Slate writer Paul Collins has an entertaining piece on Google's book search being used to identify plagiarism in major literary works (link here). The technology is the same as that now being used by schools to identify student plagiarism in homework class papers. But it raises a more serious question--when is copyright violated? One sentence? One paragraph? One page? A chapter?

Maybe the whole concept of copyright as a legal issue with damages assessed is impossible to determine and should be abandoned.

I fantasize about this. Would anyone publish? Of course, newspapers delivered to my door or sold at a stand on the way to work is a service and I would willingly pay for it. Everything else would soon be available on the internet, supported by advertising. You want it in hard copy? Fire up your printer and you get it instantly.

There is a downside. Not everyone has a computer or access to the internet--but that is changing. The real downside for me is the wasting away of newspapers, starving for revenue and increasingly abandoning content. The New York Times has the right idea--make people pay for online access to what is a truly superior product. It is still cheaper than the hard copy.

Music and films are different--maybe. Companies are already selling downloads but are having a hard time preventing free file sharing. Still, they are making potloads of money. When we see performers gross earnings decline, it may to be time to worry. But they always have the lucrative alternative of live performances.

The Korean Supreme Court ruled against Microsoft last Friday when it ruled local patents valid on technologies used in its Office suite that automatically switch the input mode between Korean and English (link here).

MS may have to suspend sales of its software there or modify the software or pay royalties to the Korean professor who developed the technology and the Korean software firm to which he sold an interest.

MS claims it has found prior art that would invalidate the Korean patents. It also argues that the plaintiff still has to show that its patent was infringed and establish the value of the damage incurred.

Nationalist Korea has been fairly hostile to foreign companies in the past and this is not MS's first dispute there.

The Library of Congress which oversees copyrights has issued six new guidelines (yahoo link here). One allows cell phone owners to break the software lock so that they can use the phone with a different service. Others let film professors copy parts of DVD's for educational purposes; allow blind people to use software to listen to copy-protected electronic books; let researchers test CD copy-protection technologies for security flaws or vulnerabilities; and permit breaking computer software and video games that require machines no longer available or computer attachments that don't function and can't be replaced.

These all seem modest but reasonable and harmless, though an occasional ox appears to feel gored.

Do lawyers have either a sense of humor or of proportion? In the latest example (NY Times link here), two employees did a private performance taking off on a U2 song, “One”, celebrating the merger of two banks. It turned up as a humorous (or awful) video on a website, Stereogum.com. The Universal Music Publishing Group had its lawyer post a cease and desist letter on the site for copyright violation.

One wonders if it would ever have been noticed after a few days.

Over on Freedom to Tinker there is a nice essay about an important discovery in the online game SecondLife. To briefly summarize: people can create and sell objects for "Linden Dollars" which can be traded in the real world for US Dollars. Someone has now built a copybot which can make exact duplicates of any object. It seems the "perfect storm" for the pro-IP crowd: surely the economy will collapse over night. (It does matter quite a bit whether the copybot can operate without or without the permission of the current owner of the object - it isn't clear to me from the essay which way it works.) If you want to know what will happen next, go read the 1958 Ralph Williams science fiction short story "Business As Usual During Alterations."

Turn your head and if the RIAA didn't do something ridiculous, the MPAA must have. Via Slashdot an article on TorrentFreak. A company preloads DVDs onto ipods then gives consumers the ipods and the DVD. That is, just doing commercially what would be perfectly legal under fair use to do for yourself. Plus - surely this increases the demand for legal movies. Smart move you big brains in the MPAA: sue the ones who are paying you money. One of the most important arguments against monopoly in my book: it empowers the stupid.

Via Tim Sullivan, an interesting article in Slate about a company specializing in collecting money from hip-hop artists who sample a few notes and play them repeatedly. While the issue of sampling in hip-hop isn't new - Larry Lessig has written about this extensively, for example, the article does have some interesting analysis of whether this makes any sense for fostering creativity.

Techdirt has an interesting discussion of patent law, suggesting that the test for whether an innovation is non-obvious needs to be clarified. So far, as a practical matter the only test is whether there is prior art and that is often hard to show, even when the invention seems all too obvious (link here).

In other words, the constitutional test for granting a patent--that the invention be new and non-obvious--is faulty in practice.

Hooboy - another DMCA triumph. From arstechnica via Matt Yglesias - A website somehow got advance notice of Best Buy's planned Thanksgiving sale prices and posted them on the internet. Best Buy forced them to take it down with a DMCA take-down notice. This is the chilling effect on free speech - facts are not copyrightable, so it is doubtful that BlackFriday could be successfully sued. But "Black Friday said, 'While we believe that sale prices are facts and not copyrightable, we do not want to risk having this website shut down due to a DMCA take down notice.'"

While we here at againstmonopoly.org are busy complaining about copyright, Larry Lessig is busy trying to do something about it. The Kahle vs. Gonzales case challenges the change from "opt-in" to "opt-out" copyright that was introduced in 1976. Except for a few authors and media firms who face less competition from existing work that is now "orphaned" and unusable by anyone, few people benefit from this change, so it has to be rated among the greater policy blunders of a Congress that has made a few. I'm doubtful that the courts will overrule a change in the law made in 1976 however stupid it might be - no doubt they will find some "infinity is really finite" way to parse the law. But I'm glad Lessig is pursuing this. He has a good post on some of the issues - just scroll past the beginning which is a not entirely comprehensible reference to a previous post until he starts talking about the justices and the questions they asked.