Brian Carver is promoting "sticky" copyright. One of the characteristics of copyright is that it is transferable. The music industry takes advantage of this to require musicians to assign copyright in their recordings to the record company. Brian argues that if copyright is intended to reward the creators, they should retain copyright in their own works and copyright should not be transferable. He goes on to consider some possible objections and his defenses.
Monday, September 29, 2003
P2P United is finally up and running. P2P United is an industry association of peer-to-peer software developers, including Grokster, Morpheus, and other smaller companies. P2P United has issued a press release encouraging negotiations between all stakeholders on file sharing and copyright. (from Boing Boing)
I have previously used The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as an example of the reuse of the public domain. In a somewhat bizarre followup to that story, Fox has been sued for copyright infringement over the movie. Martin Poll and Larry Cohen claim that the movie is based on Cast of Characters, which they originally proposed to Fox in 1993. Like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Cast of Characters features a team of Victorian era heroes battling Victorian villians. Fox claims that the movie is based on the comic book by Alan Moore, but Poll and Cohen state that the movie has more in common with their movie proposal than with the comic book.
Like the copyright infringement suit over the movie Underworld, I don't have enough knowledge of either the original work or the claimed infringing material to be able to judge the claims. I think it would be pretty stupid of Fox to state that they were making a movie based on one source while actually using another, but given how the movie turned out, expecting Fox to not be stupid might be giving them too much credit. In any event, this suit is probably worth following.
Kerry Gonzalez has been sentenced to probation and $7000 in fines and restitution for copyright infringement. Gonzalez released an unfinished version of The Hulk on the Internet prior to the release of the movie. He pleaded guilty to copyright infringement after the file was tracked back to him. The arrest and fine has been celebrated by the movie industry.