Regarding Copyright: Is a Scent Like a Song?
Wednesday, August 2, 2006, 06:12 PM - Copyfight
In its ruling, the court, the Cour de Cassation, denied the petition of a perfume maker, who claimed she deserved to continue receiving royalties from a former employer, even after she had been fired. The court stated, "The fragrance of a perfume, which results from the simple implementation of expertise" does not constitute "the creation of a form of expression able to profit from protection of works of the mind."
To confuse matters, a French court of appeals ruled the opposite last January, determining that a perfume could be a "work of the mind" protected by intellectual property law. It ordered a Belgian company to pay damages to the perfume and cosmetics giant L'Oréal, which sued it for producing counterfeits of best-selling L'Oréal perfumes.
The rulings have the noses and the perfume houses of France twitching nervously. Many "noses" consider the scents they create as important and valuable as paintings or poems.
Read the rest of the article, originally published by the NYTimes.
3 comments Journalism without journalists
Wednesday, August 2, 2006, 05:55 PM - Media
On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development -not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media -usually known, when this argument is made, as "gatekeepers" or "the priesthood"- have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. "Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff -and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession," Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths."
keep reading Amateur Journalism in the Newyorker.
All Rights Reserved: a history of American copyright law by Jeff Siegel
Tuesday, July 18, 2006, 05:06 PM - Copyfight
<i>To every cow her calf, and to every book its copy.” -- Irish King Dermott, 6th c. C.E., in his decision Finnian v. Columba (The “Abbot's Psalter” case). Probably apocryphal.</i>
it's part of American law, and among other things the philosophical and legal foundation for "work for hire," the idea that an author can be hired by an institution, paid a flat fee, and rescind all rights to the work they've created, as if the author were never involved in the first place; the publisher, not as agent of the author, but as the author. The vast majority of cultural and intellectual work is created within a work for hire arrangement, the creator ceding her work to the institution that manufactures, markets, distributes, and sells it (and it's the work, the expression of the idea, that's covered in copyright, not the idea itself). There's much talk from spokespeople for the various trade groups involved in bringing litigation on copyright matters (RIAA, MPAA, BSA for software companies, etc.) that copyright infringement harms most the authors of the work, that it takes money out of their pockets, undoing the incentive to create more work for the public good. But due to these work-for-hire arrangements, it's the opposite that's true; there is no significant correlation between a corporate entity controlling a copyright on a work and the creator of that work making money from its sale. Nowhere is this clearer than in the music business. By now you've heard story after story of artists getting screwed by their labels. The minuscule royalties and recoupable costs and so forth are only a manifestation of the real issue: the constant downward pressure of a big record label onto the livelihood of its only real asset, the recording artist who creates the product that generates their profit. As a generalization, there are few worse positions to be in in the commercial arts than major-label recording artist. Book publishing works on a fundamentally similar model, but rarely do publishers make their writers recoup marketing costs or advances; film and broadcasting, especially at big-money levels, are fully unionized, and everyone involved makes a set wage. So how do record labels get away with making tidy profits on ubiquitous songs, while the artists rarely see a dime and usually end up in debt?
Read All Rights Reserved in Stylus Magazine.
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M$ forgotten monopoly
Tuesday, July 11, 2006, 09:37 AM - Copyfight
Hakon Wium Lie, Opera's CEO & CSS creator on font politics:
Microsoft's font monopoly is due to the "Core fonts for the Web" program it launched in 1996. About 10 font families--including familiar names like Arial, Georgia, Verdana and Times New Roman--were made available "for free to the Web community, on all platforms" as Microsoft told the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the time. The fonts have served us well. They've improved both aesthetics and interoperability on the Web, and they look good in a wide range of sizes. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to close the project in 2002. The fonts are still available for anyone to use, but not to change. It is illegal to add support for more non-Western scripts. The time has come to break the Microsoft monopoly on fonts. This is easier than it sounds. There are thousands of font families on the Web--I call them Web fonts--that are freely available for anyone to use. One such font family, for example, is Goodfish, an elegant serifed font designed by Ray Larabie in 2000. It comes in four variants (regular, italic, bold, bold italic), which are encoded as four TrueType files. When zipped, the files take up about 100k of memory. That's about the same file size as a small photograph.
keep reading Microsoft's forgotten monopoly
ALSO HERE: 5 steps to font freedom
Pay a little now, pay a lot later
Tuesday, July 11, 2006, 09:30 AM - Copyfight
Choosing freedom or bondage isn't very important for a typical home computer user. Most people only use the software that comes bundled with their computer, and perhaps the occasional shareware game. Basically, they don't invest much in their setup beyond the original hardware purchase. Replace their PC with a Mac or a Linux box and they'd probably forget the difference after a day or so. This is not the case, though, with businesses who dedicate significant portions of their income to IT. It's often prohibitively expensive to alter a company's computing infrastructure once it's been established, so choosing well from the first day is critically important. That is one of the main reasons why I could never recommend a proprietary system to a business owner.
keep reading Pay a little now, pay a lot later, by Kirk Strauser.
Where's My Google PC?
Friday, July 7, 2006, 11:47 AM - Apt-get Install
Paul Boutin talks about Google PC and the OS market in Slate:
Unless you're playing Grand Theft Auto or watching HDTV, your network isn't the slowest part of your setup. It's the consumer-grade Pentium and disk drive on your Dell, and the wimpy home data bus that connects them. Home computers are marketed with slogans like "Ultimate Performance," but the truth is they're engineered to run cool, quiet, and slow compared to commercial servers. Google's Web search is blindingly fast because your requests get handled by a sprawling array of loud, hot, power-hungry server racks that you'd never allow in your house. All your home computer has to do is draw the results of Google's massive data-mining process on its screen- that's the easy part.
Read the article
game art: textures, features, perspectives
Friday, June 23, 2006, 12:27 PM - Games, Howto
;)
Gamasutra publishes an excerpt from 3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop(Focal Press, February 2006). Where we read PS though, we might as well say Gimp. Blender and Gimp are very close friends aren't they.
More videogames here
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