orlow

Photographers rue Mandy’s copyright landgrab

by

A little-reported corner of the sprawling Digital Economy Bill reduces photographers to serf status – and concerns are rippling into the wider community. Photographers say bad wording and technical ignorance are to blame for Clause 42, calling it a “luncheon voucher” for greedy publishers. “The Bill contains no deterrent to the creation of orphans, no … Read more

LibDems score copyright coup

by

The LibDems’ surprise amendment to strengthen UK courts’ powers over digital copyright infringement passed late last night, despite Labour and Tory opposition, replacing the government’s original, preferred proposal in the Digital Economy Bill.

Out goes the ability of the Minister to extend copyright legislation by statutory instrument – something earlier Ministers have already exercised, in practice. In comes the ability of the courts to block network addresses based on infringement notifications.

Read more

Rescuing Palm

by

You know you’re in trouble when your revenue is $1bn less than you’d expected for the year. But a few companies might envy being in Palm’s position. It has an excellent product it can’t sell, and in webOS an asset that wealthy rivals – Nokia, Samsung or Microsoft – would pick up in a snap.

Read more

LibDems back copyright takedowns

by

Two LibDem peers have tabled an amendment allowing the Courts to grant injunctions against ISPs – blocking off sections of the internet found to host infringing material. It’s similar to the DMCA-style proposal punted by the BPI in the new year, which we exclusively revealed.

Injunctions are already a legal tool against infringement, but the LibDem Lord gives them a new scope and spin.

Read more

Suits 2.0 at the BBC

by

Bureaucracy is the one sure winner in the BBC’s strategic review – the suits and wonks. It’s sort of like natural selection turned upside: in a changing environment, the most useless survive.

Mark Thompson’s review, leaked to the Times today, was supposed to review the Corporation’s output, and it could have helped made inroads into this culture, but it hasn’t. And although the “cuts” are trumpeted to fall on digital operations such as web and DAB, you know what will happen next.

Of course bureaucracy has been the winner of the past ten years – the public sector middle manager on private sector wages and perks is as much a symbol of the era as was the Victorian mill owner. The BBC is no exception. Whether it’s a ‘crisis’ (Ross/Brand) or an opportunity (Web 2.0), layers of process are added at the corporation.

Read more

SpinVox carcass laid bare in final accounts

by

“Dragon’s Den TV star Julie Meyer described SpinVox as “the first major technology success story out of Europe”, but the company’s final accounts show a business running at a huge loss, spending heavily to acquire customers, and with interest payments alone exceeding income.” Read more at The Register…

Obama plagiarist has a legal posse

by

Artist Shepard Fairey is facing a Grand Jury probe for falsifying evidence in a copyright case. Fairey was suing Associated Press over the use of an copyright image Fairey had used as the basis for a popular Obama election poster. To the dismay of the Boing Boing crowd, Fairey turned out not to be a … Read more

Music biz: get a cluestick from online games

by

 

An answer to the music industry’s woes slipped into the IFPI Annual Report last week, but its significance went unnoticed. Before I get to it, though, here’s a poser.

“We screw the struggling artist, and pay the suit,” Nick Carr mused recently. Carr was examining a contradiction: information has never been less free, it’s never had as much as much value attached to it. Once you add up your Sky Sub, mobile broadband bill, and the many other information services, we pay a fortune for information, most of which is entertainment. He continued:

“It’s a strange world we live in. We begrudge the folks who actually create the stuff we enjoy reading, listening to, and watching a few pennies for their labour, and yet at the very same time we casually throw hundreds of hard-earned bucks at the saps who run the stupid networks through which the stuff is delivered,” he wrote.

elsewhere and you’ll find people saying they make a point of principle not to pay for entertainment digitally, because entertainment companies are wicked. The principle is that two wrongs make a right, which makes withholding the payment justified. Maybe even morally superior to paying.

But as Nick points out, we all actually pay a fortune to suits – they’re just different suits. They’re suits at large telcos, advertising middlemen (eg, BT) and service companies. The answer seems simple.

If you’re a copyright business, then to appease the copyright militants, you must pretend that you’re not. You must say you’re in plumbing, or infrastructure. Or anything, actually. For the world’s biggest record company, Vivendi, this will be a case of returning to one’s roots. Universal’s parent Vivendi began life as Paris’s first monopoly water supplier – it only changed its name from CGE and spun off the water and sewage businesses in 2000. And look, we can mention sewage and The X Factor in the same sentence without berating the obvious.

 

 

Read more