Showing posts with label intellectual property. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intellectual property. Show all posts

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Copyright Explained

"Copyright Explained: I May Copy It, Right?" from Smashing Magazine
With blogging comes great responsibilty. You define the content of your weblog and you carry the full responsibility for every word you’ve published online. More than that, you are responsible for comments in your posts. To make sure you fulfill your legal obligations, it’s important to know, what you, as blogger, may or should do; and you have to know, how to achieve this. After all, the ignorance of the law does not make one exempt from compliance thereof.

This article explains copyright and how it applies to electronic material. Sure, it's focussed at bloggers, but anyone who is starting a career that involves publishing might be interested in this.

Monday, January 08, 2007

I hate DRM so much . . .

. . . and today's news (CNN: "Studios sign off on movie downloads") doesn't make me feel any better.

If I buy a song or a movie or an audiobook, it's MINE. I should be allowed to do anything I want with it. In particular, I should DEFINITELY be allowed to put it on my cell phone rather than my iPod. In fact, I should definitely be allowed to put it on BOTH of them. Additionally, when I upgrade my phone or when the DVD I just burned dies, I should be allowed to copy it AGAIN onto my media; I should NOT be locked out and forced to buy a new copy!

I know this is a bigger issue, and on the bigger discussion I'm convinced that copyright/IP laws do much more harm than good. However, even without that, if I'm not distributing my purchsed media to someone else, I should be allowed to do anything I want with it.

(on a related note, yesterday I tried to move some MIDI (that's right, MIDI) files (ringtones) over from my old phones to my new phone; to my surprise, those MIDI files were copy protected! The phone refused to let me move them! And this is an UNLOCKED and UNBRANDED PHONE! We're not talking about Justin Timberlake's latest howling -- we're talking about 3 second long MIDI RINGTONES! Hell is on earth)