sheenyglass 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Copyright And The End Of Property Rights

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 19 Jul, 2013 @ 10:32am

    Re: Re:

    Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it - finally my legal history class pays off!

  • On the post: Copyright And The End Of Property Rights

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 19 Jul, 2013 @ 10:25am

    Re: Re:

    No problem, glad you found it useful. As a sidenote, its often referred to as "entailed" property in literature, especially when Agatha Christie is explaining the motive for the murder of a lord by his long lost father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.

    Also I agree with you completely about the dangers of copyright subjecting our cultural life to a feudal tyrant.

  • On the post: Copyright And The End Of Property Rights

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 18 Jul, 2013 @ 11:59am

    Its a good point. Although, there is a parallel in the history of real property law - the "fee tail".

    The fee tail was a real property interest held over from feudal times that was used to essentially keep land in the hands of an aristocratic family in order to maintain the irdynasty. The way it did this was to severely restrict what property rights one could transfer - each heir had a life estate, and on their death title would automatically pass to the next lineal heir of the original grantor. So the most you could sell was the right to use the property until you died.

    The result was locking large swaths of land into an unproductive feudal/agrarian paradigm. For that reason, this was never implemented in the US to my knowledge and it's abolishment in Britain was an important reform. Basically, we've realized that for property rights to function effectively in a market economy, there have to be limitations on what you can control after you've transferred something to someone else.

    One of the major problems with "intellectual property" is that there are very few checks on it comparable to those that evolved for real and personal property (adverse possession is another great example).

  • On the post: Because Some Students At Stanford Go To Startups, That Somehow Means Stanford Is No Longer A University?

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 17 Apr, 2013 @ 02:57pm

    Re: Conflict of interest

    Indeed. The problem was not dropping out, it was conflict of interest. It looks like what really raised his hackles was the faculty and administrative involvement. It is one thing to encourage entrepreneurship and to allow for flexibility in leaving and returning after founding a business. It is another thing entirely when authority figures at the university personally profit from their charges.

  • On the post: Appeals Court Wants More Copyright Defendants To Stand Up For Their Fair Use Rights

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 22 Mar, 2013 @ 02:11pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    Fair use is an exception from copyright, meaning it is a kind of copying excluded from the scope of the copyright holder's rights. Therefore, there is no exemption from any obligation.

  • On the post: Sorry Fair Use, Court Says News Clipping Service Infringes On AP Copyrights

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 21 Mar, 2013 @ 03:10pm

    Not sure why there's no argument of de minimis use. Seems pretty applicable here - the use is no more extensive than if someone were using the article as a secondary source and quoting from it

  • On the post: French National Library Privatizes Public Domain Materials

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 01 Feb, 2013 @ 11:20am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I may be missing the point

    "I think you're wrong: the source of the restriction is the contract between the library and the company doing the digitization."

    So then what stops you just from copying the digital copy made by the company? There's no privity/contractual obligation between you and either the BnF or the company, (contracts can't create obligations for persons who aren't parties to them), so you're not in breach of their agreement.

    Conceivably, they could have an EULA to access the digitized documents, but even if that were effective for people directly accessing the documents, anyone they provide the copies to would not be subject to its terms.

  • On the post: French National Library Privatizes Public Domain Materials

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 31 Jan, 2013 @ 02:50pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: I may be missing the point

    "The issue is the rule that it can't be made available online by any other means."

    That is what I was referring to - the right to exclude other uses of the work. The basis of that kind of right is copyright. So without copyright, how can they transfer the right to exclude? I don't understand how it was a valid transaction.

  • On the post: French National Library Privatizes Public Domain Materials

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 31 Jan, 2013 @ 12:07pm

    Re: Re: I may be missing the point

    The question that comes to mind is what exactly was licensed (for lack of a better word). If these works are no longer under copyright, there are no rights to transfer to the private company. In other words, how can BnF sell what it doesn't have?

  • On the post: Camming Group Leader Sentenced To 5 Years; Barred From Owning 'Any Device' That Can Infringe Copyrights After Release

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 04 Jan, 2013 @ 07:58am

    Re:

    But I'm assuming he also was barred from owning anything that could be used to murder someone. Like scissors or a straight razor.

  • On the post: Intellectual Ventures Claims It's Misunderstood: It's Really Just Trying To Help Everyone Sift Through And Find Good Patents

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 19 Dec, 2012 @ 10:34am

    Re: Re: Re:

    "Do you actually have any evidence that Mossoff's views are the minority and that Oliar's are "*much* more compelling," or are you just playing the "my experts are awesome and yours suck!" game?"

    Well, since the abstract states his paper "exposes the near-universal misuse of history by lawyers and scholars today" its pretty much implicit in his argument that he's in the minority.

  • On the post: Intellectual Ventures Claims It's Misunderstood: It's Really Just Trying To Help Everyone Sift Through And Find Good Patents

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 19 Dec, 2012 @ 09:30am

    Re:

    First, the view of individual founders is irrelevant when talking about the actions of a legislative body as a whole. The motives of each delegate at the Constitutional convention in voting for the the constitution does nothing to change the specific language they voted for.

    Second, the moral rights legal doctrine applies to the right to attribution and the right to protect the integrity of the work. Meaning an artist has moral rights in preventing the alteration or defacement of their creation. There is no economic component to moral rights in this sense.

    If by moral rights he simply means natural law, well, then to say the founders adherents to natural law/social contract theory is basically restating common knowledge. If you are asserting that patents (and intellectual property) are an inevitable outgrowth of the labor theory of property, since Locke position was that property is created by the mixture of labor and nature (i.e., natural resources), this argument is interesting, but a bit of a stretch. Certainly not something to just throw out as an aside and take as a given

  • On the post: Time Warner Cable Doesn't Think There's Demand For Google Fiber

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 13 Dec, 2012 @ 12:51pm

    I think what they mean is that there is no demand for 1 Gbps service at the rate they want to charge. Since they charge around $30-$40/month for speeds that top out at 20 Mbps, this would be $1500-$2000/month.

    So no, there is probably very little demand for a $2000 a month internet plan. A 1 Gbps plan in a market with actual competition however...

  • On the post: Gawker Threatened For Publishing Quotes From Book Proposal, Adds 'Commentary' In Response

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 12 Dec, 2012 @ 06:40am

    Re:

    First, I'm not clear that posting a document of public interest wouldn't qualify as fair use. It seems like it might. The use of quotes vs the whole document goes to one of the four factors in a fair use analysis, the amount of work copied.

    Second, even if she did sue, what are her damages? I doubt it was registered, so no statutory damages are available. Proving actual damages would be fairly difficult since there really aren't any; she's not selling the proposal in bookstores and she's already sold the book

  • On the post: Why Copyright Shouldn't Be Considered Property… And Why A Return To 1790 Copyright May Be Desirable

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 05 Dec, 2012 @ 11:24am

    Re: non-rivalrous in consumption

    "Take for example open fields and forests in not very densily populated areas. Letting people roam freely on other people's property in such cases give very few problems and lots of advantages"


    I'm not sure freely allowing wanderers is non-rivalrous in the same way copyright is. Allowing that kind of use is incompatible with other types of uses, such as farming, whether or not there is actually an attempt to use the land in that manner. By contrast, there is no way to infringe a copyright in a way that reduces or excludes the use of the copyrighted material by others.

  • On the post: Fixing Copyright: Is Copyright A Part Of Free Market Capitalism?

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 04 Dec, 2012 @ 11:10am

    Even if you assume, for the sake of argument, that copyright is property, it still doesn't follow at all that it is required for a free market. All property rights consist of legally enforceable entitlement to control the property in various ways. A free market involves the unrestricted ability to sell and buy various rights which already exist by virtue of the decision by society/the state to legally enforce them.

    The willingness to enforce some of these rights doesn't imply anything about other rights. We could theoretically say that your property rights in land allow you to kill and eat trespassers, but we don't. Therefore homebody cannibalism is not a property right because we decide, for moral reasons, that it should not be. Similarly, we decided that people cannot be owned as property for moral reasons. There is no argument based on how we actually treat property rights which weighs for or against deciding that particular rights, like copyright, should be recognized property rights.

  • On the post: PeopleBrowsr Gets Temporary Restraining Order Against Twitter For 'Felony Interference With A Business Model'

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 29 Nov, 2012 @ 04:49pm

    Glancing at the court docs, it looks like their complaint is based on a theory of reliance (i.e., PeopleBrowsr reasonably relied on Twitter's representations). Sounds like a bit of a longshot, but on its face it doesn't seem frivolous if the allegations are true (Twitter made statements publicly and privately to PeopleBrowsr that the platform would be kept open and the termination provision would only be used if PeopleBrowsr misbehaved).

  • On the post: When Captain Picard Loses Patience With Your Cable Service, You Need To Run A Tighter Ship

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 25 Sep, 2012 @ 12:59pm

    I like the way the headline implies that Captain Picard is unusually tolerant of poor customer service.

  • On the post: Forget The Death-Star Anti-Mosquito Lasers, Here's How Nathan Myhrvold Can Help Tackle Malaria — And Improve His Image

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 04 Sep, 2012 @ 02:13pm

    Is Myhrvold a vampire stooge figuratively AND literally?

    "an "engineered blood substitute" to draw them away from humans (also useful for regions plagued by vampires, presumably.)"

    Actually, if Daybreakers, Blade: Trinity the BBC miniseries Ultraviolet are any clue, the lack of this blood substitute is the only thing standing between us and the vampires who would kill us all if only they didn't need something to eat.

    So really maybe we should encourage Myhrvold to do even more patent trolling, if only to distract him from initiating the vampire apocalypse.

  • On the post: Why Does Copyright Last 70 Years After Death… But Licenses Expire At Death?

    sheenyglass ( profile ), 04 Sep, 2012 @ 10:24am

    Re: Re:

    I think the difference is that copyright is a statutorily granted right to prevent others from copying, while a license is a contract which gives you permission to copy. I think the analogy would be that if you own your house you can pass it on to your children, but if you rent you can only do it if the lease allows that. License agreements can survive death, they just aren't drafted to include these provisions b/c content owners haven't needed to.

    Its not a constitutional issue, its a leverage imbalance issue. Its the same problem you face with "Terms of Service" agreements - you can't negotiate, so your choice is basically to accept this agreement or to not use the service. Suck it Facebook, I'm going to MySpace, which is still...terrible.

    I'm glad this issue is getting some traction; its a problem whose scope exceeds copyright. As our day to day activities become more and more dependent on services based on contractual privileges rather than rights, they become far more fragile - aside from the obvious privacy issues, if your email or Facebook account is terminated, what can you really do? Not much. I think the termination would have to be extremely arbitrary for an arbitrator (likely mandated by the TOS of course) to find in your favor.

    And good luck emailing everyone on your no longer accessible contact list to tell them your new address! (Especially if you are lazy like me and just search in gmail w/o making a formal contact list.)

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