Reason Magazine - Topics > Intellectual Property

Legally Ripping DVDs

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:40:00 EDT

Remember when you could go to jail for discussing the circumvention of copyright protections? Good times, courtesy of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, one of the most boneheaded pieces of legislation to come down the pike. (And whose legacy of restraining individual rights is still strong.)

Well those days are over, more or less, with the release of RealNetworks' RealDVD program, which lets you legally rip DVDs. Early reviews of the program are not good, but what's more important is the salvo this shoots across the bow of the big entertainment companies (spoiler alert: you just read a horrible metaphor), who have been determined not to let happen to prerecorded DVDs what they think happened to prerecorded CDs. That is, not let anybody make copies of anything, even for personal use, because it will lead to reduced sales. What the entertainment companies fail to grasp is that, as Metallica could tell you, it never pays in the long run to make it tougher for the audience to get its favored material.

According to The New York Times, RealNetworks is ready to duke it out with Hollywood. Or, perhaps the same thing, give it a way of moving from an increasingly less effective, old-style model to a newer one that actually reflects how people consume video. From the Times' account:

In March 2007, the DVD Copy Control Association, an alliance that licenses the encryption for DVDs, lost a lawsuit against Kaleidescape, a Silicon Valley start-up company that sells a $10,000 computer server that makes and stores digital copies of up to 500 films.
The DVD association has appealed the ruling. But Mr. Glaser thinks the decision has created the framework for a legal DVD copying product with built-in restrictions to prevent piracy.
The software, which will go on sale on Real.com and Amazon.com this month, will allow buyers to make one copy of a DVD, playable only on the computer where it was made. The user can transfer that copy to up to five other Windows computers, but only by buying additional copies of the software for $20 each. The software does not work on high-definition Blu-ray discs, which the movie industry has even more aggressively sought to protect from illicit copying.

More here.

reason Contributing Editor and Digeratum Mike Godwin looked forward to the fight between the Tech Faction and the Content Faction years ago here.

Can the Law Be Copyrighted?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:40:00 EDT

In California, the law is copyrighted. Meaning copying and distribution are limited. Openness crusader Carl Malamud is displeased by this. So he's trying to get sued.

On Labor Day, he posted the entire 38-volume California Code of Regulations, which includes all of the state's regulations from health care and insurance to motor vehicles and investment.
To purchase a digital copy of the California code costs $1,556, or $2,315 for a printed version. The state generates about $880,000 annually by selling its laws, according to the California Office of Administrative Law.

Listen to a pretty good, anecdote-packed Google talk by Malamud, who forced the SEC to put their corporate filings online in 1994, here.

Via Tim Kirk

Lights Out at Guerilla Radio

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:14:00 EDT

Russ Mitchell at Portfolio.com blogs about the impending close of the greatest Internet radio service in the history of Internet radio services—Pandora.com:

The [record] labels are intent on charging so a high price for streaming royalties that Pandora and its even-weaker peers would be forced out of business. That appears to be exactly what the labels want, despite the fact that research shows these kind of services actually increase record sales, as listeners discover new music and reconnect with old favorites.

Pandora and others are willing to pay royalties but need rates low enough to make enough profit to keep the service going. Such royalties historically have been set by government. Pandora is trying to get the attention of Congress, while making clear that Pandora's demise would cause internet radio to be dominated by the likes of Clear Channel. In other words, a faceless company's idea of mass hit entertainment shoved down our earholes.

I agree with Mitchell that the average big name record company can't tell its ass from a hole in the ground (Record company visits Grand Canyon, wonders, "Why is everyone taking pictures of my ass?"), but I'd rather see Pandora crash and burn than condone continued government interference in a rates dispute.

What do you think, H&R pundits?

Brian Doherty wrote here on Radiohead and the future of music without record companies.

Remixing Television

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The Day the Music Dies

leex1008@umn.edu (Timothy B. Lee) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Dead Over a DVD

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:06:00 EDT

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has attempted to stop movie piracy by suing illegal downloading sites and their users, convincing bit torrent insiders to sell out their fellow pirates, and hacking those same sites and installing malicious code, with little effect.

Under the new direction of former federal prosecutor John Malcolm, the MPAA is now using dogs to combat piracy. The cute and cuddly pooches are trained to sniff out the polycarbonates used to make illegal DVDs, and have assisted in 35 raids, the confiscation of 1.9 million illegal DVDs, and the discovery of almost 100 burning stations.

But the recent death of one of the dogs establishes a tragicomic parallel with the drug wars:

A yellow Labrador retriever named Manny, an MPAA-trained disc-sniffer, died last month in Malaysia at the age of 1. The MPAA is awaiting an autopsy report, but suspects the dog might have been murdered.
"Word on the streets," Malcolm said, was that disc-counterfeiting groups had put out a hit on the disc-sniffing pooches.
"We heard from enough people, we took it as a threat," Malcolm said. "We are very interested in getting the autopsy report. We are very concerned. I'm not looking to cast aspersions. But Manny all of a sudden died."

The two remaining dogs, worth $17,000 each, have likely recouped their costs a hundred times over, and there's no reason for the MPAA to discontinue the program unless, A) pirates kill all the dogs; B) Pirates figure out how to make DVDs out of something other than polycarbonates; or, C) The MPAA catches all the pirates.

Seeing as the latter two futures are unlikely, I wonder how many dogs the MPAA would have to lose before it considered a thoughtful response to piracy?

reason's copyright archive here.

Viacom Wants You (or, more precisely, your YouTube viewing patterns)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:42:00 EDT

In 2007, entertainment behemoth Viacom sued Google, owner of YouTube, claiming that the video-sharing behemoth was using unlicensed copyrighted material as a means of gaining eyeballs, selling ads, and thus making money. YouTube responded to the copyright-infringement claims by invoking the "safe-harbor" clause of the odious Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and pledging to promptly take down copyrighted materials when notified of infringement.

Here's the latest court developments, and they should interest (read: worry) anyone interested in the free flow of information on the intertubes, via DailyTech:

As part of its $1 billion lawsuit against user-video site YouTube, Viacom will receive a complete log of all users' activities, which will include a list of usernames, IP addresses, and videos that each account has viewed in the past.
Viacom says it wants to use the data to prove that copyright-infringing videos draw higher amounts of traffic than user-generated and fully-legal content. If Viacom's hypothesis turns out to be true, it could increase penalties against YouTube if found liable for contributory copyright infringement.
The court order to turn over site logs came as part of a sweeping request by Viacom, where it attempted to acquire source code for the site's search engine and copyright video filter - which YouTube wrote as the result of previous litigation with copyright holders - as well as copies of YouTube parent Google's advertisement database schema, and copies of all videos on the site marked "private." U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton, who is presiding over the case in New York, struck down Viacom's other requests.
YouTube will, however, also have to produce information on how private videos are viewed, including information on who watched them and how many times.

More here.

reason on how the DMCA hurts the public interest here.

On intellectual property here.

Communists for Intellectual Property

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:50:00 EDT

This is a bit old, but I don't think it's been mentioned on Hit & Run yet: Che Guevara's children are irked by the unauthorized use of the Argentina-born Cuban revolutionary's name and likeness on products such as T-shirts, posters, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and vodka:

Aleida Guevara, the eldest of Guevara's four children by his second wife, Cuban revolutionary Aleida March, said the commercialization of her father's image contributed to tension between rich and poor in some countries.
"Something that bothers me now is the appropriation of the figure of Che that has been used to make enemies from different classes. It's embarrassing," she wrote during an Internet forum sponsored by Cuba's government ahead of what would have been her father's 80th birthday on June 14....
"We don't want money, we demand respect," wrote Guevara...
But Cuba's communist government also has worked hard to make money off of the revolutionary's image, stocking tourist shops with T-shirts, postcards and other trinkets bearing his face and three-letter signature.

Here's a win/win proposal: The Cuban government can retain all rights to Che's name and likeness if it lets Cubans freely own, transfer, and use other kinds of property.

Michael Moynihan on the cult of Che here. Kerry Howley on the commercial sullying of Genghis Khan's good name here and here.

[Thanks to John Kluge for the tip.]

"I Have All the Music from 1950-2010. Do You Want a Copy?"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:51:00 EDT

A fantastic, subtle essay at Cato Unbound on copyright from Rasmus Fleischer, Swedish historian and impresario of sharing site The Pirate Bay. If you're like me, you really don't know what to think about copyright law. It's obviously broken, but is there anything about it that can be salvaged for the digital realm?

Fleischer reconfigures the issue thusly:

The real dispute is not between proponents and opponents of copyright as a whole. It is between believers and non-believers. Believers in copyright keep dreaming about building a digital simulation of a 20th-century copyright economy, based on scarcity and with distinct limits between broadcasting and unit sales. I don't believe such a stabilization will ever occur, but I fear that this vision of copyright utopia is triggering an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties. Accepting a laissez-faire attitude regarding software development and communication infrastructure can prevent such an escalation.

One more reason the believers can't ever win: Remember that old bit of jargon, the sneakernet? You're part of the sneakernet (a subset of the darknet[PDF]) when you store stuff on a CD or a flash drive and then put it in your pocket and walk it over to a friend. Portable storage capacity is booming, which leads to this question, from Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson: "When music fans can say, 'I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?', [something they will probably be able to do in a scant few years] what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?"

It's dense, but worth it. Read the whole thing.

Invasion of Privacy, Copyright Infringement, or Just Shame at Sending a Ziggy Card?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 28 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

NFL Hall of Famer Joe Montana is suing an ex-wife and an auction house for violating "his copyright and privacy rights," reports The Smoking Gun. The first of three Mrs. Montanas recently sold a bunch of letters and memorabilia from the San Francisco 49ers star's college days at Notre Dame.

This case raises potentially interesting intellectual property rights issues: What is privacy to begin with? Especially for a celeb? Are love letters copyrightable and, if so, should most of us be sued for plagiarism too? Etc.

But mostly the case is just another reason to turn to Ziggy, a comic strip created by a father and continued by a son that is every bit as unfunny as the English protectorate under Cromwell I and II, Tom Swift under Victors Appleton I and II, and the current U.S. republic cum empire under Bush 1.0 and 2.0.

I half-suspect that Montana is simply upset at a Ziggy card going public, even one from the '70s, during Ziggy's zigariffic heyday. Based on the stuff below, it's hard to know what is Montana's own feeling and what is mass-produced sentiment. But personal embarrassment should never be enough to justify lawsuits.

In Defense of Pirates

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:03:00 EDT

Storybook pirates need no defending. What’s not to love about Captain Hook?

But copyright pirates are often blamed for all manner of social ills, from the low quality of the music those whippersnappers listen to these days, to Hollywood’s troubles at the box office. In the Guardian, pop culture guru Matt Mason makes a plea on their behalf:

When an online copy of Scrabble called Scrabulous appeared on Facebook, it quickly amassed 2.3 million fans who played it every day. It was an amazing user-generated ad campaign, and sales of real Scrabble boards increased. All Hasbro and Mattel (the owners of Scrabble) had to do was swoop in with their cheque books and make it legit; instead they treated Scrabulous as a simple case of piracy and threatened to sue. It may have been smarter to cut a deal rather than anger potential customers. Thousands signed up to the "Save Scrabulous" Facebook group. One fan threatened a hunger strike. Hasbro and Mattel are still talking tough, but if the backlash continues they may be forced to eat their words.

Managing directors take note! Don't let your legal department make a decision about pirates without talking to marketing first, because pirates can sometimes refresh the parts other ad strategies cannot reach.

The same piece also has a story about how remixers have saved us from “rubbish trainers” (that’s “crappy sneakers” to Americans) by tarting up Nike’s classic Air Force 1 on their own dime, and under their own brands.

Check out my review of Matt Mason’s book, The Pirate’s Dilemma, in the May issue.

The Cheapening of a Tourism Slogan

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:27:00 EDT

In the 1990s, New York State's tourism board let the trademark on its "I ♥ NY" slogan lapse, encouraging a flood of unlicensed souvenirs carrying the famous logo. Since then the state has renewed its trademark and, in an attempt to rejuvenate the "brand," plans to crack down on what The New York Times calls "unlicensed fakes." But what exactly is inauthentic about T-shirts, towels, salt and pepper shakers, beer can holders, and paperweights that declare "I ♥ NY" without state authorization? Surely they clothe the torso, dry the hands, dispense the seasonings, keep the beverage cold, and hold the paper down at least as well as their licensed counterparts. Is the sentiment itself less sincere because it's not officially certified? Although it's easy to understand why the state wants its license fees, it'd hard to see how consumers are shortchanged by unofficial souvenirs.

In addition to the revenue from licensing, the state wants to control the types of merchandise associated with Empire State love. Ashtrays and lighters, for instance, are right out. The desire to control the messages linked to "I ♥ NY" has gone to decidedly unlovely extremes. The Times reports that the Pataki administration threatened to sue Milton Glaser for trademark infringement over his post-9/11 "I ♥ NY More Than Ever" logo. Who is Milton Glaser? The graphic designer who developed the "I ♥ NY" symbol in 1977 and let the state use it free of charge.

Hogwarts Law School

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Harry Potter gets along with his fans. Some media companies fire off menacing legal threats at the first sign that someone might be doing something unauthorized with one of their characters, but J.K. Rowling and Warner—the author of the Harry Potter books and the studio behind the Harry Potter movies, respectively—have had a generally tolerant attitude toward the amateur fiction, home movies, and online guides created by the boy wizard's fan base.

So some were surprised last fall when Rowling and Warner sued to stop RDR Books from publishing Steven Vander Ark's The Harry Potter Lexicon. The Lexicon is essentially a hard-copy version of Vander Ark's website, which collates information about the Potter series; the site is filled with detailed lists of the peoples, places, spells, and creatures that inhabit Rowling's world. Much of the text was drawn directly from Rowling's books, prompting the novelist to argue that Vander Ark intends to make money by repackaging her words. It's unclear how the courts will rule, but I'm inclined to agree with Columbia Law School's Tim Wu as to how they should rule. Wu wrote in Slate that Rowling "has confused the adaptations of a work, which she does own, with discussion of her work, which she doesn't….Textually, the law gives her sway over any form in which her work may be 'recast, transformed, or adapted.' But she does not own discussion of her work—book reviews, literary criticism, or the fan guides that she's suing."

Yet even if the courts end up agreeing with Wu, Vander Ark has lost a more important battle. The Harry Potter fan community has overwhelmingly sided with Rowling, shunning Vander Ark and denouncing him with such phrases as "arrogant, egotistical, self-absorbed jerk." The reasons for this reaction are complex. In part it reflects the difference between a book sold for profit and a website offered for free. In part it reflects allegations that Vander Ark misled potential contributors into believing his book had Rowling's blessing. In part it simply reflects the fact that fans are predisposed to agree with their favorite authors. The case hasn't been decided yet, but in the court of his peers Vander Ark will be punished—is being punished—either way.

Speaking at the OnCopyright conference in Manhattan on May 1, Wu pointed out just how sharply this cuts against most people's expectations. Ordinarily we assume that the fan norms surrounding intellectual property will be looser than the letter of the law. This time, the law may be more permissive than the fans.

The conference was sponsored by the Copyright Clearance Center, a company that helps guide businesses, universities, and others through the thicket of licenses and permissions required by intellectual property law. There were four panels over the course of the day: one on copyright's collision with technology, one on copyright and society, one on copyright and the arts, and one on copyright and the law. The speakers ranged from industry figures eager to strengthen intellectual property controls to radicals ready to dump some rules into the harbor.

But the most important division on display wasn't the split between the conservatives and the reformers. It was the line that divided the law panel from all the others. The former featured three intelligent attorneys debating how the law should be interpreted and what the law should say. The latter featured artists, journalists, entrepreneurs, activists, and academics grappling with a world where people's behavior is governed much more by tools and norms than by statute books.

Kevin O'Kane, for example, is the man behind redlasso, a service that makes it easier to search for ongoing and recent TV and radio broadcasts, extract the parts you want, and drop them into the context of your choice. You could, for example, find all the references to the word "Myanmar" in the last 12 hours of TV news, pull out the appropriate clips, and add them to an online news commentary. The result, O'Kane hopes, will be an "online media center for bloggers."

There may come a day that CNN or Fox or a local broadcaster in Iowa City decides that this useful tool is a machine for piracy and takes redlasso to court. But you need only visit YouTube, Crooks and Liars, or any video-heavy blog to see that the Web already welcomes such efforts to recycle what used to be perishable content, that this enriches our ability to discuss the issues of the day, and that people across the political spectrum engage in this behavior without pause. If the law thinks they're wrong, then our norms may know something that our laws do not.

Nor did this informal borrowing begin with the Internet. On the arts panel, the novelist Jonathan Lethem spoke about the imitation and appropriation that has always been embedded in creative activities. Every artist begins by copying, he said, and some of the best—he singled out William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan—keep borrowing until the end of their life. This is part of the creative process, he argued, and it should be welcomed rather than banished.

Lethem has covered this territory before. Last year he contributed an article to Harper's called "The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism"; it not only touted the virtues of quoting and appropriating other people's work, but was itself largely stitched together from other writer's words, a fact revealed at the end of the essay when he listed the texts he had pilfered. It was a clever stunt, but it highlighted something important about creativity: not just the fact that writers draw on other people's work, but the fact that the best writers transmute those influences into something of their own. Lethem's novel Gun, With Occasional Music carries a critic's quote on the cover declaring that it "Marries Chandler's style and Philip K. Dick's vision." It's a good description: The book, a murder mystery that features talking apes and kangaroos, feels like a mash-up of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled crime writing and Philip K. Dick's surreal science fiction. But it's impossible to imagine either Chandler or Dick producing this particular story. It's part Chandler, part Dick, and all Lethem.

The book also says something about what the world would be like without that free-flowing creative exchange. Where other dystopian novels imagine states that force individuals into a suffocating collective, the totalitarian society in Gun keeps people apart, by limiting the questions they can ask and the memories their minds can contain. The result is a world without communication and a world without a past—a world where every thought is an orphan work.

Not even the most militant copyright maximalists would consider that desirable. But even if they tried to impose such a restrictive regime, they'd be helpless in the face of technologies that make it easy to defy antiquated copyright rules, and in the face of norms that put more gentle restrictions on our behavior. The OnCopyright conference didn't give me the impression that the lawyers were on the verge of fixing America's intellectual property laws. But it did bolster my faith that we'll manage to muddle through anyway.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

Steal a Little and They Call You a Thief; Steal a Lot and They Call You King; and Then There's Jim Twitchell

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:48:00 EDT

University of Florida professor of English and advertising Jim Twitchell—an occasional reason contributor over the years—has been unmasked as a serial plagiarist by The Gainesville, Florida Sun:

James Twitchell, a widely published UF professor who writes about consumerism and pop culture, has lifted words verbatim from multiple authors in at least three books published between 2002 and 2007, a Sun investigation found.
Twitchell initially denied a pattern of plagiarism, but the 64-year-old professor was contrite and ashamed when recently confronted with a larger body of evidence.
"It's my responsibility to make sure that the words and ideas are my own and, if not, that they are properly credited. In many cases, I have not done this," Twitchell wrote in an e-mail Wednesday. "I have used the words of others and not properly attributed them. I am always in a hurry to get past descriptions to make my points, a hurry that has now rightly resulted in much shame and embarrassment. I have cheated by using pieces of descriptions written by others."

More here.

From a reason perspective, what's particularly disappointing is that Twitchell, who contributed four memorable pieces that together made a fun and erudite case for consumer capitalism, ripped off at least two other reason figures: former Editor Virginia Postrel and anthropologist Grant McCracken.

Here's Postrel's reaction:

I was surprised at the extent of Twitchell's word-for-word copying, but I don't consider that his most egregious breach of ethics. Giving your readers inaccurate information because you've changed store names--to hide the source? to make a better story? just for fun?--is worse.

And here's McCracken:

This was witting behavior. Twitchell sent Postrel the manuscript of Living It Up to ask for a blurp. She noticed Twitchell's use of the Diderot Effect and asked him to acknowledge me. Twitchell did not. According to Stripling, Twitchell claims that Diderot Effect "has become such common parlance in his area of study that he wasn't even sure who coined it." Really? But his use of my exact words tells us he was acquainted with its origin.

We've done a quick scan of Twitchell's work for reason and have no obvious cases of rip-offery and plagiarism from other sources. If we dig that up, we'll make corrections. Twitchell's behavior is not simply indefensible but really fucking stupid: We live in an age where it's tough not to get caught for plagiarizing. And where there's no cost to acknowledging sources—if anything, it's a sign of erudition and plugs an author into a broader network of thinkers.

You've Got an Old-Fashioned Idea Copyright Is Something That Lasts Forever

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:58:00 EDT

Today His Girl Friday is rightly revered as a screwball classic. But the movie didn't make a major splash when it came out in 1940, and even when critics began to take a serious look at director Howard Hawks' career in the '50s and '60s it didn't attract much notice.

Then something important happened. Film scholar David Bordwell explains:

Columbia Pictures failed to renew its copyright, and His Girl Friday fell into the public domain.

Entrepreneurs made dupe copies, in quality ranging from okay to terrible. You could rent one for peanuts and buy one for only a little more. Some of these bleary prints have been telecined and turned into the DVD versions of the film that fill bargain bins today....

Most important of all, TV stations were screening their bootleg prints. HGF didn't become a perennial like that other public domain classic It's a Wonderful Life, but its reputation rose....

Once HGF became famous, the proliferation of shoddy prints became an embarrassment. In 1993 it was inducted into the National Film Registry, which gave it priority for Library of Congress preservation. Columbia managed to copyright a new version of the film. A handsomely restored version was released on DVD, and a few years back I saw a 35mm copy whose sparkling beauty takes your breath away.

The lesson that sticks with me is this. If Columbia had renewed its copyright on schedule, would this film be so widely admired today? Scholars and the public discovered a masterpiece because they had virtually untrammeled access to it, and perhaps its gray-market status supplied an extra thrill.

Something to remember the next time the issue of extended copyright terms comes up. Copyright owners aren't the only people who respond to incentives and opportunities.

[Via Jason Mittell.]

Money for Nothing

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:49:00 EST

Surprise! Actual musicians have gotten diddly from the $370 million copyright infringement settlement between record companies and Napster et al.

Artist managers are girding for battle with their music overlords over when their clients are going to see some of the dough negotiated last year in copyright-infringement settlements with a host of Web sites....
"Artist managers and lawyers have been wondering for months when their artists will see money from the copyright settlements and how it will be accounted for," said lawyer John Branca, who has represented Korn, Don Henley, and The Rolling Stones, among others. "Some of them are even talking about filing lawsuits if they don't get paid soon."

Way to encourage and reward innovation, intellectual property law!

Read more here from The New York Post, with a classic Post-style headline: "Infringement!"

Or get a slightly more detailed analysis from CNET. ("Some on the talent side suspect the top four record companies of foot dragging or playing "hide and seek" with the cash.... If nothing else, the controversy illuminates the degree of distrust that exists between artists and the labels. As CD sales continue to shrink, look for more squabbling between them.")

Solutions to "Solutions for America"

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:47:00 EST

As Hillary Clinton--and Morton® Salt--could tell you, "When it rains it pours."® Or something.

She's already spiraling down in the polls, and pretty much everyone has given up on her pulling the Democratic nomination back from Barack Obama.

Now, reports Inside Higher Ed, she might have a trademark and/or copyright problem, courtesy of the Univ. of Richmond (whose excellent team name is the Spiders):

Hillary Clinton's campaign has of late been pushing charges that Barack Obama plagiarized some phrases in his campaign speeches.

But what about one of Clinton's favorite phrases: "Solutions for America"? It's the name for many of her campaign events. Today will feature "Solutions for America" rallies by the campaign in Ohio, and the phrase has appeared as backdrop for many campaign rallies. It turns out, however, that an organization other than the Clinton campaign has the rights to the phrase.
"Solutions for America" is the registered trademark of a University of Richmond program with the Pew Charitable Trusts to help local communities work on a series of social problems. The emphases of the program - promoting child health, reviving neighborhoods, creating jobs - have considerable overlap with Clinton campaign themes....
The Web site of "Solutions for America" clearly indicates on the bottom a copyright by the University of Richmond and the database of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office indicates that Richmond obtained the trademark on the phrase, going through the standard legal process to do so....
We do know that Richmond takes its trademark rights seriously, and doesn't like other entities using the phrase.
In 2005, for example, the American Council on Education started a campaign called "Solutions for Our Future" to highlight the role of higher education in solving problems facing American society. The consulting firm that worked with the ACE on developing that campaign told Inside Higher Ed that year that the group wanted the "Solutions for America" slogan, but that the University of Richmond had rights to the phrase and wouldn't share them.

More here.

I think it was me--no, wait it was Bob Dylan, but what the hell--who once croaked, "Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you king." I generally find most intellectual property laws are stupid (trademark not nearly as much as copyright), but the real crime here might be the stultifyingly banal slogans not just Clinton but most pols and institutions trot out like so many crippled ponies.

reason on intellectual property/copyright/etc.

Japanese Meat Magnate Trademarks "High School Girl"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:15:00 EST

Just when you thought Japan couldn't get any weirder:

Meat product manufacturer Ito Ham has taken the Japanese schoolgirl obsession to the next level by applying for the trademark rights to the word “High School Girl” (女子高生/Joshi-Kosei).
A pair of trademark applications (via the INPIT database) indicate that Ito Ham is planning a line of High School Girl® meat products, including meat pies, gyoza dumplings, pizza, curry and more. Either that, or someone in the office is just having fun.

The phrase "high school girl" is already a commonly used phrase in Japan (to say the least), so it's not clear that the trademark will be granted. Still, you have to the admire the appropriately-named meat magnate Mr. Ito Ham for trying.

To review: Japanese schoolgirls. Trademark law. Discuss.

Via the always-reliable source Pink Tentacle

Surplus Commodities and 1940s Hats

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:46:00 EST

The Library of Congress just announced that it has put up 3,000 public-domain photos on Flickr and enabling tagging by all comers. It's a pilot project that could someday be extended to the 14 million photos in the collection.

Eventually photos like the one above, which are currently labeled something like "Distributing surplus commodities, St. Johns, Ariz." will be findable by searching "America at war," "poverty," "food aid," "pine boxes" and "1940s hats."

Plus, people who just want to enjoy a little retro beauty or take in a slice of American life can do so easily.

Among other things, this means that the Library of Congress has heeded the call of David Weinberger, Internet deep thinker and author of Everything Is Miscellaneous. When reason spoke with Weinberger last year, he compared old-style photo archives to photo sharing sites. The old archives lock photos away in temperature-controlled vaults listed under one or two inadequate key words, viewed only by the intrepid. Online photo sharing sites offer everything to everyone, good and bad, to view and tag as they please. Looks like we might get the best of both worlds at last.

Friday Fun Link: RIAA CD Warning Label of Tomorrow

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:11:00 EST

"Owning a CD and not being arrested can sometimes be difficult. The following scenarios of CD use have been deemed acceptable by the RIAA...." Read the whole thing.

Mao's Millions

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:06:00 EST

The BBC reports:

The Little Red Book and other publications continue to produce royalties for Mao's estate more than 30 years after his death.

An article published in the magazine Literary World of Party History laid out just how much Mao has earned from his writing.

It said that in 1967 he was worth 5.7 million yuan ($780,000, £400,000) from books printed in Chinese, English, Russian, French, Spanish and Japanese.

But that figure, including interest, had risen to 130 million yuan ($17.6m, £8.8m) by 2001. The article did not say how much the estate is worth now.

I knew that old commie had the heart of a canny money manager when I heard that the leftist folksinger Phil Ochs had reprinted some of Mao's nonpolitical poetry on an album sleeve. Just for the hell of it, Ochs sent the chairman a check for the rights to the verses. To the singer's surprise, the check was cashed.

Mao's heirs would like to dip into the Helmsman's hoards, but China's cabinet

decided to uphold an earlier decision not to give the money to Mao's relatives because his writings were not his own, but the "crystallisation of the party's collective wisdom".

Insert Randian rant here about collectivist second-handers taking credit for a great man's solitary creation.

Antigua Gets $21 Million

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:16:00 EST

Cato's Sallie James writes that the WTO has awarded Antigua $21 million in damages for its trade dispute with the U.S. over our Internet gambling laws. The little island country will get to recoup the losses by suspending copyright laws within its borders, I guess until it estimates its economy has absorbed $21 million in revenue.

The amount is far less than what Antigua wanted ($3.4 billion), and far more than what the U.S. claimed Antigua was due ($500,000). Unfortunately, I doubt that $21 million is enough to instigate a war between the copyright lobby and the moral blowhards behind the gambling ban. And the recent settlement between the U.S. and Europe, Canada, and Japan means more damages taken out in copyright aren't likely.

I wonder if U.S. citizens will be able to take advantage of the ruling to buy pirated CDs and movies from Antigua, or if the RIAA and MPAA will pressure the federal government into banning Internet and postal transactions with copyright violators who set up shop in Antigua.

The good news I guess is that trade, globalization, and techology have made it much more difficult for the government to enforce dumb morality laws. The bad news is, they're still trying.

MORE: I probably wasn't clear enough in the post: The $21 million is an annual reparation until the U.S. changes its laws.

Silencing the Cat

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:32:00 EST

Friday fun link: Someone at Truth and Beauty Bombs has an epiphany: "if you remove all the text of Garfield's speech, or thoughts, or whatever that is...it becomes an oddly surrealist comic." A horde of contributors prove him right.

Sometimes the results aren't surreal so much as they're sad. This one makes Chris Ware look like a bubbly optimist:

Sad, very sad...yet somehow much funnier than any Garfield strip you'll ever find in the morning paper.

Yes, I'm nearly two years late in noticing this site, but Friday fun knows no statute of limitations!

[Via Wondermark.]

NSFW: EVERYBODY PANIC

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:28:00 EST

We here at reason have a complicated relationship with trademarks, patents, and copyrights. But sometimes there's good clean fun to be had with the Patent and Trademark office.

Drew Curtis, impresario of Fark.com, and subject of an interview in the December print issue of reason, has applied for a trademark on NSFW.

About the NSFW Trademark Application, I can say three things:

1) Yes, we applied for it.

2) Can't comment on the prank angle other than "stay tuned."

3) Muhahaha.

Apparently, in the time-honored Fark in-joke lexicon: EVERYBODY PANICKED and sent Curtis angry letters. He replies:

I'm guessing the complaints are from people who don't read Fark, otherwise they'd know our end goal couldn't possibly be suing everyone using NSFW out of existence.

Via Jeff Taylor

Renewed Copyrights: Bad for America

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:22:00 EST

Jeffrey Tucker at the Mises Institute, who do heroic and valuable work in both digitizing and selling printed copies of long out-of-print works of Austrian economic and libertarian interest, laments how former Sen. Robert Taft's family* hurt him, and posterity and intellectual history, by the simple act of renewing his copyright.

[*edited--I originally mistakenly wrote that it was Taft himself who renewed the copyright]