Court: Congress can’t put public domain back into copyright – Ars Technica
This is an interesting (rare!) application of First Amendment to copyright… I’m eager to read the full decision.
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Monthly Archive for April, 2009
Page 2 of 2
World’s Fastest Broadband at $20 Per Home – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
This took a few days to filter into my aggregator, but it offers a great explanation of why Internet speeds are slow here in the Sates (emphasis mine):
Competition, or the lack of it, goes a long way to explaining why the fees are higher in the United States. There is less competition in the United States than in many other countries. Broadband already has the highest profit margins of any product cable companies offer. Like any profit-maximizing business would do, they set prices in relation to other providers and market demand rather than based on costs.
Sure there are other factors (namely space–we’re a huge country), yet they become somewhat less convincing when you look at broadband access in medium and large cities. Considering that we invented the Internet, it’s surprising that people don’t complain a bit more.
I went to watch British TV Ads at the Madison Film Festival today. One of my favorites was a Freixenet documentary featuring Martin Scorsese:
Your ears do not deceive you–the audio has been disabled because music from the Hitchcock film North By Northwest plays during the film. One could argue that this music is part of what makes the ad a success, but very little of the music is recognizable (I’m a fan, and it took me a few minutes to recognize which film it was from). I’ve since found a legal version of the ad online, but I’m still asking myself whether 6 minutes of music from a 90 minute film should be automatically flagged as in violation of copyright. Since it contains the entire ad, it’s certainly not fair use, yet it causes me to wonder what legitimate clips have their entire audio tracks disabled–even for a few minutes of music.
