Japan makes online music storage illegal!

You read it right, in Japan you can't store music online! This includes private personal networks, file sharing apps, servers??? In a day where more and more of our personal data is going on the web, are we still going to have to carry around hard drives full of our purchased intellectual property?

Ohio State Caves to RIAA

In a move typical of the Ohio state administration, they are now completely complying with the RIAA. There's not really a case where the university could be sued, much like an ISP, but the administrators seem oblivious to that.

Lawyer says: Microsoft, BRING IT!

This man is not impressed by Microsoft's attempts to enforce 235 patents, so he's starting a movement of Linux users saying "You think we're breaking your patent? Then sue us." This is quite a move from the old "hope the FBI doesn't raid my mom's house" Napster cases of yesteryear. Will Microsoft bite? Or are they just pounding their chests to scare away the guppies?

The Case for Intellectual Property

The New York Times is running a story on Intellectual Property must be treated as preciously as physical property.

Pirate Bay=Going for It

The world's most popular BitTorrent tracker Pirate Bay announced they will be opening a YouTube-like site, but with "no censorship" (read: no copyright enforcement). Pirate Bay has flaunted its "international immunity" in the past, but now we're going to see just how far a website can go by residing in a liberal nation.

International Immunity

No matter how hard the U.S. enforces copyright or threatens sanctions, some countries still facilitate piracy, and it ain't going away fast.

Latest DRM cracked a week before its release

In a move proving the futility of Digital Rights Management, the new HD DVD anti-piracy measures are well behind the mouse of piracy.

Gonzalez: Don't even Try.

Alberto Gonzalez is on some kind of intellectual property spree this week. He's now proposing The Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007. If passed, the 1 to 10 years for copyright infringement would apply to people attempting to download copyrighted material, because, basically, it's the thought that counts.

You'd have thought Alberto Gonzalez was a bigger fan of stealing information, after all he's been accused of illegal wiretapping private residences, so he knows how intolerable it is to be left in the dark.

Alberto Gonzales=RIAA Puppet

Alberto Gonzales has lengthened prison sentences for copyright violators. As he says, "These crimes, as we all know, also have a direct impact on our economy, costing victims millions of dollars." Fortunately, the "victims" are very few corporations. And as we've seen in this blog, even they aren't actually losing that much. So the law gets harder while the software gets looser. Where will this crazy train end?!

Microsoft wants everyone's money!

Doesn't sound like news by the headline, but they're serious! In a major move against Free OSS (FOSS), a lot of open-source software developers have used not code, but 235 patented features of Microsoft products. In fact, Microsoft hopes to get money from both distributors and USERS of FOSS.

Disney busts Donald Lookalike

Through pure coersion, Disney has managed to make Mexican soft drink manufacturer Pascual Boing to change its logo. Maybe this kind of legal threat scares people in Mexico, but if Disney acted on this, just imagine how angry they are about the Disneyland knock off!

Chinese Generic... Disneyland???

Yup, China has walked the line of copyright infringement and opened a state-owned park that I can only describe as "almost Disneyland." Let's take a look:

That castle is very close to Disneyland's. But it isn't...

Hey that almost looks like Donald and Minnie... nahhh...

So where are the copyright lawyers on this one? How close is too close? I think this is an excellent example of "The lines only exist in your mind, once the culture is publicly known, it's publicly owned, so get over it." The nearly-identical nature of the park is so absurd it's a wonderful critique of how modern copyright policy runs counter to nature.

Teachers Dislike Having Tables Turned

That's really too bad, but a New South Wales Secondary School wants to shut down Rate My Teachers.com for its defamatory content. That's rough, I think failing students would fire teachers who give them bad grades too, for defaming them in the face of their parents, but unfortunately we all have voices.

The college equivealent of the site is Rate my Professors.com, and it's really great. I try to be as honest as possible. It really turns teaching into the competetive field that it should be, by letting students select the most enriching college experience. I don't know how many teacher options High School students get, but if it makes teachers squeamish, they have two options:

1) Teach Better
2) Shut down the site

So, in the spirit of any bureaucratic sloth, these teachers are showing us all just how pathetic humans can be.

U.S. Coerses Nations into Art Burning

In a move reminiscent of Farenheit 451 or the Nazi regime,

The U.S. has declared a list of 12 nations it intends to "watch" for their unsatisfactory anti-piracy measures. If nations do not comply with the U.S. standards of intellectual property, we just might lay sanctions on them.

I mean, I think it's great we want people to get credit. But now we're burning culture. There's one side, giving compensation to the artist, but what this represents is limiting the cultural enrichment of the impoverished person who can't afford every album ever made. CDs hold many books worth of data, so seeing a pile of CDs prepared for burning should set off all sorts of humanist alarms. If these policies succeed, we're looking at an intellectual dark age. Fortunately I think it's crazy to believe these policies will work.

Cnet: "Die, Banner Ads!"

Cnet, a site that makes its revenue off banner ads, has proclaimed the new service "We7.com" is doomed because it offers free, DRM-free music at the price of an audio ad embedded on every track. At first I thought it was just banner ads, but in fact every song has an ad, and a "don't steal" tag. It's pretty annoying.

However, if there's a clever coder out there who wants to make a script that automatically trims the ads out, I'd love to have it. The files are DRM-free, after all.

Microsoft Going Semi-Open-Source

As if responding to my last post, Microsoft announced it will partially open source it's new "Silverlight" piece of software. Of course, it's still only partially open, and they're still charging people money to use it. So is it really open source?