Luke Harding, (London) Guardian); Russian spy Anna Chapman films risque video in Moscow:
"A diplomat's daughter, Chapman was the most high-profile of 10 Russian "sleepers" arrested in America in June after being caught trying to embed themselves in American society while secretly reporting to the Kremlin and leading double lives.
The first clue that Chapman was in Moscow surfaced this week when she posted a photo taken during the session on her Facebook page.
According to lifenews.ru, Heat is now taking legal action against Chapman, accusing her of breach of copyright. It is not clear when the magazine's exclusive with the 28-year-old spy, who spent several years working in London and is a former employee of Barclays Bank, will appear."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/26/anna-chapman-moscow-revealing-video
Monday, August 30, 2010
Copyrighting Fashion: Who Gains?; New York Times, 8/30/10
Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman, Freakonomics, New York Times; Copyrighting Fashion: Who Gains?:
"Kal Raustiala, a professor at UCLA Law School and the UCLA International Institute, and Chris Sprigman, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, are experts in counterfeiting and intellectual property. They have been guest-blogging for us about copyright issues. Today, they write about new efforts to extend copyright law to the fashion industry."
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/copyrighting-fashion-who-gains/?src=twr&scp=2&sq=copyright&st=cse
"Kal Raustiala, a professor at UCLA Law School and the UCLA International Institute, and Chris Sprigman, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, are experts in counterfeiting and intellectual property. They have been guest-blogging for us about copyright issues. Today, they write about new efforts to extend copyright law to the fashion industry."
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/copyrighting-fashion-who-gains/?src=twr&scp=2&sq=copyright&st=cse
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
[OpEd] Free That Tenor Sax; New York Times, 8/22/10
[OpEd] New York Times; Free That Tenor Sax:
"For jazz fans, nothing could be more tantalizing than the excerpts made available by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem of newly discovered recordings from the 1930s and ’40s. Nearly 1,000 discs containing performances by masters like Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Billie Holiday and the long-neglected Herschel Evans suddenly re-emerged when the son of the audio engineer, William Savory, sold them to the museum.
The museum is doing its best to clean up and digitize the recordings. But because of the way copyright laws work, excerpts may be all that fans can hear for some time. The museum paid for the discs, but cannot distribute the music until it has found a way to compensate the estates of the musicians, many of which may be very difficult to track down after all these decades."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22sun3.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=copyright&st=cse
"For jazz fans, nothing could be more tantalizing than the excerpts made available by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem of newly discovered recordings from the 1930s and ’40s. Nearly 1,000 discs containing performances by masters like Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Billie Holiday and the long-neglected Herschel Evans suddenly re-emerged when the son of the audio engineer, William Savory, sold them to the museum.
The museum is doing its best to clean up and digitize the recordings. But because of the way copyright laws work, excerpts may be all that fans can hear for some time. The museum paid for the discs, but cannot distribute the music until it has found a way to compensate the estates of the musicians, many of which may be very difficult to track down after all these decades."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22sun3.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=copyright&st=cse
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Copycats vs. Copyrights; Newsweek, 8/20/10
Ezra Klein, Newsweek; Copycats vs. Copyrights: Does it make sense to legally protect the fashion industry from knockoffs?:
"At a certain point, copyrights stop protecting innovation and begin protecting profits. They scare off future inventors who want to take a 60-year-old idea and use it as the foundation to build something new and interesting. That’s the difficulty of copyrights, patents, and other forms of intellectual protection. Too little, and the first innovation won’t happen. Too much, and the second innovation—the one relying on the first—will be stanched."
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/20/copycats-versus-copyrights.html
"At a certain point, copyrights stop protecting innovation and begin protecting profits. They scare off future inventors who want to take a 60-year-old idea and use it as the foundation to build something new and interesting. That’s the difficulty of copyrights, patents, and other forms of intellectual protection. Too little, and the first innovation won’t happen. Too much, and the second innovation—the one relying on the first—will be stanched."
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/20/copycats-versus-copyrights.html
Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review; New York Times, 8/24/10
Patricia Cohen, New York Times; Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review:
"“What we’re experiencing now is the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of movable type,” said Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian at Bryn Mawr College. “The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.”
That transformation was behind the recent decision by the prestigious 60-year-old Shakespeare Quarterly to embark on an uncharacteristic experiment in the forthcoming fall issue — one that will make it, Ms. Rowe says, the first traditional humanities journal to open its reviewing to the World Wide Web...
Today a small vanguard of digitally adept scholars is rethinking how knowledge is understood and judged by inviting online readers to comment on books in progress, compiling journals from blog posts and sometimes successfully petitioning their universities to grant promotions and tenure on the basis of non-peer-reviewed projects...
“Knowledge is not democratic,” said Michèle Lamont, a Harvard sociologist who analyzes peer review in her 2009 book, “How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.” Evaluating originality and intellectual significance, she said, can be done only by those who are expert in a field.
At the same time she noted that the Web is already having an incalculable effect on academia, especially among younger professors...
“There is an ethical imperative to share information,” said Mr. Cohen, who regularly posts his work online, where he said thousands read it. Engaging people in different disciplines and from outside academia has made his scholarship better, he said.
To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=venerable%20peer%20review&st=cse
"“What we’re experiencing now is the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of movable type,” said Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian at Bryn Mawr College. “The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.”
That transformation was behind the recent decision by the prestigious 60-year-old Shakespeare Quarterly to embark on an uncharacteristic experiment in the forthcoming fall issue — one that will make it, Ms. Rowe says, the first traditional humanities journal to open its reviewing to the World Wide Web...
Today a small vanguard of digitally adept scholars is rethinking how knowledge is understood and judged by inviting online readers to comment on books in progress, compiling journals from blog posts and sometimes successfully petitioning their universities to grant promotions and tenure on the basis of non-peer-reviewed projects...
“Knowledge is not democratic,” said Michèle Lamont, a Harvard sociologist who analyzes peer review in her 2009 book, “How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.” Evaluating originality and intellectual significance, she said, can be done only by those who are expert in a field.
At the same time she noted that the Web is already having an incalculable effect on academia, especially among younger professors...
“There is an ethical imperative to share information,” said Mr. Cohen, who regularly posts his work online, where he said thousands read it. Engaging people in different disciplines and from outside academia has made his scholarship better, he said.
To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=venerable%20peer%20review&st=cse
[Book Review] An Un-'Common' Take On Copyright Law; NPR, 8/24/10
[Book Review] ]Michael Schaub, NPR; An Un-'Common' Take On Copyright Law:
"Some people believe that not only are current copyright laws too stringent, but that the assumptions the current laws are based on are artificial, illogical and outdated.
Among them is Lewis Hyde, a professor of art and politics who has studied these issues for years. In his new book Common As Air, Hyde says he's suspicious of the concept of "intellectual property" to begin with, calling it "historically strange." Hyde backs it up with an impressive amount of research; he spends a significant amount of time reflecting on the Founding Fathers, who came up with America's initial copyright laws.
Hyde is a contrarian, but he's not a scorched-earth opponent of all copyright laws. He does believe the national paradigm for intellectual property issues should be changed, though, at one point offering several examples of the absurd situations the current laws have created. (In one particularly weird example, an e-book publisher insisted its edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland "cannot be lent to someone else" and "cannot be read aloud.") Hyde advocates for a return to a "cultural commons" and quotes, approvingly, Thomas Jefferson, who believed that "ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129299939
"Some people believe that not only are current copyright laws too stringent, but that the assumptions the current laws are based on are artificial, illogical and outdated.
Among them is Lewis Hyde, a professor of art and politics who has studied these issues for years. In his new book Common As Air, Hyde says he's suspicious of the concept of "intellectual property" to begin with, calling it "historically strange." Hyde backs it up with an impressive amount of research; he spends a significant amount of time reflecting on the Founding Fathers, who came up with America's initial copyright laws.
Hyde is a contrarian, but he's not a scorched-earth opponent of all copyright laws. He does believe the national paradigm for intellectual property issues should be changed, though, at one point offering several examples of the absurd situations the current laws have created. (In one particularly weird example, an e-book publisher insisted its edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland "cannot be lent to someone else" and "cannot be read aloud.") Hyde advocates for a return to a "cultural commons" and quotes, approvingly, Thomas Jefferson, who believed that "ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129299939
[Book Review] A Republic of Letters; New York Times Book Review, 8/22/10
[Book Review] Robert Darnton, New York Times Book Review; A Republic of Letters:
"Intellectual property has become such a hot topic that it needs to be doused with some history. Strange as it may sound, this is an argument developed convincingly in Lewis Hyde’s “Common as Air,” an eloquent and erudite plea for protecting our cultural patrimony from appropriation by commercial interests."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/books/review/Darnton-t.html
"Intellectual property has become such a hot topic that it needs to be doused with some history. Strange as it may sound, this is an argument developed convincingly in Lewis Hyde’s “Common as Air,” an eloquent and erudite plea for protecting our cultural patrimony from appropriation by commercial interests."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/books/review/Darnton-t.html
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