Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Prof. Lessig has an OP-ED in the NYT today about the orphan works bill rolling now in Congress. Among the important points mentioned there, here are my three favorites: (1) to the extent that foreign authors are substantially deprived of copyright protection as a result of the new rule, the amendment will probably violate U.S. international obligations, and it would take the E.U. exactly two seconds to file a WTO complaint. (2) It makes no sense to put so much weight on the issue of “diligent effort” if rightholders are not required to register works, as in the case of patents, for instance. (3) It would be somewhat unfair to apply the rule retroactively to works by authors who relied on full, automatic copyright protection upon creation/fixation.

John Degen, a Canadian novelist, has a thoughtful post on how he has resolved to make his latest novel, The Uninvited Guest, freely available for download online. It his a short yet touching divulgation of a writer’s musing about copyright protection in the digital age, and about thinking out of the box. He says that the war is over. I’m not sure, but I liked the frankness of an author who writes books with his heart’s blood and his dilemma about coming to terms with the wired reality.

Israel is a buzzing hive of small start-up technology companies that produce great ideas and original solutions. One of them is WIX, which offers a (free - as far as I could judge) web-based tool for creating personal and business websites within minutes. The tool is designed for people having no technical background whatsoever. There is also a clip demonstrating how it works. It's a lot of fun, but what they don’t tell you is how to create great content…

I’ve just put the abstract of a new paper on my SSRN page. Temporary title is: Ontology of Information and its Lessons for Intellectual Property. The full abstract is available here (I am not yet able to make the full text available online). Here are a few lines from the abstract:

Next month Stanford CIS is hosting a conference about Legal Futures. Judging by the list of participants, the upcoming even should be nothing less than electrifying. This post is unrelated to the conference. In fact, it is not about legal “futures” at all. Rather, it is about legal “pasts.”

Some time ago I did a post on the new copyright legislation in Israel. There are many interesting things about this law, and now, at the curtsey of Prof. Niva Elkin-Koren from Haifa University, there is an unofficial English translation of the new statute available.

I came across this anecdote earlier this week, reading in the Israeli press about a judge who quoted in a court opinion an article from the Hebrew Wikipedia, but who failed to mentioned her source. The judge apparently copy-pasted whole sentences from a Hebrew Wikipedia article about umbilical cord blood. Since no references whatsoever were provided, the judge likely violated the terms of the GFDL license controlling Wikipedia content. The Israeli Wikipedia foundation complained about the mishap and was able to squeeze a laconic response from the courts administration, promising this shall not repeat.

I have never seen an SSRN paper receiving 1700 recorded downloads in mere three days or so. This is exactly what happened to “The Magnificence of the Disaster: Reconstructing the Sony BMG Rootkit Incident” by Deirdre Mulligan and Aaron Perzanowski, forthcoming in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. It is by far the most meticulous analysis of the Rootkit debacle available. Among other things, the authors propose to amend the DMCA to lodge a statutory exception that would allow both circumvention and trafficking in TPMs to the extent undertaken to investigate or eliminate protection measures that create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers.

Here's a link to the press release. It is not my jurisdiction to cover this development - I trust you’ll hear more details and updates from Anthony and his team soon. I'd only say it looks like one of the most exiting and challenging fair use cases I’ve seen recently and a must-follow one. From the press release:

Something significant has happened in the world of free licensing, Lessig has the details and a video. Apparently, an important step has been made towards interoperability between the license controlling Wikipedia articles (the GFDL v.1.2), and the CC license by-share-alike. (See also this post on the Creative Commons website).