This Week In Techdirt History: August 23rd - 29th

from the not-so-fast dept

Five Years Ago

There were a lot of branding battles breaking out this week in 2010. LucasFilm targeted a company called Jedi Mind with claims of trademark infringement, false designation of origin, trademark dilution, breach of contract and unfair competition; Madonna got sued for selling clothes under the name Material Girl by a company that had already been doing that since 1997; Warner Bros. called in the lawyers over "Harry Popper" condoms being made in Switzerland; Facebook kicked off a trademark fight with Teachbook; Take-Two Interactive discovered that it couldn't snag the bioshock.com domain because it was registered before the Bioshock trademark; and yet another player jumped into the trademark fight over the Mafia Wars Facebook game. Meanwhile, in a town up here in Ontario, some guy managed to trademark the phrase "Welcome to Parry Sound" and started demanding money from local businesses.

Copyright collection societies around the world were up to their usual tricks, with a Czech proposal that would require artists to get collection society permission to use Creative Commons, a South African society fighting to prevent music from entering the public domain, and BMI trying hard to reverse a court ruling that let venues route around it.

Also this week in 2010, Techdirt received one of the most incredible legal threats we've ever been hit with, demanding we take down the entire site over some unidentified comments.

Ten Years Ago

In 2005, China's internet censorship regime was in full-swing, and we got to see some rare quotes from the state defending the system. Meanwhile, the Chinese government was also turning its attention on video games, with the introduction of a three-hour limit on online gaming sessions.

Anti-spam laws focused on children were beginning to backfire while an unsurprising study showed that college kids are too smart to fall for spam. The popular fear that texting was ruining children's language skills was shown to be unlikely, not that anyone noticed, many being more focused on using phones to track kids' whereabouts. At least in Japan it appeared that mobile phones had the unexpected effect of reducing teen smoking.

Fifteen Years Ago

Technology was changing plenty of things in 2000. This week, we saw the first car designed almost entirely on a computer — but the more exciting advancements were in new polymers, which promised all sorts of automobile performance improvements (not to mention new achievements in the field of medicine). Some scientists were working on genetically modified goats that produce spider's web protein in their milk, while others had figured out how to make skin temporarily transparent. Meanwhile, a new protest group was building robots to spraypaint sidewalks and hand out pamphlets.

The dot-com world was still uncertain, and for some reason a lot of people seemed to love gloating about that fact. The Economist took the time to look at a list of things the internet can't do, and while it focused on loftier goals, the potential list did get a bit shorter with the first forays into online pizza delivery.

Eight-Hundred Years Ago

The Magna Carta is famous as one of the foundational documents in the history of modern law, and the fact that it was signed in 1215 is one of those popular pieces of trivia that float around with minimal context. Many can name that year, but fewer know that it would be another eight decades before the Magna Carta truly held any sway. Initially, it was the centerpiece of an English civil war, drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury and signed by King John and a bunch of rebellious Barons — all of whom on both sides promptly ignored it pretty much entirely. The King then did an end run to Pope Innocent III, who sent a letter dated August 24th, 1215 in which he declared the Magna Carta "null, and void of all validity for ever" and threatened excommunication of anyone who observed it. It would later be reintroduced at the end of the war, then again a few years later, by John's son, and then another seventy years after that by his son, at which point it finally became England's statute law.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: August 16th - 22nd

from the now-that's-theft dept

Five Years Ago

Throughout these posts we've seen lots of snippets of the history of the Pirate Bay, and this week in 2010 we looked at a presentation by Peter Sunde that tells the whole story. Meanwhile, BitTorrent was beginning to directly promote creators who embrace alternative distribution, the porn industry was once again leading the way by embracing piracy and monetizing experiences, and the Kids In The Hall admitted to pirating their own show because it's so hard to get legally. Amidst all this, a popular graph was going around suggesting that the web was dying because of its dwindling share of overall traffic, with P2P and video on the rise — but the absolute numbers told a different story.

Industry groups were negotiating net neutrality (again), and the recording industry saw this as an opportunity to link copyright infringement to child pornography (again). John Mellencamp was calling the internet an "atomic bomb" for music while U2's manager was focusing on anonymous blogging as the core problem. Grooveshark was still going strong, but Universal Music pushed Apple into pulling it from the app store, while we pointed to a chart that nicely illustrated the utter insanity of music licensing.

Ten Years Ago

Five years before that, we were pointing out that the industry has to let go of DRM before it kills mobile music, and that exclusive mobile content deals don't make any sense. We took a look at just how the DMCA came to be, and were happy to see someone finally fighting back against a RIAA lawsuit.

In the world of TV, executives were finally starting to realize that they had to embrace new technologies; in the world of movies, some theaters were trying to offer a better experience while others were blaming their slumps on the simple problem of bad movies; in the video game world people were freaking out as usual about violence while we pointed out that games actually suck for indoctrination; and in the newspaper world, it wasn't exactly shocking to learn that the growth was happening online. But by far the most hyped medium was a relatively "new" one: podcasting.

Also this week in 2005, Google piqued a little bit of interest with the purchase of a small, secretive startup called "Android" that wouldn't tell anyone what it was working on beyond "mobile software". We expressed doubts that this meant Google would be developing a mobile OS, as some had surmised, and suggested that it was probably something to do with location-aware search and advertising. Little did we know...

Fifteen Years Ago

A lot of people were expressing doubts about Amazon recently in 2000, and this week the company hit back with numbers to show it's not worried. Annother huge name at the time, RealNetworks, was rolling out a new business model that sounded a lot like premium cable. And who knew what the future would hold for these two companies...?

Digital marketing was all about targeting kids this week in 2000. They were, after all, way more likely than teens to click banner ads, and schools were such a great place for advertising to a captive audience. But why stop there? The Internet Underground Music Archive offered a prize to parents who would name their baby IUMA, and it didn't take long to find the first winner.

In the world of futuristic tech (some of which remains futuristic) we saw looks at quantum computing and neural networks, surgery conducted with the aid of robots, and far out musings about controlling the weather with satellites and microwaves.

One-Hundred And Four Years Ago

With the onslaught of people who insist on calling infringement "theft", it's easy to forget that there's also such a thing as real art theft. Perhaps the most high-profile example happened on August 21st, 1911, when the Mona Lisa was stolen by a Louvre employee who believed it should be returned to its native Italy. It wouldn't be found for two years.

Amusingly, this instance of real stealing had an effect not unlike the "stealing" that oh-so-terribly happens online: it led to a massive increase in the Mona Lisa's popularity. Prior to the theft, the painting wasn't really known outside the art world, but international reporting of the theft and recovery (notwithstanding a significant public-attention detour after the sinking of the Titanic in between) is what turned it into the world's most famous work of art.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: August 9th - 15th

from the copyright-strikes-again...-and-again,-and-again dept

Five Years Ago

And so the 2010 copyright shenanigans continue, with problems on several fronts. In the world of collection society shakedowns, we saw how the day-to-day legalized extortion by BMI works, while Canadian collection society Access Copyright was trying to bleed more money out of students for photocopying privileges; New Zealand authors were calling for a "you must be a pirate" internet licensing fee, and the settling of a payola case offered yet more evidence for why the RIAA's calls for a Performance Rights tax are ludicrous. At least all this meant that more and more people were realizing how problematic collection societies are.

In the world of lawsuit-based shakedowns, US Copyright Group actually withdrew two lawsuits... in order to refile them against individuals while Righthaven continued to ramp up its "sue everyone" insanity. But we're not done yet: next stop is the world of bogus and over-aggressive takedowns. A German anti-piracy group knocked out a video for which it had no rights whatsoever, the Discovery Channel forced down a popular Deadliest Catch fan site by claiming that embedding the official videos is infringement, and EMI suddenly decided to single out one popular Empire State Of Mind parody (out of hundreds) for a takedown. As one history we pointed to this week neatly outlines, copyright started as a tool for censorship, was attempted as an incentive system, and is now back to its roots.

Ten Years Ago

We continue our tour by jumping back to 2005 and the world of copy protection nonsense. Even as we pointed out how DRM simply doesn't work, and only pisses off legitimate customers we found out Princeton was getting ready to use digital textbooks with heavy-handed protections and wondered if companies think buyers are complete idiots — leading to the bigger question of whether the industry understands the concept of legitimate uses of technology at all. It didn't seem likely, with record labels eyeing the concept of release windows for music, universities bailing out of label-promoted forced music subscription services and people striking back at Microsoft for its intellectual property propaganda.

And now, the freakout list: FedEx freaked out about people making furniture with their boxes, politicians freaked out about Usenet, the Associated Press freaked out (or tried to stoke others to freak out) about Daylight Savings Time changes causing Y2K-esque computer problems, one writer freaked out about online anonymity, and an entire high school of students freaked out (presumably) when a computer glitch told them they all got failing grades.

Fifteen Years Ago

Finally we come to the wellspring of many of the copyright debates that still rage to this day: the Napster controversy, with Intel taking a pro-peer-to-peer stance this week while music retailers had mixed opinions and one new piece of software was attempting to blend Napster with instant messaging. Already we were starting to look at ways for artists to make money without relying on intellectual property laws.

We also saw the internet effect with other fields. In the world of health, it turned out the web was a great place for people with Munchausen syndrome (the compulsion to feign illness and disease) while people were beginning to track the overall impact of the internet on healthcare and doctor-patient relationships — plus the huge potential for dangerous quackery. In the world of sex we saw a porn ban struck down as unconstitutional while libraries were struggling with how to handle porn (still called "cyberporn") and married couples were struggling with how to handle cyber-infidelity.

Thirty-Five Years Ago

This isn't something that actually happened this week in 1980, but a New Yorker article this Thursday pointed to the newly-minted 808 Day on August 8th to honor the (not actually exact) birthday of the Roland TR-808 — the most iconic drum machine in the world. The closer look at the history is fascinating, tracking the machine's unlikely adoption by emerging styles of music, and the way its sound was essentially "crowdsourced" as various producers tweaked settings over the years and built off each others' adjustments, eventually producing the familiar sounds that you almost certainly recognize even if you don't know the machine by name.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: August 2nd - 8th

from the the-more-things-change dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we called attention to the Campbell Soup Company's positive 1964 reaction to Andy Warhol's art, and wondered how that same situation might play out today (with the smart bet being "cease and desist"). As it happened, we got plenty of examples of aggressive takedowns and legal attacks that very same week: NAMCO demanded the takedown of a kid's project recreating Pacman in a simple learning language, Pilsbury sent its lawyers after the "My Dough Girl" bakery for its mild similarity to the famous Dough Boy, the FBI claimed Wikipedia can't display its agency logo, the RIAA was going after people for sharing Radiohead's free In Rainbows album, the Beach Boys were making a ridiculous copyright claim over Katy Perry's California Gurls... The list goes on and on. At least one ridiculous threat was squashed by public reaction: George Lucas backed down from his threats against Wicked Lasers for daring to be compared by others to lightsabers.

The blocking game was being played at the highest levels around the world, too: while the UAE and Saudi Arabia were moving to ban Blackberries, Australia was grappling with attempts to make ISPs responsible for stopping piracy, and Indonesia was just going ahead and ordering all ISPs to block all porn within two weeks.

Ten Years Ago

Five years before that, some US Senators were more interested in taxing online porn than banning it — though the bill was clearly, undeniably unconstitutional. Meanwhile, in what's become a long-running tradition, America was using a trade agreement (this time the CAFTA) to export the worst parts of copyright law.

The Sprint-Nextel merger was approved, while Mozilla was in the process of building its corporate subsidiary; newspapers were still figuring out how to do online news and not always building great websites, while Rupert Murdoch was buying up online media companies. Perhaps the most notable of those purchases was MySpace, a site that was already showing cracks in its popularity and usefulness.

Also this week in 2005: the ringtone bubble was bursting, people were getting stung by phishing schemes and bad bank security (while the fear of identity theft was great news for the document destruction business), Cisco was learning a tough lesson about attempting security through obscurity, and apparently the astrophysics community was learning a security lesson of its own.

Fifteen Years Ago

The big topic this week in 2000 was e-commerce. Some were questioning whether or not it had any kind of future at all, though others were saying it's doing just fine. The people getting in on the conversation ranged from a small-town mayor who decided e-commerce is evil all the way to the presidential candidates.

Mobile devices were causing all the usual upsets in places people hadn't previously considered them, whether that's bugging people on camping sites or causing mistrials in murder cases. Internet-enabled cellphones were selling well, though it wasn't clear if this had much to do with the under-utilized internet capabilities, and some wondered if PC-dominance in the US was holding back adoption of truly revolutionary mobile devices. But hey, these were the days when a 6-gigabyte MP3 player was news.

Thirty-Eight Years Ago

A couple months ago, we pointed to the release of the Apple II in 1977. Now, hot on its heels, we've got the August 3rd release that same year of the competing TRS-80 Micro Computer System, another major milestone in the history of personal computing.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: July 26th - August 1st

from the happy-birthday-FBI-and-CIA! dept

Five Years Ago

The last few weeks have been full of copyright ridiculousness, but this week in 2010 features a lot of exploration into copyright's nuances. First, the Copyright Office and Librarian of Congress finally outlined DMCA exemptions for jailbreaking smartphones and some other situations, while rejecting some other proposed exceptions — and sparking Canada to take a fresh look at its own anti-circumvention proposals, essentially admitting it lets the US heavily influence Canadian copyright law. One US court started to put some limitations on the anti-circumvention clause itself by suggesting that simply using circumvention software is not itself a violation; the British High Court ruled that emulating a piece of software is not infringement; and another ruling let venues deduct from their BMI license deals when they directly license music. This was also hot on the heels of ASCAP's boss refusing Larry Lessig's invitation to debate, and bizarrely claiming that said invitation was an attempt to "silence" ASCAP.

A bunch of other interesting questions arose in the form of copyright concerns over Flipbook, the sale of prints made from long-lost (but recently found) Ansel Adams negatives, attempts to assert new copyrights on work by an artist who had been dead for 71 years, and the highly problematic proposal of a new digital transmission right. Meanwhile, the British Library was concerned about copyright hindering research, and gamers everywhere were worrying about copyright stymying the preservation of video game history.

Ten Years Ago

We got a bunch of wonderful tech-panics this week in 2005. Perhaps most notable was the head of the Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force declaring that "cantenna" wi-fi extenders are nefarious and illegal and getting the news media to swallow it. We also saw a panic over "pod slurping" (an unnecessarily specific version of data-theft-by-trespassing), and a seemingly random trio of senators got extremely concerned about porn on file-sharing networks while we awaited a mysterious new anti-porn bill informed by obsolete data. One lawyer in the US was moving on from his freakouts about Grand Theft Auto and unveiling brand new freakouts about The Sims, while Australia was outdoing the US on the former by effectively banning GTA altogether. Beatles producer George Martin was complaining about how easy it is for people to record music these days, and Techdirt itself became the target of a very tiny and personal tech-freakout: one unknown AOL user who was convinced we were spamming him (and apparently unable to find the unsubscribe button in every one of our double-opt-in newsletters). At least it didn't go down the way things do in Russia, where a notorious spammer was found brutally murdered.

Also, long before the world reeled at Pluto's loss of planet status (something I believe is now back up for debate?), astronomers were pointing to a tenth planet even further out.

Fifteen Years Ago

Napster's fate was in a serious state of flux this week in 2000. First, a judge ordered an injunction, shutting it down; the pundits piled on, taking a wide variety of views on this development (some much smarter than others); but, by the end of the week, Napster was granted a stay on the injunction and kept things running; cue an unbelievable volume of discussion from all corners of the internet, with some realizing that the RIAA's war on Napster, even if ultimately "successful", was a perfect example of utterly failed strategic thinking.

As you follow Techdirt's posts right around this time, you'll notice something that we started to notice ourselves: intellectual property was becoming our most popular topic and a tentpole of the blog (even though today it's hard to imagine that ever wasn't the case!)

This week in 2000 we also saw early glimmers of major technological trends, like the fact that the video-game industry would become a massive entertainment sector rivalling Hollywood. But we also saw lots of tech that was just slightly ahead of its time: wireless was heavily hyped and clearly going to matter some day, but lots of key factors were holding back adoption, especially in the US and especially when it came to things like wireless banking. Some tech was clearly moving forward — such as input methods for handheld devices (which were still pretty dismal back then) — while other areas were a bit more stubborn: newspapers didn't seem to be dying nearly as fast as predicted, and 83% of people in the UK said they'd never switch to the internet for news.

107 & 68 Years Ago

July 26th is a double-whammy in the history of America's federal landscape in the areas of law enforcement, security, espionage and more. First, in 1908, it was the day that The Bureau of Investigation (which would become the FBI) was formed. Then, thirty-nine years later, it marks the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, which established the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency, and laid the groundwork for the Department of Defense.

Filed Under: history, look back

Taylor Swift's Streaming Rant Nearly Identical To Garth Brooks' Used CD Rant

from the will-swift's-statement-look-so-silly-years-later? dept

The music business tends to repeat itself. Conversations that seem completely intertwined with new technologies mirror those over earlier developments. Read Adrian John's Piracy, for example, and see how closely the file-sharing debate followed the one about sheet music a century earlier.

Even with that background, the parallels between Taylor Swift's widely discussed comments about Apple Music earlier this year and Garth Brooks' outspoken stance on used CD sales are striking. It's hard to argue with Swift—she is, after all, a shrewd businesswoman, and who knows what the future holds -- but the fact that Brooks' fears proved so unfounded takes some of the winds out of her sails. We may be at the end of history, and today's problems might be totally unlike the ones we faced before, but probably not.

Here's an excerpt of what Swift said about Apple's free trial:

I'm sure you are aware that Apple Music will be offering a free 3 month trial to anyone who signs up for the service. I'm not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months. I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company.

This is not about me. Thankfully I am on my fifth album and can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows. This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success. This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt. This is about the producer who works tirelessly to innovate and create, just like the innovators and creators at Apple are pioneering in their field…but will not get paid for a quarter of a year's worth of plays on his or her songs.

And here's a journalist from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer paraphrasing Brooks' comments at his sold-out arena concert, a few months after announcing he would only be selling his new record at stores that did not carry used CDs.

Brooks said that because no royalties are paid on the sale of used CDs, writers, labels, publishers and artists were being cheated. He said he would only supply chains that sell used CDs with his cassettes, and hinted that he might be working on another "format" to thwart such sales.

Brooks said he does not need any money, but lesser-known artists could suffer if secondhand CD sales take off. If used CD sales were to go into massive retail, he said, it would severely affect people in the recording industry, creating a sales loop that would profit only stores but not the creators, publishers and artists.

CD retailers, meanwhile, have argued that the cost of new CDs is too high for young buyers, and that selling used CDs exposes an artist's music to different audiences.

For both Swift and Brooks -- each among the best-selling acts of their generation -- an emerging marketplace that makes music more accessible -- but less well-compensated -- was worth speaking out about. They both note that it's not about them, but about the principle, and that the unpaid exposure would hurt new musicians. Both point to the middleman's profits as an obvious evil.

To my mind, both artists are mistaken about the value of exposure and discoverability. Tim O'Reilly's observation that obscurity is a greater threat to the emerging artist than piracy remains true; it's also true that obscurity is a greater threat than used record sales, free trials, and most everything else.

But on the other counts, too, Garth Brooks was wrong. Used CD sales didn't undermine the music industry and they didn't keep new artists from finding audiences.

We know this because his plan to sell only through certain CD stores failed, amidst anti-trust investigations into his record label.

Taylor Swift was, at least narrowly, right. Apple Music should've been paying royalties for its free trials all along. But elsewhere, her skepticism about streaming and business models that include "free" might not be well placed. Unfortunately, because music licensing in this space is fundamentally more of a permissions culture than selling plastic discs was, we may never find out.

Reposted from parker higgins dot net

Filed Under: garth books, history, music, predictions, rants, streaming, taylor swift, used cds

This Week In Techdirt History: July 19th - 25th

from the a-type-of-type dept

Five Years Ago

The copyright world was still full of activity this week in 2010. A bizarre lawsuit against Scribd, claiming the company's copyright filters were themselves infringing, was dropped; a Dutch court ruled (again) that the Pirate Bay must block Dutch users, while the Swedish Pirate Party launched the Pirate ISP; US Copyright Group filed more lawsuits in its copyright shakedown campaign, while more porn companies were getting in on the same game and Perfect 10 was trying its own brand of copyright insanity in Canada and RightHaven was ramping up its own now-infamous trolling. The entertainment industry was still trying (and failing) to make DRM not suck, the BSA was using totally made-up stats to try to change African copyright laws, Homeland Security was still aggressively conflating copyright infringement with counterfeiting, and IP Czar Victoria Espinel was playing the "blame China" card.

On the flipside, Deutsche Bank was suggesting it's time to rethink copyright and the Telegraph in the UK was suggesting record labels should give all their music away as free MP3s. RapidShare was vindicated by a German court, while an appeals court in the US was explaining to some documentary filmmakers that you can't copyright facts. And since it's admittedly fun to see copyright abuse fail, we got two entertaining stories when the designer leading the charge for fashion copyright was caught copying designs, and a Canadian copyright lawsuit seeking $27-million in damages ended with an award of $500.

There was a big non-copyright victory too: the Senate passed its bill against "libel tourism", moving towards protecting Americans from a particularly pernicious infringement on their free speech.

Ten Years Ago

Five years before that, this week in 2005 we met the first US piracy czar. Ringtone sellers were freaking out about online "shoplifters" while a fear of piracy was preventing the creation of Harry Potter e-books (and spurring the creation of homebrew versions). The Associated Press was happily misrepresenting BitTorrent while the RIAA and MPAA were trying to get California schools to do their dirty work. Up in Canada, the National Gallery was demonstrating that it did not understand the public domain, while film festival organizers in Edinburgh were adopting Hollywood-style bans on mobile phones. The stupidity and inefficacy of all these things was unimportant: the entertainment industry just believes what it wants to believe.

Apparently in 2005, you could still take a stance against mobile phones as a whole, on the basis that they could be used as terrorism tools — though a quick look at how much teens and young adults loved their phones should have put that to bed as a realistic position. Of course, far more popular was concern over violence and sex in video games, the hype of which led Grand Theft Auto to get bumped up from an M rating to "Adults Only".

Fifteen Years Ago

Silicon Valley was still in a state of flux this week in 2000. People noted that VCs were hit by the dot-com bubble in their own way alongside entrepreneurs, people were making wildly different predictions about the future of Webvan (turns out the dark ones were correct), and Steve Ballmer was suggesting dot-coms are still overvalued and overfunded (with perhaps not entirely pure motives).

In a surprising shift in the 2000-internet landscape, CNET bought ZDNET for $1.6-billion (only $0.2-billion less than CBS would buy it for eight years later), and some wondered how this would impact the journalism. Online advertising, at least, appeared to be working and the wireless web was slowly but surely starting to make some sense. The phenomenon of texting was still fresh, as were sneaky phishing scams.

Also, I'd entirely forgotten about the existence of this machine, but it was this week in 2000 that Apple introduced the G4 Cube. It was an utter flop, and Macworld has a great look at the still-ongoing debate about why.

One-Hundred And Eighty-Six Years Ago

Before there were typewriters, there were "typographers" — the cumbersome forerunners that date all the way back to the early 19th century. Though the details of the first known example — an 1808 Italian machine — are mostly lost, it was on July 23rd, 1829 that the first American "typographer" machine was granted a patent. It was invented by William Austin Burt, and would later come to be retroactively known as a typewriter as that word gained popularity.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: July 12th - 18th

from the moore's-law dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we had lots of followups on stories from last week and other recent developments. We took a closer look at the constitutional analysis of the huge copyright awards in the Tenenbaum case, and saw the first post-Bilski patent appeal reject a software patent. Meanwhile, UK newspapers were responding to Prince's bizarre anti-internet rant, and Larry Lessig was responding to ASCAP's anti-Creative Commons stance by challenging the boss to a debate.

The RIAA was up to all sorts of nonsense, too. Despite the recording industry being in freefall, the association's bosses were getting huge raises; perhaps that's no surprise from an organization with such wacky, self-serving accounting that even major label musicians rarely make money. Then again, some back-of-the-envelope math shows that the RIAA spent $17.6-million on lawsuits to get $391,000 in settlements. As for the voices in the crowd, they were mixed: though the composer who spent last week debating a teenager was sticking to his guns about filesharing, former Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner was admitting that it can't be stopped; and at least one record label head was looking towards a future where artists and labels embark on joint ventures. The WSJ was highlighting the problems of 'permission culture', while more people were beginning to realize that copyright serves middlemen, not creators.

On the ACTA front, EU negotiators were presenting the deal to parliament... in secret to the point that even US intellectual property groups were getting nervous. The negotiators ignored their promises of transparency and made no move towards releasing a draft publicly, but of course that didn't matter because it was immediately leaked, teaching us a lot of interesting details. Brazil, meanwhile, was looking at copyright reform that would impose penalties for hindering fair use or the public domain, while we were looking at the possibility of Bolivia opting out of Berne and WIPO altogether.

Ten Years Ago

Hot on the heels of the Grokster ruling, this week in 2005 the recording industry was already pushing to expand (and abuse) the definition of inducement. It was also pushing the line that piracy is dominated by organized crime syndicates, who apparently still offer better service than the legal Napster foisted upon (and ignored by) university students. Perhaps they'd soon declare Amazon a syndicate too, what with it moving into the on-demand DVD printing world. In the Netherlands, at least, ISPs were saved from having to hand info over to the industry, though in Australia a judge decided that even linking to MP3s is illegal.

In a long-anticipated test of all sorts of internet law, the Internet Archive was sued after material from it was used as evidence in a lawsuit. Of course, Canada appeared to be considering a new law that would effectively ban the Internet Archive (not to mention Google) altogether.

Fifteen Years Ago

Five years before Napster was legal, crappy and being foisted upon students, it was in a nebulous zone between lawsuits. Musicians were complaining about it with a national advertising campaign, while its famed enemy Lars Ulrich was making his case to Congress — but both seemed to be missing the point. At the same time, despite all this and its legal woes, Napster's traffic was up.

Many people would say we still haven't totally figured out cellphone etiquette today, so you can imagine the conversation in 2000. To paraphrase an old saying, "we can put a living capsule into orbit, but we can't figure out how to use cellphones politely?" (Of course, regarding that, we were also realizing that living in space is dangerous in more ways than one.)

Also in 2000: people were grappling with the definition of the (now-chic) geek, searching for yourself online was still considered egotistical, cutting-edge gaming industry technology was being applied in lots of other places, and of course we had the obligatory concerns about internet dependancy.

Forty-Seven Years Ago

In the history of computing, it's impossible to deny the pivotal role that Intel has played. I'd estimate that about 99% of everything I've ever done on any kind of computer has involved an Intel chip, and that's true for a lot of people. Well, it was today in 1968 that Intel Corporation was founded in Mountain View, California.

Filed Under: history, look back

Joseph Goebbels Estate Wins Copyright Suit Over Use Of Nazi's Diary In Biography

from the nazis-i-hate-these-guys dept

Decades later, the Nazis, or at least the estate of a long-dead Nazi, gets a win. In a case we had written about months ago, in which the estate of infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels sued Random House Germany over the inclusion of quotes from Goebbels' diary, claiming copyright infringement, we raised the story up as an example of why fair use rights are necessary for the sake of scholarly work. The idea that the estate of an historical figure could censor, or even put up a toll booth, between history and those that would learn from it has to be about as good of an example of what the originators of copyright didn't want as any. The whole point was to proliferate knowledge and the arts. I'm not sure why a Nazi's diary should even be afforded such protections in any respects, nevermind the estate of the dead Nazi be allowed to control the dissemination of history in this way.

The German courts appear to disagree, however, having found in the favor of the Goebbels estate.

The Munich district court ruled in favor of the estate's claims, although it pointed out that the royalty rights to Goebbles' writings would expire at the end of 2015, 70 years after his death. Random House intends to appeal the case at the German Supreme Court. If it is successful, [Random House's attorney Rainer] Dresen says, other media organizations could be examining the royalties they have been paying the Goebbels estate for their publications. "The court's ruling would declare the estate's position null and void, necessitating refunds," he says.

As Mike noted in the last post, there are so very many arguments against why this ruling shouldn't have occurred. The first is that Germany ought to have something like Fair Use protections, which would have tossed this whole thing out immediately. Does Germany really want the estate's of historical figures to control historical scholarship in this way? Do we really need to trot out the whole "those who don't learn from history are deemed to repeat it" mantra?

And beyond that, it's not even clear that the Goebbel's Estate has the rights it's been selling anyway. When the US seized the original publishing house, it took control of the publishing rights for Mein Kampf, so why not Goebbels' diary as well? On top of that, it turns out Goebbels may have sold his own publishing rights to the Nazi regime, meaning the Bavarian government would now be the ownership party, not his estate. If that's the case, the Bavarian government is playing very, very dumb.

Dresen has pointed to evidence from a journal entry from 1936 when Goebbels sold the rights to Nazi state publishers. He believes this should transfer the copyright to the Bavarian government. "Bavaria is not interested," he told Newsweek, "'Show me the author's contract' they said, knowing the archives were destroyed at the war's end."

Either way, pending the appeal, count this as a loss for historical scholarly work. And from a court in a country that really, really should know better than this.

Filed Under: copyright, diary, germany, history, joseph goebbels, research
Companies: random house

This Week In Techdirt History: July 5th - 11th

from the lost-history dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, the Joel Tenenbaum continued to echo the Jammie Thomas case as a judge declared the damages to be unconstitutionally excessive. Meanwhile, a heated online debate about file sharing broke out between a teenager and a composer, with at least one music/media professor taking the right side. The never-normal Prince was making bold proclamations about the death of music and the internet, and Kara Swisher was taking his side, while we wondered just how many 'significant blows' against file sharing it would take to make any kind of difference.

We were also fresh out of one of the DHS' big domain seizure rounds, and discovering that they wanted to go after The Pirate Bay and Megaupload as well. Snoop Dogg was sued for sampling while the band Men At Work was ordered to pay 5% of all earnings on 'Down Under' to the publisher of an old folk tune — great examples of the sort of creative interference that doesn't happen in the copyright-free world of food. At least 'Hollywood Accounting' was starting to lose in the courts, while the Washington Post was recognizing how crazy Summit Entertainment can be about Twilight IP. A lawsuit was underway that explored the boundaries of Creative Commons, while we explored some nuances of using free as part of a business model — just don't tell that to the financial columnist who lectured a bunch of little kids for running a free lemonade stand.

Ten Years Ago

The iPhone was still two years out, but the rumors that Apple would be entering the phone business in some big, mysterious way had already been long-circulating, and resurfaced this week in 2005. SOPA was still six years out, but the German recording industry was already onto the idea of poisoning the DNS to block file sharing. The age of MMORPGS was already well underway, and we discovered the strange new industry of real sweatshops farming virtual goods. And people were beginning to realize just how little digital memories fade (even if you want them to).

The EU Parliament faced the question of software patents this week in 2005, and threw out the whole idea with a landslide vote. Back home, supporters of the Broadcast Flag were taking a sneakier approach to dealing with legislators and the public, obfuscating the facts like crazy. That kind of constant obfuscation is how you end up with people who completely fail to understand the difference between trademark and copyright.

A lot of people were focused on 'mobile music'... to a fault, in fact. Some were just worried about mobile phone etiquette in the office. Others were tracking the predicted blog bubble and debating the legality of open Wi-Fi. Amidst all this, though, one huge and sad story swept through the world: the London subway bombings, which served as a tragic coming-of-age event for the internet as news media.

Fifteen Years Ago

It was very quiet on Techdirt this week in 2000, but apparently we didn't stop posting entirely for the 4th of July holiday, especially since Techdirt was getting a bunch of new traffic from being voted 'Cool Stop on the Internet'. Meanwhile, this was still a time of great uncertainty in Silicon Valley, but it was starting to sort itself out: the IPO market clearly hadn't died entirely and a bunch of upcoming IPOs were from companies that were actually profitable, even as major dotcom failures were hurting partners like PR firms and law firms. Unfortunately some entrepreneurs were pulling deceptive tricks to catch the eyes of VCs — perhaps lending some credence to UK residents, who trusted old names more than flashy new dotcoms.

Tech adoption in the world was rapid and only accelerating. Mobile phone penetration kept blasting through more and more key threshholds, while we heard some of the first rumblings of the now-ubiquitous "camera phone". On the flipside, a lot of companies were struggling to accept and respond to online customer inquiries, while students were proving nervous about online college applications which felt a little too much like dropping your future into the void.

Seventy-Eight Years Ago

Film buffs, historians and fans of American culture will all feel a pang of sadness at mention of the Fox vault fire, which happened on July 9th, 1937 when canisters of nitrate film spontaneously combusted and destroyed the only copies of virtually every silent film Fox had made up to that date. It was a staggering loss for the history of cinema, and today we have only snippets and low-quality copies of a handful of the lost films — just enough to give us a taste of everything we're missing.

Today, of course, there's absolutely no good reason for something like this to ever happen again: new films, music, books, photographs and other forms of content can be stored digitally in thousands or millions of places, such that nothing short of the total breakdown of society could wipe them out. And yet the sad truth is that we haven't taken full advantage of this capability: all over the world, committed archivists are being blocked in their efforts by copyright laws, DRM and a general ownership mentality. Right now there are old films rotting in vaults — or getting ready to explode in their canisters — while historians line up outside only to be denied entry. So in truth there are only two things that can destroy our cultural heritage in the digital era: the total breakdown of society, and copyright law.

Filed Under: history, look back