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[Catloaf]

Just when something sweet comes out of an entity that I expect to have roughly the same output as a horse's ass and surprises me back into having some degree of faith in humanity, the reality that I've come to know and despise predictably smashes my hopes back down.

At least I still got a slight net gain for my faith in humanity, though.

[Thad]

Marvel issues C&D to creators of Starstruck, who originally published it through Epic, nominally Marvel's creator-owned imprint.

Appears they found the paperwork quickly and Marvel's already backed off, but Bissette's concerned that this won't be the last time Marvel tries to grab a creator's copyright.

[Thad]

Derek Khanna talks to Ars.

Unsurprisingly, he finds the "inadequate review" excuse to be bullshit and says it actually received more review than a typical RSC paper.

He also says that, while he's not getting any support from Congress, he's getting quite a bit from the public -- again, not a surprise.

Khanna expressed no regrets and he urged other Hill staffers not to be intimidated.

"I encourage Hill staffers to bring forth new ideas. Don't be discouraged by the potential consequences," Khanna told us. "You work for the American people. It's your job, your obligation to be challenging existing paradigms and put forward novel solutions to existing problems."

[Thad]

Buffy vs. Edward removed from Youtube on DMCA grounds, despite being OFFICIALLY FUCKING RECOGNIZED, BY NAME, AS A DMCA EXEMPTION BY THE US COPYRIGHT OFFICE.

Since none of YouTube’s internal systems were able to prevent this abuse by Lionsgate and our direct outreach to the content owner hit a brick wall, with the help of New Media Rights I have now filed an official DMCA counter-notification with YouTube. Lionsgate has 14 days to either allow the remix back online or sue me. We will see what happens.

I expect Lionsgate to slink away on this one, realizing that they've accidentally stumbled across someone who (1) is willing to fight back and (2) again, has HIS WORK LISTED BY NAME in the Copyright Office's documentation on fair-use content that is exempt from DMCA takedowns.

Part of me hopes they'll be foolish enough to go ahead, but I really don't wish a lengthy David-and-Goliath legal battle on any David, no matter how much we'd all benefit from Goliath getting a rock upside his head.

[NexAdruin]

http://allthingsd.com/20130126/ripped-off-by-glee-jonathan-coulton-rereleases-his-own-mix-a-lot-cover/

Coulton did a version of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back" and Glee covered Coulton's version, possibly even using audio that he himself recorded. Coulton isn't happy about it, and other artists are starting to come out with similar claims.

[Thad]

NewEgg defeats patent troll; court overturns frivolous "shopping cart" patent

For Newegg's chief legal officer Lee Cheng, it's a huge validation of the strategy the company decided to pursue back in 2007: not to settle with patent trolls. Ever.

"We basically took a look at this situation and said, this is bullshit," said Cheng in an interview with Ars. "We saw that if we paid off this patent holder, we'd have to pay off every patent holder this same amount. This is the first case we took all the way to trial. And now, nobody has to pay Soverain jack squat for these patents."

If I ever meet this guy I am buying him a beer.

[Thad]

HBO's automated DMCA takedown software asks Google to remove links to infringing content at...hbo.com.

[Thad]

Ars: Site plagiarizes blog posts, then files DMCA takedown on originals

As crazy (yet sadly unsurprising) as that headline is, the story is even crazier.

The blog that had its posts removed is Retraction Watch.  It keeps track of scientific papers that have been retracted.

The Retraction Watch blog is run by Ivan Oransky, the executive editor at Reuters Health, and Adam Marcus, the managing editor of Anesthesiology News. Working in the field of medical reporting, they began to realize cases of erroneous or falsified research were often pulled from the scientific record with little notice, leaving the research community with little idea which, if any, aspects of the original report could be relied on. So they started to track the retraction of scientific papers on a blog they set up.

[...]

One of the cases they followed was Anil Potti, a cancer researcher who worked at Duke University at the time. Potti first fell under scrutiny for embellishing his resume, but the investigation quickly expanded as broader questions were raised about his research. As the investigation continued, a number of Potti's papers ended up being retracted as accusations of falsified data were raised. Eventually, three clinical trials that were started based on Potti's data were stopped entirely. Although federal investigations of Potti's conduct are still in progress, he eventually resigned from Duke.

In all, Retraction Watch published 22 stories on the implosion of Potti's career. In fact, three of the top four Google results for his name all point to the Retraction Watch blog (the fourth is his Wikipedia entry). Despite the widespread attention to his misbehavior, Potti managed to get a position at the University of North Dakota (where he worked earlier in his career). Meanwhile, he hired a reputation management company, which dutifully went about creating websites with glowing things to say about the doctor.

All this just happened yesterday, so there's no hard proof yet that this is a case of a disgraced researcher (or his reputation management company) attempting to scrub his negative Google results through copyright fraud, but, well, that's sure what it looks like, isn't it?

If this IS the work of a reputation management company, he should probably hire a new one.  Because somehow I doubt this little stunt is going to lead to FEWER high-ranked Google results calling him a conman and a fraud.

[Brentai]

As stupid as this whole thing is, I'm happy to finally see some case examples of people taking advantage of our fucked copyright enforcement system's obvious applications for criminal activity.

[JDigital]

I heard of a guy once, back in maybe the late nineties, who would do this to Geocities sites. He'd copy the site to his own domain, improve the spelling and HTML to look legitimate, then report the original to Yahoo for plagiarism.

Trolling was an art form back then.

[Thad]

Six Strikes has gone into effect; participating ISP's are AT&T, Verizon, Cablevision, Time Warner, and of course Comcast.  This is probably the most pleased I've been to be a Cox customer since 2000, when I first upgraded from dialup.

“What is ‘improperly?' This is one of the problems with the system,” Derek Bambauer, a tech law professor at the University of Arizona, e-mailed Ars after he saw the alert pages.

“Making a fair use of a copyrighted work is not infringement. Thus, even if I download an entire copy, if it's fair use, I am not an infringer—and yet, the private law of six strikes treats me as one.”

Bambauer collaborated with Chris Soghoian, a policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, to submit Freedom of Information Act requests to learn more about the creation of the Six Strikes program. The two have a pending legal case to compel the Obama Administration’s Office of Management and Budget to release more information and related documents.

“Six strikes is fundamentally flawed,” Bambauer added. “Part of the reason is that users were never at the table: the bargaining parties were content owners and ISPs. And ISPs have very limited incentives to defend free speech or protect against mistakes—especially if all of their major competitors are in the system, too. No way to vote against the system with your feet.”

No surprises here.  VPN's are about to be a pretty good business to be in, I think.

[Smiler]

If I read about this right they are still using the exact same methods as before to find infringing users, so the only difference is that now the ISPs are super-required to send out the angry messages to their customers.

[Thad]

So I dunno if you guys have been following this, but the latest round of DMCA exemptions did NOT include jailbreaking phones -- so it's now illegal to jailbreak your phone.  (As far as I know it's still legal to root your phone but, absurdly, only a phone.  You can root an iPhone but not an iPod or iPad.  In practice, I can't imagine that nonsense holding up in court, but as you know most DMCA cases are not decided in a courtroom.)

Backlash has been swift and the FCC has agreed to investigate, whatever that means.

Derek Khanna, an online activist and former Republican staffer who has helped publicize the issue, called Genachowski's pledge a "terrific development." According to Khanna, the FCC "should be investigating this. The decision is indefensible."

He pointed out that the Competitive Carriers Association, which represents Sprint, T-Mobile, and dozens of smaller wireless carriers, has called for the ban on cell phone unlocking to be repealed.

[Thad]

Bolstered by the response to the jailbreaking petition, some activists have set up a site at fixthedmca.org urging the repeal of the anti-circumvention clause.

I'm not much for online petition, but the way I see it this is the most momentum the issue's ever had and every little bit helps.  I didn't think we'd beat SOPA, either, but here we are.

[Thad]

Apple files a patent for reselling ebooks and music.

As you might suspect, I am pretty conflicted on this.  On the one hand, yay opening the door for digital resale; on the other, boo for DRM and software patents.

(And I thought Apple was done with music DRM -- maybe they'll just be rewriting the metadata on resold music files.  You can probably make an educated guess as to my opinion on whether that should be patentable.)

Amazon's filed similar patents.  I'd be happy to see Audible audiobooks become resellable; I'm not one of those nitwits who thinks an active used market is bad for business.  If someone buys one of my audiobooks, listens to it once, and then resells it or gives it away, then that's one more person who knows my name and, hopefully, thinks I'm okay at this whole narration thing.

[A²]

Court upholds first sale doctrine in that case about a student sent books from his family in Thailand and resold on the American Market that I could swear Thad posted about in here but I can't find it

[Thad]

Third, Wiley and the dissent claim that a nongeographical interpretation will make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for publishers (and other copyright holders) to divide foreign and domestic markets. We concede that is so. A publisher may find it more difficult to charge different prices for the same book in different geographic markets. But we do not see how these facts help Wiley, for we can find no basic principle of copyright law that suggests that publishers are especially entitled to such rights.

FTW.

Memo to Big Media: it's not the courts' job to protect your twentieth-century business model.  Deal with it.






UP NEXT: Big Media deals with it by asking Congress to protect their twentieth-century business model.

[Mongrel]

Man, I wonder how that affects game companies like WotC or GW. HUMMMMM (Well, okay, GW is a UK company, so not so much them). Is there any fallout effect here on companies with price differentials in foreign markets?

Actually, it's funny when you think about it. See the "Rich people win" part of globalization has been pretty-well established (production moved to cheapest operating location, capital having few links to a given state and therefore less loyalty to that state, etc. etc.). But this was one way that the little guy stood to benefit: In poorer markets you had either cheap domestic products or western products that had been marked down specifically for the purposes of entering that market. The people living in the poorer market could then turn the thing on it's head, selling their discounted product back to the "parent" country at lower prices than were offered in that country. Producers wanted it both ways: they wanted to get into cheaper markets, but still maximize profits back home, using punitive region-based pricing and demanding legislation to circumvent what should be a free market. 

You're probably right about the UP NEXT bit, but it's nice to see someone somewhere giving the lie to this nonsense.

[Thad]

Yeah, wanting all of the strengths of the global economy/new technology/what-have-you and none of the drawbacks is a pretty apt description of how Corporate America functions.

In lots and lots of cases, they've succeeded -- the bank bailout is the most glaring example, but hardly the only one.

[Sharkey]

Ah, you've gotta love 17th 21st century mercantilism. Really, the parallels between this and stuff like the button-maker's guild pushing through laws against wearing or making cloth buttons, or death for making salt from brine instead of buying monopoly salt...  four hundred years later and it's just not getting any less absurd.