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Is ‘Happy Birthday’ Still Under Copyright?

Joanna Cabot — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 01:59:02 +0000

Mike Masnick has a great write-up about a pending lawsuit that finally challenges the copyright claim Warner/Chappell Music has been enforcing for decades over the ‘Happy Birthday’ song. I remember first hearing about this odd little copyright issue during an episode of the late but great sitcom, “Sports Night.” The main characters were two sports newscasters, [...]

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The Perils of Newer, Easier Sharing

Joanna Cabot — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:43:13 +0000

I’ve had an object lesson this week in the perils of newer, easier information-sharing, via two news articles which came my way through different means. The first was a write-up in the local paper featuring a colleague of mine who had decorated her house in celebration of the Maple Leaf’s glorious but ultimately short-lived playoff [...]

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We Goofed! Nintendo story accidentally appeared as ours

Dan Eldridge — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:38:33 +0000

Yesterday evening, we posted as our final story of the day a fascinating article about a new Nintendo video game titled Tomodachi Collection: New Life, which has been described as not unlike a Japanese version of The Sims. The crux of the article was that Nintendo had unintentionally made it possible for the male characters in the game [...]

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The SimCity Debacle: Another lesson in why DRM is a bad idea

Joanna Cabot — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:00:14 +0000

For anyone who is still not convinced that DRM, as a concept, is a terrible idea, the recent Sim City debacle illustrates why. The short version is, software publisher EA so feared ‘piracy’ of the latest Sim City incarnation that they crippled the game to require a live Internet connection (to its authentication servers) at [...]

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Paid vs. Free Entertainment: A Case Study

Joanna Cabot — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:28:33 +0000

Techdirt has a great write-up about a British children’s author, Terry Deary, who is on a misguided campaign against libraries. Deary believes libraries are giving away entertainment for free; he also believes they are severely damaging the book publishing industry. Techdirt’s Tim Cushing argues that, notwithstanding some of the fallacies the author is operating under, [...]

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Europe’s Database Right: A scary concept

Joanna Cabot — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:48:01 +0000

Techdirt has a write-up on something I had never heard of–a special copyright introduced in 1996 which protects the contents of databases, even if all the works they list are public domain. The case Techdirt profiles involves a company which wanted to obtain some government records from the 1700s and 1800s and were told they [...]

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Schools: The Next Frontier for Battles Over Copyright?

Joanna Cabot — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:00:17 +0000

Techdirt is one of many who have picked up this story about a copyright battle that’s brewing in a Maryland school district over who owns work done by teachers—and students—during school time. The Prince George district is trying to pass a policy that would give it ownership over all materials that teachers create for use [...]

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Why Online Textbooks Still Don’t Work

Joanna Cabot — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:30:09 +0000

Techdirt has a great write-up about a school district that is spending over $2 million to switch back to paper textbooks after investing heavily in an on-line model. The problem? Surprisingly, it’s not one of those, ‘There isn’t enough content available yet!’ situations. There is content. But the hardware requirements to run it, in this age [...]

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Why Everyone Should Care About DRM’s Punishment Of The Visually Impaired

a TeleRead Contributor — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 20:39:12 +0000

Techdirt writes a lot about the problems with DRM, and how inefficient and inconvenient it is. But for millions of visually-impaired people, those “inconveniences” represent something much deeper, and much worse. Somebody who has started writing eloquently about this issue is Rupert Goodwins. He is one of the UK’s most respected technology journalists and also, [...]

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Harry Potter e-book reaction roundup

Chris Meadows — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 04:06:17 +0000

Well, the Harry Potter e-books are out, and they’re making a splash. There are a number of reactions being reported on the web to various aspects of the announcement, and it interests me to look at some of them. For starters, Tim Carmody at Wired calls attention to the fact that Amazon and Barnes & [...]

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Unrepentant file sharer explains why he does it

Chris Meadows — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:15:00 +0000

hise’s a quite long screed by Bobbi Smith, a media consumer who both buys and pirates a lot of material, in the form of an open letter to content creators. To sum it up, Smith finds he actually buys significantly more media since he started pirating than before he could ($2,500 per year, he says, [...]

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Public Domain Review calls attention to obscure public domain works

Chris Meadows — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:15:00 +0000

On Techdirt, Nina Paley posts about a new site called Public Domain Review, that has started up to call people’s attention to some of the more obsure and unknown works available in the public domain. The site looks like an interesting way to find out more about free e-books, music, art, and so forth that [...]

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Adding real interactivity to e-books

Chris Meadows — Sat, 21 May 2011 15:33:14 +0000

On Techdirt, Mike Masnick discusses a post by J.A. Konrath proposing turning each e-book into its own social network. The idea is to give an e-book a form of “interactivity” that is more interactive than the audiovisual bells and whistles most publishers seem to associate with interactivity these days. Konrath’s post discusses the possibility of [...]

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Groupon thrives with unique content strategy

Chris Meadows — Sat, 07 May 2011 17:27:59 +0000

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick has an interesting piece looking at the dynamics of Groupon, and how they’re able to keep ahead of competitors. You would think that there’s nothing particularly special about a coupon site, but Groupon manages to stay ahead of the competition through its execution—most notably, the snappy, humorous copy it comes up [...]

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