Today’s links An open copyright casebook, featuring AI, Warhol and more: Up-to-date, erudite, and free! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2019 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. An open copyright casebook, featuring AI, Warhol and more (permalink) Few debates invite more uninformed commentary than “IP” – a loosely defined grab bag that regulates an ever-expaning sphere of our daily activities, despite the fact that almost no one, including senior executives in the entertainment industry, understands how it works. Take reading a book. If the book arrives between two covers in the form of ink sprayed on compressed vegetable pulp, you don’t need to understand the first thing about copyright to read it. But if that book arrives as a stream of bits in an app, those bits are just the thinnest scrim of scum atop a terminally polluted ocean of legalese. At the bottom layer: the license “agreement” for your device itself – thousands of words of nonsense that bind you not to replace its software with another vendor’s code, to use the company’s own service depots, etc etc. This garbage novella of legalese implicates trademark law, copyright, patent, and “paracopyrights” like the anticircumvention rule defined by Section 1201 of the DMCA: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-lawsuit-takes-dmca-section-1201-research-and-technology-restrictions-violate Then there’s the store that sold you the ebook: it has…Pluralistic: An open copyright casebook, featuring AI, Warhol and more (30 Jul 2024)

Today’s links An open copyright casebook, featuring AI, Warhol and more: Up-to-date, erudite, and free! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2019 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. An open copyright casebook, featuring AI, Warhol and more (permalink) Few debates invite more uninformed commentary than “IP” – a loosely defined grab bag that regulates an ever-expaning sphere of our daily activities, despite the fact that almost no one, including senior executives in the entertainment industry, understands how it works. Take reading a book. If the book arrives between two covers in the form of ink sprayed on compressed vegetable pulp, you don’t need to understand the first thing about copyright to read it. But if that book arrives as a stream of bits in an app, those bits are just the thinnest scrim of scum atop a terminally polluted ocean of legalese. At the bottom layer: the license “agreement” for your device itself – thousands of words of nonsense that bind you not to replace its software with another vendor’s code, to use the company’s own service depots, etc etc. This garbage novella of legalese implicates trademark law, copyright, patent, and “paracopyrights” like the anticircumvention rule defined by Section 1201 of the DMCA: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-lawsuit-takes-dmca-section-1201-research-and-technology-restrictions-violate Then there’s the store that sold you the ebook: it has…Pluralistic: An open copyright casebook, featuring AI, Warhol and more (30 Jul 2024)