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Know Your Rights: H.264, patent licensing, and you
Know Your Rights is Engadget's technology law series, written by our own totally punk ex-copyright attorney Nilay Patel. In it we'll try to answer some fundamental tech-law questions to help you stay out of trouble in this brave new world. This isn't legal advice or analysis, so don't get all donked in the head. What on earth is going on with H.264, patents, and video encoding on the web? It seems like ever since Steve Jobs published his Thoughts on Flash the world has gone crazy. We know what you mean! It's getting pretty silly out there. OSNews just declared that H.264 would be the death of video art and culture because professional video cameras are only licensed by AT&T for personal and non-commercial usage. Terrifying, although most of the creative people we know have continued working free of devastating laser attacks from space.
Know Your Rights: Does the Kindle 2's text-to-speech infringe authors' copyrights?
Know Your Rights is Engadget's technology law series, written by our own totally punk ex-copyright attorney Nilay Patel. In it we'll try to answer some fundamental tech-law questions to help you stay out of trouble in this brave new world. Disclaimer: this isn't legal advice, but it is best read aloud by a text to speech app. Hey, so does the Kindle 2's Read to Me text-to-speech feature really infringe on authors' copyrights? It's nice to be back! It's been a while. Yeah yeah. Get to it. Okay, so the issue is that the Kindle 2's Read to Me feature obviously threatens the audiobook market, and while at first blush it seems like the Authors Guild has a pretty weak case when executive director Paul Aiken says things like "They don't have the right to read a book out loud," it's not necessarily as ridiculous as it seems.
Know Your Rights: Why is copyright law so screwed up?
Know Your Rights is Engadget's new technology law series, written by our own totally punk copyright attorney Nilay Patel. In it we'll try to answer some fundamental tech-law questions to help you stay out of trouble in this brave new world. Disclaimer: Although this post was written by an attorney, it is not meant as legal advice or analysis and should not be taken as such.What on earth is going on with that $222,000 RIAA judgment against that poor woman in Minnesota? Is the system really that broken?Why do you always ask questions that you know will have answers that you don't like?Come on -- almost a quarter-million dollars for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa? No one even uses that anymore.Well, the truth is that the system isn't broken at all, really -- it's working exactly as it was designed. Under the rules in place now, anyone who willfully infringes a copyright is on the hook for at least $750 and a max of $150,000 per infringement. Since each song you share is a unique copyrighted work, that means you get hit with that penalty for every track in your shared folder. This obviously lead to some strange hypothetical results -- sharing that copy of "Wave of Mutilation" triggers the exact same legal mechanisms as sharing all of, say, OS X or Vista, since those are considered single copyrighted works, but that's how we determine damages in our system.Well, so why were the damages so ridiculous in this case?A range from $750 to $150,000 is pretty huge, and we may never know exactly why the jury in the Jammie Thomas case settled on $9,250 per infringement as their number -- and most observers seem to agree that it's a figure that is out of proportion with whatever harm she may have caused the labels. There is also no conclusive evidence that damages of this size have done anything to halt the growth of P2P file-sharing.The real problem that's being brought to light is that our system doesn't always keep pace with the rapid changes in technology. Every system has flaws, and it's incredibly unlikely that lawmakers, of all people, will be able to draft legislation forward-looking enough to avoid similar breakdowns in the future.So why even bother? If we can't get it right, why even try to impose all these limitations? It just seems to lead to things like DRM.
