On Being a Luddite — Another fantastic piece from David Newhoff. “What we preserve of the past implies the question of what we protect from the future. There is nothing inherently anti-progress about this question unless progress must exclusively mean to leap without looking.”
CBS Seeks to Unwind Retrans Agreement with Dish Network — Each of the four major US broadcast networks is currently involved in litigation with Dish Network over its Autohop and Primetime Anytime services. In the latest development, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter, CBS has amended its counterclaims after learning that Dish allegedly failed to disclose details of these services when the two companies were negotiating a new retransmission agreement in 2011.
In the Last Year… — Creative America reviews some of the positive developments in copyright law during 2012.
A middleman in the great internet copyright debate — The Irish Time sits down with Rob Levine, author of the 2011 book Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business can Fight Back, to talk about issues raised in his book and developments in the copyright world since it was published. Levine is speaking in Ireland this week.
Did Glee Steal from Jonathan Coulton? — Alison Keeley of IP Brief provides an excellent roundup of the news and legal issues revolving around this week’s kerfuffle that resulted when musician and internet star Coulton thought a version of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” featured on an upcoming episode of Glee sounded a lot like a version he had released online several years ago.
Commodities, Monopolies, Remixes and Rights – A Symphony — The Cynical Musician picks up on an my earlier post Three Reasons Copyright is Not a Monopoly and embarks on a lengthy but thought-provoking romp that thoroughly puts to rest notions that copyright is synonymous with monopoly.
Finally, this week, Kim Dotcom unveiled Mega, his latest venture, and surprisingly, the strongest criticisms have come not from the copyright community, but from the tech and security community, who have said of the service: “Megabad“, “Surprisingly bad“, “Quite frankly it felt like I had coded this in 2011 while drunkâ€, “don’t trust it“, “casts serious doubts over their entire operation and the competence of those behind it“, “poorly implemented by people clearly unfamiliar with basic cryptography.”