Julianna Yau’s blog

Copyright

• Japan considers iPod tax (John Degen responds)
• Susan Scafidi shares a case where knockoff clothing directly impacted the value and saleability of the original
• Cory Doctorow on free-based business models
• Russell McOrmond gives a good summary of the content creator vs access provider debate

Orphan Works

• The Art Law Blog reports that the Orphan Works bill in the US has been passed
• Orphan Works blog posts on opinions and points to a summary of the debate between photo advocates

Art

• Making Art and Essential Part of Life
• Another government culture site bites the dust

Related posts

• The Question of Ownership (0)
• Playing catch-up (0)
• Finding adoptive parents for “orphaned” works (2)
• “Copyright obsession”? (0)
• Yoav Mazeh: Fixation in Copyright - part two: the discussion (0)

Today was Day 1 of CopyCamp 2008. It was mostly a reception/meet-and-greet for us to get to know each other. Misha did a great job of mixing up the crowd, but many of us (including myself) ended up gravitating to people we knew afterwards. In my defence, there were some people (several from Ottawa, like Russell McOrmond, April Britski and Janice Seline) who I see very rarely, and others (like Sam Trosow and Chris Moore) with whom I’ve had mostly online conversations.

Tomorrow, I will try to post my raw notes during CopyCamp. Wireless Toronto has setup a network for us at OISE, so I should be online as long as I can balance being an unintentional wallflower to get to an outlet and not maxing out my battery.

Related posts

• Technology In the Arts Conference - Day 1 Session Summary (0)
• CopyCamp2 Registration Now Open (0)
• CopyCamp2 (0)
• CopyCamp Tomorrow (0)
• CopyCamp Returns April 29th - 30th! (0)

A while ago, others wrote about the conundrum of the concept of “intellectual property” (Cory Doctorow and Mike Masnick; Russell McOrmond has also been concerned about the use of the phrase as jargon for some time). Many of the lectures presented by the Centre for Innovation Law & Policy have also touched on the link between creativity and ownership of that creativity.

I’ve been mulling over these thoughts, and am trying to make some sense of why and whether physical output is fundamentally different from intellectual output. It is difficult to penetrate this because it suffers from similar philosophical challenges as the link between the mind and body.

Issues of copyright are seeming to develop more shades of grey in the differentiation between the ownership of a thing and the copying of an idea. Copyright law generally prevents ideas from receiving protection, but whether it’s a question of basketball, wanting to be someone’s boyfriend, toilet paper or other silliness, people are pushing the limits of what can be protected by copyright and what can be owned.

The problem is perhaps how easily ideas can now be stolen from creative persons to be made into the fortunes of the business-savvy. One of the recent examples of this is OLPC’s XO laptop, which is threatening to be another Atari 400 or Commodore 64. Although it would be difficult to successfully argue that the concept of an inexpensive and small portable computing device was “stolen” or “belonged” to the pioneers at OLPC, their literal inability to deliver the XO is suspected to be a factor in the departure of some of the major minds behind the project.

Of course, an idea on its own is almost completely useless. Whether it is political, philosophical, artistic, technological, musical or otherwise, an idea which never gets past the conceptual stage is little more than exercise for your brain. But how do we find a balance between rewarding the birth of new ideas and allowing people to stand on the shoulder of giants?

Related posts

• XO shipping update (0)
• XO laptop shipping in Canada begins (?) (2)
• XO Laptop - Second Impressions (0)
• XO Laptop - Living Vicariously Through Flickr and Youtube (0)
• XO Laptop - First Impressions (6)

There have been some great responses and related posts to the one I wrote on Roles & Responsibilities on the Web, focused primarily on ISPs:

• Copyright formalities, technical measures, and what a modernizing Copyright treaty would really look like - Russell McOrmond
• ISP Insanity - Metaphaze (with diagrams! fun!)
  
• ISPs Face New Role in Network Control - Michael Geist

Related posts

• Week (or so) in review: Copyright (1)
• Waiting For Copyright Legislation… (0)
• TVO’s The Agenda on Copyright (6)
• TVO On Copyright, Now Online (0)
• TIAC - Copyright Law, Technology and Cultural Management (0)

I’ll be getting back to my deconstruction of copyright next week. Here’s what’s been floating around the web and blogosphere in the past week…

While most discussions about copyright infringement and the internet is focused on users as infringers, Digital Copyright Canada picks up on the itWorldCanada article We’re not thieves. We just can’t read contracts (McAfee and Open Source). Monica Hesse of the Washington Post also writes about the topic, focusing on corporate misuse of copyrighted photos.

The Crave blog finds software that allows users to record free, unlimited MP3 audio with your cell phone and hardware to share content between iPods.

Both Michael Geist and Russell McOrmond pick up on the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s public letter to the Industry Minister and Canadian Heritage Minister on the impacts DMCA-style legislation has on privacy.

The Vancouver Sun also publishes an article arguing that reformed copyright laws shouldn’t suppress creativity.

Meanwhile, Howard Knopf picks up on another camcording bust.

And I’m still behind on my reading of some blogs I recently discovered:

• Northworthy
• ©ollectanea
• Scrutiny
• The Patry Copyright Blog

Related posts

• Waiting For Copyright Legislation… (0)
• Writing to government about a copyright inquiry (2)
• TVO’s The Agenda on Copyright (6)
• TVO On Copyright, Now Online (0)
• Steven Sandor on the Copyright Legislation delay (0)

I finally found some time to read Russell McOrmond’s review of Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide. He has spoken highly of the book, and it is now on my reading list (two or three books from Wired Shut, which is the one I’m very slowly working through…not because of readability but the limited reading time I have).

Some of Russell’s comments are a bit concerning, with the misunderstanding of Creative Commons being the most concerning for me. I know many people who kind of know that there’s this thing called Creative Commons and that it has something to do with alternative copyright licensing, but few have a good understanding of how it works. I’ve been distressed by people who present it as something which makes that type of license possible rather than the fact that Creative Commons licences make using that type of license much more accessible. I’ve also been distressed by a lawyer explaining that it has a code which allows the license to follow the work, in terms of something similar to a digital rights management technique rather than a licensing provision. I’m sure it’s all a result of a broken-telephone transmission of information, but it doesn’t excuse people from not going to the source to check their facts.

Although I have used the term “copyleft” in the past, after some discussions with Russell I am better understanding the complications which can arise from using the term. Russell’s comments on the term in his review of Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide are quite concise, and our discussions leave me puzzling over a more suitable term.

In reading the comments on “harmonization”, it became clear to me that the problem is creators want to be (and should be) treated equally in the Copyright Act. Unfortunately, it seems that well-meaning but ill-informed persons end up using harmonization to achieve equality. I have been guilty of that breakdown in logic in the past, but have been slowly moving away from that perspective. In my continual thoughts on the fact that not all creative works are the same, it is becoming more apparent that equal treatment needs specialized attention rather than harmonization (which could potentially do more harm than it was intended to).

Related posts

• Week (or so) in review: Copyright (1)
• My comments on the CCC platform (0)
• Jessica Litman - Rethinking Copyright (0)
• Elizabeth Judge: Presumed Intentions (0)
• An Experiment In Deconstructing Copyright – Part 5 - Copyright Act (2)