Are there benefits to “piracy”?
Thursday, November 6th, 2008 Posted in Business Law, Information Technology, Intellectual Property, Video Games | 1 Comment »The pro-copyright, pro-DMCA, anti-counterfeit lobby groups would have you believe that all unauthorized reproduction (and distribution), colloquially known (inaccurately) as piracy, is horrid for the industries concerned, and is destroying them. They go so far as to call it theft, ...
Alternatives to C-61, part II
Thursday, August 28th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »Here's the rest of that post: GOALS The goal of any legislation is to balance concerns of interested but competing parties, and to approach this balance, as much as possible, with a public interest bias. The concerns were these:
Alternatives to C-61: Statutory concerns for the protection and encouragement of creative works
Sunday, August 24th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property | 1 Comment »I want to suggest an alternative paradigm to the statutory regime for creative works as intellectual property, a.k.a. copyright. I'm not going to get into detailed explanations of the existing Copyleft and other alternative paradigms to copyright. But I'm going ...
Hedy Fry’s Copyright Balance
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 Posted in Intellectual Property, Privacy | No Comments »The electoral district in which I live is called "Vancouver Centre." My elected representative is the Honourable Member of Parliament, Dr. Hedy Fry. Dr. Fry is something of an activist; she has always been an outspoken representative of her constituents. ...
The “Deliverance” of C-61 Begins
Thursday, June 19th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »Here we go... [UPDATED: Links added] It's been a week since the Minister of Information Industry, Jim Prentice, dropped a piano Bill C-61 on us. Thanks to Prof. Michael Geist, we had some warning: This bill would ...
RIAA and MPAA hijack the border (or someone like them)
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 Posted in Civil Liberties, Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »Cyberion, at Tazzu, posted a link to the Vancouver Province story on the threatened border checks on the legitimacy of electronic media. (Cyberion's post) I had some rather strong feelings, and ranted the following: This is one of the nastiest and ...
Why the RIAA should be subject to Judicial Review
Monday, March 24th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »Nate Anderson of Ars Technica published a piece on March 11 entitled, "RIAA tells Ars: We're not hypocrites". Essentially it boils down to this: The RIAA's collective spin-off -- in some ways similar to SOCAN here -- is ...
Collective mens rea? Or a lack of musical supply…
Thursday, March 20th, 2008 Posted in Business Law, Intellectual Property | 1 Comment »Ben Jones of TorrentFreak published an article a couple of weeks ago discussing the 2008 Digital Entertainment Survey in the U.K., in which it was revealed not only that so-called "piracy" is rampant, even among the generally non-criminal element. ...
Nine Inch Nails in the RIAA’s Coffin
Thursday, March 13th, 2008 Posted in Humanities, Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »According to Prof. Larry Lessig, Nine Inch Nails' latest album has been released under Creative Commons. Kudos to Trent Reznor! http://lessig.org/blog/2008/03/nin_goes_cc.html I tried to comment but Prof. Lessig's blog is giving me some sort of SQL error. Here is my ...
Michael Geist lauds CRIA; jeers RIAA’s “hassle” policy
Monday, March 10th, 2008 Posted in Intellectual Property | 1 Comment »The difference between commercial piracy and private copying was clear in the Copyright Act's s.80, it was made clearer by BMG v. John Doe, and now we can see the difference in action. Professor Michael Geist compares the RIAA's ...
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