Category Archives: copyright

Parliament to screw up music copyright?

Thanks to Harry Metcalfe for alerting Geeklawyer to the news, greeted with weary ennui, that Parliament is thinking of yielding to the special interest groups and uber rich lobbying power of the music cartel. Despite Gower saying that extending the mechanical copyright term from 50 to 70 years was unjustified on economic grounds the […]

Torvalds ‘pleased’ with the GPL 3 draft

News.com has done an interview with Linus Torvalds in which he is said to be pleased with the new GPL version 3 draft. Keeping Linus happy is a good thing since he controls the largest and most important Free/Open Source software project around: the Linux kernel.
Having read the interview it looks more like he is […]

Da Vinci - Da Bomb

In what is the least unexpected decision of the year the Court of appeal dismissed the appeal- Dan Brown didn’t infringe copyright. Details to follow.
IPKat points to the words of Mummery LJ and what is a useful kick in the pants to litigators: the assessment needs to be an holistic one. Looking at isolated […]

DRM free music?

DRM free music is a tantalising prospect. Previously this idea was no more than a wet dream to techno-liberals but one which, given the entrenched attitudes impoverished imaginations and mindset of monopolists, was only ever an idle fantasy in the real world.

Gower(s) IP review

The Gower report on IP struck Geeklawyer as a very balanced and intellectually rigourous review. He was clearly at pains to consider all sides to the increasingly political nature of IP rights.

Copyright talk by Professor Jonathan Zittrain

Professor Zit (yes, Geeklawyer is in sniggering schoolboy mode) is a renowned Harvard cyberlaw scholar currently a Professorial Fellow at Keeble Oxford. He recently gave the keynote speech at the Open Rights Groups “Release the Music‘ event.
A fascinating talk well worth listening to, with some interesting insights and analogies.
I’ve mirrored the ogg file of the […]

Copyright extension

Geeklawyer is somewhat concerned that the current news reports that Sir ‘colostomy bag’ Cliff may not get his pension fund are a tad premature.

remixing

Geeklawyer, hero of the digital underground and legend of the grotesquely exaggerated fee note, would not knowingly link to a copyright infringement. So much is obvious from a cursory assessment of his integrity. However Geeklawyer is a 60’s and 70’s nostalgia fan for whom one film stands out: Kubricks “Clockwork Orange” a glorious and artistic […]

Deranged ‘creatives’ shout in the street at passers by…

The British Council, whose remit is promoting British culture abroad, has produced a report musing about the Creative Commons license scheme. For those who are not IP geeks this is a licence which creates a counter-intuitive permissive distribution and rights framework. All very subversive and counter, errr, culture.

The world is saved: free music now available

Geeklawyer stripped and ran naked through the streets of his city in celebration when the BBC began broadcasting the news today that Universal was to make music available for free.