Digital Rights Network

Don Foster MP organised a parliamentary debate last week on the Gowers review into intellectual property policy (via dooooooom.blogspot.com):

"Opponents also challenge the idea that back catalogue revenues provide investment for new ventures and to support new artists. Peter Jameson of the BPI argued in The Guardian on 24 April that such investment had contributed to a boom in new British music, citing artists such as Arctic Monkeys, James Blunt and Kaiser Chiefs. However, Arctic Monkeys are with Domino Records, which was founded in 1993 and rarely re-releases records that predate itself, and James Blunt was signed by the US label Custard Records, which was set up only in 2004 and so has little back catalogue material to release; the same is true of Kaiser Chiefs, who are signed to B-Unique, which was also founded in 2004. Those are hardly good examples of recording companies that rely on significant revenue from the back catalogue profits that would be under threat if we were to stick at the 50-year copyright term." ( More info here.)

Jean-Baptiste Soufron has posted a useful summary of current state of the French effort to transpose the EUCD into national law: http://soufron.typhon.net/article.php3?id_article=132

Michelle Childs of CPTech has posted a summary of a presentation by Leonardo Cervera Nava (LCN) an Administrator in the Copyright and Knowledge-based Economy section of DG Internal Market. Of specific interest was the following info about their scheduled review of the copyright and term directives:

"... First in relation to the Commission's review of the Copyright Directive, due this year. Originally it was to be a review only of implementation, but now it will be an evaluation review of the Directive i.e an evaluation of whether or not has it achieved its policy objectives. This is an important change. ....

The Times online is carrying a story that the Vatican has decided to aggressively assert its copyright in the Pope's pronouncements:

For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

... Publishers will have to negotiate a levy of between 3 per cent and 5 per cent of the cover price of any book or publication “containing the Pope’s words”. Those who infringe the copyright face legal action and a higher levy of 15 per cent.

The BBC is reporting that the first works from the Google Print project have been unveiled and put online. Included in this opening swathe are many 19th Century works of American literature and history.

The works were chosen because they are uncopyrighted works that are unaffected by the legal action that briefly halted Google's digitisation project. The legal challenge comes from the Authors Guild which claims it involves "massive copyright infringement".

The entire text of these works is being put online by the search giant's digitisation project. The text will be searchable and users will be able to save images of pages. Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan which has been involved in developing the project said "Today we welcome the world to our library".

"A new rock group featuring former members of The Clash and Generation X has taken a novel approach to the issue of piracy by urging their fans to copy their music."

2005-07-15
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4683875.stm

"It is enough to make a sceptic believe in life after death. For the past few years the music industry has been predicting the death of the singles market because of the global scourge of illegal downloading.

And what has happened? The latest figures show that 524,000 singles were sold last week in the UK, an impressive 7% increase on a year ago and no less that 44% up on sales earlier in the year, when the sirens of doom were at their loudest.

Oh, I've forgotten a small point. These figures only refer to sales of what is known in the trade as "physical" singles. If (legal) downloads are included, sales have soared by a staggering 88% in the last year to 977,000 last week."

Interesting article about a new generation of no-frills laptops, includes stuff about building wifi networks in developing countries.

Excellent non-specialist discussion of the relation of copyright, plagiarism and borrowing by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker: Something Borrowed - Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life. It includes many of the usual suspects (Lessig, drug patents etc) and extends beyond copyright to IP generally. It also does a very good job of making clear why 'IP' is not property most fundamentally because of its non-rival nature - a point which, to my mind, is still most eloquently put by Jefferson: He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

I have just written an overview of the Medical Innovation Convention. This is a draft international treaty, originally proposed by Jamie Love (CpTech) and Tim Hubbard (Sanger institute), that would provide for a new global framework for medical innovation. The current system, heavily based on TRIPs and ever stronger intellectual property rights, is in crisis, failing to deliver not only for developing countries but also, increasingly for high-income nations. Read the overview here.