John Lanchester wrote a long piece for the UK Guardian suggesting that Copyright be in effect until "50 years after an author's death" at which time it is available to anyone "for a small royalty."

While the piece is interesting, this argument does not even touch on the idea of corporate personhood. Walt Disney, the imagineer, may be dead, but the company still lives.

I'm actually much more aggressive with my suggestion. Copyright should be installed for renewable periods of 12 years. If you fail to make your product available at reasonable price to people who desire it, then you lose the copyright. It seems absolutely silly to know that so many publishing houses and heirs own rights to works we can never see, which they themselves did not produce.

Uri Geller, crack-pot psychic, should get in trouble for misusing DMCA to remove videos from youtube for which he is not the copyright holder.

The link from this boingboing article to a video of James Randi debunking faith healers and psychics is well worth your time. A great video for disspelling irrational belief.

Quoted: A directory of wonderful things.

This looks like an outstanding piece of work on what DRM costs the implementer. I need to scratch out some time to take a read through it.

DMCA author says it's a failure.

Author Jonathan Lethem has decided to option his most recent book to a filmmaker with some interesting terms. He is requesting that the filmmaker relinquish all rights five years from the movie release so that others may produce derivative work without fear of reprisal.

Quoted: Lately I’ve become fitful about some of the typical ways art is commodified. Despite making my living (mostly) by licensing my own copyrights, I found myself questioning some of the particular ways such rights are transacted, and even some of the premises underlying what’s called intellectual property. I read a lot of Lawrence Lessig and Siva Vaidhyanathan, who convinced me that technological progress – and globalization – made this a particularly contemporary issue. I also read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which persuaded me, paradoxically, that these issues are eternal ones, deeply embedded in the impulse to make any kind of art in the first place. I came away with the sense that artists ought to engage these questions directly, rather than leaving it entirely for corporations (on one side) and public advocates (on the other) to hash out. I also realized that sometimes giving things away – things that are usually seen to have an important and intrinsic ‘value’, like a film option – already felt like a meaningful part of what I do. I wanted to do more of it.

The 7 lessons of distribution for authors:

Quoted: 1) Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
2) Piracy is progressive taxation.
3) Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
4) Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
5) File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
6) "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.
7) There's more than one way to do it.

Tim O'Reilly blogging about when free distribution is the best approach. I love the example from Frank Herbert's "Dune," using the ecological example of "law of the minimum" - that growth is "limited by the necessary nutrient that is in shortest supply."

Quoted: A lot has to do with the ratio of possible consumers of the free product who might be converted to paying customers to the total market size. If I have awareness with .01% of the target market, giving copies away to raise awareness to 10% of the market, where 10% of those might convert (1% total) is a good deal. But if I have awareness with 60% of the target market, and give my product away, with a 10% conversion rate, I've lost a great deal.

C-SPAN asked Nancy Pelosi to remove video of herself which she posted to her blog from a trial originally broadcast on C-SPAN. While they claim that they were protecting their copyright, they are a publicly supported charity and they should post everything for the public domain.

Quoted: In this open letter to C-SPAN's CEO, I submit my purchase order for 6,251 congressional hearings and assert my fair use rights.

Some notes on "fair use" on websites.

Quoted: Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the software downloads and web sites that actually save time. Don't live to geek; geek to live.