Sunlight Research is sponsoring a Webinar (paid) on the Oracle-Google case on Sept. 8.  Note the business model here – an Internet session put on by a patent expert, complete with background materials distributed in pdf, for a charge, as a commercial venture.
Will the Larry Lessig/Tim Wu/Free Press crowd react with horrorified cries of how information should be free, and urge the BitTorrent users of America to capture and re-stream the session and pirate the materials? Why should people be allowed to pay to get information from an expert when …

Disney and Time Warner are suing a company called Triton Media, in an effort to expand the definitions of “contributory copyright infringement” and “inducing infringement.” [Note: There is more than one Triton in the US media world, unfortunately. The defendant here is Triton Media of Scottsdale, AZ. Triton Digital Media of Sherman Oaks, CA, is NOT involved.]
The gist of the Complaint (and thanks to Eriq Gardner of The Hollywood Reporter for posting a PDF) is:
Defendant has owned, operated, provided advertising consulting and referrals for, and/or provided other material assistance to …

One of the problems of dealing with the tech world is that the disputes often involve complexities that render understanding exceedingly difficult. This does not prevent pontification, however, often hideously wrong. (See, e.g., net neutrality, passim, to the continuing frustration of those such as my colleague George Ou, who do understand the underlying technical issues.)
So it is with Oracle’s patent infringement lawsuit against Google, which involves intersecting complexities of patent doctrine, computer coding, open source software licenses, and the shifting tectonics of the smartphone market. Each of these topics is …

Current copyright law is a ramshackle outcome of 200 years of accommodations to the exigencies of the moment and the power of the affected interests, with only an occasional input from honest principle, so it cannot be expected to make coherent sense.

Similar to the MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. case, the “safe harbor” clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) protected YouTube’s founders from civil liabilities because they had responded to take down notices. In the process of doing this they were also allowing for copyright violations and piracy just like the Grokster case.

Therese Poletti in Market Watch reviews a book that I missed when it came out six months ago, but will surely catch up with – You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, described by the NYTimes in the words used as the title of this post.
The NYT said:
In [an earlier] manifesto Mr. Lanier argued that design (or ratification) by committee often does not result in the best product, and that the new collectivist ethos — embodied by everything from Wikipedia to “American Idol” to Google searches — diminishes the …

The Rand Corporation has released Intellectual Property and Developing Countries: A review of the literature (2010), a report to “support[] the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and the Department for International Development (DfID) in assessing the impact of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in developing countries, in the context of the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and the development of TRIPS-plus standards.”
The report is deliberately low-key (a.k.a. – wonkish) and even-handed in the “supporters say – opponents say” mode, but since the topic of IP and …

Jeff Jarvis wrote a book titled What Would Google Do?, blurbed as explaining why “Google is not just a company, it is an entirely new way of thinking,” so it surprises not that his recent post in Buzz Machine, “Google takes the FTC to school,” chortles about how Google’s comments (July 20, 2010) on the FTC’s Staff Discussion Draft on  Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism is: “a wonderful document that takes the FTC — and the news industry — to school on the First Amendment, copyright, …

Last week’s Financial Times had a series on Internet search that was chock full of interesting tidbits.
One of them was about a new business model – a firm tracks what users are searching for, and then commissions a starving free lance writer to bang out an article incorporating the appropriate terms, lifting any actual information from more original pieces, with the aim of siphoning off the searchers and thus getting a share of the crucial click market.
To repeat one of the most common current observations about the state of the …

In “Journalism Needs Government Help” (Wall Street Journal, July 14) Columbia President Lee Bollinger urges public support for both press and broadcasting, which are reeling financially as “proliferation of communications outlets has fractured the base of advertising and readers.” He argues that the current system, or perhaps one should say the late system, was a product of mixed public and private action, and that “trusting the market alone . . . would mean venturing into the unknown – a risky proposition.”
Dear to his heart is the idea of a national …