How could they not given they read Michele and me?

Sometimes a picture really is worth the thousand words that appear in the actual op-ed.

The irony of asserting that Shakespeare would have had any use for copyright is rich. The bard routinely stole other authors stories, characters, and conflicts, and remade them (remixed?) into the plays and language that we still read and perform today. And there is no evidence whatsoever that Shakespeare ever appealed to the copyright law of time (the so-call Royal Charter of 1557) to protect his own work. There is ample evidence that he took steps to keep his work from being stolen -- by making sure that no printer or scribe saw a full manuscript, and limiting actors to only the material they needed to properly learn and perform their parts. But copyright? No. I also suspect that were Shakespeare alive and working today, he would have been appalled by the Sonny Bono Mickey Mouse copyright extension act.

Via Radar-Online:

Madonna's music manager brother Chris Ciccone has blasted Lady Gaga's sound-alike new single Born This Way.

He told RadarOnline.com: "All I can say is 'What the F**K!...It sounds just like Express Yourself - I can't believe it to tell you the truth."

Read the full story here: http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2011/02/exclusive-interview-madonnas-brother-blasts-lady-gaga-sound-alike-new-song

You can compare samples from the two songs here:

http://media.ccomrcdn.com/media/station_content/163/GAGA_MADONNA_MASHUP_2-11-11_1297447093_8958.mp3

After hearing the comparison myself, I can draw a personal conclusion that Lady Gaga was heavily influenced by Madonna and is far less talented and original than people give her credit for.

But could she be liable for copyright infringement? In a sane world, the answer should be "no", since the works can still be distinguished. Gaga clearly took the broad structure of Madonna's song (the "spine" of the melody, if you will), but then put a personal gloss over it to make it her own, new work. The fact that it clearly grew out of Madonna's previous creation should not make it an actual "copy" in the eyes of the law.

However, this is not a sane world as far as the realm of copyright law is concerned. New musical works can still be considered "copies" or unlawful "derivative works" if they even build upon more abstract aesthetic elements such as melodic motifs and musical timings in such a way that a listener can recognize it as being influenced by a previous work.

A famous example in legal circles is when George Harrison was found liable for copyright infringement when his song "My Sweet Lord" was deemed too similar to the Chiffons' hit "He's So Fine".

Read the court ruling and hear samples from both works here:

http://cip.law.ucla.edu/cases/case_brightharrisongs.html

If Harrison can be found liable, it isn't too much of a stretch to suggest that Gaga could be liable for infringement as well if Madonna decided to go after her. One could always argue that Gaga's song has more original production "frills" than the similarities found between Harrison and the Chiffons' song. But you would be splitting some awfully thin hairs at that point, and end up turning what should be objective law into a legal decree based on personal aesthetic judgments. In my book, that's a sad criteria to enforce the law with. But that is what the current copyright regime has wrought.

It should be enough to brand Lady Gaga as a coat-tailing poseur. There is no need for a legal system which could dole out punishment to her for "copying" in this instance.

Jay McInerney in the NY Times reminds us why there will never be a biographical account of J.D. Salinger that is as accurate and insightful as it could be, all thanks to a bit of stifling censorship from the current copyright regime:

...Hamilton tracked down a great deal of unpublished correspondence and quoted extensively from Salinger's letters and books. When a galley of the book reached Salinger, he called in the lawyers and demanded that Random House remove quotations of unpublished letters from the text. The initial district court ruling in favor of Random House and Hamilton was overturned on appeal with major repercussions for American copyright law and with the immediate result that Hamilton was forced to paraphrase the letters he'd relied so heavily on. Slawenski is muzzled by that 1987 ruling and also by his fastidious interpretation of fair-use copyright law in regard to quoting from the fiction, limiting himself pretty much to short phrases. The bulk of the book was written when the litigious Salinger was still alive, but I can't help wondering if his heirs might have proved a little more relaxed about quotation. Margaret Salinger's memoir, "Dream Catcher" (2000), to which Sla­wenski is heavily indebted, quotes great swatches of the prose, but she may have presumed that even J. D. Salinger was loath to sue his own daughter.

Full review/article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/books/review/McInerney-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

For the third time in less than a decade, courtesy of the Congress of the United States, a natural experiment is being carried out (as we write) to prove one can make money by publishing books that are not copyright protected. Said otherwise, that one does not need copyright to make money printing and selling books worthy of at least the paper they are printed upon.

A few days ago, the Congress of the United States released the report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Like all government documents, it can be downloaded for free here. It is also published by Public Affairs for $14.99. Obviously, you can find it at online bookstores for about half that price, and it seems to be SELLING pretty well (#412 in Amazon ranking of all books, when I last checked it).

The two previous experiments were, respectively, the report on 9/11 and the one on the invasion of Iraq. According to Amazon's ranking, they are currently selling less than AIM (:-)) but they are still selling copies after a few million ones were sold or downloaded when they were first circulated. No, we have not made the 1M number ... yet!

If you want to see how broad and deep the "copying" business has become, you need to take a look at Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix link here. Part 1 considers music, Part 2 looks at movies like the James Bond series, and Part 3 and 4 have yet to be produced. The point of this is how hard it has become to justify copyright as applied to music and stories. Look at the Vimeos to see how compelling the argument is. The material is highly entertaining as well.

Just like the headline says. You can read about the background here:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/free-internet-porn-isnt-unfair-competition-to-pay-sites-appeals-court/

This obviously has beneficial implications for many genres of Internet-based media.

You can read the actual court opinion here:

http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?xmldoc=In%20CACO%2020110126040.xml&docbase=CSLWAR3-2007-CURR

Though interestingly enough, the Appeals Court ordered that this opinion NOT be published in its official reports, meaning that lawyers won't be able to cite it as legal precedent in future cases. Why this is the case remains unclear. Perhaps they were simply embarrassed by the subject matter and didn't want to be tagged as being the judges who helped guarantee the continued flow of free porn for all?

One of the most promising areas for medical research are stem cells, and now that the Obama Administration has lifted many restrictions on their use, you would think this line of research would be booming. Not so according to Medindia which reports that there has been such a rush to patent in this area that research is in fact very difficult now.

Matt Yglesias does a neat skewering of Obama's State of the Union self-congratulatory allusion to our patents: "No country has more successful companies, or grants more patents to inventors and entrepreneurs."link here

He then does a riff on what would have happened if Newton had got a software patent on calculus. He would have sat on the patent "until Leibniz published his superior method and then sued the pants off anyone who tried to take a derivative without coughing up a hefty license fee."

Yglesias manages to get in other digs over what is currently patentable and the likely lower quality of today's patents. He concludes by noting patents do not create "property' but rather are a regulation which creates a monopoly.

Read it. It is nice to have such a good writer on our side.

PAUL BOUTIN writes in the New York Times online about Google's latest move in its evolving corporate strategy link here. It uses the Chrome OS and the cloud to strip users of the need to have a hard drive, allowing the computer to be simpler and perhaps a third or more cheaper than comparable machines that require a hard drive and an expensive proprietary operating system like Windows OS. Since the Chrome OS is free, buyers will not have to pay for it either, if they are able to give up the proprietary programs.

A lot of this still needs to be worked out, like a printer and the software for other activities that is so widely available for Windows or Apple. But if the OS becomes popular, I suspect this will be the greatest challenge Windows or Apple has yet faced. Their choice is to keep innovating ahead of Google to keep their OS's and other apps competitive or create their own hard-drive-less machines.

Interesting times are ahead. But I would put my money on Google whose speed of software innovation has been well ahead of its competitors.