Monday’s post on Filesharing in Underdeveloped Nations: Let’s Take from the Poor and Give to the Rich linked to the interesting work that Alec van Gelder & Mark Schultz have done on the development of Nashville as a country music center and the lessons of that experience for the less-developed nations of Africa and Latin [...]

Liability for accidents should generally be levied against all those who create risk factors. And Phoenix Center examines if this is also the case with software developers. They determined that there are two types of software, an intrinsic variety and an extrinsic variety.

TechDirt is glorying about a Huge Push In Brazil To Legalize File Sharing. I could understand this argument against copyright if it were cast in the form of saying that the transaction costs are too high, and thus put too much sand in the gears of commerce and sharing. But this is not at all the argument – in fact, the Internet is wringing transaction costs out of the system and rendering concepts such as “fair use” increasingly obsolete.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.) [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]