The government of Egypt plans to pass a law that would require royalty payments on reproductions of museum pieces or national monuments such as the pyramids and the Sphinx.

According to Zahi Hawass, chairman of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, this law would apply to all countries, and is needed to cover the costs of maintaining ancient sites.

From a BBC News article:

“Commercial use” of ancient monuments like the pyramids or the sphinx would also be controlled, he said.

“Even if it is for private use, they must have permission from the Egyptian government,” he added.

But he said the law would not stop local and international artists reproducing monuments as long as they were not exact replicas.

Continued

The RIAA sank to a new all-time low by producing a two-minute video press release intended for local TV stations to broadcast about copyright infringement during the holiday season.

A copy of the poorly made video may be found here. It matches a press release by the RIAA released on December 13, 2007.

Among the claims made: if you see music compilations that would only exist in the fantasies of music lovers, they’re probably too good to be true.

Let’s stop right there. The arrogance of that one statement is too profound to ignore. The RIAA is essentially claiming that producers will never give customers what they actually want. This is like saying, “Sure, you may want a bun with your hamburger, but anyone who would give it to you is selling you an illegal bun.” If there is demonstrable demand, intelligent businesspeople seek to fulfill it, not deny it.
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The stick is back, and so is using the federal government as hired muscle.

Media lobbyists are trying to get Congress to pass the PRO IP Act of 2007 (Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property), which creates the White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative, or “WHIPER.”

This new agency will police U.S. intellectual property laws around the world. Not content with deploying military troops to other countries, apparently the feds now want to send in lawyers.
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Mike Masnick offers an excellent article on TechDirt.com, which points out that the goal of Non-Compete Agreements and those of Digital Rights Management (DRM) are essentially the same: to restrict the free flow of information. Masnick accurately note that non-competes are the “DRM of human capital.”

A new study now shows that the degree of mobility for employees who move from one company to another may have a direct bearing on the economic health and diversity of a state.
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Spam Arrest, a provider of software and services aimed at stopping email spam, has won a U.S. Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruling, allowing it to keep its trademark despite a petition from canned-meat producers Hormel.

The TTAB blog quotes the ruling:
“Simply put, the scope of protection of petitioner’s mark, while extremely broad, does not extend to prevent the use of SPAM ARREST for spam filtering software, since consumers will understand SPAM as used in respondent’s mark in its generic sense rather than as referring to petitioner’s mark(s).”

Happily the court focused on the test of likelihood of confusion among consumers, rather than whether the mark was famous and would be diluted as a promotional asset. This is generally good news, because trademarks exist primarily to prevent confusion, not to restrict otherwise efficient public speech.

Spam Arrest Chief Executive Brian Cartmell said in a statement,
“Consumers are smarter than to confuse us with the source for meat called spam.”

Described in one of his own press releases as a “creative genius and forward thinker by nature,” the Purple One’s legal creativity is legendary.

Recall his 1993 falling-out with Warner Bros. during which he only appeared in public with the word “slave” written on his cheek. Then he abandoned his stage name for a symbol. The line between brilliance and freakishness is gossamer-thin.
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The RIAA and MPAA have never tried the carrot-and-stick approach to anti-piracy efforts — just the stick part. It’s all about the stick.

The reason is a perception that an entire generation of kids and young adults does not respect copyrights, and that the combination of digital content and the widespread distribution medium of the Internet provide for the perfect storm. Also, as a friend of mine in the legal department of a Hollywood studio says, they are damn scared.

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The Case:
The tragic story of Megan Meier, a 13-year-old St. Louis-area girl who committed suicide after being harassed on MySpace, has grabbed national headlines and inspired thousands of web readers to participate in a collective sorting of legal and ethical issues surrounding the case.

Meier met a 16-year-old named “Josh Evans” on MySpace. Her mother reluctantly gave permission to add Josh as a friend and visit with him online. They became close, but he suddenly turned on her, calling her names, saying she was “a bad person and everybody hates you.” Others joined the harassment, and the barrage culminated in Meier’s Oct. 16, 2006, suicide, just short of her 14th birthday.

Weeks later, Meier’s parents learned the boy didn’t exist—he’d been fabricated by a neighbor, Lori Drew, the mother of one of Meier’s former friends. The girls had had a falling-out, police say, and Drew wanted to know what Meier was saying about her daughter. Local police and the FBI investigated, but more than a year later, no criminal charges had been filed. Then things escalated.
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Can you imagine a more certain way to create a culture of lawlessness than to inspire a popular contempt for law? Few things are more likely to provoke contempt than to hand out rights so broad that to average people they are reduced to absurdity.

That’s what University of Utah Law Professor John Tehranian illustrates in his upcoming Utah Law Review article (PDF). He observes that copyright law is more prominent in public awareness than ever, yet the chasm between copyright law and social norms “is so profound that on any given day even the most law-abiding American engages in thousands of actions that likely constitute copyright infringement.”
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Part 3 in a series: Part 1 | Part 2

An avatar walks into a bar in Second Life, and another avatar looks at his shoes and says, “Hey! Nice Air Jordans!” Although it sounds like a classic joke set-up, it’s really a case of trademark infringement.

Sorry if you’re disappointed there’s no punchline, but imagine how Nike feels. Or Gucci, Louis Vuitton, or a host of other companies who defend intellectual property rights in the real world. They’re not laughing either–assuming they are even aware of the issue.

As an experiment, I built a new head for my avatar to mimic the Jack character from the popular Jack-in-the-Box restaurant commercials. I reinforced the allusion by constructing a large 7-foot-diameter hamburger that would follow me around wherever I went. Predictably, I had people come up to me and ask if I was really Jack, which I denied. The point here is that people assumed I was legit and officially sanctioned by the Jack-in-the-Box restaurant chain. In a virtual world, the expression of a brand conveys the appearance of some legitimacy.
Continued