Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:26:30 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091110/0744386876.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091110/0744386876.shtml rival the way the entertainment industry acts towards those who violate licenses, reader Nick Coghlan writes in to point to an article that highlights how different they are in many cases, with Bradley Kuhn, the technical director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), putting forth new guidelines that encourage people not to jump to conclusions when they see potential violations, and to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone they suspect of violating the license. Compare that to the tens of thousands of threat letters sent out by the RIAA, at times with little real evidence.

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]]> it's-a-bit-different http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20091110/0744386876 Tue, 28 Aug 2007 14:04:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070828/030550.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070828/030550.shtml it saves them a few bucks. The latest such story involves a group called Prism that is against the idea that publicly-funded research should be available to the public for free. The group bases a lot of its claims on the importance of strong copyrights, but apparently it's not such a huge fan of living up its own standards. As Slashdot highlights the group not only copied some images from Getty Images without paying for them, it put them up on its website with the digital watermarks clearly visible. If you've ever bought stock photography licenses, you know that as you sort through the images, they all contain these visible watermarks to prevent people from doing exactly this type of thing. You only get the watermark-free versions after you've purchased a license. Of course, with the avalanche of Slashdot users, it looks like the group quickly ran out and licensed the photos it was using -- but it again highlights the hypocracy of those who claim to be in favor of strong copyright, when they really just want a monopoly for themselves when it helps themselves.

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]]> funny-how-that-works... http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20070828/030550