BBC: “Musical copyright terms ‘to stay’”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6186436.stm :

Sir Cliff Richard appears set to lose a battle to extend the number of years that musicians can receive royalties for their records, the BBC has learned.

He wants copyright to last 95 years, rather than the present 50 years.

But an independent review is to recommend the terms are not extended, a well-placed government source has said.

This outcome would mean the report had “missed a great opportunity” to support the music industry, the chairman of the British Phonographic Industry claimed.

Wikipedia Explodes in China

From Slashdot:

“The Chinese have recently been allowed to enjoy the Chinese version of Wikipedia now that the ban has been lifted. And the result is an explosion in use after being banned for a year. From the article, “Activity on nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation’s Chinese Wikipedia site has skyrocketed since its release, which Internet users in China first started reporting on Nov. 10. Since then, the number of new users registering to contribute to the site has exceeded 1,200 a day, up from an average of 300 to 400 prior to the unblocking. The number of new articles posted daily has increased 75% from the week before, with the total now surpassing 100,000, according to the foundation.” No one’s sure how long this will be available to the People’s Republic of China but hopefully the government will recognize that at least a significant part of the populace enjoys a Wikipedia community.”

That’s all.

Working with Law at the Ground Level

Somewhat related to my last post (just minutes ago) on developing rule of law in post-conflict situations, I reflect upon a conversation I had after a rugby match between BC Law and Yale:

I was talking with a Yale graduate student in archeology about his work in the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. From my own experiences in East Africa, I always wondered about how people go about and research ancient history in places so unexplored such as East Africa.

He basically confirmed my suspicions and said, “You just go into towns and talk to people and ask about their grandparents.”

And so I believe that in developing reforms such as rule of law (and especially IP-related law in terms of corporate investment) you really need to go in and figure out what’s been going on per a cultural basis–and that needs to happen not by asking theorists or by positing your own assumptions as to how things should be, but rather talking to the people and seeing what their thoughts are first.

In my experience, the thickest barrier between this type of anthropological and humanistic work and the work desired of the “development set” is that you have to get “down and dirty” with the culture. Unfortunately, many of the “development set” find it difficult to sit in a mud hut sitting on seasons of cow shit and work through the culture into understanding what has happened before their Nikes have touched the ground.

But to develop legal systems it takes time to figure out what has happened before–socially, culturally, and psychologically–for modern patterns and practices to take hold.

Virtual Worlds as Examples of Developing Economies

In researching a paper/presentation for my comparative law class, I ran across a journal article that compares development of rule of law in post-conflict situations to those in online, virtual worlds:

Jonathan E. Hendrix, Law Without State: The Collapsed State Challenge to Traditional International Enforcement, 24 Wis. Int’l L. J. 587 (2006).

The article, in part, compares the situation in Somalia to that in virtual worlds. In a largely unmanageable legal system, economies and polity flourish, but are unregulated from a “top-down” sense. The individual actors within the chaotic state set the stage for what rule of law needs to be developed.

Hendrix then posits that this creates a situation where international law can step in and set the foundation for domestic law and policies, in the vacuum of the latter.

I plan to use this to support my hypothesis that rule of law cannot completely supersede the “will of economy”–that rule of law reform in post-conflict situations should be more “thumbs in the dam” than brutally building a brand-new dam. Rule of law reform should fix things that need to be fixed rather than prospectively apply carte blanche “developed” legal systems on top of effectively disparate legal and cultural systems.

Flickr/Yahoo! Files Patent for “Interestingness”

From Boing Boing, with a link to the actual patent application.

Here’s the abstract of the patent application:

Interestingness ranking of media objects
Media objects, such as images or soundtracks, may be ranked according to a new class of metrics known as “interestingness.” These rankings may be based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object, the number of users who have assigned metadata to the media object, access patterns related to the media object, and/or a lapse of time related to the media object.

Boing Boing mentions that there may exist prior art in this area. The comment says: “There’s a very large number of papers in the image processing and collaborative filtering areas that all define various notions of relevance, interestingness, salience, or novelty. A specific innovative technique might be patentable, but not the general idea of computing how interesting an image or media object is to a person or set of people.”

NTP goes after Palm

This is really more in the category of yesterday’s news, but NTP has gone after Palm after extorting $612.5 million from Research in Motion.

 http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061106/ap_on_hi_te/ntp_palm_2

This seems to be another case dedicated to proving that our patent system needs serious help.

One Court Decision Upholding An Expectation of Privacy in E-mails

In researching for my crim pro paper, I ran across this recently decided case: U.S. v. Long, 64 M.J. 57 (U.S. Armed Forces 2006). Most courts to date hold that there is no expectation of privacy in one’s e-mails. The legal reasoning behind this is generally based upon the facts that once you send an e-mail it bounces along a chain of servers on a public Internet, and that once the recipient receives the e-mail it is easily forwarded to the general public.

Long veers strongly from these precedents. Lance Corporal Long used her military e-mail system to communicate with friends regarding her drug use. Long, 64 M.J. at 59. The Government then brought these e-mails to evidence for charges of unlawful drug use. Id.

The Long court agreed with the lower court decision that the e-mail evidence should be suppressed since Long “had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the e-mails sent and received on her government computer.” Long, 64 M.J. at 60.

Furthermore, even though there was a log-on banner to the e-mail system, explaining that e-mail use was monitored, users do not consent to monitoring of their e-mail for law enforcement purposes. Long, 64 M.J. at 65. The court interpreted precisely the language of the log-on banner, noting that the monitoring consented only be for “limited purposes”–and that no user would expect “no privacy” from the language of the banner. Id.

OK. I’m tired now. Back to Federal Income Tax for me…