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This is a really interesting story about a legal battle Disney had in the 70s with some cartoonists who wanted to poke fun at Disney by drawing Mickey in their underground comics. I thought I had read it all about Disney and Copyright fights, but I’d never heard of this. (Link from SCOTUSBlog.)

So, I’ve been thinking about the plausibility of the idea described in the two posts below of making copyrights unassignable. That is, copyrights would stick to the author for their duration. But, if we allow all this contracting out of the actual copying on behalf of the author then it seems inevitable that all the [...]

Another implication, some might call it an objection, to this Sticky Copyright idea is that it either complicates or forbids works for hire. I am not so sure that this troubles me. It is in large part the whole point to begin with. When I’m not typing on my Zaurus, I’ll explore this more…

The always impressive bIPlog has some details on Fred von Lohman’s talks yesterday at Berkeley. I attended both events and find Mary Hodder’s summary an excellent recap if you missed it.
Fred did spark a thought in me, and I wrote it down during the afternoon talk:
“Copyright is a system fundamentally designed to deprive artists of [...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Senior Staff Attorney, Fred von Lohman, is scheduled to discuss File-Sharing lawsuits by the RIAA on UC-Berkeley’s campus today in two events. The first talk, File-Sharing 411, is aimed at undergraduates and will feature free pizza! It will be at 166 Barrows at 12:30 p.m. The second talk, File-Sharing: Legal Issues [...]

For posterity: If you want to install Debian Woody on a machine using a Matrox G550 graphics card, then realize that the version of XFree86 that comes standard with Woody won’t work. After the basic install you will be stuck at a command line and must do this:
1. brush off your vi editing skills and [...]

Alabama, my birth-place, voted no yesterday to a tax-plan pushed by their Republican governor. Now, if this were a G.W. Bush-styled tax plan that increases the tax burden on the poor while decreasing it on wealthy corporations, I’d cheer this defeat.
But this plan was different.
I probably disagree with Gov. Riley on almost everything except [...]

BarnesandNoble.com affiliates received the following e-mail today:
Dear Barnes & Noble.com Affiliate,
As of September 9, 2003, Barnes & Noble.com will no longer sell
eBooks. Please remove all links to the eBooks Page or any individual
eBooks from your site. Any links from your site to our eBooks area
that are not taken down will be redirected to the Barnes [...]

I leaned something about myself today. I really, really, really, hate software patents. I suppose I knew this already, because there are so many good reasons to hate software patents. But when I read this article detailing how Microsoft has been ordered to pay $521 million dollars for infringing someone else’s software patent I thought, [...]