David Pogue, New York Times; No Easy Answers in the Copyright Debate:
"You'd think it'd be pretty easy to live within the copyright laws, or at least to understand them: If you want something of value, you pay for it.
Different people have drastically different ideas about pirated sheet-music.
But two things happened this week that are enough to rattle anyone who thinks it's that simple.
First, I was alerted to a blog post by Jason Robert Brown. He's a songwriter and the composer of Broadway musicals like "13," "The Last Five Years" and "Parade." (I knew him when he was just starting out and I was still working on Broadway.) He became alarmed at how many pieces of sheet music to his songs were available for free, illegal download online. And after tolerating it for years, he finally tried an experiment.
He contacted each person on the download board like this: "Hey there! Can I get you to stop trading my stuff? It's totally not cool with me. Write me if you have any questions; I'm happy to talk to you about this."
You can read the full story here. But in short, one articulate young lady decided to push back, explaining her rationale for downloading his songs. What follows is a lengthy, sometimes testy back-and-forth-and an even lengthier, more passionate torrent of discussion in the comments for his post.
In the end, I side with Mr. Brown. One of his songs costs $4 in sheet-music form; that doesn't seem unreasonable. His teenaged challenger's argument is that her parents don't support her singing career -- but I don't see why it's Mr. Brown's obligation to sacrifice on her behalf.
I was pretty sure of myself -- until I heard from my friend Michael Hawley, formerly of the M.I.T. Media Lab, now a digital-media researcher, award-winning pianist and polymath. After reading Mr. Brown's account, he wrote to explain why he thinks sheet-music pirating is O.K., or even necessary.
Here's what he says:
=====
I play the piano. Over the years, I have collected 15,000 piano scores in PDF form, covering about 400 years of classical keyboard works.
It's like lint in the drier of the Internet. Much of it is not available anywhere for purchase, or even findable in libraries for circulation. Max Reger's arrangement for two pianos of Wagner's overture, for instance? Well, the Max Reger Institute in Karlsruhe, Germany has a copy...
The last classical sheet music store in New York, Patelson's, went out of business recently. The recession finished them off. It was THE place to go to buy piano music. When I was in high school, I used to go there for hard-to-find scores by Granados or Medtner, and then hit the Carnegie Deli for some pastrami. Amazing, isn't it? New York City doesn't have an independent store that sells classical music scores.
Fortunately, over the last ten or fifteen years, amateur pianists have been scanning the contents of their grandmother's piano benches, and... voilà. A million monkeys typing don't get you Shakespeare, but a million monkeys scanning -- that makes a dent. I began collecting this stuff as a hobby. One day, I looked at my pile of music score bits. In those days, 15 gigabytes was most of my hard drive. But it was all there. All of Bach. All of Scriabin. All of Rachmaninoff.
At the Van Cliburn piano competition, a couple years ago, I gave tiny thumb drives to some of the winners and said, "Enjoy." Each thumb drive was smaller than my pinky but contained was the whole 15 GB trove. It blew their minds. Basically, every significant piano piece is in the pile.
What happened is, the classical piano sheet music publishing world plotzed a long time ago. But thanks to the monkeys, a lot of DNA has been preserved and is more available now than ever before. The monkeys aren't as well organized as the Wikipedia minions, but someday they will be.
When the publishers, composers, music stores have long since gone out of business, when the libraries don't have the stuff, the internet quickly becomes the Sargasso sea for catching this stuff. Not saying that your songwriter friend's points aren't completely valid -- of course they are. As slippery as digital rights are, the fact is that digital publishing probably gives people more ways to make more money and reach far wider audiences than the paper-based music publishing racket ever did.
But copyright, like the people who originate the material and the industries that promulgate it, has a lifespan. I think the classical piano sheet music world gives a glimpse of the end state -- out of the ashes of the music business, comes the rebirth of the musician business (as John Perry Barlow once said). It also, more importantly, shows what happens when a society does a poor, random job of preserving their cultural heritage to nurture future generations.
Generally, I side with the teenagers.
====
I still think that if something is available for sale legitimately, you should pay for it (books, music, photos, movies, sheet music). A lot of the Bach, Scriabin and Rachmaninoff in Mr. Hawley's collection is certainly available, and handing it to friends on a flash drive is absolutely depriving the publishers of their revenue. True, the composers are long dead, but editing and publishing sheet music is still worth something.
It's those obscure, out-of-print, not-available-anywhere items in his collection that make a tougher case. How many hours are you obligated to research and dig just to find out if something is available for sale? In this case, the barriers to a legitimate purchase are ridiculously high. Isn't digital piracy justified in that case?
Let me know what you think in the Comments at nytimes.com/pogue."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/technology/personaltech/08pogue-web.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
Friday, July 9, 2010
Stanford Ushers In The Age Of Bookless Libraries; NPR, 7/8/10
Laura Sydell, NPR; Stanford Ushers In The Age Of Bookless Libraries:
"The periodical shelves at Stanford University’s Engineering Library are nearly bare. Library chief Helen Josephine says that in the past five years, most engineering periodicals have been moved online, making their print versions pretty obsolete — and books aren't doing much better.
According to Josephine, students can now browse those periodicals from their laptops or mobile devices.
For years, students have had to search through volume after volume of books before finding the right formula — but no more. Josephine says that "with books being digitized and available through full text search capabilities, they can find that formula quite easily."
In 2005, when the university realized it was running out space for its growing collection of 80,000 engineering books, administrators decided to build a new library. But instead of creating more space for books, they chose to create less.
The new library is set to open in August with 10,000 engineering books on the shelves — a decrease of more than 85 percent from the old library. Stanford library director Michael Keller says the librarians determined which books to keep on the shelf by looking at how frequently a book was checked out. They found that the vast majority of the collection hadn't been taken off the shelf in five years.
Keller expects that, eventually, there won't be any books on the shelves at all.
"As the world turns more and more, the items that appeared in physical form in previous decades and centuries are appearing in digital form," he says.
Given the nature of engineering, that actually comes in handy. Engineering uses some basic formulas but is generally a rapidly changing field — particularly in specialties such as software and bioengineering. Traditional textbooks have rarely been able to keep up.
Jim Plummer, dean of Stanford's School of Engineering, says that's why his faculty is increasingly using e-books.
"It allows our faculty to change examples," he says," to put in new homework problems ... and lectures and things like that in almost a real-time way."
A New Trend In Libraries?
For the moment, the Engineering Library is the only Stanford library that's cutting back on books. But Keller says he can see what's coming down the road by simply looking at the current crop of Stanford students.
"They write their papers online, and they read articles online, and many, many, many of them read chapters and books online," he says. "I can see in this population of students behaviors that clearly indicate where this is all going."
And while it's still rare among American libraries to get rid of such a large amount of books, it's clear that many are starting to lay the groundwork for a different future. According to a survey by the Association of Research Libraries, American libraries are spending more of their money on electronic resources and less on books.
Cornell University's Engineering Library recently announced an initiative similar to Stanford's — but the move to electronic books is also meeting some resistance. An effort by Arizona State University to use Amazon's Kindle to distribute electronic textbooks was met with a lawsuit because the device wasn't fully accessible to the visually impaired.
Meanwhile, back at Stanford's new Engineering Library, librarians are looking forward to spending less time with books and more time with people.
"That's what we're so [excited about]," Josephine says, "the idea of actually offering more services, offering more workshops, offering more one-on-one time with students."
But some Stanford students express mixed feelings about the shift. Engineering student Sam Tsai is checking out some old-fashioned paper books.
"To read a book on the screen is kind of tiring for me," Tsai says, "so I sometimes like [the] paper form. But if I can access books online, it's much more convenient for me, so I would actually prefer that as well."
For now, at least, Tsai can have the option of both."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128361395&ps=cprs
"The periodical shelves at Stanford University’s Engineering Library are nearly bare. Library chief Helen Josephine says that in the past five years, most engineering periodicals have been moved online, making their print versions pretty obsolete — and books aren't doing much better.
According to Josephine, students can now browse those periodicals from their laptops or mobile devices.
For years, students have had to search through volume after volume of books before finding the right formula — but no more. Josephine says that "with books being digitized and available through full text search capabilities, they can find that formula quite easily."
In 2005, when the university realized it was running out space for its growing collection of 80,000 engineering books, administrators decided to build a new library. But instead of creating more space for books, they chose to create less.
The new library is set to open in August with 10,000 engineering books on the shelves — a decrease of more than 85 percent from the old library. Stanford library director Michael Keller says the librarians determined which books to keep on the shelf by looking at how frequently a book was checked out. They found that the vast majority of the collection hadn't been taken off the shelf in five years.
Keller expects that, eventually, there won't be any books on the shelves at all.
"As the world turns more and more, the items that appeared in physical form in previous decades and centuries are appearing in digital form," he says.
Given the nature of engineering, that actually comes in handy. Engineering uses some basic formulas but is generally a rapidly changing field — particularly in specialties such as software and bioengineering. Traditional textbooks have rarely been able to keep up.
Jim Plummer, dean of Stanford's School of Engineering, says that's why his faculty is increasingly using e-books.
"It allows our faculty to change examples," he says," to put in new homework problems ... and lectures and things like that in almost a real-time way."
A New Trend In Libraries?
For the moment, the Engineering Library is the only Stanford library that's cutting back on books. But Keller says he can see what's coming down the road by simply looking at the current crop of Stanford students.
"They write their papers online, and they read articles online, and many, many, many of them read chapters and books online," he says. "I can see in this population of students behaviors that clearly indicate where this is all going."
And while it's still rare among American libraries to get rid of such a large amount of books, it's clear that many are starting to lay the groundwork for a different future. According to a survey by the Association of Research Libraries, American libraries are spending more of their money on electronic resources and less on books.
Cornell University's Engineering Library recently announced an initiative similar to Stanford's — but the move to electronic books is also meeting some resistance. An effort by Arizona State University to use Amazon's Kindle to distribute electronic textbooks was met with a lawsuit because the device wasn't fully accessible to the visually impaired.
Meanwhile, back at Stanford's new Engineering Library, librarians are looking forward to spending less time with books and more time with people.
"That's what we're so [excited about]," Josephine says, "the idea of actually offering more services, offering more workshops, offering more one-on-one time with students."
But some Stanford students express mixed feelings about the shift. Engineering student Sam Tsai is checking out some old-fashioned paper books.
"To read a book on the screen is kind of tiring for me," Tsai says, "so I sometimes like [the] paper form. But if I can access books online, it's much more convenient for me, so I would actually prefer that as well."
For now, at least, Tsai can have the option of both."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128361395&ps=cprs
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery; New York Times, 7/6/10
Trip Gabriel, New York Times; To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery:
"Anti-plagiarism services requiring students to submit papers to be vetted for copying is a booming business. Fifty-five percent of colleges and universities now use such a service, according to the Campus Computing Survey.
The best-known service, Turnitin.com, is engaged in an endless cat-and-mouse game with technologically savvy students who try to outsmart it. “The Turnitin algorithms are updated on an on-going basis,” the company warned last month in a blog post titled “Can Students ‘Trick’ Turnitin?”
The extent of student cheating, difficult to measure precisely, appears widespread at colleges. In surveys of 14,000 undergraduates over the last four years, an average of 61 percent admitted to cheating on assignments and exams.
The figure declined somewhat from 65 percent earlier in the decade, but the researcher who conducted the surveys, Donald L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers, doubts there is less of it. Instead, he suspects students no longer regard certain acts as cheating at all, for instance, cutting and pasting a few sentences at a time from the Internet.
Andrew Daines, who graduated in May from Cornell, where he served on a board in the College of Arts and Sciences that hears cheating cases, said Internet plagiarism was so common that professors told him they had replaced written assignments with tests and in-class writing.
Mr. Daines, a philosophy major, contributed to pages that Cornell added last month to its student Web site to bring attention to academic integrity. They include a link to a voluntary tutorial on avoiding plagiarism and a strongly worded admonition that “other generations may not have had as many temptations to cheat or plagiarize as yours,” and urging students to view this as a character test.
Mr. Daines said he was especially disturbed by an epidemic of students’ copying homework. “The term ‘collaborative work’ has been taken to this unbelievable extreme where it means, because of the ease of e-mailing, one person looking at someone else who’s done the assignment,” he said.
At M.I.T., David E. Pritchard, a physics professor, was able to accurately measure homework copying with software he had developed for another purpose — to allow students to complete sets of physics problems online. Some answered the questions so fast, “at first I thought we had some geniuses here at M.I.T.,” Dr. Pritchard said. Then he realized they were completing problems in less time than it took to read them and were copying the answers — mostly, it turned out, from e-mail from friends who had already done the assignment.
About 20 percent copied one-third or more of their homework, according to a study Dr. Pritchard and colleagues published this year. Students who copy homework find answers at sites like Course Hero, which is a kind of Napster of homework sharing, where students from more than 3,500 institutions upload papers, class notes and past exams.
Another site, Cramster, specializes in solutions to textbook questions in science and engineering. It boasts answers from 77 physics textbooks — but not Dr. Pritchard’s popular “Mastering Physics,” an online tutorial, because his publisher, Pearson, searches the Web for solutions and requests they be taken down to protect its copyright.
“You can use technology as well for detecting as for committing” cheating, Dr. Pritchard said.
The most popular anti-cheating technology, Turnitin.com, says it is now used by 9,500 high schools and colleges. Students submit written assignments to be compared with billions of archived Web pages and millions of other student papers, before they are sent to instructors. The company says that schools using the service for several years experience a decline in plagiarism.
Cheaters trying to outfox Turnitin have tried many tricks, some described in blogs and videos. One is to replace every “e” in plagiarized text with a foreign letter that looks like it, such as a Cyrillic “e,” meant to fool Turnitin’s scanners. Another is to use the Macros tool in Microsoft Word to hide copied text. Turnitin says neither scheme works.
Some educators have rejected the service and other anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.
Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”
For similar reasons, some students at the University of Central Florida objected to the business school’s testing center with its eye-in-the-sky video in its early days, Dr. Ellis said.
But recently during final exams after a summer semester, almost no students voiced such concerns. Rose Calixte, a senior, was told during an exam to turn her cap backward, a rule meant to prevent students from writing notes under the brim. Ms. Calixte disapproved of the fashion statement but didn’t knock the reason: “This is college. There is the possibility for people to cheat.”
A first-year M.B.A. student, Ashley Haumann, said that when she was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, “everyone cheated” in her accounting class of 300 by comparing answers during quizzes. She preferred the highly monitored testing center because it “encourages you to be ready for the test because you can’t turn and ask, ‘What’d you get?’ ”
For educators uncomfortable in the role of anti-cheating enforcer, an online tutorial in plagiarism may prove an elegantly simple technological fix.
That was the finding of a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January. Students at an unnamed selective college who completed a Web tutorial were shown to plagiarize two-thirds less than students who did not. (The study also found that plagiarism was concentrated among students with lower SAT scores.)
The tutorial “had an outsize impact,” said Thomas S. Dee, a co-author, who is now an economist at the University of Virginia.
“Many instructors don’t want to create this kind of adversarial environment with their students where there is a presumption of guilt,” Dr. Dee said. “Our results suggest a tutorial worked by educating students rather than by frightening them.”
Only a handful of colleges currently require students to complete such a tutorial, which typically illustrates how to cite a source or even someone else’s ideas, followed by a quiz.
The tutorial that Bowdoin uses was developed with its neighbor colleges Bates and Colby several years ago. Part of the reason it is required for enrollment, said Suzanne B. Lovett, a Bowdoin psychology professor whose specialty is cognitive development, is that Internet-age students see so many examples of text, music and images copied online without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism.
As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/education/06cheat.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=turnitin&st=cse&scp=1
"Anti-plagiarism services requiring students to submit papers to be vetted for copying is a booming business. Fifty-five percent of colleges and universities now use such a service, according to the Campus Computing Survey.
The best-known service, Turnitin.com, is engaged in an endless cat-and-mouse game with technologically savvy students who try to outsmart it. “The Turnitin algorithms are updated on an on-going basis,” the company warned last month in a blog post titled “Can Students ‘Trick’ Turnitin?”
The extent of student cheating, difficult to measure precisely, appears widespread at colleges. In surveys of 14,000 undergraduates over the last four years, an average of 61 percent admitted to cheating on assignments and exams.
The figure declined somewhat from 65 percent earlier in the decade, but the researcher who conducted the surveys, Donald L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers, doubts there is less of it. Instead, he suspects students no longer regard certain acts as cheating at all, for instance, cutting and pasting a few sentences at a time from the Internet.
Andrew Daines, who graduated in May from Cornell, where he served on a board in the College of Arts and Sciences that hears cheating cases, said Internet plagiarism was so common that professors told him they had replaced written assignments with tests and in-class writing.
Mr. Daines, a philosophy major, contributed to pages that Cornell added last month to its student Web site to bring attention to academic integrity. They include a link to a voluntary tutorial on avoiding plagiarism and a strongly worded admonition that “other generations may not have had as many temptations to cheat or plagiarize as yours,” and urging students to view this as a character test.
Mr. Daines said he was especially disturbed by an epidemic of students’ copying homework. “The term ‘collaborative work’ has been taken to this unbelievable extreme where it means, because of the ease of e-mailing, one person looking at someone else who’s done the assignment,” he said.
At M.I.T., David E. Pritchard, a physics professor, was able to accurately measure homework copying with software he had developed for another purpose — to allow students to complete sets of physics problems online. Some answered the questions so fast, “at first I thought we had some geniuses here at M.I.T.,” Dr. Pritchard said. Then he realized they were completing problems in less time than it took to read them and were copying the answers — mostly, it turned out, from e-mail from friends who had already done the assignment.
About 20 percent copied one-third or more of their homework, according to a study Dr. Pritchard and colleagues published this year. Students who copy homework find answers at sites like Course Hero, which is a kind of Napster of homework sharing, where students from more than 3,500 institutions upload papers, class notes and past exams.
Another site, Cramster, specializes in solutions to textbook questions in science and engineering. It boasts answers from 77 physics textbooks — but not Dr. Pritchard’s popular “Mastering Physics,” an online tutorial, because his publisher, Pearson, searches the Web for solutions and requests they be taken down to protect its copyright.
“You can use technology as well for detecting as for committing” cheating, Dr. Pritchard said.
The most popular anti-cheating technology, Turnitin.com, says it is now used by 9,500 high schools and colleges. Students submit written assignments to be compared with billions of archived Web pages and millions of other student papers, before they are sent to instructors. The company says that schools using the service for several years experience a decline in plagiarism.
Cheaters trying to outfox Turnitin have tried many tricks, some described in blogs and videos. One is to replace every “e” in plagiarized text with a foreign letter that looks like it, such as a Cyrillic “e,” meant to fool Turnitin’s scanners. Another is to use the Macros tool in Microsoft Word to hide copied text. Turnitin says neither scheme works.
Some educators have rejected the service and other anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.
Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”
For similar reasons, some students at the University of Central Florida objected to the business school’s testing center with its eye-in-the-sky video in its early days, Dr. Ellis said.
But recently during final exams after a summer semester, almost no students voiced such concerns. Rose Calixte, a senior, was told during an exam to turn her cap backward, a rule meant to prevent students from writing notes under the brim. Ms. Calixte disapproved of the fashion statement but didn’t knock the reason: “This is college. There is the possibility for people to cheat.”
A first-year M.B.A. student, Ashley Haumann, said that when she was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, “everyone cheated” in her accounting class of 300 by comparing answers during quizzes. She preferred the highly monitored testing center because it “encourages you to be ready for the test because you can’t turn and ask, ‘What’d you get?’ ”
For educators uncomfortable in the role of anti-cheating enforcer, an online tutorial in plagiarism may prove an elegantly simple technological fix.
That was the finding of a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January. Students at an unnamed selective college who completed a Web tutorial were shown to plagiarize two-thirds less than students who did not. (The study also found that plagiarism was concentrated among students with lower SAT scores.)
The tutorial “had an outsize impact,” said Thomas S. Dee, a co-author, who is now an economist at the University of Virginia.
“Many instructors don’t want to create this kind of adversarial environment with their students where there is a presumption of guilt,” Dr. Dee said. “Our results suggest a tutorial worked by educating students rather than by frightening them.”
Only a handful of colleges currently require students to complete such a tutorial, which typically illustrates how to cite a source or even someone else’s ideas, followed by a quiz.
The tutorial that Bowdoin uses was developed with its neighbor colleges Bates and Colby several years ago. Part of the reason it is required for enrollment, said Suzanne B. Lovett, a Bowdoin psychology professor whose specialty is cognitive development, is that Internet-age students see so many examples of text, music and images copied online without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism.
As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/education/06cheat.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=turnitin&st=cse&scp=1
Men at Work flautist has heard the thunder; Sydney Morning Herald, 7/7/10
Patrick Donovan, Sydney Morning Herald; Men at Work flautist has heard the thunder:
"THE man at the centre of Men at Work's copyright dispute is shattered that the famous song and his reputation have been tarnished.
''It has destroyed so much of my song,'' flute player Greg Ham said.
His refrain in Down Under was found to have reproduced a ''substantial part'' of the Guides' campfire anthem Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.
''It will be the way the song is remembered and I hate that,'' he said. ''I'm terribly disappointed that that's the way I'm going to be remembered - for copying something.''
Justice Peter Jacobsen yesterday ordered the song's composers, Colin Hay and Ron Strykert, and its publisher EMI to pay publisher Larrikin Music 5 per cent of Down Under's future profits, as well as royalties dating back to 2002.
Larrikin Music holds the copyright for the original Kookaburra melody, which was written more than 75 years ago by Toorak teacher Marion Sinclair.
The ruling is for substantially less than the 50 per cent royalty cut sought by Larrikin.
Mr Ham, who receives a small percentage of the song's royalties, said the decision ''could have been worse''.
''If it had been backdated to the '80s that would have been wrist slashing stuff,'' he said.
''I'll never see another cent out of that song again. We'll face massive legal costs.
''At the end of the day, I'll end up selling my house.''
He said he was still ''flabbergasted'' by the ruling of plagiarism.
''No one detected it - I didn't detect it and I played the f---ing thing.''
''I was looking for something that sounded Australiana - that's what came out - it was never Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.
''Music's always been about referring to what's already in our culture.''
He attacked the case as a ''massive waste of money and energy'' and said publishers would now be less likely to take on young songwriters.
''This whole copyright issue needs to be dealt with.
''Musicians are unaware of their rights, and they need to be able to cover themselves.''"
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/men-at-work-flautist-has-heard-the-thunder-20100706-zyzu.html
"THE man at the centre of Men at Work's copyright dispute is shattered that the famous song and his reputation have been tarnished.
''It has destroyed so much of my song,'' flute player Greg Ham said.
His refrain in Down Under was found to have reproduced a ''substantial part'' of the Guides' campfire anthem Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.
''It will be the way the song is remembered and I hate that,'' he said. ''I'm terribly disappointed that that's the way I'm going to be remembered - for copying something.''
Justice Peter Jacobsen yesterday ordered the song's composers, Colin Hay and Ron Strykert, and its publisher EMI to pay publisher Larrikin Music 5 per cent of Down Under's future profits, as well as royalties dating back to 2002.
Larrikin Music holds the copyright for the original Kookaburra melody, which was written more than 75 years ago by Toorak teacher Marion Sinclair.
The ruling is for substantially less than the 50 per cent royalty cut sought by Larrikin.
Mr Ham, who receives a small percentage of the song's royalties, said the decision ''could have been worse''.
''If it had been backdated to the '80s that would have been wrist slashing stuff,'' he said.
''I'll never see another cent out of that song again. We'll face massive legal costs.
''At the end of the day, I'll end up selling my house.''
He said he was still ''flabbergasted'' by the ruling of plagiarism.
''No one detected it - I didn't detect it and I played the f---ing thing.''
''I was looking for something that sounded Australiana - that's what came out - it was never Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.
''Music's always been about referring to what's already in our culture.''
He attacked the case as a ''massive waste of money and energy'' and said publishers would now be less likely to take on young songwriters.
''This whole copyright issue needs to be dealt with.
''Musicians are unaware of their rights, and they need to be able to cover themselves.''"
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/men-at-work-flautist-has-heard-the-thunder-20100706-zyzu.html
Senate Candidate Angle Accuses Senator Reid Of Copyright Infringement For Displaying Angle's Website; TechDirt.com, 7/6/10
Mike Masnick, TechDirt.com; Senate Candidate Angle Accuses Senator Reid Of Copyright Infringement For Displaying Angle's Website:
"The internet never forgets, but apparently, someone involved in the Senate election campaign for Sharron Angle was unaware of this fact. It appears that Angle and her staff are also quite unaware of The Streisand Effect. As you may or may not know, Angle is running for US Senator in Nevada, where she's challenging current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Reid, apparently, has been using images from Angle's primary campaign website against her. Angle apparently totally revamped her website after winning the primary, apparently to tone down some of the rhetoric on the website. So, she's not very pleased that Reid is showing off her old website -- which his staff apparently reposted at a new domain.
So, what does she do? She sends a cease-and-desist to Reid for publishing her own website claiming that it infringed on her copyright. No, seriously. You can read the cease & desist here and laugh along with it. Her lawyers claim that Reid only did this to capture email addresses under false pretenses, but it seems pretty clear that Reid's campaign just wanted to highlight some of Angle's more incendiary comments from the primary campaign, which she's now trying to back away from.
And, of course, because of all of this, Angle and her lawyers handed the Reid campaign a perfect peg to highlight exactly those statements."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100706/03574110080.shtml
"The internet never forgets, but apparently, someone involved in the Senate election campaign for Sharron Angle was unaware of this fact. It appears that Angle and her staff are also quite unaware of The Streisand Effect. As you may or may not know, Angle is running for US Senator in Nevada, where she's challenging current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Reid, apparently, has been using images from Angle's primary campaign website against her. Angle apparently totally revamped her website after winning the primary, apparently to tone down some of the rhetoric on the website. So, she's not very pleased that Reid is showing off her old website -- which his staff apparently reposted at a new domain.
So, what does she do? She sends a cease-and-desist to Reid for publishing her own website claiming that it infringed on her copyright. No, seriously. You can read the cease & desist here and laugh along with it. Her lawyers claim that Reid only did this to capture email addresses under false pretenses, but it seems pretty clear that Reid's campaign just wanted to highlight some of Angle's more incendiary comments from the primary campaign, which she's now trying to back away from.
And, of course, because of all of this, Angle and her lawyers handed the Reid campaign a perfect peg to highlight exactly those statements."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100706/03574110080.shtml
Reid Republishes Angle's Old Website, Defying Cease And Desist Order; HuffingtonPost.com, 7/6/10
Sam Stein, HuffingtonPost.com; Reid Republishes Angle's Old Website, Defying Cease And Desist Order:
"Less than 24 hours after removing a version of Sharron Angle's original unvarnished campaign website, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is defying a cease and desist order from his Tea Party opponent and republishing the site.
The Nevada Democrat's re-election campaign unveiled (for the second time) its website The Real Sharron Angle on Tuesday afternoon. The site is basically the same platform Angle used when running in the Nevada Republican primary, though Reid's staff tinkered with its presentation to ensure it could withstand a legal challenge from the Angle campaign.
The move is a show of defiance from the Majority Leader. Hours after launching her new website -- in which many of her more provocative positions have been scrubbed -- Angle filed a legal objection to Reid's publishing of her old campaign website material, claiming misuse of copyrighted materials. The Tea Party favorite was able to win temporary relief, with Reid agreeing to pull down the old site over the July 4th weekend. But the Senate Majority Leader's legal team clearly feels there is no standing for Angle's objections. At the very least, the advantages of highlighting Angle's now- former positions and statements outweighs the potential cost in legal fees from the back-and-forth sparring over copyright law.
"While we disagree with the assertions in Angle's "Cease and Desist" letter, we took the website down temporarily to make crystal clear the intent is solely to point out how far Sharron Angle is running from her own embarrassing record," read a statement from Brandon Hall, Reid's campaign manager. "We are not attempting to deceive anyone. Unfortunately, that point was lost on Angle's campaign, as evidenced by the threat of legal action to get her own website taken down. We made minor changes to address her frivolous concerns and now hope the new Sharron Angle will focus on explaining why the old Sharron Angle's views are so unacceptable."
Reid has made changes in his presentation of Angle's old website. The new version does not contain the sections soliciting donations and email addresses, in an effort to disabuse the claim that he is trying to steal the names of her supporters."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/06/reid-republishes-angles-o_n_637018.html
"Less than 24 hours after removing a version of Sharron Angle's original unvarnished campaign website, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is defying a cease and desist order from his Tea Party opponent and republishing the site.
The Nevada Democrat's re-election campaign unveiled (for the second time) its website The Real Sharron Angle on Tuesday afternoon. The site is basically the same platform Angle used when running in the Nevada Republican primary, though Reid's staff tinkered with its presentation to ensure it could withstand a legal challenge from the Angle campaign.
The move is a show of defiance from the Majority Leader. Hours after launching her new website -- in which many of her more provocative positions have been scrubbed -- Angle filed a legal objection to Reid's publishing of her old campaign website material, claiming misuse of copyrighted materials. The Tea Party favorite was able to win temporary relief, with Reid agreeing to pull down the old site over the July 4th weekend. But the Senate Majority Leader's legal team clearly feels there is no standing for Angle's objections. At the very least, the advantages of highlighting Angle's now- former positions and statements outweighs the potential cost in legal fees from the back-and-forth sparring over copyright law.
"While we disagree with the assertions in Angle's "Cease and Desist" letter, we took the website down temporarily to make crystal clear the intent is solely to point out how far Sharron Angle is running from her own embarrassing record," read a statement from Brandon Hall, Reid's campaign manager. "We are not attempting to deceive anyone. Unfortunately, that point was lost on Angle's campaign, as evidenced by the threat of legal action to get her own website taken down. We made minor changes to address her frivolous concerns and now hope the new Sharron Angle will focus on explaining why the old Sharron Angle's views are so unacceptable."
Reid has made changes in his presentation of Angle's old website. The new version does not contain the sections soliciting donations and email addresses, in an effort to disabuse the claim that he is trying to steal the names of her supporters."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/06/reid-republishes-angles-o_n_637018.html
Monday, July 5, 2010
ACTA slouches on, will be final within 6 months; ArsTechnica.com, 7/2/10
Nate Anderson, ArsTechnica.com; ACTA slouches on, will be final within 6 months:
"The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement rolls on. Negotiators have just wrapped up another round of talks this week in Lucerne, Switzerland, and more than two years into the ACTA process, have actually started to meet with civil society groups to talk about the actual ACTA draft text. (Many governments have previously asked for comments on ACTA, but before releasing the full text.)
"On the first day of the negotiations, in the interest of transparency, the Swiss Government hosted meetings at which ACTA negotiators met with representatives of civil society who have expressed an interest in ACTA to exchange views," says the official announcement...
Stung by years of criticism over the lack of transparency and ACTA's clear emphasis on enforcement (without much interest in limits and exceptions), the negotiators stress that "ACTA is not intended to include new intellectual property rights or to enlarge or diminish existing intellectual property rights. ACTA will not interfere with a signatory’s ability to respect fundamental rights and liberties."
"ACTA will not oblige border authorities to search travelers' baggage or their personal electronic devices for infringing materials."
ACTA's negotiations next come to the US, in what is meant as one of the final rounds on the agreement. The goal is to wrap ACTA up in 2010."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/acta-slouches-on-will-be-final-within-6-months.ars
"The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement rolls on. Negotiators have just wrapped up another round of talks this week in Lucerne, Switzerland, and more than two years into the ACTA process, have actually started to meet with civil society groups to talk about the actual ACTA draft text. (Many governments have previously asked for comments on ACTA, but before releasing the full text.)
"On the first day of the negotiations, in the interest of transparency, the Swiss Government hosted meetings at which ACTA negotiators met with representatives of civil society who have expressed an interest in ACTA to exchange views," says the official announcement...
Stung by years of criticism over the lack of transparency and ACTA's clear emphasis on enforcement (without much interest in limits and exceptions), the negotiators stress that "ACTA is not intended to include new intellectual property rights or to enlarge or diminish existing intellectual property rights. ACTA will not interfere with a signatory’s ability to respect fundamental rights and liberties."
"ACTA will not oblige border authorities to search travelers' baggage or their personal electronic devices for infringing materials."
ACTA's negotiations next come to the US, in what is meant as one of the final rounds on the agreement. The goal is to wrap ACTA up in 2010."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/acta-slouches-on-will-be-final-within-6-months.ars
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