Okay, I'm starting a new directory for Odex-related silliness. First, they were going after downloaders, and the downloaders staged an action figure protest, in Singapore, where protests are illegal. Now it seems that the version of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Odex is distributing contains sections word for word identical to, and apparently copied from, the version distributed by the "a.f.k." fansub group. More coverage at Anime News Network. やれやれ! I thought Bobbin was the funniest thing to come out of Singapore, these days, but they're certainly giving her a run for the money. (29 September 2007)
No, not really. But we seem to have something unfolding in Singapore that parallels what's been happening on Livejournal - in particular, a fan community steeped in denial, a population who don't really understand how little power they actually have, and idiots who do have power shooting off their mouths. When I checked my news aggregator this morning there were two Singapore-related stories in a row. The first one is from James Grimmelmann, who just attended the State of Play conference in Singapore and commented that Singapore itself seems to be run like an MMORPG. The other story is the latest installment of the Odex saga. [2125 words...] (29 September 2007)
This item is not new - it's from 2005 - but I just found out about it, and it seems timely considering the "fictional material must be exempt from censorship" theory some people have been talking about recently. It seems that Puni Puni Poemy is classified as "objectionable" in New Zealand, which makes it illegal to sell, import, or possess for the purpose of distribution, including non-profit distribution. As a strict-liability offence, persons doing those things can be required to pay a fine of up to NZ$10,000; do it knowingly and there can be a prison sentence of up to ten years. (Larger fines for commercial entities.) The link is to the page of a fan who unsuccessfully appealed the decision; timeline, references to the statutes, and so on are included there. [368 words...] (22 August 2007)
I don't have as much detail on this file as I would like, but it sounds like a winner, and one you probably won't see covered on the other sites you read. It seems that SuicideGirls, the well-known "altporn" Web site, is currently suing one of their former employees on noncompete grounds. The defendant is a photographer who used to work for them, signed a contract with a noncompete clause, and now they claim is running a Web site of his own in competition with them against the non-compete agreement. His claim is that A. he's not running the Web site in question, he only did contract photography for it (which evidently wouldn't violate the agreement); B. the Web site in question isn't in competition with SuicideGirls under the definition in the agreement; and C. at least one of the clauses they're trying to enforce wasn't even in the contract he signed. That's all a pretty straightforward contract dispute and without having all the evidence, you and I can't meaningfully judge it. What interests me more is some of the stuff I've read in people's comments on the case, which suggests a consensus that this case is part of a larger pattern of SuicideGirls using legal threats, intimidation, and other shady means to create and preserve a monopoly on the "altporn" genre. Their position (hotly debated by other players) is that they are the first and original "altporn" Web site, they invented it, they "own" the "altporn" genre, and anyone else doing similar things is stealing from them. Sound familiar? Reports from the defendant's side of the current lawsuit are in the lithium_panic Livejournal community. A news article about it is on FleshPanic. Both those linked pages contain softcore pornographic photos. I'm looking for more details and will post them as I find them. (21 February 2007)
Since 2004 I've been following the case of Isamu Kaneko as it gradually makes its way through the Japanese court system. He's the developer of Winny, a peer-to-peer file sharing application that's apparently quite popular in Japan. The charge is that by developing this product, he was supposedly infringing copyright because the users of the product use it to infringe copyright. The most recent development is that he's been found guilty in the Kyoto District Court (story from Asahi Shimbun). An appeal is expected. See also coverage from Yomiuru Shimbun, The China Post (AP article), and the Free Kaneko Web site. (14 December 2006)
Here's an interesting new Supreme Court decision. It turns out that "attempt to conspire to commit possession of stolen liquor" is not a crime in Canada. If "foo" is an offence, "attempt to commit foo" may be an offence and "conspiracy to commit foo" may be an offence, but that doesn't mean that "attempt to conspire to commit foo" is an offence. It is not the case, according to the decision authored by Justice Fish, that "the provisions governing inchoate liability can be stacked one upon the other, like building blocks." On the other hand, it seems to me that "conspiracy to attempt" is the same thing as regular conspiracy, so that's still an offence even if "attempt to conspire" isn't. Are we confused yet? [449 words...] (23 November 2006)
Someone accused of illegal filesharing has died, the RIAA is continuing to sue them, and the community is up in arms about how insensitive and illogical that is. Well, the community is wrong. [970 words...] (14 August 2006)
A US Federal Court has decided that Major League Baseball (MLB) does not own the names and statistics of its players as intellectual property. The names and statistics are factual information, not subject to copyright. As a result, the plaintiff "CBC Distribution and Marketing" (which operates a fantasy baseball league; no relation to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) can freely use those statistics in its operations without paying a licensing fee. [904 words...] (10 August 2006)
CBC News is running a lot of coverage on an international child pornography investigation from a few years ago. What basically happened is that US police seized a database of credit card transactions from a Web site that sold access to child pornography as well as "adult verification" services for access to legal, constitutionally protected, adult pornography. They forwarded the customer database to their partners in many other countries, including Canada - where the police treated it as a list of known guilty child pornography customers. Many of the names were in fact from people who had only purchased legal, constitutionally protected, adult pornography; and many others were from people who had been victims of credit card fraud and never had any dealings with any kind of pornography at all. Nonetheless, everyone on the list was treated as guilty until proven innocent, and in several cases guilty even after being proven innocent. CBC coverage here, with multimedia; see also this item from the London (UK) Times Online, describing the "evidence shambles" on the UK end. (15 March 2006)
I've been having trouble with my Supreme Court RSS feed recently (fixed now, I hope), so I missed this when it was first posted, but it's quite interesting and I don't think anybody in the open-source community knows about it yet. You may be aware of cases in the USA where drivers have been acquitted of drunk driving charges because breath-test manufacturers refuse to disclose their source code. Well, here's something similar. Some Federal inmates were transferred to a higher-security prison on the recommendation of a computerized risk-evaluation system. When they appealed, they wanted the details of the software's "scoring matrix"; and the Supreme Court allows the appeal, saying "Without the scoring matrix which provides information on the numerical values to be assigned to each factor and to the manner in which a final score is generated by the computerized tool, the inmates were deprived of information essential to understanding the computerized system which generated their scores and were prevented from formulating a meaningful response to the reclassification decisions." That's not phrased in terms of a requirement for source-code disclosure, but it seems to be the same issue we see in the drunk driving cases. (7 March 2006)
Britney Spears, the noted semiconductor physics educator, is being sued by an Indiana man named Steve Wallace. Wallace alleges that he wrote the song "Sometimes" in 1990. A virtually identical song appeared credited to Spears on the album ... Baby One More Time in 1999. It would be pretty ironic if the claim of plagiarism turned out to be valid. [133 words...] (12 May 2005)
This English-language summary of a Norwegian Supreme Court case (PDF format, prepared by Georg Krog, found in Lawrence Lessig's Web log) discusses a Web site called "napster.no", which provided links to unauthorized copies of music stored on servers outside Norway. The Court rejects the idea that mere linking is automatically "making available" - a significant point because it implicates the current discussion on "making available" in Canada, in the contexts of both copyright and child pornography - but they find the accused guilty anyway, because of the context in which he linked to the infringing material. (9 May 2005)
Here are some detailed notes on the Grokster oral argument from Timothy K. Armstrong, who was there. UPDATE: More notes here from Alex Halderman, guest-posting in Freedom To Tinker; he links to yet more notes from other people, and lots of 8x10 colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one. (3 April 2005)
Slashdot is running an item about how the Texas Attorney General is suing VoIP provider Vonage for trouble with the 911 service. Vonage sells "IP phones" and service to back them, so you can (according to their ads, and this is the major selling point) get rid of your landline phone and use their product to make your calls, routing the signal over your high-speed Internet connection. Phone companies are required to provide 911 service. Vonage's 911 service doesn't always work very well, case in point being a situation where someone was unable to reach 911 on the VoIP phone during a home-invasion situation with two people shot. The Slashdot commentary arguably represents a new low in intelligence and political insight in that forum, and it really strongly supports Seth Finkelstein's claim that Libertarianism makes you stupid. I think it's clear which position is right and which position is stupid in this case, but I also think it's interesting that the other side thinks their position is equally obviously the only rational one. [4594 words...] (23 March 2005)
The site "Animesuki.com", which distributes BitTorrent "torrents" of anime "fansubs", has received a cease-and-desist letter from Media Factory Inc., and in reaction has stopped distributing torrents for products from that company. See their announcement of the decision. [1191 words...] (11 December 2004)
I just filled out the form to receive statutory damages in the PayPal class action lawsuit. You might want to do the same. Basically, everyone who signed up for an account between 1 October 1999 and 31 January 2004, and that's a lot of us, is eligible for at least "statutory damages", which is US$1million split among everyone who signs up. If you were one of the people who actually experienced the problems with dispute resolution that triggered the class action lawsuit, then you may be eligible for a different and larger sum as a "dispute resolution" claimant. The deadline for excluding yourself from the class has already passed, so if you are eligible, very few reasons remain not to claim your share. The next significant date is October 23, which seems to be the last day you can fill out the online form to make a claim. So visit the main-linked Web site above; there are a lot of important legal notices there, but the form you'll probably want to fill out after you read those is the one called "Statutory Damage Claim". [PayPal class action settlement] (13 October 2004)
This case, just decided by the Ontario Court of Appeal, looks very much list the Tasini case from the U.S.: freelance writers sell publication privileges for stories to a newspaper, the newspaper includes those stories in its electonic editions, the writers complain that that's not included in the privileges they sold. So far, the courts are agreeing with them. Another case, involving other Canadian newspapers, is still pending. [Robertson v. Thompson Corporation] (7 October 2004)
I reported previously on the lawsuit against Disney for a red tint in North American-released copies of Spirited Away, which the studio claimed was introduced for better colour reproduction on the plasma displays everyone uses nowadays if they are big-time cocaine dealers and can afford plasma displays, but which customers said was a mastering error that Disney ought to make good on. Anyway, the suit is being dropped and Disney is agreeing to sing the Very Sorry Song and inform the public about any future "adjustment" - which will at least make it difficult for them to claim any future production errors as deliberate colour correction. [Spirited Away red-tint lawsuit settled] (13 September 2004)
You may remeber Bonzi Software, who were behind the classic "Security Alert, Your Computer Is Currently Broadcasting An Internet IP Address" fake-dialog-box banner ads. Back in 2002 they were class-action sued over those ads. Although literally true (well, almost), the ad wording was deceitful and dishonest - it was like saying "Warning! Your telephone has a PHONE NUMBER, which can be used to CALL YOU!!!". I also commented on an apparent Astroturf campaign against the class's lawyer. Unfortunately, such "fake UI" ads are now endemic on the Web. Anyway, the current item is about Bonzi settling another set of false-advertising charges, in which they sold a product called "InternetALERT" under wildly overblown claims as to its ability to protect users from attack. [Bonzi in trouble again] (3 September 2004)
Here's the latest news from Japan on the Winny file-sharing case - the developer has pled not guilty. Links to earlier coverage at the bottom of that article. [Kaneko pleads not guilty] (1 September 2004)
So, more than a year ago there was that business with the Penny Arcade Strawberry Shortcake parody, which to this day is a big source of search engine hits for my Web site even though I don't even have a copy of the controversial cartoon. Well, this business with the Woody Guthrie song and the political Flash animation seems to be exactly the same situation: Jibjab produces a parody using a Woody Guthrie song, the holders of the copyright on the song are calling "infringement", Jibjab calls "parody", and the claim is made that it's not a legitimate parody because the targets of the parody are the US Presidential candidates rather than Woody Guthrie. Just as in the Strawberry Shortcake/Penny Arcade situation, I'm calling "bullshit". [414 words...] (28 July 2004)
This short document from the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut denies a request by Pfizer, Inc. to serve court documents on the operators of two Web sites by email instead of in other ways. It interested me because email service came up in the Cyber Patrol case - the judge gave Microsystems et al. permission to serve documents on mirror site operators (not on me) by email, apparently because of the claim that regular service would be too slow. [US Court: email document service not good enough] (15 July 2004)
Here's the Supreme Court decision in SOCAN v. CAIP. This is the case in which the music industry demanded that Internet providers pay a royalty to cover unauthorized copying by their subscribers. All nine justices agree that although Parliament could impose that burden on ISPs, Parliament did not; the copyright law specifically exempts telecommunications providers, and that applies here. The majority also holds that if they weren't exempt, ISPs could be liable even for unauthorized copying from servers outside Canada to clients inside Canada; but since they're exempt anyway, that doesn't matter. As another significant point, they hold that a temporary copy of a file existing in an ISP's cache, is not a "reproduction" that would create copyright liability. [504 words...] (2 July 2004)
Here's the latest of the series of US Supreme Court decisions in Ashcroft v. ACLU. This is one incarnation of the CDA (Communications Decency Act): a law called COPA (Child Online Protection Act) which purports to ban commercial pornography from being posted on the Web where minors can see it. Naturally, there've been the Constitutional challenges we might expect. They've been fighting over different versions and offshoots of the CDA since 1996. [793 words...] (2 July 2004)
Linked from this page is the 78-page PDF of an amicus brief filed by q bunch of legal scholars from Harvard, at the request of the court in one of the current batch of RIAA filesharing lawsuits. It provides a good overview of some of the issues in those cases, mentions BMG v. Doe, and promises some time Real Soon Now to have a Wiki version, which may or may not attract interesting comments from the people who pay attention to such things. [Harvard brief on RIAA v. P2P users] (28 May 2004)
US pop star Madonna has paid (as of May 2004) to settle out-of-court a lawsuit from the heirs of French erotic photographer Guy Bourdin. The suit claimed that she had plagiarized his work in making her video for the song "Hollywood". Some notes and a side-by-side comparison of still images at the above link. Meanwhile, it has also been claimed (although I know of no court case... yet) that Madonna was the victim of similar plagiarism in the case of the opening to the Japanese animated TV show Witch Hunter Robin, which bears a striking similarity to the Madonna video "Take a Bow". As of April 2006, I notice that the Livejournal posting that publicized the Robin story no longer carries valid screenshots, so I'm posting them on my own site. This information shouldn't be lost. [261 words...] (25 May 2004)
The Supreme Court of Canada has issued its decision in the above-named copyright infringement case. The basic idea: The Law Society operates a library; one of the services provided by the library is that they will make a copy of an article and either give it to you, or fax it to you; they also provide self-service photocopiers. Fairly standard library stuff. There are limits and checks and balances on these services: for instance, the library is only open to "Law Society members, the judiciary and other authorized researchers" (quote from the abstract of the decision) and the self-serve copiers have notices near them saying not to use them for copyright infringement. It's also worth noting that many of the materials in question are public legal documents that are not subject to copyright. Nonetheless, the publishers claim that they hold privileges on case summaries, headings, and other material that they added to the public documents in publishing them; and that the library's copying services constitute unauthorized "reproduction" and infringe copyright. The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that the library's activities are "fair dealing" and thus not infringing. [1362 words...] (4 March 2004)
The Canadian Supreme Court has issued its decision in Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law v. Canada (Attorney General), as you probably know if you've been paying attention to the news. I haven't finished reading this yet, but it should be of interest. The Criminal Code says that parents are allowed to use "reasonable" force against children. Six of the nine Justices hold that that's not an infringement of the child's rights. One says that it is an infringement, but it's a justifiable infringement. One says that it's unconstitutional by reason of being vague. One says that it's unconstitutional because it's an infringement of the child's rights. Of course, those are oversimplifications of the positions in the actual decision. Go read it. [Supreme court issues spanking decision] (30 January 2004)
You will of course have heard about this in the news, but the main link here is the actual decision in R. v. Malmo-Levine and R. v. Caine, in which the Canadian Supreme Court had ruled that Parliament is Constitutionally allowed to prohibit simple possession of marijuana. See also the decision in R. v. Clay, which holds that Parliament is allowed to prohibit simple possession of Cannabis sativa and its products (i.e. "hemp", and cuttings used to grow pot plants), even when they don't contain enough THC to be used for drug purposes directly. [Supreme Court: pot prohibition Constitutional] (24 December 2003)
I'm annoyed at the number of intelligent people who are telling each other that yesterday's Copyright Board decision makes peer-to-peer filesharing à la Napster, perfectly legal in Canada. That's generally not true, although there are some subtleties involved, which is why I used an asterisk in the headline. I've also heard some shocking misconceptions about what the decision will do to the price of media, how a person might get around paying the levy, and so on. Here's my contribution to the confusion. Please read these comments, the decision, and the statute, before you attempt to inform others about the consequences of the decision. [1476 words...] (13 December 2003)
The main link is the Copyright Board's decision on the blank media levy; here's my fast, first-impression review of it. In a few words: they kept the rates on CD-R, audio cassettes, and similar at existing levels; added a levy on portable music players with built-in memories; and declined to levy any other new categories (for instance, DVD-R media). The new levy on portable music players (technically, on the memory permanently embedded in such players - note that it wouldn't apply to memory or players separate from each other) is $2 for capacities up to 1Gb, $15 for more than 1Gb but less than 10Gb, and $25 for capacities greater than 10Gb. [1321 words...] (12 December 2003)
You've probably heard in other media that the Supreme Court of Canada heard arguments on the Tariff 22 decision last week. Jason Young was there, and here (linked) is his report. For background, you might also want to read the Copyright Board decision and Federal Court of Appeal decisionat issue. I haven't been following it carefully, but a short summary of the background is below. [586 words...] (7 December 2003)
Upon information and belief (isn't that fun to say?) this is the official complaint in Parke v. RIAA. That's the lawsuit from a few days back in which a consumer is objecting to the RIAA's misleading "amnesty" program, in which file traders can sign an admission of guilt to copyright infringement and in exchange get... well, really nothing good, because the RIAA promises not to sue them, but not in any provable paper-trailed way that would hold up in court, and the RIAA itself isn't actually the party doing the suing anyway and there's no promise that they won't hand the confessions over to the record labels, who are the actual plaintiffs in the "RIAA" lawsuits. See also Penny Arcade's take on it. Unfortunately, this complaint was obviously composed in a rush - the writer made, among other English usage errors, the deadly "affect/effect" mistake. [Parke v. RIAA complaint] (14 September 2003)
This is another of those things that was on Slashdot, and I usually skip covering them, but I have a few things to say about it, so here goes. The story up to this point: Penny Arcade is a Web comic mostly about video game culture. American Greetings sells greeting cards, and holds privileges on a character called Strawberry Shortcake, normally depicted as a sweet, innocent little girl. She had her own TV show for a while, I think; a character in the same general category as the Care Bears (who are another American Greetings product). Penny Arcade ran a cartoon showing Strawberry Shortcake as a dominatrix, apparently intended to poke fun at a game called American McGee's Alice, which Penny Arcade claims is an example of ruining an existing piece of literature (Alice in Wonderland) by misguided attempts to make it "darker". The cartoon effectively answered the question, "What would American McGee do if given the chance to sin again?" [1347 words...] (23 April 2003)
This item from Lawmeme discusses the case of United States v. Holm, in which a defendant convicted of possession of child pornography was forbidden future access to the Internet. The court found on appeal that that ban was excessive, echoing some of the ideas I raised last October in my discussion of Bill C-234 (see also my ISP licensing links page). From the opinion of Judge Wood, internal citations omitted: "While parolees typically have fewer constitutional rights than ordinary persons, this is the early 21st century equivalent of forbidding all telephone calls, or all newspapers. Without more evidence in the record that such a drastic measure is appropriate for Holm, it cannot stand." [US Seventh Circuit finds Internet ban excessive] (12 April 2003)
Here's an interesting Supreme Court decision that I didn't notice earlier, possibly because it apparently came out while I was on vacation. A kindergarten-grade 1 teacher asked the School Board to approve three books depicting families with same-sex parents. The Board refused because many parents would object and they didn't want to stir up trouble. Should that decision be allowed? Majority decision of Chief Justice McLachlin and Justices L'Heureux-Dubé, Iacobucci, Major, Binnie and Arbour: the Board has to reconsider its decision and use only the criteria set forth in the School Act (there might be other reasons not to approve the books, but the fact that they will upset people isn't an acceptable reason). Justice LeBel voted with them but said that the Board's "decision amounts to a breach of statute, is patently unreasonable, and should be quashed." Justices Gonthier and Bastarache voted against, saying that it was okay for the Board to refuse to approve the books. [Chamberlain v. Surrey School District No. 36] (30 January 2003)
You've heard the news, now read the decision - the Supreme Court votes 5-4 against patentability of "higher" (apparently meaning "multicellular") life forms including the Harvard "oncomouse". [Harvard College v. Canada] (5 December 2002)
On Tuesday the Federal Court of Appeal issued a decision on a case that copyright watchers should be aware of. Some publishers were providing court cases in a nice friendly form, with notes and indexing added; the Law Society's library was making photocopies for use by library patrons; the publishers claim copyright infringement. The decision could implicate some database protection and Internet "making available" issues. [1405 words...] (16 May 2002)
Linked above: a recent Supreme Court of Canada decision that may be of interest in the DMCA debate. The situation is that a visual artist licensed his paintings to be made into posters and stationery, on paper. Some art galleries took the paper posters (which they had purchased legitimately, and the artist received the royalties accordingly), and subjected them to a conversion process that transferred them to canvas. The general idea of the process (which I'd never heard of, but sounds interesting) is that a sort of glue is applied to the surface of the poster, it sticks to the ink, and then the whole mess is soaked in water until the paper can peel away. The resulting layer of glue and ink then gets stuck to a piece of canvas - so the result is a canvas poster, with the usual canvas texture, bearing the image from the poster. It's not clear that this is "copying", because the original paper poster is necessarily destroyed in the process, while the ink (which arguably contains the artistic part of the poster) is unchanged, merely moved from one backing to another. Now the artist is suing, claiming that this process (especially since the canvas transfers were sold, at a profit) violated copyright. [321 words...] (13 April 2002)
I didn't post this yesterday because I thought Slashdot would pick it up for sure, and there's no point my posting it here if you'll read it there. But they didn't, they posted lots of other less important stuff, so here goes: EFF and Dr. Felten have decided not to appeal the dismissal of their case. That surprises me. I wonder if there's a hidden strategy going on. I find it hard to believe that the reasons given in the press release linked above are the whole story, since the record industry's "We never threatened anyone and promise never to do it again!" story doesn't smell any better now than it ever did. Maybe EFF/Felten had good reasons to believe that they couldn't win this case, or that there's another case they could win even more strongly. Unfortunately, if there is something like that going on, we have no way of knowing at this point. [Felten case dropped] (7 February 2002)
...but that's not quite as bad as it sounds. The linked document was represented to me as a "decision", but it's labelled "memorandum" and appears to be a document written by the chief judge explaining why the court decided the way it did, not the actual decision itself. But I may be confused simply by the style of the opening paragraph, which isn't the style I'd expect from a real decision. The document relates to Civil Action 00-11489-WGY in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, or i.LAN v. NextPoint. It's written by Chief Judge William G. Young. [1031 words...] (10 January 2002)
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