Free Republic

The Copyright Cage Bars can't have TVs bigger than 55 inches. Teddy bears can't include tape decks. Girl Scouts who sing "Puff, the Magic Dragon" owe royalties. Copyright law needs to change. By Jonathan Zittrain A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO I WAS TALKING WITH A LAW SCHOOL COLLEAGUE about cyberlaw and the people who study it. "I've always wondered," he said, "why all the cyberprofs hate copyright." I don't actually hate copyright, and yet I knew just what he meant. Almost all of us who study and write about the law of cyberspace agree that copyright law is a big...

Profits from piracyEvidence is mounting that cracking down on software copyright infringement may not be good for business. Case study: Microsoft in China.- - - - - - - - - - - -By Sam WilliamsSept. 26, 2002  |  Call it a strange case of quid pro quo without the quo. Earlier this summer, Microsoft and China, two inscrutable monoliths waging a protracted cold war over copyrights and software pricing, finally decided to settle their differences via a three-year, $750 million "memorandum of understanding," the largest deal ever between the Chinese government and a foreign software company. Details of the...

"Copyright is my right. Buy a license or you'll have trouble with the police," croons Egyptian pop singer Shaban Abd el-Reheem on his latest album. His recording is one of the many unconventional weapons waged in the battle to stop the rampant piracy of records, software, movies, and books in Egypt, whose 65 million people make up the biggest consumer market in the Middle East. In February, the Business Software Alliance, the group that represents Microsoft, Adobe, and other software makers concerned about piracy, signed up another unusual partner -- the grand muftis at Al Azhar in Cairo. The highest...

WISCONSIN COMPANY PAYS SOFTWARE WATCHDOG $150,000 BSA Announces Software Grace Period in MilwaukeeWashington, D.C., April 29, 2002 – The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a watchdog group representing the nation’s leading software manufacturers, today announced that Commercial Communication, Inc., a printing company located in Hartland, WI, paid BSA $150,000 after a self-audit revealed more copies of Adobe, Autodesk, Macromedia, Microsoft and Symantec software programs on its computers than it had licenses to support. In addition to the payment, the company agreed to delete any unlicensed copies, purchase replacement software and strengthen its software management practices. This settlement announcement comes at...

Critics say punishment for ‘recreational’ piracy is too harsh By THE WALL STREET JOURNAL March 21 — The U.S. software industry says it has a big problem, and it believes it has a solution: putting Robin Rothberg and some of his friends behind bars. Not everyone agrees. MR. ROTHBERG, a 34-year-old Boston-area computer consultant, was for a year or two around 1997 a leader of “Pirates With Attitude” — an online software-piracy group. The Pirates — like hundreds or even thousands of other groups on the Web — do for software what Napster did for music, making programs such as...