You are currently browsing the Mutant Squirrel posts tagged: copyright


Should We Keep Letting the MPAA Fib

And an Ars Technica article points out that US box office doing its biggest year of business ever in 2007, growing 5.4 percent over 2006 and bringing in $9.63 billionSo the question is, how much longer are we going to let the MPAA concoct a "truth" that allows them to push new crappy laws that erode our freedoms? Read more [...]

A Message to a Friend Explaining My View on Intellectual Property

I think that IP is one of the largest issues going and to make it worse, people don't know anything about it. IP is used to create artificial monopolies, like MLB saying people can't disseminate the facts (which are currently not part of IP) of a baseball without authorization. Read more [...]

2012 Olympic Games

This message was not brought to you by the real Olympic Games, but is instead a demonstration of the free speech which the folks who run Olympic Games are trying to kill. David Edgar puts it pretty well: By declaring images, titles and now words to be ownable brands, these various organisations and individuals are contributing to an increased commodification and thus privatisation of materials previously agreed to be in the public domain. Read more [...]

A Demonstration of How Copyright is Being Used in America

Greedy people without any ideas are abusing a poorly designed system meant to protect people with ideas from greedy people without ideas. Lawyers have convinced doctors to patent medical procedures, convinced accountants to patent tax-strategies, and of course didn't even need to convince large incumbent companies from using patents to stamp down rival startups. Read more [...]

Where is Capitalism Anyway

The concept of the free market is that those who can't survive in business are pushed out of the market, however through intellectual property management any company that has established itself can remain on artificial life-support by abusing the system through lawsuits that either give failing businesses a cut of their competition's income or by blocking that competition altogether. Read more [...]

Look What That Wacky DMCA is Doing Now!

CNet reports: Indeed, Richard Silver, who filed the copyright for the Electric Slide in 2004, said on one of his Web pages that the DeGeneres Show had been putting up a legal fight as he tried to get compensation for a segment that aired in February 2006 in which actress Teri Hatcher and other dancers performed the popular wedding shuffle. Read more [...]

Sand Animation

In this video Ferenc Cakó gives a kind of performance by sculpting sand on a projector, called sand animation... The only thing I find slightly disturbing is Cakó's attempt at copyright on his website: Live Sand Animation © is the idea, and the creation of Mr Ferenc Cakó. Read more [...]