

washingtonpost.com: Patenting Air or Protecting Property?

] "Piracy is like terrorism today and it exists everywhere
] and it is a very dangerous phenomenon."

Damn these people are ignorant!

Intellectual property piracy is form of terrorism: WIPO chief

] Diebold filed papers with the Court today indicating that
] it "has decided not to take the additional step of suing
] for copyright infringement for the materials at issue.
] Given the widespread availability of the stolen materials,
] Diebold has further decided to withdraw its existing DMCA
] notifications and not to issue any further ones for those
] materials.”

Bowing to pressure from the EFF as well as Congress, Diebold has blinked. They are stepping back from a fight without admitting their arguements are wrong. I don't think the EFF wants the judge to allow them to do this. They're in court now and the EFF wants a precident rather then a weasleout as occured in the Felton case.

Diebold blinks