News today that Paramount and CBS -- the owners of Star Trek -- are suing the makers of Axanar, an independent Star Trek film. This is no ordinary fan film. Instead, it is a productiont that has received more than $1 million in crowdfunding. Moreover, it is not intended for commercial release. It will be …
Information Does not Want to be Free by Cory Doctorow
Science fiction writer and blogger, Cory Doctorow has written a business oriented, short book entitled Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free. Of course, it shares a theme with my own Information Wants to be Shared although my book is written in a more positive vein. My book is longer, sells for less and will no doubt both sell …
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Monkey selfies and copyright
OK, as it is Friday afternoon, it is time to examine the monkey in the room: who owns copyright when some narcissistic non-human takes a selfie with a human's camera? According to legal opinion, the answer is: not the human. What that means, is that as only humans can own copyright -- well, and there …
Behavioural artists and piracy
Piracy is everywhere but in music artists' supply. That's the strong impression I get from the academic literature on the subject. There is evidence that piracy has reduced straight-up music sales revenue but overall it is unclear whether digitisation has impacted adversely on artist returns (because they make up losses with concert revenue and the …
Income-contingent IP enforcement: Paying for your right to party
We all know the issue with copyright and patent enforcement whereby some creative upstart uses some IP without permission only to be slapped down by the IP rights holder. And we all know that economics does not help us out much here to sort out what to do beyond: if you could just work out …
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"Free to air" really means that broadcasters have no case
The US Supreme Court is currently hearing a fascinating copyright case. It has been brought be Aereo, a company that streams 'free to air' or broadcast television over the internet to people's computers. It costs for $8 a month for them for which the broadcasters receive -- dum dum dah -- nothing. Well, except the …
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New paper on Remix Rights
When Ronald Coase passed away last year, it occurred to me that no one had really applied a Coasian framework to the characterisation of copyright regimes. I had been interested in these since reading Larry Lessig's book, Remix. Remixing is where users take original content (such as the Harlem Shake) and put it in new forms. …
An important development for fair use on YouTube
There has been much discussion regarding YouTube's approaches to copyright protection. In many respects, what YouTube is doing is providing a set of institutions designed at reducing the transactions costs associated with managing copyright. At its best, YouTube allows copyright owners to assert ownership when their work or part of their work is used by …
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Once there was a tree … Shel Silverstein's estate and publishers
... and this time the tree wasn't happy. There was this boy, San Diego State University professor Joseph Thomas, who wanted to use some branches of the tree to build a biography of Shel Silverstein. Now even though in this case, the tree could still live on happily with all of its branches and all …
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Digitopoly 