I?m a retired lawyer but not a copyright or IP expert, and have read through the DMCA but not taken any courses on it since it was enacted after my retirement. Please tell me you?re kidding about the copyright royalty demand for posting the ultrasound pictures of your as yet to be born child, and they don?t really send those demands, either to proud parents to be or impe3nding new defendants in utero, yet. I?m sure they will now, but please tell me they haven?t until you so brilliantly suggested this new income steam. I?m still not clear about what in the ultrasound picture they claim to have created by their own intellect, too. What would the total liability of the pre-born child whose ultrasound was used in the famous ?Is something inside telling you to buy a Volvo?? commercial, the parents, or Volvo, be?
I?m lost track of the lawsuit over the claims of some large medical enterprises to some manner of legal rights to individuals? apparently un-recombinant DNA. Since we know you can gather DNA samples from soda cans, cigarette butts, spit on the sidewalk, etc., not to mention certain felony crime evidence kits, would the person who originally acquired that unique DNA by conception and birth be liable for making it available to anyone other than the medical facility claiming rights in it? Since no human actually designed the DNA, it escapes me how any person or entity could claim to have acquired intellectual property type rights in it.
My elderly parents were running a small hotel in northwestern Pennsylvania many years ago when it honored reservations by and had as guests a number of fellows on their way to a now-infamous meeting of leaders of a certain infamous organization variously called the boys, the Mob, the Mafia, etc., the existence of which, in a brilliant takeoff on a brilliant PR campaign by the Devil, J. Edgar Hoover, the D.A. of Brooklyn and New York, and others had been persuaded to say didn?t exist, complete with a slogan, ?No, Virginia, there is no Mafia,? itself ripped off from the Baltimore Sun?s famous ?Letter to Virginia.? They carried heavy gun cases, claiming they might do some crow hunting, which would have required incredible skill with the weapons we saw, and tipped well. Shortly thereafter, the hotel received a demand letter from SESAC, of which none of us had ever heard, demanding royalties for some obscure march played at halftime of the Super Bowl which had been playing on the TV in the hotel bar. Mother (a) confused them with the Musicians?? Union, (b) confused that with the Teamsters who were involved in a high-profile investigation at that and other times, and (c) was sure this was somehow connected to our recent high-tipping guests. I checked with someone knowledgeable and got this resolved cheaply once I learned that they did exist and represented some, albeit a few, artists we had ever heard of. Then, of course, ASCAP, who we had heard of, contacted the hotel, about, for example, some piano and sing-alongs, and they mistakenly responded that they paid SESAC instead. A quick conversation with them, and a quick call to the Hotel Association, revealed that they had already negotiated reasonable blanket license rates for small hotels. I knew abbot BMI but don?t know if they ever made a demand or not. We considered copyrighting a bunch of my aspiring musician kid brother?s and some of his friends? guitar licks etc. forming our own Performing Rights Society, and seeing how many small businesses would pay them, but didn?t actually do that.
Don?t get me started on DRM. Somehow I cannot figure out how that would work on DNA or individual people. If the rights to my DNA belong to Johns Hopkins and my wife?s to the Mayo Clinic, and we and our child live in Texas, what court has jurisdiction and venue of the lawsuit and which state?s law applies? If you buy a prize cow or bull, how many cloned copies, and how many natural copies, are you allowed to make, and how would they divide3 up the royalties? I suspect that it violates the license on MS Excel if I get one of my good computer geek buddies to create a program that runs on it, compares some options, and prepares bankruptcy court filing documents that comply with a set of official requirements the government sells no workable program to create, and the commercially available ones tend to be expensive, clunky, and hard to use.
Lee DeForest was apparently quite good at spotting patentable elements in circuitry in the early days of radio. Two people at two different companies apparently developed television independently. That?s why they have no gone to first to file.
The law book companies?a field now reduced to a small handful because the big ones that used to compete in some things have merged, been taken over, consolidated, etc.,, –have set it up so that the electronic copies of these same books turn into pumpkins and have to be re-purchased frequently. That?s outrageous. Even more so is the state governments and politicians letting them assign and copyright the only official and proper ways to cite laws and court cases created by public officials with public money that are open public records. You end up with expensive books you have to buy because the official comments on the law don?t appear in the free versions or the electronic versions, and you have to keep replacing them because they change six pages every two years.
My copyrighted and un-copyrighted copies of the Constitution say Congress is authorized to grant patents and copyrights for limited terms of years. It escapes me how Congress thinks it can grant retroactive copyrights, except to cure accidents like the poor guy who forgot to renew the copyright on It?s a Wonderful Life, or copyrights for ?limited? terms longer than the author?s or anyone?s natural life, or in virtual perpetuity.
There are a whole lot more content users than copyrighted content creators. I?m both but consume a lot more than I create, especially that I may ever try to sell. I grew up on paper books, including law books, that you could use or show to a judge or anyone else without having to pay for them all over again. If a mystery writer I never heard of even on writing Web sites until I read about him on a computer site can make a chunk of money selling his work exclusively on line at ninety-nine cents a book copy, surely there is a way they can do a better, more efficient, and cheaper job of this. Now the fun problem is that I need a copy of what one law book said in 1999, nobody I know has a copy anymore, and the publisher won?t sell it to me or wants several times the original price, making it unaffordable.
One would think that if the EU can force us to change our law on some parts of IP, they, plus the majority of Americans I know who want good privacy protection, should be able to get Congress to pass some, if they want to pretend this is still a representative government.