Jurors hit Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams with $7.4-million verdict; Los Angeles Times, 3/10/15

Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times; Jurors hit Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams with $7.4-million verdict:

"A federal jury found Tuesday that the 2013 hit song "Blurred Lines" infringed on the Marvin Gaye chart-topper "Got to Give It Up," awarding nearly $7.4 million to Gaye's children.

Jurors found against singer-songwriters Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke, but held harmless the record company and rapper T.I."

CrowdFlower Launches Open Data Project Covering Everything From Climate Change To #ThatDress; TechCrunch, 3/3/15

Anthony Ha, TechCrunch; CrowdFlower Launches Open Data Project Covering Everything From Climate Change To #ThatDress:

"Crowdsourcing company CrowdFlower allows businesses to tap into a distributed workforce of 5 million contributors for basic tasks like sentiment analysis. Today it’s releasing some of that data to the public through its new Data for Everyone initiative.

Founder and CEO Lukas Biewald (a friend of mine from college) told me that last year, the company quietly began asking some of its customers if they were willing to make the data they gathered through CrowdFlower public, and now it’s officially launching the initiative with its first batch of data sets.

Biewald said this grew out of his own frustrations about the lack of open data during his time as a grad student and as a scientist at search startup Powerset. His hope is to turn CrowdFlower into a central repository where open data can be found by researchers and entrepreneurs. (Factual was another startup trying to become a hub for open data, though in recent years, it’s become more focused on gathering location data to power mobile ads.)"

Here’s What Will Truly Change Higher Education: Online Degrees That Are Seen as Official; New York Times, 3/5/15

Kevin Carey, New York Times; Here’s What Will Truly Change Higher Education: Online Degrees That Are Seen as Official:

"The failure of MOOCs to disrupt higher education has nothing to do with the quality of the courses themselves, many of which are quite good and getting better. Colleges are holding technology at bay because the only thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable price. What they don’t offer are official college degrees, the kind that can get you a job. And that, it turns out, is mostly what college students are paying for.

Now information technology is poised to transform college degrees. When that happens, the economic foundations beneath the academy will truly begin to tremble...

Free online courses won’t revolutionize education until there is a parallel system of free or low-fee credentials, not controlled by traditional colleges, that leads to jobs. Now technological innovators are working on that, too.

The Mozilla Foundation, which brought the world the Firefox web browser, has spent the last few years creating what it calls the Open Badges project. Badges are electronic credentials that any organization, collegiate or otherwise, can issue. Badges indicate specific skills and knowledge, backed by links to electronic evidence of how and why, exactly, the badge was earned.

Traditional institutions, including Michigan State and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are experimenting with issuing badges. But so are organizations like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 4-H, the Smithsonian, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Y.M.C.A. of Greater New York."

What Happens When Mein Kampf's Copyright Expires?; New Republic, 3/6/15

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, New Republic; What Happens When Mein Kampf's Copyright Expires? :

"Later this year, the official copyright for Mein Kampf expires—70 years after the demise of its author. Since 1945, the Bavarian State (which owns the copyright) has refused to allow anyone to publish the volume. But in expectation of the copyright’s expiration (and in the hope of getting a jump on neo-Nazis who may try to publish their own slanted versions of the text) the esteemed Munich and Berlin-based Institute for Contemporary History decided some years ago to publish its own, critically annotated version. The move has generated some opposition, with some arguing against the release of any new version; “Can you annotate the Devil?” one critic asks."

Pharrell Williams Acknowledges Similarity to Gaye Song in ‘Blurred Lines’ Case; New York Times, 3/4/15

Ben Sisario and Noah Smith, New York Times; Pharrell Williams Acknowledges Similarity to Gaye Song in ‘Blurred Lines’ Case:

"How closely does Robin Thicke’s hit “Blurred Lines” resemble a classic by Marvin Gaye?

That question is central to a closely watched copyright case here, and on Wednesday, Pharrell Williams, the producer behind “Blurred Lines,” acknowledged a similarity to Gaye’s 1977 song “Got to Give It Up” but denied that there had been any intention to copy it.

“I must have been channeling that feeling, that late-’70s feeling,” Mr. Williams testified in the case, which pits him and Mr. Thicke against the family of Gaye, who died in 1984...

Mr. Busch then asked Mr. Williams whether “Blurred Lines” had a similar “feel” to “Got to Give It Up” and others from its era.

“Feel,” Mr. Williams said, “not infringement.”"

Industry Issues Intrude in ‘Blurred Lines’ Case; New York Times, 3/1/15

Ben Sisario, New York Times; Industry Issues Intrude in ‘Blurred Lines’ Case:

"Copyright cases can be esoteric affairs. But the “Blurred Lines” trial, which began Tuesday before Judge John A. Kronstadt in United States District Court for the Central District of California, has provided a rare window into an unseemly and embarrassing side of the music industry. Testimony and a flurry of pretrial documents have revealed lurid details of drugs, unearned songwriting credits, and intentional deception of the news media employed as a standard promotional practice...

If Mr. Thicke’s side loses, the potential damages could be large. “Blurred Lines” has sold 7.3 million copies in the United States, and Richard S. Busch, the Gaye family’s lawyer, claimed in his opening statement that the song had earned at least $30 million in profit — a figure Mr. Thicke’s lawyers disputed. If Mr. Thicke’s side is found liable of infringement, then the jury would decide what percentage of the song’s profits should be shared with the Gayes as damages."

How Copyright Terms Restrict Scholarship; Pacific Standard, 2/17/15

Noah Bertlatsky, Pacific Standard; How Copyright Terms Restrict Scholarship:

"Copyright in the United States is supposed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries," according to the Constitution. Yet, in the case of the early Marston and Peter comics, copyright appears to have failed. DC is not keeping the comics in print: So, in order to read the complete run of Wonder Woman in her two comics (Wonder Woman and Sensation Comics) for my research, I had to find unlicensed digital editions. Without piracy, my book would have been impossible to complete."