Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Being better than free when copies are ubiquitous

  The digital world fundamentally changes what a copy means for copyright. I wrote about this in the past from the legal perspective, suggesting an implied license to reproduce and a greater reliance on other rights. Kevin Kelly has a great post up about the Internet's role as a super-distribution center and how to make money in the face of this ( via Andrew ). Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies? I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus: When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. In other words, money is no longer in the distribution, but "rather... Posted Feb 22 2008, 10:15 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Copyright, Business, Law

• Scoble, Facebook and Data Ownership

  I've sort of ignored the whole Scoble/Facebook fiasco, with people arguing on both sides who "owns" the data. Jimmy Gutterman misses the point a bit , because Facebook has already opened up the social graph through the Facebook Platform API. What they don't expose - and why this script resorted to screen-scraping - is any contact information. He paints this as a "lock in" issue, but I doubt that's their primary goal. We already complain enough about the spam we get on Facebook, and I would hate it if someone in my network shared - accidentally or on purpose - that contact information with spammers. So, yeah, I think what Facebook did is a good thing, which seems to be the majority sentiment. Mike Arrington said Plaxo flubbed it and Jeff Jarvis agrees . Loren Feldman called Robert Scoble a corporate spy . Allen discussed how we should approach the data ownership problem . Dare says Facebook is right - since Scoble did not enter any of the contact information... Posted Jan 09 2008, 11:08 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Copyright, Privacy, Blogging, Law, Facebook

• Understanding the Cablevision DVR lawsuit

  While I agree with Mark Cuban that the lawsuit is a mistake , I thought it was worth discussing why - from a legal perspective - the network DVR is an issue. Copyright gives the owner a limited monopoly over a few aspects, most notably the ability to reproduce and distribute the work. In a "normal" DVR, there are two points where these rights come into play: a reproduction and distribution in the initial broadcast, and a reproduction when saving to the hard drive. (Under current case law, even taking a digital file and loading it into memory to play is technically a "reproduction", fixed for purposes of copyright). The former is obviously licensed by the copyright holder. What allows the latter is a concept known as fair use . (Remember, I said it was a limited monopoly). There are four factors to determining whether something qualifies as fair use: the purpose and character of the use the nature of the work the amount used the effect on the market for the work None of these factors are... Posted Apr 11 2007, 08:25 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Gadgets, Copyright, Video, Law

• Abandonware and Unlocked Cellphones

  This is old news, but in the craziness of the semester I never got around to discussing and I think it's worth mentioning now. The US Copyright Office recently approved six new DMCA exceptions , including exceptions for abandonware and cellphone unlocking . This is a good step, but as Fred mentions the list notably does not include exceptions such as space-shifting. It could be said those uses fall more squarely under Fair Use as opposed to abandonware and cellphone unlocking, but as I alluded to before we shouldn't use the murky Fair Use analysis as a catch all . Still, it's a step in the right direction.... and I can finally recommend downloading this classic game in good faith. Posted Jan 02 2007, 03:31 PM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Copyright, Law