Art: What's Original, Anyway?. An upcoming art exhibit teases the bounds of legality by incorporating copyright-protected images, sounds and words. Organizers timed it to coincide with a landmark Supreme Court copyright case. By Kendra Mayfield. [Wired News]

Illegal Art debuts in NYC, Chicago, and online. It comes to NYC Nov. 13 - Dec. 6, and Chicago Jan. 25 - Feb. 21. According to a description on www.illegal-art.org, the show "will celebrate what is rapidly becoming the 'degenerate art' of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes of intellectual property. Some of the pieces in the show have eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court." Check the audio page for 21 full-length, shamelessly illegit MP3 downloads. While you can. [Boing Boing Blog]

Eldred—its all over but the scrivening—Sounds like the oral argument was about like you would expect: the court doesn't see a big first amendment issue (frankly, neither do I) and neither side emerged feeling that victory is certain. Of course, trying to predict the outcome of appellate arguments based on the questions that are posed during oral argument is dicey at best because judges ask questions for a variety of reasons, not just to express disapproval with the argument being advanced.

Anyway, I wasn't at the oral argument. And I'm not a copyright law expert. So it's safe to say that I'm dangerously under-informed, which makes it perfectly appropriate for me to opine on the likely outcome of Eldred. First, to the members of the Supreme Court this is not a watershed moment of jurisprudence. It's just an interesting copyright law case, with the most interesting thing being the constitutional dimensions. Second, the court has a policy of avoiding, where possible, declaring laws unconstitutional. So I think the court will write a 6-3 opinion (at least, maybe 7-2 or better) that the CETA is constitutional. But the majority opinion (and the dissent) will fulminate a bit about how there are "limits" and "don't think that we won't strike down the next term extension." They might even indicate that trying to harmonize our terms with other countries' terms, while laudable in the abstract, could run afoul of the Constitution (they probably won't say this, but they could say it the usual diffuse way that tantalizes law professors everywhere). Anyway, bottom line: Lessig did a great job, but the larger forces are against the argument that he advances. I wish the court would see the creeping extensions as a serious social problem of large players trying to control information. But they won't.

But, like I said yesterday, the world will keep on turning. Hollywood will rejoice when the opinion is announced and many of us will hang our heads. And then, in a couple of years, something entirely different will happen that none of us can forsee now (not even me, blessed as I am with these tremendous visionary insights). The Internet will survive and the information consumers will get what they want, not because they are legally entitiled to it, but because the suppliers will eventually learn a new form of control. What form? I can't say really. But it will be one that brings them more money. And, frankly, there's nothing wrong with that. As long as everyone gets what they want. And I think, eventually, that's going to happen.

[Ernie the Attorney]

Video from OSXCON digital rights management panel. O'Reilly has posted Nat's video and audio from the Digital Rights Management (DRM) panel we did at the O'Reilly OS X convention (look for the word "Multimedia" on the page).

The panel was called "Mac OS X, A Digital Rights Management Operating System," and it was moderated by Dan Gillmor, with me, Victor Nemachek (from El Gato, makers of the eyeTV TiVo-like Mac device), Tim O'Reilly and JD Lasica (a journalist working on a book on DRM). This was a good, meaty panel, but what it really lacked was someone from the other side, someone who wanted to endorse DRM as a viable technology.

We invited people from Hollywood, from Apple and from Microsoft, but no one would come. [Boing Boing Blog]

Forum Asks, Who Owns a Dance?. Questions about authenticity in dance now revolve around whether choreographers in fact own their own dances and if they even wanted those dances to be seen after their deaths. By Jennifer Dunning. [New York Times: Arts]