7.3 No Other Distribution Authorized Under this Agreement Except for the distribution of freely available Licensed Applications and the distribution of Applications for use on Registered Devices as set forth in Sections 7.1 and 7.2 above, no other distribution of programs or applications developed using the Apple Software is authorized or permitted hereunder. In the absence of a separate agreement with Apple, You agree not to distribute Your Application to third parties via other distribution methods or to enable or permit others to do so.

Diabolical.
Apple’s developer tools license mandates use of their distribution channel.
Because, you know, Cydia is such a threat to Apple’s business model.
Imagine if gcc’s license required your resulting executables run solely on Linux.
Imagine if Google required hosting your web apps on solely App Engine if you used Closure.
I hope section 7.3 comes back to bite Apple during their Department of Justice investigation.

This pithy and funny chart does a superb job of explaining how the insertion of a lot of "business model" (FBI warnings, unskippable trailers, THX vanity sequences) makes buying a DVD a lot worse than pirating the same disc online. I rip all my kid's DVDs (not least because she has a tendency to scratch them to hell), and the difference between firing up a movie on a laptop and it just starting versus trying to explain to a toddler why Daddy has to spend five minutes pressing next-next-next menu-menu-menu is enormous. I think it all comes down to the stuff in the DVD-CCA spec that allows DVD creators to flag sequences as unskippable: that's such an attractive nuisance, it's bound to attract every hard-sell marketer and power-tripping fool in any media company, who will eventually colonize it with so much crapola that it comes just short of destroying the possibility that anyone will voluntarily pay for the product. (Be sure to click below for the whole thing)

The defendants were Phone Directories Company Pty Ltd, its directors and others. The company has been competing against Telstra/Sensis since the mid-1990s. Cleverly, at least initially the business of Phone Directories Company Pty Ltd produced directories for regional areas, places where Telstra was not active or not greatly active.

Kulturdepartementet har invitert til en referansegruppe som skal arbeide med problemstillinger knyttet til ulovlig fildeling. Gruppen skal ta stilling til mulige tiltak som kan begrense den ulovlige fildelingen og samtidig stimulere til økt bruk av lovlige tjenester.Her finner du invitasjonsbrev og mandat for referansegruppen. InvitasjonsbrevMandat

A lot of commercial software comes with H.264 encoders and decoders, and some computers arrive with this software preinstalled. This leads a lot of people to believe that they can legally view and create H.264 videos for whatever purpose they like. Unfortunately for them, it ain’t so.

Last year, Radiohead expressed their growing discomfort with record labels that abuse copyrights for their own benefit, while harassing their fans. In a recent interview, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien said that he doesn’t believe piracy is killing the music industry, but that the industry will kill itself if it doesn’t adapt to the digital age.
In an attempt to take a stand against the labels, several well known artists including Radiohead formed the Featured Artists Coalition last year, a lobby group that aims to end the extortion-like practices of record labels and allow artists to gain more control over their own work.
Radiohead and others are unhappy with the fact that the labels, represented by lobby groups such as the RIAA and IFPI, are pushing for anti-piracy legislation without consulting the artists they claim to represent. Radiohead, who used BitTorrent to leakone of their songs, went as far as being willing to show up as a witness against the RIAA in court.
In a new MIDEM interview, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien stands up for file-sharers once again, stating that piracy is not killing the music industry in his view.
Torrent Freak

We can safely argue the Hadopi logo story categorises as an epic FAIL – what internet lingo describes as the often hilarious combination of failure as a result of lack of skill or sound judgement on the one hand, and sweet irony on the other hand. The multiple layers of failure make this story a particularly tragic one.
First we need a little context.
(...)
The so-called Hadopi law passed last year. In other countries similar legislation is commonly known as the “three strikes” law. It consist of a procedure warning twice people who have illegally downloaded copyright-protected works, before shutting off their internet connection for an indefinite period of time. Not only is the whole household taken offline if any person living there is accused of three acts of infringement, it is also added to a list of addresses to which it is illegal to provide Internet access.

Over the past six years, the record industry has successfully sued thousands of people in the United States for illegally downloading copyrighted songs. Just this summer, the only two file-sharing cases to go to trial ended in big wins for the industry. Soon, though, the major labels are going to have a different copyright battle on their hands -- one that will pit them not against those who want to listen to recordings, but those who created them in the first place. Call it the fight over "Funkytown."
The looming problem is the so-called termination rights Congress gave to creators of copyrighted material when it amended the U.S. copyright law in 1976. The rights -- which allow a copyright grant to be terminated after 35 years -- have bedeviled the film and publishing industries lately in cases involving the Superman franchise, John Steinbeck novels and Captain America comic books. Legal observers say those conflicts will pale next to the ones facing the music industry come 2013. That's the first year holders of sound-recording copyrights can take advantage of this provision, which, in turn, makes recordings from 1978 potentially the first to be up for grabs.

This is the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see. It shows the fate of the three main pillars of music industry revenue - recorded music, live music, and PRS revenues (royalties collected on behalf of artists when their music is played in public) over the last 5 years. We’ve broken each category into two sub-categories so that, for any chunk of revenue - recorded music sales, for instance - you can see the percentage that goes to the artist, and the percentage that goes elsewhere. (In the case of recorded music, the lion’s share of revenue goes to the record label; in the case of live, the promoter takes a cut etc.)

The MPAA has successfully shut down an entire town's municipal WiFi because a single user was found to be downloading a copyrighted movie. Rather than being embarrassed by this gross example of collective punishment (a practice outlawed in the Geneva conventions) against Coshocton, OH, the MPAA's spokeslizard took the opportunity to cry poor (even though the studios are bringing in record box-office and aftermarket receipts).

FLERE KONTROLLER: Kystvakta er satt inn i jakten på piratkopierte kartsystemer langs hele kysten av Sør-Norge. Det skjer etter at flere fiskere ble avslørt med ulovlige kart under en politirazzia i forrige uke.
Kjøp bilde

En ny avtale mellom NRK og plateselskapenes bransjeorganisasjon IFPI kan få store konsekvenser for allmennkringkasterens podkasttilbud. - Vi har fått i stand en avtale mellom IFPI og NRK om at maks 50 prosent av podkastene kan være musikk.
(...)
P1-programleder Kari Slaatsveen raser imidlertid mot de nye retningslinjene, og sier til NRK.no at hun ikke vil redigere i programmene slik at de oppfyller de nye kravene. — Det var gøy så lenge det varte, men nå er det ha det på badet for oss, sier hun til nrk.no.— For oss å rippe ned programmet til bare verbalt høres helt i tåka. Det samme vil jeg tro gjelder Jungeltelegrafen, P.i.l.s. og Pyro, sier hun videre.Programleder Bård Ose i «Populærmusikk ispedd litt sladder», P.i.l.s, ser ikke lyst på å slutte med podkaster.  — Trist. Veldig trist, sier Ose til NRK.

Kjære NRK, Det er med stor interesse vi har mottatt nyheten om at deres nye avtale med IFPI gjør det vanskeligere for dere å legge ut podkaster. Vi skjønner at det er vanskelig å få til programmer med under femti prosent musikk, og vi syns det hadde vært trist om mange av deres flotte podkaster hadde måttet utgå på grunn av IFPIs gammeldagse holdninger til opphavsrett. Men alt trenger ikke å være mørkt og trist!

But some publishers worry that the convenience of borrowing books electronically could ultimately cut into sales of print editions.“I don’t have to get in my car, go to the library, look at the book, check it out,” said John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, which publishes authors like Janet Evanovich, Augusten Burroughs and Jeffrey Eugenides. “Instead, I’m sitting in the comfort of my living room and can say, ‘Oh, that looks interesting’ and download it.”

The film It's a Wonderful Life is now very popular but originally lost money. It was only after 1970 when copyright lapsed and it was taken up by others that it became successful. Ditto The Secret Garden, a children's classic, and numerous others. This is worth noting because governments everywhere are caving in to corporate lobbies by extending the life of copyright, — ludicrous in a digital age — to life plus 70 years.
(...)
Disney made its early money by reworking ideas in the public domain such as Cinderella and the fairytales of the brothers Grimm – themselves collectors rather than originators of folk tales. It then turned turtle and used copyright to boost profits without having to do anything.

Samlaget, the Norwegian publisher for Little Brother, have released the full text of the book as a downloadable PDF. Samlaget have been incredibly forward-looking and a delight to work with. They brought me to Norway to participate in a debate on the future of copyright law at the Litteraturhuset, and my translator, editor, and publicist were all excited by the possibilities opened up by free digital distribution as a means to sell print books.

Ole Paus liker ikke utviklingen i musikkbransjen og varsler at han nå snart gir seg som plateartist.
- Jeg liker ikke utviklingen i bransjen, men den kan man ikke stoppe. Da får jeg heller trekke meg tilbake, sier artisten til VG.Han sier også at «får nok innkalle artilleriet og ta et generaloppgjør med en bransje som ikke lenger er min».

Forfatteren Cory Doctorow er kjerringa mot strømmen. Mens norske forfattere deltar i oppropet «dele, ikke stjele», der de krever at norske politikere tar grep for å sikre opphavsretten, kjemper Doctorow for en liberal fildelingslovgivning og en mindre restriktiv opphavsrett.

Forlaget Samlaget legg ut halve boka gratis på internett, men vil du lese heile, må du kjøpe papirutgåva. Dette er mot forfattaren si vilje.

- Eg gjev vekk bøkene mine fordi eg trur eg tenar meir pengar på det. Det same gjeld her i Noreg, seier Cory Doctorow. Den kanadiske forfattaren er kjend for å vere ein ivrig tilhengjar av gratis publisering på internett. Han meiner gratis elektroniske utgåver av bøker sel dei trykte bøkene.

En rekke kunstner- og forfatterorganisasjoner lanserte nylig en kampanje mot «stjeling» av innhold på internett. Kampanjen ber de politiske partiene klargjøre sine standpunkter, men legger samtidig klare føringer på hvilke standpunkter de politiske partiene bør ha.
Oppropet har i liten eller ingen grad vært diskutert internt i organisasjonene, og vi mener organisajonene gjør strategisk feil når de avviser forslag fra Venstre, SV, og Rødt som kan gi oss nye kompensasjonsmodeller for innhold på nettet.

Forfatter Eirik Newth mener kunstnerne og organisasjonene bak oppropet mot fildeling mangler respekt for nettbrukernes personvern og rettssikkerhet.