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Author Topic: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law  (Read 58769 times)

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Pacobird

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #280 on: August 18, 2009, 02:53:08 PM »

(ps get a real issue nerds)
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Thad

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #281 on: September 26, 2009, 09:17:53 PM »

Okay, playing catchup.

WHY IN THE NAME OF GOD'S FUCK ARE YOU ARGUING WITH A FUCKING LAWYER

WHY

Next thread-derailing post like this gets you kicked off Real World.  Have a nice day.

My stance is simple and not at all based on the letter of the law: I support DRM because I think copyright infringement is, on a moral level, stealing.

Which might be relevant if DRM actually (1) prevented infringement and (2) didn't harm legitimate customers.  A point which I'm pretty sure every single person in this thread has already made several times.

Someone put the sweat of his brow into the creation of something that we all agree belongs to them in some way,

Yeah, like when Michael Jackson made Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  And I will never forget Bob Iger's fantastic run on Spider-Man.

My mentioning of any letter of the law at all has only been to call attention to the spirit of our cultural prohibition on stealing, and to draw moral parallels.  You all may disagree, but I have yet to see an argument as to why, and I find it telling that whenever someone who is pro-Copyright draws that simple moral parallel, the response is inevitably technical hair-splitting between "theft" and "infringement", which is ultimately a questionable distinction since both are quite illegal anyway.

I've already pointed out the huge gaping fallacy in your "all illegal things are equivalent" argument.

...you know what?  Nice try.  You're not going to respond to a single thing I said in my post, and you're going to ignore Det's request for any kind of evidence that DRM works (come on, let's have that argument; I'm sure Yyler will jump right in and obnoxiously demand in all caps why you're arguing with a computer scientist), and then you're going to turn around and accuse everybody ELSE of ignoring you and repeating the same arguments over and over again?

Come on, dude, this ain't my first rodeo.  I've played this game before; I'll respond to your arguments when you respond to mine.

...actually, I already did respond to your arguments.  I'll respond to your arguments when you come up with some new ones, then.

I wonder if this has ever not been the case (ignoring, for a moment, DRM which specifically fucks with the right of first sale).  The idea that buying a record somehow entitles you to rights over the music within or to somehow download it all if you're a big fattie and sit on it and break it is very, very new—and I don't think simply because the technology which enables it is new. 

Making a copy to a cassette tape to play in your car was perfectly legal.  And 1980's copyright law said that it was legal to make a single copy of any software you owned for backup purposes.

The Internet has complicated the hell out of these things.  Strictly speaking, it's legal to rip a CD to MP3 but not to download somebody ELSE'S MP3 rip of it if you already own a copy, which is rather a silly and arbitrary distinction.  And you can record a TV show off the air and skip the commercials, but not download somebody else's copy that already has them ripped out -- this one's a little more understandable, of course, given the nature of ad-supported revenue, but at the end of the day I still didn't watch the ads in either case.  A lot of the discussion amounts to trying to figure out where the line is.

Agreed, but if that's your beef the real problem here is not the enforcement of IP rights at all; it is the continued validity of EULAs.  After all, there's nothing stopping anybody from contracting away their rights of first sale, but it is problematic if they do not realize they are doing it.

Ahhh, NOW we're getting somewhere.

You can't defend DRM AND hold EULA's to be unconscionable.  Maybe in a purely philosophical sense (like how the platonic ideal of DRM is okay, it's just the pesky reality of it that, you know, doesn't work and trashes people's CD drives) those two views are compatible, but in real life, the two issues are inextricable.  DRM exists to enforce EULA's, period.

As I understand it, what makes EULA's unconscionable (or at least one of the factors) is that the EU has no ability to negotiate.  Add in the ability for users to negotiate contracts and you'd need corresponding DRM limits for each contract.  (And of course if I could engage in contract negotiations with software vendors, I would demand my product not come with any DRM in the first damn place.)

So what sort of licensing scenario would you suggest, in that case?

...I'll start another post for all the comic-booky copyright news of late.
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Thad

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #282 on: September 26, 2009, 10:37:49 PM »

So, okay.  Going waaaaaaay back to the beginning of the thread and the Superman copyright termination case.

The latest is that, about 6 weeks back, the Siegels secured more Superman rights.  Here's how it went down: as I noted back at the beginning of the thread, copyright lawyer Jeff Trexler put out a slew of very good posts about the case on Newsarama.  One of them, Russell Keaton: Superman's Fifth Beatle, attracted the attention of publisher Denis Kitchen, who alluded in a comment to some unpublished correspondence between Siegel and Keaton.  The Siegels' lawyers caught wind of this and asked to see the letters, and discovered that Siegel had written the Superman story from Action Comics #4 prior to signing his contract with National/DC.

(To review, Siegel and Shuster's heirs are only eligible to reclaim copyright on material that was created BEFORE their contracts with DC; whatever they made under contract was never their property to begin with and was always DC's.  Stuff they created on their own and THEN sold to DC, however, is eligible for their heirs to reclaim.)

The upshot of all of this is that the Siegels now own Superman's origin story.  Newsarama has a quick overview; Variety has a more in-depth description of what the Siegels got here:

Quote
This means the Siegels -- repped by Marc Toberoff of Toberoff & Associates -- now control depictions of Superman's origins from the planet Krypton, his parents Jor-El and Lora, Superman as the infant Kal-El, the launching of the infant Superman into space by his parents as Krypton explodes and his landing on Earth in a fiery crash.

That's a pretty fucking important piece of the property to own, right there.

The timing is good for the Siegels: this week saw the release of DC's latest retelling of Superman's origin story, and recent rumors suggest that, after the disappointing numbers from Superman Returns, DC was planning to give the franchise the Batman treatment and relaunch it from the origin story.  (Per Nrama, WB has confirmed that the litigation has put Superman movie plans on hold.)

That said, the nimrods on the comments threads suggesting that the Siegel heirs deliberately timed this decision for the release of Superman: Secret Origin and to preempt a hypothetical Superman Begins clearly do not have a working idea of how the court system works; you can't really time decisions by a comic book release schedule.

Meanwhile, over on the Marvel side:

Hollywood Reporter: Jack Kirby's heirs have hired Toberoff and filed similar termination notices to Marvel for a bevy of his characters, including the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the X-Men, and...Spider-Man?

Per Robot 6, Kirby's claim on Spider-Man goes something like this: Stan Lee approached him with the character idea and he did a couple designs; Stan didn't like him because he was too musclebound, so he went to Ditko instead.  But some accounts claim that Kirby introduced some elements from an unpublished character called the Silver Spider that he and Joe Simon co-created.

CBR has a good rundown of the legal ramifications here; Nat Gertler has a list of bad assumptions people in the comments section have been making.

Some points:

While they're similar on the surface (and share the same lawyer), this is a completely different animal from the Superman case.  For starters, the circumstances of Siegel and Shuster's contracts with DC were well-known; the heirs know that DC is entitled to the work they did under contract and DC knows the heirs are entitled to the work they did before the contract, it's just a question of determining which is which, and what that entails.  Meanwhile, from what I gather, nobody really knows what Kirby's contract with Marvel was, or even if he had one; apparently everyone who worked for Marvel in the 1960's was a freelancer, not an employee.  This was so Marvel could screw them out of employee benefits, but it may come back to bite them in the ass if it means they were buying characters from people who weren't their employees.  Marvel's going to have to produce evidence that Kirby created his characters as work-for-hire, under a contract -- and not a back-of-the-check contract.  At any rate, when Kirby tried to get his original art back from Marvel in the 1980's, they tried to make him sign a contract saying he wouldn't seek the return of any of his characters, which would suggest they thought he might have a case.

Another key difference is Stan Lee's place in the equation.  Where the Siegel and Shuster heirs are BOTH seeking termination of copyright transfer, Stan Lee's not going to seek termination on any of the characters he co-created.  He's got a sweetheart deal with Marvel; as I understand it he agreed never to seek copyright termination in return for $1M a year for the rest of his life.  So Marvel's going to own half the copyright to these characters no matter what happens (and in the likely event that the heirs fail their bid for Spider-Man, all of their biggest character, unless Ditko's got some heirs out there who have very different political beliefs from his own); if the Kirbys get the rights to some of them, Marvel doesn't lose them, it just has to share the profits.  (Which is a whole other mess in and of itself; if, for example, the Kirbys got half the X-Men rights, what would they entitled to from a movie like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which has "X-Men" right in the title but only has 3 Kirby characters in it, in very minor roles?)

Anyway!  This is the kind of stuff that fascinates the hell out of me.  (I realize most people do not share this fascination, and in fact explained all this to my girlfriend last night when she was complaining of insomnia in the hopes that it would cure it.)

There's also been huge news on Marvelman, but I think I'm going to split a Marvelman thread off from the Funnybooks thread and talk about it there.  In the meantime it is 11:35 and, while I'm not sleepy, I figure I should at least look at some other threads for a bit rather than stay on this one topic.
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Alex

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #283 on: September 27, 2009, 12:02:11 AM »

Anyway!  This is the kind of stuff that fascinates the hell out of me.  (I realize most people do not share this fascination, and in fact explained all this to my girlfriend last night when she was complaining of insomnia in the hopes that it would cure it.)

I'm pretty intrigued by this stuff too, I just don't have the smarts to fully follow it so having someone else explain it is A++ to me.
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Mongrel

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #284 on: September 27, 2009, 06:04:26 AM »

Anyway!  This is the kind of stuff that fascinates the hell out of me.  (I realize most people do not share this fascination, and in fact explained all this to my girlfriend last night when she was complaining of insomnia in the hopes that it would cure it.)

I'm pretty intrigued by this stuff too, I just don't have the smarts to fully follow it so having someone else explain it is A++ to me.

  Werd ta that, homes.

Thad's boilerplate accounts are much more succinct and enjoyable than actually following along with all this stuff as it breaks.
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Mongrel

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #285 on: October 20, 2009, 06:16:14 AM »

Sometimes we can all use a laugh. I noticed this amusing trademark line appended to all emails I receive from UPS. I have 'enhanced' the relevant bit.

Quote
© 2009 United Parcel Service of America, Inc. UPS, the UPS brandmark, and the color brown are trademarks of United Parcel Service of America, Inc. All rights reserved.

:rolleyes:
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McDohl

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #286 on: October 20, 2009, 06:29:25 AM »

I just changed the forum color scheme to brown in honor of that. :8D:
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SCD

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #287 on: October 20, 2009, 06:36:13 AM »

I've now changed my workplace signature to brown.
 :perfect:

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Miss Cat Ears

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #288 on: October 20, 2009, 07:03:27 AM »

dibs on periwinkle
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Rico

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #289 on: October 20, 2009, 10:58:30 AM »

I guess it is hard for people to know what trademarks actually mean.
I AM BEING FUNNY ON THE INTERNET GUYS
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Mongrel

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #290 on: October 22, 2009, 07:40:18 AM »

Nokia sues Apple, claiming iphone infringes 10 Nokia patents

That's some amusingly high-level patent trolling. I guess this is the new model if you can't compete.
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Brentai

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #291 on: October 22, 2009, 09:48:35 AM »

Pissing on the iPhone seems to be in vogue these days.  I guess since Windows 7 isn't a huge piece of fudge everybody has to take their elitism elsewhere?
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Thad

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #292 on: October 25, 2009, 06:08:58 PM »

Backing up a bit, something I meant to mention earlier:

I wonder if this has ever not been the case (ignoring, for a moment, DRM which specifically fucks with the right of first sale).  The idea that buying a record somehow entitles you to rights over the music within or to somehow download it all if you're a big fattie and sit on it and break it is very, very new—and I don't think simply because the technology which enables it is new. 

Making a copy to a cassette tape to play in your car was perfectly legal.  And 1980's copyright law said that it was legal to make a single copy of any software you owned for backup purposes.

The Internet has complicated the hell out of these things.  Strictly speaking, it's legal to rip a CD to MP3 but not to download somebody ELSE'S MP3 rip of it if you already own a copy, which is rather a silly and arbitrary distinction.  And you can record a TV show off the air and skip the commercials, but not download somebody else's copy that already has them ripped out -- this one's a little more understandable, of course, given the nature of ad-supported revenue, but at the end of the day I still didn't watch the ads in either case.  A lot of the discussion amounts to trying to figure out where the line is.

Relevant: Kaleidescape loses; DVD copying falls again.

Quote from: cnet
"It may well be fair use for an individual consumer to store a backup copy of a personally owned DVD on that individual's computer," [Judge] Patel wrote, "a federal law (the DMCA) has nonetheless made it illegal to manufacture or traffic in a device or tool that permits a consumer to make such copies."

So, uh.

According to current US copyright law, it's legal to HAVE a backup copy of something you own...just not legal to MAKE one.

:endit:





(EDIT: Fixed typo which presumably made that last sentence very confusing.)
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Büge

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #293 on: November 29, 2009, 06:53:27 PM »

Huh.

BoardGameGeek.com has apparently been handed a C&D order from Games Workshop. What's odd is that they were forced to take down FAQs, rules summaries and scenarios, too.
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sei

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #294 on: November 29, 2009, 07:15:20 PM »

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sei

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #295 on: December 17, 2009, 04:07:30 PM »

A follow up on that (and I'm quite late in linking this) from the land of the obvious.
Roughly a week ago, Mininova was still the largest torrent site on the Internet, but this quickly changed after the site’s founders removed of millions of torrents to avoid having to pay millions of dollars in fines. In the days that followed, traffic to the site dropped 66%, while the number of daily downloads are less than 4% of what they used to be.
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sei

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #296 on: December 25, 2009, 11:50:40 PM »

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Mongrel

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #297 on: December 26, 2009, 08:53:26 AM »

When the hell are these guys going to wise up and base their sites in countries where they can get away with this shit? I mean, these legal cases are (for the most part) a foregone conclusion, so the next step is to set up shop in a friendly jurisdiction (or at least one that's happy to turn a blind eye to your shenanigans). It's basic capitalism, and it's happened to most other moneymaking ventures at one time or another, most notably with the shipping industry and Hollywood (the latter one also arising from the need to avoid copyright law).

I mean sure, it doesn't make any sense for joe whozit with a tiny site to pack up and move to some random country in eastern europe, asia, or wherever else, but if you want to fully commit to barefaced piracy and derive a non-negligible income from same, it's probably worth it in the mid-to-long term.

Or just be an asian citizen to start with. I'm still waiting for a giant piracy site to start somwhere in East Asia or maybe Russia that carries a full search for western content as well.
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Thad

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #298 on: January 11, 2010, 04:10:13 PM »

Marvel's filed suit against Kirby's heirs, seeking to have their copyright claims dismissed.

There's a thread at Robot 6 with typical ass-backwards ignorant fanboy commentary (repeated references to Kirby's heirs suing Marvel, which is the opposite of what happened), but unlike other threads of the sort, Kurt Busiek posts repeatedly and at length and explains the law, why it exists, what it means, and how it applies to these specific circumstances.  It's not really anything I didn't already know (except that Kurt Busiek wrote an unpublished Final Fantasy comic!), but it's very well presented.  Kurt's comments are highly recommended reading, but I'd advise ignoring the rest of the thread.
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Mongrel

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Re: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law
« Reply #299 on: January 11, 2010, 04:24:25 PM »

Followed your advice to the letter.

All I have to say is:

Quote from: poster in that thread
I like Kurt Busiek's one man campaign to make the internet smarter.

EDIT: Scotch that, I would also like to add that watching Kurt take a five second sidestep to pwn the hell out of the idiot who brought up the French Revolution before getting right back on topic was a thing of pure beauty. 
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