Patento.absurdium

This Salon.com treatise on Chinese piracy points out how serious and pervasive the problem is. And it isn't just intellectual property, it's clothing, hard goods -- everything from MacDonalds to Starbucks -- that gets cloned within the Chinese borders.

I used to do some work in Shanghai. Long before DVD burners were widely available here in the states, kids in Shanghai development houses were burning digital copies of new DVDs that came in from the outside. They had the hardware, the software -- an entire infrastructure -- available to them for the sole purpose of copying stuff. And they had the technological wherewithal to supercede any silly copy-protection or encryption scheme the MPAA, RIAA, or DEA can come up with.

This is where the real focus on piracy needs to be. Microsoft knows it. Everyone in the software industry knows it. There are probably people in the RIAA who know it, but it's far easier to treat average Americans like criminals and to dupe (or pay) ignorant Congressmen (see: "Berman Proposal A Publicity Stunt" and "Legislation from the Hot-tub Party") into passing ill-conceived, over-arching legislation that criminalizes all sorts of normal, rational activity.

This certainly isn't an easy problem to solve. China has been working on it for years, as the article points out. But it is where the real focus on piracy needs to go. Not toward the average customer for music, films, and other media.

posted by Bag Man » July 8 2:16 PM | 10 comments. "Piracy sure beats manual labor" Can China's Piracy industry be stopped? Should it be stopped? Will this be the fate of all copyrighted material? Lisa Movius offers few answers, but gives a pretty good overview of the situation.

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Publishers Should Embrace Multi-Modal Publishing

1:23:41 AM

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An interesting Q/A quote on multi-modal publishing from Terry Fisher speaking at iLAW last week.

[...]"When you finish writing a book (ILAW casebook), would you consider different models for publishing? The answer is yes. Foundation Press turns out to be reasonable about us releasing a version online, for free. Why is Foundation Press happy about this? As long as we don't make PDF files available in same pagination of the book, law students will be happy to have the book in "real" form. So yes, it's a little bit of experimentation."[...]

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