Google CEO Eric Schmidt has announced that the company will be complying with demands that captured Wifi data be turned over to state agencies in Germany, France and Spain. The data has also been demanded by a US federal judge. This article discusses what Google did and why turning over the data is undesirable.
In an essay entitled “Intellectual Property Norms in Stand-Up Comedy“, Professors Oliar and Sprigman of the University of Virginia present a study of how stand-up comedians have created a parallel system of protecting copyright based on social rather than legal norms. They also detail the differences that the emergence of these norms have made to the creative process. When jokes were held to be common property, comedians put less effort into individual jokes. Instead, comedians worked with short—often stolen—jokes and focused on creating performances that were tougher to duplicate. As the social system arose to protect their jokes, comedians turned to long-form routines, focusing on the text of the joke. The essay will be published in The Making and Unmaking of Intellectual Property from University of Chicago Press.
It has been reported that the famous New York street musician Robert Burck, known as “The Naked Cowboy”, is suing rival busker Sandy Kane for trademark violation. Burck claims that his look is trademarked and that Kane was “seeking to earn a living by appropriating his intellectual property for her own commercial benefit”.
There is an excellent article by Cory Doctorow on guardian.co.uk that highlights the problems with protecting digital locks and suggests that Canada is being bullied into the reforms by the United States. Doctorow points out that after wide public consultation regarding copyright reform the consensus was to “let us have protection for digital locks, but only if you’re breaking them in order to commit an act of actual copyright infringement”. Of course our government failed to heed the calls and has gone the other way in pursuing U.S. style protection for the digital locks themselves and we are left to wonder exactly whose interests are being protected.
An article by Danielle LaBossiere Parr, executive director of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, appeared recently in the Calgary Herald. The article was titled “Why gamers should love copyright bill” and set about explaining why the new bill is good for gamers. Parr cites a “300 percent increase in the number of games illegally downloaded via Canadian ISP’s between 2007 and 2008″ as evidence that the Canadian government hasn’t been doing enough to protect creator’s rights. Insufficient protection, Parr says, is tantamount to forcing creators to “give their works away for free”. It is argued that better protection allows for more innovation and risk taking among producers and ultimately to better products in the hands of consumers.
The Register reports that India recently submitted a document to the World Trade Organization which is critical of ACTA. One of India’s main concerns is that the agreement has the potential to destabilize existing international agreements and damage the economies of developing nations. They also argue that, when it comes to intellectual property reform, ACTA “does not represent a reasonable or realistic response” and that such an agreement “has to emerge from a multilateral and transparent process”.