blog.shrub

they suggest reform:

A first, useful step would be a drastic reduction of copyright back to its original terms—14 years, renewable once.

The US supreme court said your city can give your land to developers. In her scathing dissent, O’Connor wrote:

Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.

AP: “She was joined in her opinion by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, as well as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.”

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 11 (b):

By presenting to the court (whether by signing, filing, submitting, or later advocating) a pleading, written motion, or other paper, an attorney or unrepresented party is certifying that to the best of the person’s knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances,–

1. it is not being presented for any improper purpose, such as to harass or to cause unnecessary delay or needless increase in the cost of litigation;
2. the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions therein are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for the extension, modification, or reversal of existing law or the establishment of new law;
3. the allegations and other factual contentions have evidentiary support or, if specifically so identified, are likely to have evidentiary support after a reasonable opportunity for further investigation or discovery; and
4. the denials of factual contentions are warranted on the evidence or, if specifically so identified, are reasonably based on a lack of information or belief.

Wikipedia has good coverage of this and related topics.

Everyone’s favourite Canadian law professor Michael Geist calls attention to the recent Federal Court of Appeal decision on file sharing.

Graham Henderson of the CRIA says:

The judge has determined that uploading, downloading, it’s illegal.

But, wait! It’s not true:

Actually, the court did no such thing. Concluding its copyright discussion at paragraph 54, the court says:

“I make no such findings here and wish to make it clear that if this case proceeds further, it should be done on the basis that no findings to date on the issue of infringement have been made.”

Jorge Cortell, who had taught at Polytechnic University of Valencia UPV in Spain for five years was forced to resign after the Dean caved in to pressure from the Spanish Recording Industry Association and the MPAA.

Cary Sherman weasled an op-ed out of the Post-Gazette where he spread the usual BS. CMU Professfor of Computer Science and art Roger Dannenberg told the RIAA where to go:

Mr. Sherman, you say that stealing “is not OK,” and yet I have musician friends who cannot get RIAA members to pay them the royalties they are due. While you are asking universities to address your problems, please don’t forget that you too can be a “powerful leader in curbing theft of copyright materials on campus.” If you’ll stop your members from stealing from my friends, and then study some history, maybe I can help you.

Michael Weiss, CEO of Morpheus:

A victory for StreamCast will ensure that Americans won’t have to live in a society where every file is fingerprinted, every user is tagged, every search is monitored and every result is filtered.

The Economist, fresh off their SemaCode scoop, rips in to the music industry’s legal “strategy”:

But even if the entertainment business manages to coax more users into paying for legal downloads and succeeds in court against Grokster and StreamCast, its problems are unlikely to go away. True, a Supreme Court ruling in the industry’s favour would put paid to other P2P services. But it is not clear that curbing illegal downloading will translate into extra sales for the music business. A rush into legal downloading would hardly be good for sales of CDs: some cannibalisation is inevitable. And perhaps the decline in global sales is indicative of a far greater problem for the music industry—consumers simply think that many of its products are just not worth paying for.

Salon notes how the automakers have backed themselves in to a corner:

With this agreement, the automakers unilaterally disarm from their long-standing position that they cannot make clean cars. In fact, they have sued to overturn the California Clean Car Law which is the basis for Canada’s action. The auto companies are now in the awkward position of telling a judge that they cannot make the same cars in California that they will make in Canada.