URLs: The Profession, 2004 May

Data and Information as Property

Sean Dodson, Second Sight, The Guardian, 2003 December 18 (you might not have noticed but the Copyright and Related Rights Regulation 2003 came into force at the end of October)

Rhianna Pratchett, Does this look familiar?, The Guardian, 2003 December 20 (a legal battle throws light on the fact that many games appear to look much the same)

Graeme Philipson, To be or not to be, that is the qwerty, The Age, 2003 December 8 (computer-generated poetry has been with us almost from the beginning)

Paul Rincon, Robot scientist proves its worth, BBC, 2004 January 14 (UK researchers build a robot scientist that performs just as well in the lab as its human counterparts)

Leon Gettler, Creation does not guarantee remuneration, The Age, 2004 January 16 (the looming threats to Google and Apple's iPod are just two examples showing why renewal and innovation don't stack up to management theories about growth and learning organisations)

Software "spots new treatments", BBC, 2004 February 1 (a computer program, designed to scan research papers, could help find new uses for existing drugs)

Paul Carr, One day we'll all be reading e-papers, The Guardian, 2004 February 9 (print publishing and online publishing are converging at such an incredible speed that it won't be long before it will be virtually impossible to distinguish between them)

David Whitehouse, Genome data to be released, BBC, 2004 February 18 (the sequence of the human genetic blueprint deciphered three years ago by a private company is to be made public)

Alex Kirby, Traditional knowledge "in peril", BBC, 2004 February 19 (a legal loophole means indigenous people's knowledge has to be published)

Paul Rubens, Virtual voices, The Guardian, 2004 February 19 (Lola and Leon are the first cloned voices used to create software that mimics human singing)

Christopher May, Digital rights management and the breakdown of social norms, First Monday, 2003 February 19 (a legal loophole means indigenous people's knowledge has to be published)

Duncan Lamont, The law and that lie, The Guardian, 2004 February 23 (fake images such as the one last week of Jane Fonda and John Kerry are on the increase; so is there a legal way to stop them?)

Richard Horton, The Dawn of McScience, The New York Review of Books, 2004 March 11 (in Science in the Private Interest, a strongly argued polemic against the commercial conditions in which scientific research currently operates, Sheldon Krimsky shows how universities have become little more than instruments of wealth)

Colin Tudge, The honesty of science is being compromised at every turn New Statesman, 2004 April 26

Wiley Miller, Non Sequitur 2004 May 31

Copyright

Intellectual Property Copyright (Music Video/movies Deep Linking) Patents Trade Marks Unsorted

Eric Wilson, The harsh reality of royalties, The Age, 2003 December 15 (e-learning may be the loser in a software copyright stoush; universities are set to become both the victims and the beneficiaries of surprise royalty demands, as the IT market polarises between free and patented software)

Charles Scanlon, S Korea promises piracy action, BBC, 2004 January 9 (South Korea's government is stung by allegations that it is a leading violater of American copyright laws)

Film firms lose DVD piracy battle, BBC, 2004 January 6 (US movie industry fight to prosecute a Norwegian hacker has ended in failure)

Playboy allowed to sue AOL, BBC, 2004 January 15 (Playboy gets the right to sue AOL unit Netscape in a breach of copyright case over the term "playmate")

Ian Mayes, The meal is ended but the memory lingers on, The Guardian, 2004 January 31 (the unlimited life of a redundant review; brings up the interesting point that "anything on the internet is seen as a fresh publication each time it is accessed.")

Mark Pearce, An advert or the real thing?, The Guardian, 2004 February 9 (David Bedford wants £250,000 in damages for the use of his image in an advertising campaign for the 118 118 directory enquiries service)

Kate Bulkley, The tale of Tractor Tom, The Guardian, 2004 February 23 (the lucrative business of character licensing has always been associated with big US companies such as Disney, but now smaller British players are getting in on the act)

Adam Turner, Copy, right?, The Age, 2004 February 24 (copyright and the right to copy are the biggest hurdles facing the digital media revolution)

Sean Dodson, Tailored television, The Guardian, 2004 February 26 (after an inauspicious start, the personal video recorder is back, and it could revolutionise the way we watch programs)

Robert McCrum. Burning down the embargo, The Observer, 2004 March 7 (in a world of online bookshops, who needs embargo agreements any more?)

Jim McClellan, Blurring the boundaries, The Guardian, 2004 July 29 (writers have embraced the net to do research, but few have used it for creative purposes; a new centre is aiming to change all that)

Hamish Mackintosh, Talk Time, The Guardian, 2004 July 29 (Lawrence Lessig is professor of law at Stanford University and an expert on digital rights and copyright law)

Copyright: Music

Intellectual Property Copyright (General Video/movies Deep Linking) Patents Trade Marks Unsorted

Legal action over anti-copy DVDs, BBC, 2004 January 6 (major record labels are sued by a European consumer group over copy-protected CDs)

Seth Schiesel, Profit-minded bands upload straight to Web, International Herald Tribune, 2004 January 23 (as other technology companies scramble to match the success of Apple's online music store, iTunes, a different online music economy is emerging around the sale of recordings of live performances, often with no restriction on how they may be played or shared)

Record labels in "piracy" raids, BBC, 2004 February 6 (Australian record labels raid universities and internet firms to hunt for evidence of online music "piracy")

Kazaa files motion to delay copyright proceedings, The Age, 2004 February 10 (peer to peer music group Kazaa is trying to delay proceedings for alleged copyright breaches brought against them by the Australian record industry until a similar case in the United States is finalised)

Music site plea in "piracy" case, BBC, 2004 February 10 (the Australian owners of online music service Kazaa ask for evidence to be ruled as "inadmissable")

Seth Schiesel, Beyond piracy: the new face of Internet file-sharing, International Herald Tribune, 2004 February 12 (if Napster started the first generation of file sharing, and services like Kazaa represented the second, then the system developed by Bram Cohen, known as BitTorrent, may well be leading the third)

Canada joins online piracy fight, BBC, 2004 February 17 (Canada's biggest music companies start legal moves to try to identify people who illegally swap songs online)

US steps up online piracy fight, BBC, 2004 February 18 (the US record industry sues another 531 people in its continuing campaign against online music piracy)

Napster sells five million songs, BBC, 2004 February 24 (music download service Napster says it has sold more than five million songs since its relaunch)

Eminem sues Apple for ad song, BBC, 2004 February 25 (rap star Eminem claims the computer firm used one of his songs in an advertisement without his permission)

Beatles remix was "art project", BBC, 2004 February 26 (a DJ whose Beatles remix album was blocked by EMI says he never meant to break copyright laws)

Victor Keegan, The great downloads war, The Guardian, 2004 March 5 (Apple's iPod has put it in pole position in the MP3 downloads race, but the running order may be about to change)

Copyright: Video/Movies

Intellectual Property Copyright (General Music Deep Linking) Patents Trade Marks Unsorted

Italy "heads piracy shame list", BBC, 2004 January 29 (Italy has the highest level of video and DVD piracy in the western world)

Oscars expel voter over "piracy", BBC, 2004 February 5 (Academy Awards bosses kick out a member after copies of preview videos ended up on the internet)

Microsoft to protect Disney films, BBC, 2004 February 9 (Disney has signed up to use Microsoft software to protect its animated movies when they go online)

Alfred Hermida, Game copying becomes easier, BBC, 2004 February 17 (a firm whose DVD-copying software has angered film studios could have just made a foe of the games industry)

Man denies Oscar piracy charges, BBC, 2004 February 18 (a man accused of distributing films online that were supplied to an Oscar voter denies the charges)

Court bans DVD copy software, The Age, 2004 February 24 (DVD duplication software maker 321 Studios has been told by a US federal judge of the Northern District Court of California to stop selling its DVD Copy Plus and DVD-X COPY software products)

Andra Jackson, Children in booming DVD racket, The Age, 2004 February 24 (children as young as 13 are being hired as police lookouts by people selling pirated DVDs and compact discs at Melbourne's markets)

John Naughton, Hollywood's nightmare has arrived, The Observer, 2004 March 7 (a new piece of software means downloading movies has never been easier)

Copyright: Deep Linking

Intellectual Property Copyright (General Music Video/movies) Patents Trade Marks Unsorted

Chris Sherman, Deep Linking, 2002 July

Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox, 2003 March 3

Site Barks About Deep Link, Wired

Deep Linking Takes Another Blow, Wired

Deep Linking Lunacy, 2002 July 7

Legality of "Deep Linking" Remains Deeply Complicated (the Ticketmaster linking lawsuit)

Margaret Smith Kubiszyn, Emerging Legal Guidance on Deep Linking

Gayle Campbell and Pattie Steib, Deep Linking, Southeastern Louisiana University

Brian Morrisey, Can "Deep Linking" Lead to Deep Trouble?, 2002 May 17

Darrel Ince, Breaking the links, The Guardian, 2003 December 13 (clueless lawyers and commercial greed could soon prevent deep linking between websites)

Patents and Software

Intellectual Property Copyright (General Music Video/movies Deep Linking) Trade Marks Unsorted

Clark Boyd, Software patents "threaten Linux", BBC, 2004 January 23 (leading open source advocate Bruce Perens warns of the threat to Linux from software patents)

Jennifer L Schenker, Europe's tug of war over software patents, International Herald Tribune, 2004 February 2 (you cannot patent software in the European Union today - except if the software is part of a separate invention or process, and even then, it depends on your country)

Stephen Bayley, Left breast, right breast, The Guardian, 2004 February 21 (Stephen van Dulken tries to examine a nation through the things it makes and consumes in Inventing the American Dream, a history of patents)

Richard Page, Second Sight, The Guardian, 2004 March 4 (a software industry, dominated by a small number of companies protected by a wall of patents permeating every aspect of our lives, will not be answerable to governments, let alone individual customers)

Adam B Jaffe and Josh Lerner, Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What to Do About It Princeton University Press (see also the Scientific American Staking Claims column for 2004 June and July)

Trade Marks and Advertising

Intellectual Property Copyright (General Music Video/movies Deep Linking) Patents Unsorted

Sam Varghese, Taking the stuffing out of Microsoft, The Age, 2004 January 22 (to the world at large, the word Microsoft means one thing - computer software; in Australia, the trademark Microsoft is also used, legally, by a company which manufactures pillows and quilts)

Tracey Logan, TV-style adverts arrive on web, BBC, 2004 February 3 (net users may have to get used to watching TV ads between web pages, if current trials are successful)

MSN bans pop-ups on global sites, BBC, 2004 February 16 (Microsoft's net arm, MSN, is to scrap pop-up ads on most global sites after realising they annoy web searchers)

Nick Cohen, The unfree market, The Observer, 2004 March 7 (the young need to be protected from advertising for the same reason they are protected from sex)

Wiley Miller, Non Sequitur 2004 June 2

Unsorted

Intellectual Property Copyright (General Music Video/movies Deep Linking) Patents Trade Marks

UK police tackle web porn, BBC, 2004 February 5 (police in the UK are contacting other forces worldwide in an attempt to close down websites with sexually violent content)

Jamie Doward, Pirates loot the film and music giants' coffers, The Observer, 2004 February 8 (organised crime is running the multi-billion counterfeit trade - and it's not just Hollywood that will suffer)

Sam Varghese, Perth company gives SCO Australia deadline to withdraw IP claims, The Age, 2004 February 10 (Perth-based open source company Cyberknights has written to The SCO Group in Australia giving the latter a deadline of February 13 to withdraw its claims that it owns IP in the Linux kernel which users should license if they wish to use Linux legally)

Alok Jha, Ghost plagues Microsoft machine, The Guardian, 2004 February 14 (new blow to software giant as secret Windows blueprint leaked)

Victoria Shannon, A cornucopia of CDs, International Herald Tribune, 2004 February 14 (you need to be careful what you buy at the record store, since more and more CDs are coming in slightly different formats or have some kind of copying limitations)

Workplace data theft "rampant", BBC, 2004 February 15 (many staff are happy to steal key information from the firms they work for)

Charles Boundy, Protection peril, The Guardian, 2004 February 16 (the data protection act is miscast as a privacy law, as forthcoming appeals by Naomi Campbell and the Douglases may well show)

Microsoft hunts source code leak, BBC, 2004 February 16 (the investigation into the Windows code leak turns to a Silicon Valley firm that works closely with Microsoft)

Google expands its search empire, BBC, 2004 February 18 (Google has expanded its web index to more than six billion items, including almost a billion images)

Microsoft targets source pirates, BBC, 2004 February 19 (Microsoft is writing to people who are distributing its leaked source code via the net and file-sharing systems)

Reuters, Discs rejected, The Guardian, 2004 February 19 (Microsoft fails to pacify rivals by bundling others' software)

Police chief calls for net clean up, BBC, 2004 February 24 (the head of the UK's net crime team has called for a clean-up of sites promoting cannibalism and necrophilia)

Verisign sues over site closure, BBC, 2004 February 27 (Verisign, whose Site Finder service had to close, is suing policy body ICANN, saying it overstepped the mark)

Oracle takeover faces legal block, BBC, 2004 February 27 (the US Justice Department issues lawsuit to prevent the software giant taking over rival PeopleSoft, claiming the deal would be anti-competitive)

Microsoft ends "unfair" contract, BBC, 2004 February 27 (Microsoft says it will ditch a controversial contracts provision under investigation by fair trade officials in Japan)

John Naughton, Still searching for the web's holy grail, The Observer, 2004 February 29 (stand-up comedians have a saying that "you're only as good as your last gig"; the same goes for computer technology)