Group items tagged

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?” The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again. On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?

most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action.

We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance. “And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

The goal of creating the limited monopoly called an intellectual property right is to provide the minimum necessary incentive to encourage the desired level of innovation

When someone takes your car, they have the car and you do not. When, because of some new technology, someone is able to get access to the MP3 file of your new song, they have the file and so do you. You did not lose the song. What you may have lost is the opportunity to sell the song to that person or to the people with whom they “share” the file. We should not be indifferent to this kind of loss; it is a serious concern.

we should pause before increasing the level of rights, changing the architecture of our communications networks, creating new crimes, and so on.

The downside dominates the field, the upside is invisible.

Until the triumph of DVDs, the videocassette rental market made up more than 50 percent of the movie industry’s revenues

A cheaper copying technology definitely caused losses. But it also provided substantial gains, gains that far outweighed the losses.

“fair use”

The defense is not “I trespassed on your land, but I was starving.” It is “I did not trespass on your land. I walked on the public road that runs through it, a road you never owned in the first place.”

“Yes, I trespassed on your land, which was wrong, I admit. But I was starving and looking for food. Please give me a break.” This is simply inaccurate.

One cannot start from the presumption that the rights holder has absolute rights over all possible uses and therefore that any time a citizen makes use of the work in any way, the rights holder is entitled to get paid or to claim “piracy” if he does not get paid.

Fair use

for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.

purpose and character of the use

nature of the copyrighted work

amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole

effect of the use upon the potential market

a multitude of dangers:

overly broad rights will chill speech, criticism, or scientific progress

discourage “follow-on” innovation;

hurts consumers or citizens while being less subject to antitrust regulation

We restrict the length of intellectual property rights. (At least, we used to. The framers thought it so important to do so that they put the need to have a limited term in the Constitution itself

when the content industries come asking for additional or new rights, for new penalties, for the criminalization of certain types of technology, we should take into account the gains that the Internet has brought them, as well as the costs

“Decompilation” was fair use

Without interoperability, we could never take our existing documents or spreadsheets or datasets and move to a new program, even if it was better

Internet Threat—“cheaper copying requires greater control

The Sony Court declared that because video recorders were capable of substantial noninfringing uses, the manufacturers of those devices were not guilty of contributory infringement.