Anyone using counterfeit products who "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death" can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.

This is just bizarre!

Tech news blog - Gonzales proposes life in prison for software pirates

Vidmeter, which tracks the online video business, determined that the clips that were removed for copyright violations — most of them copyrighted by big media companies — comprise just 9 percent of all videos on the site. Even more surprising, the videos that have been removed make up just 6 percent of the total views (vidmeter.com).

YouTube’s Favorite Clips Aren't Copyrighted - New York Times

EMI Group will soon sell digital music with better sound quality and no digital rights management restrictions through Apple's iTunes Store.

Wow. I am really quite amazed by this announcement! I really, honestly thought Jobs was blowing smoke.

EMI, Apple partner on DRM-free premium music | CNET News.com

Someone samples Steven Colbert on YouTube. Viacom files a DMCA takedown. EFF sues Viacom. Steven Colbert invites John Perry Barlow on the show to discuss it. Someone posts that video to iFilm. You'll have to click through to see it because it doesn't embed...

John Perrry Barlow: "Its kind of a metaphor of a metaphor if you know what I mean."

John Perry on the Colbert Report

MoveOn, Brave New Films Sue Viacom For Illegal Takedown of YouTube Video

On slashdot today there was speculation that Google might have bought YouTube specifically because they didn't want YouTube's lawyers fighting the epic copyright battle that has begun. I am amazed that Viacom let this go to court. They are clearly going to loose. Perhaps they wish to distract EFF and drain their resources while they focus on Google. Currently listening to: "Duel of the Fates" by John Williams

EFF joins the Viacom/YouTube Frey...

The Viacom v Youtube lawsuit could be one of the key legal battles that will define the future of the Interet. Lessig wrote an editorial today in NYT critical of moves made at the Supreme Court that set the stage for this showdown, making the now popular accusation that they have legislated from the bench.

The Grokster case thus sent a clear message to lawyers everywhere: You get two bites at the copyright policy-making apple, one in Congress and one in the courts. But in Congress, you need hundreds of votes. In the courts, you need just five. Viacom has now accepted this invitation from the Supreme Court....

Congress, of course, is perfectly capable of changing or removing the safe harbor provision to meet Viacom’s liking. But Viacom recognizes there’s no political support for the change it wants. It thus turns to a policy maker that doesn’t need political support — the Supreme Court.

Some interesting discussion in the thread here. Of course, these basic legal questions may never see the light of day, as it is entirely possible that this case is merely a negotiating stick that Viacom is using to get more out of Google in some sort of backroom deal over content distribution.

This article over at Advertising Age provides some additional perspective.

"If the L.A. Times doesn't generate news from places like Iraq, how will Yahoo, which doesn't operate its own bureaus, maintain a reliable stream of professional-quality reporting? In a very real way, the internet risks killing off the goose that keeps laying its golden eggs..."

There is something ironic about writing a blog entry that quotes something quoted in a news article about the damage the blogosphere is doing to the business models of traditional reporting.

"Recommendation is the new marketing."

"Will Viacom acquire a social framework for video assets or is YouTube going to acquire a library of content? That's the question."

No one source of video content will ever be THE social framework for video assets. Social frameworks exist independently of particular sets of video assets. Attempting to establish that sort of control is self defeating.

However, if the social frameworks were king, you'd think MemeStreams would be the focus of attention and not YouTube. Ultimately, content is not king, and filters are not king. Bandwidth, and the money that funds it, is king. There will be as many social frameworks as there are societies. There will be many content producers, a small number of which will make money. But the market will only sustain a few free video hosting systems. Its not about production cost or end user value. Its about marginal cost. You can copy a floppy but you can't copy a server.

A lot of people learned the wrong lessons from the cold war. They beleive very strongly that the problem with socialism is that fairness destroys incentives. This is merely political rhetoric. The economies in western Europe are fair, and libertarians are fond of pointing out that freer economies are more efficient. But, western Europe is not on the verge of collapse. Focusing on this issue is to ignore the mountain for the molehill.

The problem with socialism is that it isn't a natural state. It has to be engineered into existance through authoritarianism. Intellectual Property has exactly the same problem, and the efficiencies afforded by its "free" market nature are minor when held next to the major structural weaknesses that exist in forced economic fantasies.

Our society is completely unprepared to face this reality because we're too steeped in the political rhetoric of yesterday's arguement.

Make Way for Copyright Chaos - New York Times

That math suggests that the royalty rate decision — for the performance alone, not even including composers' royalties! — is in the in the ballpark of 100% or more of total revenues. —KH

RIAA acts to kill Internet Radio AGAIN! Per listener royalty rates to more than double by 2009.

RAIN: Radio And Internet Newsletter

C-Span did contact the speaker’s office to have it take down a clip from her blog — one shot by C-Span’s cameras at a House Science and Technology Committee hearing on global warming where Ms. Pelosi testified.

C-Span, a private nonprofit company financed by the cable and satellite affiliates that carry its programming, says that over more than 25 years of operating it has consistently asserted its copyright to any material it shoots with its own cameras.

You don't own the videos of government testimony. Carl Malamud has been working on changing that. He has started posting hearings into the public domain. Download them. Quote them in your podcast. Sample them in your music. Use this or it will go away.

Which Videos Are Protected? Lawmakers Get a Lesson - New York Times

Uber Civil Disobediance!

In this Netzpolitik-Interview EFF-Founder John Perry Barlow talks about massive civil disobedience in the copyright debate. The Interview was done at the 23. Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.

I've you've seen Lessig's Talk from 23C3, and you absolutely should, then you'll note the debate at the end between Barlow and Lessig, and you'll want to round things out by watching this short clip. If anyone knows where I can find video of Barlows full talk at 23C3 please post!

NetzpolitikTV: John Perry Barlow uber zivilen Ungehorsam

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps
it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into
the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess
himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses
the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. 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. That ideas should freely spread from one to
another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man,
and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and
benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire,
expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any
point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our
physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Blogged for future reference.

Letter concerning patents from Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson