It’s campaign season and flaps between musicians and politicians are on the rise. Early last week we noted that Talking Heads frontman David Byrne sued Florida Governor Charlie Crist for releasing an attack ad using the band’s Road to Nowhere. The Crist camp posted the commercial on the campaign website and YouTube without first obtaining [...]

At TEDxNYED, Lawrence Lessig gave a talk on the importance of balancing commercial and sharing culture through copyright. “Freedom,” he states, “is [the] opportunity to both have the commercial success of the [] works and the opportunity to build this different kind of culture — and for that to happen, you need ideas like fair [...]

As anticipated, Voltage Pictures LLC, producers of The Hurt Locker have filed a copyright infringement suit against 5,000 unnamed defendants in federal court (Washington DC). Voltage is proceeding without naming the individual defendants, but is confident that discovery will yield the identity of each offender via Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Once identified, the complaint (below) [...]

I was just having a conversation about the joy of vintage NES clones and now this. The Tetris Company, LLC, licensee of various Tetris copyrights and Tetris trademark, sent Google a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice Tuesday demanding the removal of 35 games from the Android Market: Google’s facilitation of the distribution, without permission, [...]

Looking for something to do in the New York area this weekend? Visit the RE/Mixed Media Festival 2010: Sunday, May 30th 2010; 2 PM Galapagos Art Space 16 Main Street DUMBO, Brooklyn FREE! (21 and over) Presented by the League of Independents (LOFI): The RE/Mixed Media Festival is our way of contributing to the ongoing [...]

David Byrne is suing Florida Governor Charlie Crist for copyright infringement. Crist used the Talking Heads 1985 single Road to Nowhere as part of his senatorial campaign earlier this year. The song has since been changed, but is said to have been used on the Governor’s campaign website and attack ads appearing on YouTube. Byrne [...]

Google’s effort to create a digital library is once again under legal scrutiny. The Open Book Alliance issued a study detailing how the proposed Google Book Settlement violates international laws and treaties. The report, compiled by notable intellectual property attorney Cynthia Arato, notes, if approved, the settlement would grant Google automatic rights to exploit digitally [...]

Willem B. pointed me towards a great post by David Bollier from On The Commons. It explores transformative literature via a mashup of Nabokov’s Lolita and Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Otto Lambert’s A Tangle of Thorns Or, the Fair Use of the Commons in a Transformative World “improbably manages to blend the warped, [...]