Ready, Aye, Ready

Thomas Edison, visionary, appears to have created the odious EULA well before anyone even had an acronym for it. (Via BoingBoing) more »

This is not a law you want to see coming north of the border: In Florida, for example, anyone attempting to sell used CDs to a retailer must present identification and be fingerprinted, and any retailer looking to sell those same CDs must apply for a pe… more »

Well, looks like the music industry is demonstrating once again as to why DRM is a bad idea for pretty much everyone involved. (Via BoingBoing) more »

Tidbits has a sensible comment on Microsoft's decision to postpone the shutdown of their DRM servers: Microsoft had to view the downside to its move to save most likely a few hundred thousand dollars a year against millions in defending itself and tens… more »

In his ongoing commentary about the effect of the Conservative Party's new copyright bill, Michael Geist raises the issue of copyright on work-for-hire photography: For decades, Canadian copyright law has vested copyright in commissioned photographs – l… more »

...may not be quite as cordial as he'd like, but the Children's Cottage Society should probably do well out of it. (Via Michael Geist) more »

I had completely forgotten about this innovative and utterly daft piece of DRM technology form the early '80s. Fortunately it was quite expensive and unreliable so it was quickly dumped for the cheaper black-text-on-red-paper word lookup solution. I didn… more »

Yup. Jim Prentice's Canadian uber-DMCA is rearing its ugly head again. Do I hold out hope that the opposition parties will kill it? I guess it depends on how much the studios have been forking over to the various "interested" MPs again... Anyway, here… more »

Microsoft's shutting down their DRM validation servers for their retired MSN Music store, and thus rendering all music purchased through it unusable should the registered machine associated with the DRM license ever be altered or replaced. This reminded… more »

As regular readers know, I love my "Irregular Webcomic" which is probably the smartest use of Lego out there, including building large Millennium Falcons. In the linked-to episode above, he explains Godel's incompleteness theorem. You need to read thi… more »

Apparently Mattel has finally decided that Facebook's "Scrabulous" game is infringing their "Scrabble" game enough to issue a cease-and-desist order. Get your turns in now! more »

I perfectly understand copyrighting an image. I can't understand claiming trademark infringement on the subject of an image. BoingBoing links to a car club who wanted to put out a calendar with pictures of their cars, pictures they'd taken themselves.… more »

This is ugly; Rogers has started adding their own content to webpages sourced from a third party. I have no issue with their transfer cap as mentioned in the linked article but manipulating received data is an abuse of power when acting as the transport… more »

This is an unusual one: Western Digital put out a NAS that actually filters out 20 file formats by their suffix as being copyright infringements. The DRM is buried in software used by the product to make files available remotely (i.e. outside of a se… more »

I quite like Fark but I have to say that trying to take out a trademark on the term "NSFW" is a rather poor show. The only thing that could justify this is if they're attempting to make a statement about the inappropriateness of taking a common term and… more »