Larry Lessig. Source: Robert Scoble on Flickr. License: CC-BY 2.0.

Techdirt reports that Larry Lessig has been sent a DMCA takedown notice for one of his presentations on YouTube by Warner Music.

Lessig has announced that Warner Music issued a DMCA takedown on one of Lessig’s own presentations, in which his use is almost certainly fair use. Lessig, of course, is a lawyer, and a big supporter of fair use, so it’s no surprise that he’s also said he’s going to be fighting this.

The thing that I can’t understand is who at Warner Music would decide this was a good idea? We’ve seen Warner make a number of highly questionable moves over the past six months, but this may be the most incomprehensible. Warner Music may claim it was an accident or that it didn’t mean to send the takedown, but that’s hard to fathom as well. The DMCA rules are pretty clear, that the filer needs to clearly own the content, and previously lawsuits have said they need to take fair use into account. I’m guessing we haven’t heard the end of this yet…

Can we say “epic fail”?

• Techdirt
• Official announcement on Twitter
• Slashdot

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deeplinks Blog reports that the Wikimedia Foundation has demanded that Wikipedia Art, a site commenting on art and Wikipedia, cease using the domain name “wikipediaart.org” on the grounds that the domain name violates the Wikimedia Foundation’s trademarks.

Last February, a pair of artists, working with several collaborators, created a Wikipedia article and invited the general public to add to it, following Wikipedia’s standards of credibility and verifiability. The work was intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. But Wikipedia editors did not take kindly to the project, and it was shut down within fifteen hours for being insufficiently “encyclopaedic.”

Fast forward a couple of months. The artists, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, have created a noncommercial website that documents the project, called Wikipedia Art. The domain name for the project: wikipediaart.org.

Yep, they used the term “wikipedia” in their domain name. “Wikipedia” is a trademark owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. And now the Foundation has demanded that the artists give up the domain name peaceably or it will attempt to take it by (legal) force.

I fail to see any trademark problems here. Trademark law exists to avoid confusion among customers with regard to brands, logos, and names. Based on the EFF’s article, it appears that all this site was doing was using the name to refer to the site itself, not host a faux Wikipedia or deceive Wikipedians into going to Wikipedia Art instead. The site itself even has a disclaimer at the top of the page denying any involvement with Wikipedia. I for one am grateful that the EFF has not overlooked their principles on free speech just because the site in question just happens to be Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation should retract their accusations and apologize immediately (or at the very least provide an explanation for this action).

• Electronic Frontier Foundation

books in a stack - Credit: austinevan on Flickr (CC BY)

AfterDawn.com reports that a Finnish book rental service called “Bookabooka” is being threatened by copyright organization TTVK. TTVK calls the site the “Pirate Bay for textbooks.”

Bookabooka doesn’t host any e-books on its site, but instead allows students to rent their textbooks to their peers. Renting is conducted via traditional “snailmail” (i.e. postal service) and it is mandatory that the textbooks are originals (not xeroxed copies). Bookabooka acts only as an intermediate, connecting the students together and doesn’t handle the shipping or returns of the textbooks.

Despite these “small” differences between TPB and Bookabooka, The Finnish book publishers’ association (Suomen Kustannusyhdistys) is convinced that Bookabooka is breaking the copyright legislation and threatening their business. Annual school textbook sales in Finland were worth more than €100M in year 2007.

This is just outrageous. I don’t believe this is even within the scope of copyright law. Is this really any different than what Craigslist allows people to do? The article says that Bookabooka is not responding to the threats. Good for them. We need more services like this, not less.

• AfterDawn.com
• Slashdot

Blind Justice - Credit: Dan Strange on Flickr (CC BY)

It has been discovered that the judge in The Pirate Bay trial has links to the entertainment industry.  A retrial is being sought.

Less than a week after the conclusion of The Pirate Bay trial, a new controversy has surfaced over the judge’s possible conflict of interests. It turns out that Judge Tomas Norström—the judge who found The Pirate Bay defendants guilty and slapped them with jail time—is currently a member of the Swedish Copyright Association, an organization that works against piracy along with a number of entertainment industry members. As a result, lawyers for the defendants have made it clear that they will push for a retrial.

The Swedish media dug up information this week revealing that Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association along with Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted—individuals who represented the recording industry in The Pirate Bay trial. Additionally, Norström also sits on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, an advocacy group that pushes stricter copyright laws.

And these aren’t just accusations. Norström acknowledged to Sveriges Radio, as reported by The Local, that the findings are true; he just thought that it wouldn’t be a problem. “My view has been that these activities do not constitute a conflict of interest,” Norström said.

I’m not really sure this is a problem either.  If there’s no money involved here, I guess it’s not.  You can’t accuse a judge of bias because he agrees with the law, and wants it to be stricter.

• Ars Technica

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope Wallpaper - Credit: flakeparadigm on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope, has been released.

The latest release of Ubuntu brings the best open source technologies together on one platform, with the benefit of free updates for 18 months. Constant improvements, feature additions and extended machine and network support explain why Ubuntu wins more converts with every release. This tour will help you discover, like millions of users worldwide, why Ubuntu Desktop Edition 9.04 is the desktop operating system for you.

Nothing new here.

• Ubuntu

Cory Doctorow recently appeared before book publishers at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference to explain to leaders of the publishing industry why DRM on digital books is bad for customers, bad for authors, and bad for business.

… Customers especially don’t like it when they wake up one day and find that their legally purchased products will no longer read — as Fictionwise customers discovered when DRM provider Overdrive ended its licensing deal with Fictionwise…

But the message the publishers really needed to hear was one Cory delivered loud and clear: DRM is not about stopping piracy, it’s about locking customers and businesses into a proprietary platform.

The music industry has already gone down this (walled) garden path, and discovered too late that DRM did nothing to stop or even slow piracy — but it did manage to alienate customers and give Apple an enormous amount of leverage over their businesses. It’s not too late for the publishing industry to avoid this deadly mistake….

Source: EFF

Lanzada | Galicia - España - Credit: Paulo Brandão on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

Oracle and Sun have announced that Oracle will acquire Sun for $9.50 per share in cash.

“This is a fantastic day for Sun’s customers, developers, partners and employees across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace,” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, “From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun’s SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we’ll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace.”

So, who wants to make bets on when all the stuff Sun freed will be proprietary again?  All the projects I have to worry about now…Java, MySQL, OpenOffice…

• Sun
• Oracle
• Slashdot

Creative Commons NonCommercial Icon. Source: Creative Commons and Wikimedia Commons. License: CC-BY 3.0

Creative Commons is starting up a second survey on the NonCommercial provision of their licenses, this one aiming at non-authors.

During the first phase of the study, which took place last fall, we focused on talking with and surveying creators, using a questionnaire that was fielded to a sample of US-based content creators, and also made available (in an expanded version) to anyone interested. See 1, 2, 3.

Now we want to hear about noncommercial use from the user’s perspective — recognizing of course that the creator/user distinction is itself worthy of study! Whether you consider yourself a member of the Creative Commons community, or are interested more generally in copyright, we hope you will respond. While answering all the questions can take a while, particularly if you have a lot to say, many people who participated last time found it an interesting and useful experience.

Even though the provision is still not a free one, I hope this will clarify a few things about it. Note that the survey takes a while to complete, so set aside some time before starting.

• Creative Commons
• NonCommercial Survey

Demonstanter - Credit: komponisto on Flickr (CC BY)

After the verdict in the The Pirate Bay trial, Pirate Party membership has increased from 15,000 to 18,000 within hours.

“We’ve surpassed another party in parliament, making us the 5th largest in member count, and our youth section is about to take the number 1 position,” Swedish Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak in a comment.

Christian Engström, vice-chairman of the Swedish Pirate Party said in a comment that the verdict is their ticket into the European Parliament. For the upcoming European election, the Pirate Party requires 100,000 Swedish votes to get a seat, a goal that is within reach after today.

They seem a little optimistic, but I guess this is good news.  How do things like this work?  I’d love to support a party that wants to reform copyright, but I doubt that would ever outweigh my opinions on other political issues that they might take a stance on.

• TorrentFreak

East Wing - Credit: thadman on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

In the landmark trial of TPB, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Carl Lundström will receive 1 year in jail and a fine of $905,000 each.

The court said that the four defendants worked as a team, were aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy and assisted the infringements. It categorized the infringements as ’severe’. The judge said that the users of The Pirate Bay committed the first offense by sharing files and the four assisted this

…

The judge also stated that the usage of BitTorrent at The Pirate Bay is illegal. Rest assured, other torrent sites hosted in Sweden will be keeping a close eye on developments.

Bummer man.  By this argument, is using the internet illegal too?

• TorrentFreak
• The Pirate Bay
• Ars Technica