Group items tagged

The great EduBlogs copyright ridiculousness fiasco. "And today, our hosting company, ServerBeach, to whom we pay $6,954.37 every month to host Edublogs, turned off our webservers, without notice, less than 12 hours after issuing us with a DMCA email. Because one of our teachers, in 2007, had shared a copy of Beck's Hopelessness Scale with his class, a 20 question list, totalling some 279 words, published in 1974, that Pearson would like you to pay $120 for."

Resource from students at McGill Uni regarding copyright and open access materials.

RT @NLNZ: Emerson contemplates the proposed #Library Licence idea, on the blog: http://t.co/O1M3CppB #copyright

Guardian Article. "As the demise of the Sopa anti-piracy act showed, established arguments for protecting the rights of content creators are almost impossible to apply to a digital world"

Mike ''MOD'' O'Donnell from TradeMe on why the TPP is bad for copyright and bad for consumers.

Who is requesting takedown, for what and when. Google is transparent about requests made regarding copyright infringement notices.

Article on the proposed copyright provisions in the TransPacific Partnership which directly affects NZ.

The government of Switzerland has issued a statement declaring that it will not take action to alter current copyright laws allowing the downloading of music and movies for personal use. The statement is the result of a lengthy study conducted by the Swiss government into the impact of so-called "piracy" on the entertainment industry. Despite the industry's claims that downloading undermines their business, this study shows that the effect of unauthorized downloading on the industry's bottom line is negligible. One key finding of the study is that downloaders spend as much if not more to acquire content legally as those who do not download. Researchers found no change in amount of disposable income spent on music and movies, despite the fact that roughly one third of Swiss people engage in some form of downloading. The government concluded, then, that no change to the current legal structure was necessary, and urged the entertainment industry to grow and adapt with the changes in technology and in consumer habits, rather than trying to suppress progress.

The movie industry uses someone's music without authorisation in an anti-piracy video.  They first refuse to deal with it then try and cream money from any deal. The irony weeps from every pore!

Excellent post on fair use, its flaws and the danger of copyright accusation without trial.  This is an example of remix and appropriation of an image where the author could not afford to go to court and potentially lose (multiple times $150,000) and so settled out of court at $32500.

short video explaining the different copyright options available under creative commons

"At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS by limiting their access to cheap generic medicines. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries; but recently, groups have emerged around the world to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counter-politics of "access to knowledge" or "A2K." They include software programmers who took to the streets to defeat software patents in Europe, AIDS activists who forced multinational pharmaceutical companies to permit copies of their medicines to be sold in poor countries, subsistence farmers defending their rights to food security or access to agricultural biotechnology, and college students who created a new "free culture" movement to defend the digital commons. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property maps this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. It gathers some of the most important thinkers and advocates in the field to make the stakes and strategies at play in this new domain visible and the terms of intellectual property law intelligible in their political implications around the world. A Creative Commons edition of this work will be freely available online."

Brian Lamb on the links between radio development and ds106radio, the rise of a business whose sole job is to create business by pushing copyright and the danger of an anodyne future for the Internet

Don't post your lecture recording if you're a student - OK if you're staff.

Course it's not piracy - that's something that happens on the high seas. And it's also not p2p either, which is used as a measure by RIANZ for copyright infringement.

The fight against unfair copyright continues in small ways.