Special announcement: If you’re a recent law school grad in or interested in DC and copyright, the Copyright Alliance and the Copyright Office are both hiring. Info on the Copyright Alliance legal fellow position here; info on the Copyright Office Barbara A. Ringer Copyright Honors Program here.
The Internet’s Original Sin — Spoiler alert: it’s advertising. A fascinating read that details why the reliance on ad-based business models may be destroying the internet. Ethan Zuckerman points to four downsides to this model: it encourages surveillance, reduces the production of thoughtful content, results in centralization of control, and causes negatives like filter bubbles and echo chambers.
Harper’s Publisher Standing Firm in His Defense of Print and Paywall — “His thesis is built on three pillars. The web is bad for writers, he said, who are too exhausted by the pace of an endless news cycle to write poised, reflective stories and who are paid peanuts if they do. It’s bad for publishers, who have lost advertising revenue to Google and Facebook and will never make enough from a free model to sustain great writing. And it’s bad for readers, who cannot absorb information well on devices that buzz, flash and generally distract.”
Reading Literature on Screen: A Price for Convenience? — “In most respects, there was no significant difference between the Kindle readers and the paper readers: the emotional measures were roughly the same, and both groups of readers responded almost equally to questions dealing with the setting of the story, the characters and other plot details. But, the Kindle readers scored significantly lower on questions about when events in the story occurred. They also performed almost twice as poorly when asked to arrange 14 plot points in the correct sequence.”
Warner Bros. Wins Appeal Over Fictional Technology in ‘Dark Knight Rises’ — Though not copyright, an interesting IP case involving the developer of a product suing the Batman studio for including in the film a product that used the same name. Spoiler alert: things did not end well for the developer. Said the Seventh Circuit, “Trademark law protects the source-denoting function of words used in conjunction with goods and services in the marketplace, not the words themselves.”
The Cult of Sharing — “None of the users of the new profit-driven services are under any delusion that they are transacting with others—the term sharing economy even highlights this fact. What’s crucial to realize is that proponents of ‘sharing’ are reinventing our understanding of economic relations between individuals so that they no longer imply individualism, greed or self-interest. Instead, we’re led to believe that commerce conducted on their platforms is ultimately about generosity, helpfulness, community-building, and love.”
Is Spotify Killing Music? — “British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg has compared YouTube to Big Brother. ‘Rather than a huge boot stamping on a human face forever,†he said at a London press conference in June, “it’s a corporation that changes its logo every week.'”
No one cares about manufacturing costs — “Amazon wants to sell ebooks profitably at $9.99. In order to do that, they need publishers to sell them the books at some number less than that. It’s the same negotiation Home Depot has with Black & Decker. Except that you don’t see Home Depot setting up websites that selectively quote George Orwell to make their point.”
Orwell estate hits back at Amazon’s corporate ‘doublespeak’ — “Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell prize, an award for political writing set up in honour of the author, was equally outraged. ‘That Amazon should manipulate Orwell against the interests of writers and their publishers is dystopian and shameless,’ she said today. ‘Orwell, before he had any money, gave a lot of it away to poor and young and struggling writers. Amazon has no interest in writers and wants to throttle publishers. It is marching towards becoming a monopoly book and consequently a monopoly ideas provider – in order to maximise its commercial interest. A world in which all thought has to be bought from one place is Orwellian.'”
Stop Writing Dystopian Sci-Fi—It’s Making Us All Fear Technology — The future is fun, the future is fair.