copyfight – Page 2

Astronaut Chris Hadfield performs David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on the ISS

Astronaut Chris Hadfield — the tweeting , tumbling Canadian astronaut who’s a one-dude astro-ambassador from the space programme to the Internet — has produced and released a video of his own performance of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (AKA the “Major Tom song”) on the ISS. He adapts the lyrics a bit to his own situation — and changes out the whole dying-in-space chorous — but is otherwise pretty faithful. From the credits, it appears that David Bowie gave permission for this, though that’s not entirely clear. I would think that not even a major record label would be hamfisted and cack-handed enough to send a takedown notice over this one (it’s been suggested for Boing Boing more than any other link in my memory), but I’m prepared to be surprised. Space Oddity

Sherlock Holmes copyrights are an insane hairball

Robbo sez, “The Independent Filmmaker Project has a great post examining the nonsense which continues to surround Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most loved character, Sherlock Holmes (now 125 years old) , and whether he resides not just at 221B Baker Street – but also in the public domain.” According to the lawsuit all the Sherlock Holmes stories entered the public domain under the laws of the United Kingdom and Canada in 1980. However, with the passage of the U. S. Copyright Act of 1976 the author of a work that had passed into the public domain in the United States, or his heirs, were entitled to restore the work to copyright in the United States under certain conditions. In 1981, Dame Jean Conan Doyle, the last surviving child of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, applied for registration of the copyright to “The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes,” a collection of stories. This work is comprised of 12 stories that were first published in various periodicals between 1921 and 1927, and the collection was first published as a book in the United States in 1927. The complaint asserts that the Doyle estate sent a letter to Pegasus Books threatening to prevent publication of “In the Company of Sherlock Holmes” unless it was paid a license fee. Kingler’s prior publisher, Random House, had reluctantly paid $5,000 fee for an earlier Klinger collection he edited titled “A Study in Sherlock,” even though Klinger believed he was not legally required to do so. The suit asks the court to make a declaratory judgment, establishing that the basic “Sherlock Holmes story elements” are in the public domain under U.S copyright law. Klinger claims that the stories in his new collection avoided drawing on copyrighted elements introduced in any of the Holmes stories published after January 1, 1923. In a 2004 decision, a U.S District court judge Naomi Reice Buchwald determined that of Doyle’s 60 Sherlock Holmes stories, nine might still be under copyright.[2]Although the character of Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, various storylines, dialogue and characters that first appeared in these nine stories could be protected under U.S. copyright law. A copyright for a derivative work based on a prior work does not create copyright protection retroactively for the underlying work but can protect new material that has been added. Attentive readers will remember last month’s post about the scholar who is suing the Holmes estate over this question. Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Public Domain [Mark Litwak/IFP] ( Thanks, Robbo ! )

Fix the DMCA! Repeal anti-circumvention and truly own your devices

Austin sez, “Last year the Librarian of Congress made it illegal to unlock your cell phone by changing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). This can lead to exorbitant costs to consumers traveling internationally and, perhaps more importantly, it is restricting our freedom in unfair ways. It also has odd implications like forcing the blind to file for exemption every three years in order to use third-party screen readers. After 100,000 people signed a petition on this issue, the White House responded in support of making these laws more fair. Sina Khanifar, who created that petition with support from Y-Combinator, Reddit, Mozilla Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and more has launched a website to educate the public on the issue and give them the tools to notify their representatives directly with their thoughts on the issue.” Fix the DMCA

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Fix the DMCA! Repeal anti-circumvention and truly own your devices

FBI employees love the BitTorrent

TorrentFreak used the ScanEye BitTorrent monitoring service to check what was being downloaded by IP addresses associated with the FBI. There’s a lot: As can be seen above there is a particular interest in movies and TV-show downloads at the FBI’s largest division. Some of the titles are relevant to the intelligence community such as “Homeland”, “The Girl Who played With Fire”, “The Good Wife” and “Dexter”. Other titles, including the Aussie soap opera Home and Away, are more general entertainment. The big question is of course why these FBI IP-addresses are showing up in BitTorrent swarms. The most likely explanation is that employees were downloading these videos for personal entertainment. This wouldn’t be much of a surprise really, as we’ve seen this before at congressional offices the Department of Justice, national parliaments, record labels and movie studios. FBI Employees Download Pirated Movies and TV-Shows [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]

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FBI employees love the BitTorrent

Amoeba Records launches downloadable music store for digitized rarities

Amoeba Records — the amazing California music superstore — has relaunched Amoeba.com , with a huge selection of downloadable music rarities, digitized from old vinyl. In some cases, the store has tracked down rightsholders for these out-of-print rarities, and cleared the music for sale for the first time; in others, it’s escrowing the sales funds for payment to rightsholders when and if they present themselves. “We’ve been digitizing a lot,” says Jim Henderson, who owns Amoeba along with partners Marc Weinstein, Karen Pearson and Dave Prinz. “What you see now is the lost-between-the-cracks, underappreciated, undervalued (music) from dead labels, (obscure) artists, stuff that we really stand behind. It’s mostly in the rock genre, with a lot of jazz, a lot of blues, some country, some spoken word. There are some oddities for sure.” Many of the LPs have been getting remastering upgrades from the original vinyl and shellac sources. Currently, there are only about 1,000 titles for sale, but Amoeba is adding 10 or 15 more every day. Some Vinyl Vaults artists are readily familiar, and in some cases Amoeba’s source material emanates from its owners’ own collections. Some of Prinz’s rare Louis Armstrong 78s were digitized and are being sold as downloads, while Weinstein’s prized collection of 144 Sun Ra albums has also been ripped. Some Vinyl Vaults artists have proven so elusive that even diligent detective work could not track them down. Henderson points to an unknown ’70s country artist known only as C.J., whose album “My Lady’s Eyes” is for sale on the site. “We couldn’t find C.J.; we couldn’t find a label that put the record out,” Henderson says. “But it’s a compelling piece, (so) we said, ‘This should be up.’ ” Weinstein adds that if a sale is made, the money goes into an escrow account. “If (someone says), ‘That’s mine,’ well, OK, we can either take it down or we’ll sell it, and you’ve got this nice (digital) master. We’ll sell it, we’ll promote it; let’s sign a contract.” Music retail giant puts tunes online [Variety/Christopher Morris] Amoeba.com ( Thanks, Fipi Lele! )

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Amoeba Records launches downloadable music store for digitized rarities

Tracking Oscar screener piracy, the 2013 edition

Since 2003, Waxy.org ‘s Andy Baio has been documenting evidence of pirated/leaked Oscars screeners— in other words, copies of nominated films sent to Academy Awards voters which then make their way on to filesharing networks. The 2013 edition of his spreadsheet is out . He’ll post analysis tomorrow. “Most shocking find so far,” he tweets , “The Les Misérables screener hasn’t leaked online yet. Everyone knows pirates love musicals!”

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Tracking Oscar screener piracy, the 2013 edition

HOWTO convert an MP3 to a playable, 3D printed record

Instructables user Aandaghassaei has posted a HOWTO for making a 3D printed record that plays on a regular turntable. Her method converts any digital audio file to grooves ready to print. It’s a bit fuzzy, but still rather exciting! I’m waiting for the way when taking a snapshot of a vinyl disc can be the first step toward deriving its audio content, converting that back to a shapefile, and printing out a high-fidelity duplicate. In this Instructable, I’ll demonstrate how I developed a workflow that can convert any audio file, of virtually any format, into a 3D model of a record. This is far too complex a task to perform with traditional drafting-style CAD techniques, so I wrote an program to do this conversion automatically. It works by importing raw audio data, performing some calculations to generate the geometry of a record, and eventually exporting this geometry straight to the STL file format (used by all 3D printers). Most of the heavy lifting is done by Processing, an open source environment that’s often used for coding interactive graphics applications. To get Processing to export to STL, I used the ModelBuilder Library written by Marius Watz (if you are into Arduino/Processing and 3D printing I highly recommend checking this out, it works great). I’ve uploaded some of my complete record models to the 123D gallery as well as the Pirate Bay. Check Step 6 for a complete listing of what’s there and what I plan on posting. Alternatively, you can go to Step 7 to download my code and learn how to make your own printable records from any audio file you like. 3D Printed Record

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HOWTO convert an MP3 to a playable, 3D printed record

Bunnie Huang is building a laptop

Virtuoso hardware hacker Bunnie Huang is building an open hardware laptop. Want. We started the design in June, and last week I got my first prototype motherboards, hot off the SMT line. It’s booting linux, and I’m currently grinding through the validation of all the sub-components. I thought I’d share the design progress with my readers. Of course, a feature of a build-it-yourself laptop is that all the design documentation is open, so others of sufficient skill and resources can also build it. The hardware and its sub-components are picked so as to make this the most practically open hardware laptop I could create using state of the art technology. You can download, without NDA, the datasheets for all the components, and key peripheral options are available so it’s possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque blobs. Building my Own Laptop

Copyright troll tries to use TorrentFreak to intimidate victims, TorrentFreak changes the site to empower them to resist trolling

Prena Law, a notorious porno copyright troll sent out a blackmail letter to victims that included the URL of a TorrentFreak article describing one of the rare cases in which someone stood up to a troll and lost. TorrentFreak felt that this was misleading, and resented being used as part of a sleazy scheme, so they replaced the article with a page explaining how copyright trolls work, and how to defend yourself against them. Porno copyright trolls are companies that sends out legal threats to people, claiming they were downloading porn with embarrassing titles and demanding money not to permanently associate their names with porn by naming them in lawsuits. Thousands and thousands of people have been victimized by them. We redirected the URL referenced by Prenda to a page with information about these mass-BitTorrent lawsuits. So, instead of being scared by an article about a $1.5 million judgment, Internet bill payers can inform themselves about the steps they can take to respond to the settlement letter. The page in question explains that increasingly judges are condemning the practices of copyright trolls, and that many mass lawsuits have been thrown out. Just recently a judge designated Prenda’s ways as a “bad faith effort,” and dismissed one of their mass-BitTorrent lawsuits. In addition to some much-needed balance we also included links to attorneys who are familiar with these lawsuits, plus links to other useful resources. Hopefully, this will enable a few of the victims to respond properly and resolve the matter without having to pay up. TorrentFreak Trolls a Copyright Troll

House Republicans release watershed copyright reform paper

Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix it (PDF) is a position paper just released by House Republicans, advocating for a raft of eminently sensible reforms to copyright law, including expanding and clarifying fair use; reaffirming that copyright’s purpose is to serve the public interest (not to enrich investors); to limit statutory damages for copyright infringement; to punish false copyright claims; and to limit copyright terms. This is pretty close to the full raft of reforms that progressive types on both sides of the US political spectrum have been pushing for. It’ll be interesting to see whether the Dems (who have a much closer relationship to Hollywood and rely on it for funding) are able to muster any support for this. Mike Masnick’s got good analysis of this on TechDirt, and notes that this is a huge shift from the House that, 10 months ago, was ready to pass SOPA. This document really is a watershed moment. Even if it does not lead to any actual legislation, just the fact that some in Congress are discussing how copyright has gone way too far and even looking at suggestions that focus on what benefits the public the most is a huge step forward from what we’ve come to expect. In many ways, this is the next logical step after the completion of the SOPA fight. Rather than just fighting bad policy, it’s time for Congress to recognize that existing copyright law is bad policy and now is the time to fix it. It comes as a surprise, but kudos to the Republican Study Committee — and specifically Derek Khanna, the policy staffer who wrote the document — for stepping up and saying what needed to be said, but which too many in Congress had been afraid to say for fear of how the entertainment industry lobbyists would react. House Republicans: Copyright Law Destroys Markets; It’s Time For Real Reform

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House Republicans release watershed copyright reform paper

Ken May

Tag: copyfight