6 comments

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  dmarti

  11 months ago

  Don't forget the Elcomsoft case -- the only time that a US Attorney tried to put a case of circumvention without infringement in front of a jury, the result was a jury nullification. It isn't a generational thing. Copyright expansion goes beyond most people's copynorms, and needs to back off.
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  William Patry

  11 months ago

  Tim, I am happy you are more optimistic than I. I don't have enough data to know whether your generational theory works. I have always thought many younger people are more pessimistic than I. I would add to the mix case law, which has been mixed. Grokster, for example, was a terrible decision regardless of how one feels about the result. The Bridgeport sampling case that held there is no de minimis threshold for infringement of sound recordings is a disaster. The MAI v. Peak line of cases on RAM copying have been extremely harmful. The Ninth Circuit's decisions on divisibility, now joined by the Second Circuit are absurd. At the same time the CoStar decision and the requirement of a volitional act has been positive as have the caching and indexing cases, so I wouldn't say the case law has been as bad as the legislative record. But the globalization of the worst features of U.S. law through trade agreements should also concern us deeply.
  
  In any event, we certainly need people who are optimistic now more than ever, and I am thrilled you are one of them.
  Bill
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  Joseph Weisenthal

  11 months ago

  The divergence you cite between law and actual behavior is right on. When I focus on all the idiotic laws that get passed in all kinds of areas I get really depressed. If the world really looked the way politicians would like to mold it, I'd want to plug myself into a morphine drip and never take it out.
  
  I get a lot more optimistic on all kinds of things when I see how the world actually is.
  
  Even with that though, the morphine drip sounds nice sometimes.
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  eee_eff

  11 months ago

  But the globalization of the worst features of U.S. law through trade agreements should also concern us deeply.
  
  Yes, this sets a really bad precedent, and has helped build up resentment against the US (as if there weren't already enough reasons)
  
  I've seen this first hand in my trips to Poland each year since 1998. Poland is still one of the most pro-US countries in the world, but, leaving aside the foreign policy disasters of the previous 8 years or so, I observed that there is an awareness of how the US has tried to strong arm their IP rules on other countries, and it was the Polish agricultural rep. who had helped derail software patent directive in the EU, and I was (pleasantly) surprised how popular that action was, and how many in the younger computer-saavy generation knew about that issue.
  
  As a Architect, I aam lucky to work in a field that up until now has been relatively unbothered by the silly eccesses of patent and copyright laws, but I am concerned that condition may be temporary, seeing what's been going on in other fields.
  
  I suspect the reason architecture is (relatively) unaffected by this is that much of what an Architect does can't just be copied for another project.
  
  Would anyone know of a blog focusing on IP issues related to architecture?
  
  (Adam/Jerry/Jim: Here's your chance; find me a good architecture IP blog and I might not stick around here here, asking you all sorts of question and making uncomfortable ppoints...)
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  eee_eff

  11 months ago

  Oh, and if we are talking about bad decisions, the Blizzard V Bnet D has got to be up there:
  
  http://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd
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  Steve R.

  11 months ago

  See the Ubersoft cartoon. While not specifically on copyright, it does make a poignant observation that we have entered an era were any activity (such as a perceived copyright infringement) that frustrates the corporate revenue stream is becoming ever more criminalized.
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