Intellectual Property Law Internet Law IT Law Computer Law

Someone on one of my IRC channels gave a link to a movie which I post below.

I am very nosy and curious person by my nature so I watched this movie quickly after I saw this link. You may learn very simple lesson from this movie i.e. cracks and keygenerators install viruses and other malicious software. Well, I generally agree with such statement but I have to object to the metod of how the thesis is supported in this movie. First, Bartels Media MaxiVista Mirror Pro Edition v2.0.14.Retail.Incl.Keymaker-ZWT is a computer program produced by Bartels Media and its name is MaxiVista Mirror Pro Edition in version 2 0 14. This software and a keygenerator attached to it were both downloaded from www.keygen.cc website. Second, originally, the publication’s name is Bartels.Media.MaxiVista.Mirror.Pro.Edition.v2.0.14.Retail.Incl.Keymaker-ZWT and on no account it was intended to be distributed on publicly available websites or with any kind of malicious software attached. It is all based on the warez scene. I can only conclude that third party person downloaded this warez release from the FTP server or acquired it by any other means (DCC, P2P) and attached a virus or any other malicious software to it and after such action it was published at www.keygen.cc website. Someone manipulated the code of the original software to circumvent its protection, someone else manipulated that warez release and yet someone else manipulated information he presented. Nasty behaviour.

The movie industry claimed that the Advanced Access Content System is a perfect protection measure. I recommend you to check www.aacsla.com website which is filled with many of such paeans. Meanwhile there is already a thread at www.doom9.org website how to make a backup copy of movies in HD DVD format using BackupHDDVD software. There is also a short movie for all of you who are interested in this issue.

I got an infantile postulate de lege ferenda - let us absolve ourselves from legal protection of silly technologies. And totally in passing:
01000001 01000001 01000011 01010011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110011 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01110100 01100101 01100011 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00101110 ;)

Update December 30, 2006.
It looks like the AACS protection system was not cracked yet. More details at Chris Lanier’s website.

01001001 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01000001 01000001 01000011 01010011 00100000 01110011 01110101 01100011 01101011 01110011 00100001

There is an article at www.boingboing.net website about how Google’s search engine was used to obtain evidence against WiFI hacker. Meanwhile you may also read an article at www.shoemoney.com website about how hackers harvest information about websites they want to hack using Google searches.

Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel prize winner, shares very negative opinions about pharmaceutical patents in the article published in the British Medical Journal titled Scrooge and intellectual property rights. As usually I also recommend you very interesting comments about this issue at www.slashdot.org website.

You will read very interesting summary of “battles” which were conducted by the Motion Picture Association of America against BitTorrent websites at www.torrentfreak.com website.

There is a very interesting interview made by Chris DiBona and Leo Laporte with professor Eben Moglen at www.twit.tv website. You may learn some new facts about FSF and another version of the GNU GPL 3.0 licence. There is a lot more of course. For your comfort I put direct link to this podcast on my website.

Below, I present a short movie in which Leo Laporte criticizes ideas behind the Zune player. He does it in a real American way. Good parts concern “DRM” issues and the iPod navigation patent.

I remembered myself about Bill Gates last statement at once

DRM is not where it should be, but you won’t get me to say that there should be usage models and different payment models for usage. At the end of the day, incentive systems do make a difference, but we don’t have it right with incentives or interoperability.

More about Bill Gates statements in the article at www.techcrunch.com website. Some issues about iPod’s patent (there are some) were described in an interesting way in articles at www.channelregister.co.uk and www.appleinsider.com websites. Some speculations about Apple’s last patent fillings are also mentioned in the article at www.appleinsider.com website. I wish you good reading.

There is a post about top 10 sex toys patents at www.homemade-sex-toys.com website. I’d like to aviod any misunderstandings about this issue like I had with the new Firefox browser’s logo, so I must tell you that I have found this information at www.boingboing.net website! Other sex patents were described earlier at www.fleshbot.com website.

Well my website is also devoted to branding issues, so you will probably understand why I couldn’t resist to write about the proposal for a new logo for Firefox browser. More details at madvillainy.blogspot.com blog. :)

Very funny post at www.boingboing.net. It is less funny when someone remebers where from came the (in)famous Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie. Anyway national emblems can not be a trademark/service mark in Poland. How about Russia?

The so-called viral marketing, word-of-mouth marketing or as other people prefer to call it - guerrilla marketing, found its place in the net. The issue of such shady business was taken into consideration by the Federal Trade Commission. More details about this case are discussed in the article at www.washingtonpost.com website. Not so long ago, this kind of promotion had a bad impact on Sony’s image. This problem concerned the blog titled alliwantforxmasisapsp.com, which was operated by a company hired by Sony Corp. You may read about that in articles at www.gwn.com and www.younewb.com websites. However there is also an article about a reaction against PSP graffiti promotion (allegedly sponsored by Sony) available at www.gwn.com website.
You may also check www.ifilm.com website with big collection of 2006 best “viral” movies. Not all of them concern marketing and promotion.

It became a reality, the official website - www.google.com/patents, on which you may search for patents applications issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. All patents available through Google Patent Search come from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Patents issued in the United States are public domain government information, and images of the entire database of U.S. patents are readily available online via the USPTO website. Speaking about other interesting news here is a design patent no D533,561, issued for Google, covering “Graphical user interface”.

Well, the subject is a little bit gaudy. I would like to write about the initiative of a group of developers of the Ryzom game. After Nevrax, a company that own the game’s code, issued a statement about its bankruptcy, some of its workers decided to take the matter into their hands. They turned on to all interested people (users, suporters etc.) to make donations in order to buy the code and all of its releated elements. They intend to free this game using the GNU GPL. I also refer all readers interested in this issue to the project’s social contract published by organizers of this donation.

Update January 4, 2007.
Sadly, it was not possible to buy the mentioned above code. More details in the forum’s thread at www.ryzom.org website.

Michael Schmitz is a designer, an artists, who while creating a logotype for Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics used to follow rules of Game of Life. Really interesting creativity. More details in the article at www.we-make-money-not-art.com website. Check also www.genotyp.com website which is another very interesting project. Good combination of typefaces for registering as industrial designs.

As you can read in the article at www.arstechnica.com website, EMI, the music gigant is experimenting on selling music in MP3 file format, without so-called “DRMs” (the proper term should be rights-management information systems but as you can see it is really hard to say for the average man in the street). I wonder if it is a sign of change of views? What about the “legal trash” as article 7 of the Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (Official Journal L 167 , 22/06/2001 P. 0010 - 0019)? We will see.
In passing, I would like to invite those readers who will be around to my lecture titled “Legal aspects of FLOSS licences”. The lecture is arranged by the Koło Naukowe Prawa Własności Intelektualnej UG. It is scheduled on December 8, ETA 3PM, room no 1039 at the Faculty of Law and Administration, University of Gdansk.