Mix: AAPL, Canada, Jacuzzi, EMI, Unlock:

The Copyright Board of Canada has approved a new tax on music downloads from iTunes and other online retailers. Retroactive to 1996, the tax means Apple will have to pay 3.1 cents for each music file they sell, or 1.5 cents per track for complete albums, to SOCAN (the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada).

The whole idea of a retro-active tax seems particularly wrong. Not only can the government charge you a tax on things you’re doing, but they can charge you for things you’d done in the past?

Rethink: Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional:

But where does this leave individual developers/firms/companies who’ve used the logo to promote Rails services or Rails-based products? If the logo is a trademark (and it is), then shouldn’t everyone who’s used it in vain stop using it? I should think so, but it would be nice if there were some kind of “logo program” to replace it—some kind of official “We Use Rails” logo with open-but-very specific licensing provisions to allow people to indicate that they use Rails, or that their product/book/service is about Rails, without necessarily claiming or implying approval by DHH. I mean, when Engine Yard uses the logo, does that mean they’re an “approved” Rails host? Are they more or less “approved” than Dreamhost? If we’re talking about the logo as a protected trademark, then let’s not keep the discussion limited to books and conferences.

(Via nuby on rails.)

Interesting question for lots of organizations. I know a lot of groups are starting to develop sanctioned “affiliate”, “partner”, or other logo programs. Seems One incentive is the ability to then offer usage of a logo as a benefit to joining at some level.

BBC NEWS | UK | England | Staffordshire | Teenager sues over porn picture

This BBC article has a note about a photo that a British teenage posted on the internet was snapped up and used on the cover of an adult DVD. Adding insult to injury though, is the company’s response to the girl’s outrage over usage of her image (from the article):

She said she had e-mailed TVX and was told that her photo was “to blame” for the DVD’s poor sales.

(Via BBC News.)

YouTube Obeys Fake Takedown Request From 15 Year Old : “Want a video removed from YouTube? Send along a fake takedown notice pretending to be from the copyright holder. At least, it’s a prank that worked for a 15 year old from Perth, Australia, who sent a signed form to YouTube pretending to be from the Australian Broadcasting Company. The form requested the takedown of hundreds of clips from ‘The Chaser’s War on Everything’.”

(Via Mashable.)

I have to admit that I can understand how this would happen.

1. Given both the lack of authenticity you see in a lot of genuine communications from Banks or companies (that come from only an IP address, or some internal server, etc.) and the general difficulty of verifying identity online.
2. The current litigious atmosphere in business in general makes it hard to argue for erring on the side of not taking every incoming item carefully. Afterall, if you were a junior-ish person processing these requests, would you like to go on the line if it meant possibly being held responsible for exposing the company to a lawsuit?

EFF’s investigation revealed that ‘This Land is Your Land’ appears to have been in the public domain since the early 1970s. Woody Guthrie wrote his classic American song in 1940, when the copyright laws granted a copyright term of 28 years, renewable once for an additional 28. According to EFF, the initial copyright term was triggered when Guthrie sold his first versions of the song as sheet music in 1945. The copyright on the song then ran out when Ludlow failed to renew its registration in 1973. Ludlow believes its copyright — initially filed in 1956 and renewed in 1984 — remains valid and disputes EFF’s claims.

An audit conducted by Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) found 283 potential patent infringements in the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 code base. The OSRM, a group that offers indemnification against Linux copyright infringement claims, conducted a study in advance of the expansion of its indemnification offerings to cover patent infringement. According the OSRM, 27 of the patents are held by Microsoft, which has signaled its intention to make patent licensing a major source of future revenues. Another 98 are owned by companies with heavy Linux investments, including 60 from IBM and 20 from HP. HP acknowledged the possibility of patent infringement risks two years ago in an internal memo, which was subsequently made public.”

Geico sues Google, Overture over trademarks | CNET News.com

bq. Geico, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company owned by Warren Buffett, filed suit against Google and Yahoo-owned Overture on May 4, in federal court in Alexandria, Va. The insurer charged the two companies with infringing on its trademarks when they sold them as keywords to Geico’s rivals, so that the protected terms could appear in sponsored search results. According to the suit, that practice causes consumer confusion, in violation of the Lanham Act, the primary federal law covering trademark registration and protection.

It seems to me that this is going to far. If targeted search is illegal, than do copyright holders also have the right to prohibit people from recommending a product/service by saying “it’s just like X ?”

95yearCopy.pdf – In the USA, the constitution gives Congress the authority to grant a copyright for a limited time. The purpose of this is clear from the context: economic benefits. An economic benefit can be regarded as a sequence of cash flows. In finance, the duration of a sequence of cash flows is not measured directly in years; rather, duration is calculated via a formula involving interest rates. At present, Congress has granted copyrights to corporations for terms of 95 years. The duration of 95 years seems not significantly different from the duration of perpetuity. Hence, 95-year copyright terms seem effectively not time-limited. Thus, such terms might well violate the constitution. [ "(extlink)Douglas Keenan":mailto:doug.keenan@informath.org ]

This is an interesting argument that I haven’t seen before. If the financial benefits from a 95 year copyright term when you depreciate the future income stream are insignificantly different as compared to an unlimited perpetual stream, is the term in fact limited? Since the Constitution states that copyright must be for a limited time, does that make continually extending the term of copyright unconstitutional?

Doug Keenan argues that it might, as in terms of evaluated income, the 95 year term is statistically insignificant in it’s value from the income you’d receive (assuming constant payments) from a perpetual income stream. He uses the scientific standard of withing 2 standard deviations (95.4% certainty) as his benchmark.

In any respect, it’s an interesting addition to the debate on copyright.

Losing Control of Your TV – Indeed, Hollywood was always set up to be one of the winners of the home technology revolution. What would have been different if the movie industry had won in its lawsuit against Sony is that the revolution in camcorders, amateur video productions, and independent moviemakers never would have happened. Steven Soderbergh would never have created Sex, Lies and Videotape. The Rodney King beating by the police wouldn’t have been filmed. Perhaps a generation of creativity and political change would have been lost. And Hollywood would have been happy. This is why I am so passionately opposed to letting the movie industry dictate design specifications for consumer electronics and home PCs. Hollywood moguls want consumers to purchase one-way devices that jack-in to the today business models. They are terrified of creativity that they cannot harness and monetize. Instead of sharing the golden eggs with the world, they would rather kill the magic goose. The broadcast flag ability to stamp out the recording of high-quality digital signals is probably the largest step in this direction since Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act back in 1998 a piece of legislation that has had astoundingly negative impacts throughout the high-tech world.

It seems to me that this is why we have laws. The problem is now that there’s a technical temptation to hard code prevention for possible violations into equipment. Seems to me that this is dangerous ground – what if the laws change? Also, aren’t we still innocent until proven guilty? Commercial interests apparently have more value than individual rights.

.Name has apparently abandoned their earlier policy of only giving out third level domains (e.g. you could register john.smith.name but not just smith.name — thus preventing any other smiths from using a .name address) and will now act as just another TLD. [ "(extlink)Hack the Planet":http://wmf.editthispage.com ]

It seems like perhaps a return to a proposal that was floated by Steven Case IIRC a few years ago to create TLD’s for every category of copyright and trademarks needs to be revisited, with some new arrangements made for individuals.