Bits & Pieces

A poem for the day:

Blonde we like wins Downhill (Last name rhymes with “Bonn”)

There once was a lawyer from the IOC,
who called us to protect “intellectual property.”

“During the Olympics”, she said with a sneer
“your site can’t use an Olympian’s name even if they use your gear.”

“No pictures, no video, no blog posts can be used…”
Even if they are old? “No!”, she enthused.

While Olympians chase gold the IOC pursues green.
Cough up millions, or your logo cannot be seen.

Except there it is, on top of countless heads!
Tax free endorsements the IOC dreads.

And so it is with a wink and a nudge
that we would like to congratulate a skier whose name we must fudge.

Her hair is long and blonde
Last name rhymes with the German city of Bonn.

Congratulations Women’s Downhill winner –
from all of us here at UVEX (no longer an IOC sinner).

- John Rowles, of sporting goods maker UVEX, on how the racketeers of the International Olympic Committee tried to prevent them from mentioning their clients’ names. (via Quote of the Day Mailing List)

[http://www.uvexsports.com/2010/02/blonde-we-like-wins-downhill-last-name.html]

As the New York Times is reporting, there is currently an international effort underway to negotiate a new treaty primarily aimed at protecting intellectual property.  And it is being done in secret.

Behind a veil of secrecy, the United States, the European Union, Japan and other countries are forging ahead with plans to coordinate an international crackdown on illegally copied music, movies, designer bags and other goods that change hands in sidewalk souks and Internet bazaars.

Negotiators, under intense pressure from media companies, luxury brands and other corporate victims of piracy, are scrambling to complete a so-called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement by the end of the year.

But the process is running into growing criticism from Internet campaigners, lawmakers and even some people involved in it.

Since when is it good policy to negotiate law in secret and primarily for the benefit of private parties rather than sound policy reasons? One of the possible approaches apparently being considered would mandate some sort of regulations that would require ISPs to disconnect customers who content provider claim have engaged in illegal file sharing. Where is the due process? Why isn’t this just a way for a private industry to get law enforcement for its own protection for free?

More from the EFF, Public Knowledge and James Love.

Yes, according to Lauren Weinstein:

As I type this text, I’m listening to old tunes on imeem in the background. In case you haven’t being paying attention recently to the Media Piracy Wars, imeem is perhaps the best demonstration to date that the RIAA and record labels have already capitulated — a fate likely to follow in relatively short order for all other media that can be easily digitized. Right now I’m playing a stream of Animals classics — with “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” spinning at the moment (as it happens, long my theme song).

The imeem site, among various other fascinating features, legally allows you to play — in their entirety — pretty much any single or album track you’re likely to care about. Rock, classical, pop, novelty, soundtrack — whatever, it’s a seemingly bottomless box. OK, there are some exceptions, but I have to try pretty hard to find selections that aren’t available.

While in theory you can only play (not download) the tracks for free, there are of course a variety of ways to capture such audio content, in either analog or digital domains. Even postulating the unlikely government mandating of draconian content control mechanisms (like crippled A/D converters, analog tagging blocks, and other similar creepy crawlies) trying to prevent the essentially unlimited transfer of digitized media materials between private parties is already a lost cause.

And while most of the arguing to date has been over illicit media exchanges (e.g., via P2P networks) — it seems inevitable that ultimately motion pictures will follow a similar path to that of music when it comes to pretty much universal legal free online access in some form — after all, from a digital standpoint, the only real difference is the much larger number of bytes, and that’s decreasingly a practical problem. Books and other written materials may likely follow the same course in due time. Software packages have achieved some protection when tightly tied to individual computers through online registration systems, but pushback from users, non-copy-protected applications, and open source packages are increasingly impacting this arena as well.

Back in YouTube and Google Book Search: Pain, Delight, and Copyright, I suggested that technological change was “diluting” the concept of copyright.

I’ll now go one step farther. Copyright — for most practical purposes — is effectively dead. Now, that doesn’t mean that the slowly moldering corpse of copyright won’t be with us for quite some time in various forms. Copyright concepts will maintain their value longest as mechanisms to prosecute illicit commercial exploitation of associated media, but as a tool to prevent or control mass distribution, the coffin nails are being hammered in more deeply with every passing day.