COPYCENSE

"The American Conservative Union, the nation’s oldest conservative group, has become the latest and most vocal critic of an anti-file-swapping bill that foes say could target products like Apple Computer’s iPod.

"The ACU, which holds influential Republican activists and former senators on its board of directors, is running newspaper and magazine advertisements that take a humorous jab at the so-called Induce Act — and slams some conservative politicians for supporting it."

Declan McCullagh. Conservative Group Savages Anti-P2P Bill. News.com. Sept. 24, 2004.

"Programmers on Wednesday released the new version 3.0 of SpamAssassin, open-source software for filtering out unwanted e-mail, but the changes are as much legal as technological.

"Project leaders for the widely used software chose to enter the fold of the Apache Software Foundation to take advantage of the nonprofit group’s legal and technical resources. To make the move, SpamAssassin had to adopt the Apache License.

"Previously, the software was available under a choice of two licenses: the General Public License  that governs Linux and many other open-source programs and the Perl Artistic License."

Stephen Shankland. SpamAssassin Sports New Open-Source License. News.com. Sept. 22, 2004.

"Pop piracy should be decriminalised and the music industry should realise that efforts to stop illegal downloading are doomed, a conference has been told.

"Instead the music industry should embrace file-sharers, said technology journalist and author Andrew Orlowski in a keynote speech at the Interactive @ In The City conference being held in Manchester. One way could be the addition of a small surcharge to net subscription fees which could be shared among artists whose music is being downloaded."

Mark Ward. Call to Legalise File-Sharing With Taxes BBC. Sept. 22, 2004.

"Next month, songs by the Beastie Boys, David Byrne and 14 others will appear on a compilation CD whose contents are meant to be copied freely online, remixed or sampled by other artists for use in their own new recordings.

"’The Wired CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.’ was compiled by the editors of Wired magazine, of San Francisco, as an experimental implementation of a new kind of intellectual-property license called Creative Commons.

"In this case, all 16 participants are allowing their work to be shared on the Internet. Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson describes Creative Commons as a way of declaring that the recordings come with ‘some rights reserved,’ as opposed to the traditional ‘all rights reserved.’"

Eathan Smith. This Compilation CD Is Meant To Be Copied and Shared. Wall Street Journal Online. Sept. 20, 2004.

See also:
Brian Braiker. Take My Music . . . Please. Newsweek. Oct. 5. 2004.

"Valuable resources are being lost to students, researchers and historians because of sweeping changes in copyright law, according to digital archivists who are suing the government.

"These resources — older books, films and music — are often out of print and considered no longer commercially viable, but are still locked up under copyright. Locating copyright owners is a formidable challenge because Congress no longer requires that owners register or renew their copyrights with the U.S. Copyright Office.

"Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and Rick Prelinger, a film collector, want permission to digitize these so-called orphan works to create online libraries for free public access."

Katie Dean. Saving the Artistic Orphans. Wired News. Sept. 20, 2004.