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So you think that there's nothing wrong with Warner Brothers making $1M/year on the copyright to Happy Birthday?

What creativity or derived works are being encouraged by this? How is the original producer being protected from being ripped off? She's been dead for over 50 years.

Personally, I think we need a copyright reform law titled the Happy Birthday law. Let people know that they're "ripping off" Warner Brothers by singing Happy Birthday!

Look up the history of copyright in British common law. The origional intent of copyright was to give the crown control over what could be published. Here and here are some decent sites detailing the history of copyright (in the US and UK, respectively). In particular, I'm refering to the Licensing Act of 1662, which granted publishers the monopoly currently refered to as copyright in exchange for censorship of information deemed damaging to the church or government.

Nope. Bobbs Merrill was decided by the Court based purely on interpretation of the copyright statute. The only precedent that restricts Congress in this matter are cases where the Court found a Constitutional requirement.

Well, strictly speaking, nothing "restricts" Congress in this matter. They can pass any law they want. However, they are not going to pass such a law lightly in the face of 160 years of court precedents to the contrary, regardless of what they are based on, which was and remains my point.

As far as the codification of the first sale doctrine, the Association of Research Libraries would seem to disagree with you:

"The 1976 act preempted all previous copyright law in the United States. The act covered the following areas: scope and subject matter of works covered, exclusive rights, copyright term, copyright notice and copyright registration, copyright infringement, fair use and defenses and remedies to infringement. With this revision, for the first time the fair use and first sale doctrines were codified..."

Not true... While I don't contest the idea that the Federal Government may have some very stagnant technology in certain areas, the above statement is not true. The White House *did* have email (and therefore computers) in 1993.

See this site (from a 30 sec Google search) for more details.

My opinion is that the typical single licence EULA *is* rendered unenforcable even if a shrinkwrap licence can create an enforcable contract. Assuming for the sake of argument this very debateable point, you would have to look at the context of the negotiation to identify whether the elements of a contract are present. When the transfer of ownership is a first sale, I believe the garden variety EULA would fail the consideration test because such a licence generally does not offer anything that is not a recognized right of ownership per 17 USC 117. Specifically, the right to make an adaptation of the program for use in a machine is a right the owner already possesses and typically a EULA does nothing other than provide this. However, and this is important, when the licence in question purports to offer rights to install on multiple machines, then it DOES provide something that is not provided by first sale to the media owner. I believe that the Microsoft v. Harmony case actually pertains to OEM style multiple installation licencing, and is often misinterpreted by the "software is licenced" advocates. The sad thing about all of this is that if software publishers had simply written their licences as "family" licences or "one home, one work installation" as actually reflects what people do and want, then they could have a very sound footing for their licence restrictions.

Royalties are so bad that "Happy Birthday" (the royalties of which go to the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts) can't be used at scouting functions without permission and there has been litigation to that effect.

That's because the Scouts don't own "Happy Birthday". AOL does through its Warner-Chappell Music Publishing division. Perpetually.

This has been hashed out on CNI many times, but people keep forgetting either when Disney's film was released or when Kipling's copyright expired.

For the record:

Kipling's copyright expired in 1956.
Disney released their version in 1967.

Now let us never speak of this again.

This has been hashed out on CNI many times, but people keep forgetting either when Disney's film was released or when Kipling's copyright expired.

For the record:

Kipling's copyright expired in 1956.
Disney released their version in 1967.

Now let us never speak of this again.

This mis-anecdote originated from the following exchange, on http://www.cni.org/Hforums/cni-copyright/2000-02/0 428.html:

So, assuming the above is all accurate, Disney waited 11 years, not 1, after the 56-year Kipling copyrights expired. The point still remains, that if the current copyright term had been in place, Disney could not have created the film until ~2007 instead of 1957.

Then tell me what this thread is doing discussing bascially the same thing but is dated back to Dec 1999.

And these other articles as well dating back to Nov 1999.

Note 276 In Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., a California federal district court ruled that the defendant's use of "thumbnail" images in its search engine was fair use and did not infringe on the rights of plaintiff photographer.


* Thumbnail photo not infringing *
Ditto.com uses an automated program to crawl through the web collecting and building a database of images. When a user puts a specific term into Ditto.com's search engine, thumbnail reproductions of those images pop up. A California photographer who specializes in images filed a copyright infringement suit. A Southern California federal judge handed a preliminary ruling in favor of Ditto.com

I thought that copyright laws predated the French Revolution. This site doesn't even mention the French Revolution. It says that the laws originate in England around 1710. The Frech Revolution wasn't until 1789. Now in France, the copyright laws began with the French Revolution. Before that the crown would bestow the right to publish. During the revolution everything was chaos but in 1793 they restored the copyright to the authors.

--xPhase

Fair use isn't an affirmative right, but the Association of Research Libraries timeline says when copyright law was was heavily revised in 1976, fair use became an official defense against infringement charges--though what's allowed and what isn't is only somewhat less vague than when courts were simply disregarding some benign infrinements (which seems ironically similar to jury nullification).

What you fail to realize that the copyright laws, in their present form, are stealing off of you and me and everyone else. Copyright is supposed to encourage the useful arts and sciences for the benefit of the public . It is clear that the copyright laws of today are written not to benefit the public, but to preserve the excessive profits of a few major corporations. Disobedience of unjust laws is not only justified, it is our duty as citizens.

Current copyright law doesn't even benefit the artists. There is much less live music in this country than there was 30 years ago, before the wave of corporate mega-mergers hit in the music industry. The etree model of music distribution is preferable to the copyright-heavy oligopolic distribution model we have today. It works like this: Musicians derive their income chiefly from live performances. In turn, they allow their fans to record the live performances for free, and trade the recordings for non-commercial use only. The recordings serve to generate a larger following, so demand for live musical performances rises, and the venues are always filled. The Grateful Dead outearned Micheal Jackson in his heydey using this approach. Today, the model is being increasingly used, and there are hundreds of taper-friendly bands . The benefits to the public are both immediate and far-reaching: Not only are most of the live recordings free, but this also has the effect of increasing the total number of musicians by encouraging live musical performances, as opposed to spinning discs in nightclubs. Just as importantly, it has the effect of cutting out the middleman, the huge corporations that impose their "corporate tax" on everyone else to benefit no one except themselves.

The more inappropriate aspect of this response is that it adopts the language of property rights with respect to copyright and patents - the view that monopolies in information are somehow natural, god given things.

This is a deeply problematic view of copyright and patent law, one which was explicity ruled out in various common law jurisdictions by virtue of Donaldson v. Becket (1774) and the US Constitution.

A more reasonable and modern approach is to regard IP laws as economic instruments which must balance the public interest in incentives with the public interest in widespread distribution. The Free Software movement (and the more general anti-IP sentiment on the internet) is a result of the fact that technology has shifted this balance - the public interest dictates that copyright and patent laws ought to be weaker, to utilise the distributional possibilities of the net. In this context, IBM's actions can be seen to be more unethical and inconsistent.

Of course, expecting the average copyright lawyer, let alone IBM marketing, to acknowledge this, is rather unrealisitic. :)

BTW, for further reading, see RMS' artcile Re-evaluating copyright: the public must prevail, William Fisher's Theories of Intellectual Property, or A Philosophy of Intellectual Property by Peter Drahos.

One practical issue is that very few little hick towns are going to fork over cash for the real work that goes into writing and updating a building code, thus, if SBCCInc. doesn't get some sort of compensation, then people all over the south are going to have out of date builidng codes. Pure Capitalism allows the stupid to shoot themselves in the foot, which is great, unless you are transfered by your company to the Hicksville office and your house is a fire trap and your kids school doesn't have enough bathrooms. (Makes me think that a euro-style National Building Code would be a good idea, but then again, I think that a national high school curriculum could be a good idea too.)

I wonder what's going on with the International Building Code?

It makes me physically ill to realize that Socialist France dictated national copyright policy to the land of the free and the home of the brave; the leaders of the land (when I was 5 years old, in 1978) did nothing to prevent it, and the current representatives are moving to strengthen the poorly-crafted dictates of earlier misguided legislators.

If you're interested in knowing what really happened to fair use in the USA and form an intelligent opinion regarding the legality of these technological measures to discourage fair use, I strongly recommend you consult some resources linked from http://fairuse.stanford.edu, particularly A History of Copyright in the U.S..

Matt Barnson

Happy Birthday is still copyrighted and generates royalties of $1 million per year.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

or this:http://www .cni.org/pub/NISO/docs/Z39.50-brochure/50.brochure .part01.html

or this: http://www.i fla.org/documents/libraries/cataloging/metadata/gi ls-i.txt

That last link has a lot of very good low level contrast between the 1988 version and the early 90s version. Now all you need is someone to standup and swear they deployed Z39.50 1988 when it came out.

You're both right and wrong - the US was not a member of the Berne Convention (1886) until 1988 but copyright -is- inbuilt into the US Constitution. See http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html I'm uncertain as to when the US and the UK consumated "copyright relations" but you will find various well documented cases where authors such as Dickens (in the mid-19th century) could not recoup their royalties from the US markets. This could well be the aforementioned "unauthorised printing" f.

"There are deeper problems on the horizon. Some companies are now "loaning" or "renting" software. In some cases, you don't even keep copies on your local machine. You just download it from the server and use it for a bit."

Not without permission. This is illegal under the Computer Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990:
(b)(1)(A) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a), unless authorized by the owners of copyright in the sound recording or the owner of copyright in a computer program (including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such program), and in the case of a sound recording in the musical works embodied therein, neither the owner of a particular phonorecord nor any person in possession of a particular copy of a computer program (including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such program), may, for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage, dispose of, or authorize the disposal of, the possession of that phonorecord or computer program (including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such program) by rental, lease, or lending.

The association of research libraries has a web page on DMCA. This is a little library-centric, but generally quite informative.

Be prepared not to like what you read.

It appears that DMCA make simply "gaining access" to copyrighted material you already own illegal if it involves defeating technological protection measures. Note that this says nothing about having to make illegitimate copies.

There is a "reverse engineering" exception which might apply. I don't know, but I suspect that was slipped in to allow reverse engineering of file formats (e.g. to be able to read ms word documents). It is not clear whether this applies in the case of DeCSS, which allows you to gain access to copyrighted program material (albeit mainly useful for purposes most people would consider legitimate).

With regards to how this effects Norway, the technological protection method (TPM) parts are apparently laid out in Title 1, which implements the World Intellectual Property Organization Performance and Phonograms Treaty of 1996. If Norway is a signatory to this treaty, then the same rules apply there.

Frankly, as a US citizen, I think these measures are an affront to the spirit of our constitution (although given how far the technical niceties of the law are from the spirit of the constitution, DMCA may be literally constitutional while at the same time trampling on the intent of the Constitution). Congress is given a limited right to establish copyright to incent creators. While it would be absurd to say that DMCA is not in the interest of the members of the MPAA, it's also absurd to suggest that the MPAA members don't have sufficient incentive to create without it. And DMCA restricts ordinary users from using copyrighted material that any reasonable person.

For example -- suppose in a few years DVD is overtaken by a different optical disk standard. You can't buy an optical disk player that understands Css, and there is no software DVD player for Windows 2010. According to this unjust law, you cannot play your DVDs, even if you have a DVD compatible drive, because it would require that you work around Css.

We really need to get a congressional letter writing campaign going against this terrible law.

I've been looking for a reference that long prior to the invention of the printing press, a monk copied a manuscript and the owner of the original claimed ownership of the copy. The court ruled that, like the offspring of livestock, the copy belonged to the owner of the original. I'm thinking this was around the time of Columba of Iona (6th c.). Some of my research indicates that this story may be
apocryphal.

But, on the other hand, I have found some evidence for unlimited copyright in English Common Law

I've been looking for a reference that long prior to the invention of the printing press, a monk copied a manuscript and the owner of the original claimed ownership of the copy. The court ruled that, like the offspring of livestock, the copy belonged to the owner of the original. I'm thinking this was around the time of Columba of Iona (6th c.). Some of my research indicates that this story may be
apocryphal.

But, on the other hand, I have found some evidence for unlimited copyright in English Common Law