Alex reports on the Dastar decision, including a remarkable passage in which the Supreme Court seems to recognize that (as James Boyle quoted Northrop Frye) "poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels".
You can get my partial hash collision code out of CVS. I need to fix it up quite a bit and merge some code from Jef which allows fairly efficient loops using multi-byte arrays as loop counters. (For one thing, this lets us search over 2^32 possibilities, which my current code can't do.)
The 7th Circuit did not accept our amicus brief.
Aaron attended the argument and wrote a bit about it.
Happy birthday (June 3) to Larry Lessig. As a birthday present, he requests that you sign the Eric Eldred Act petition. I'm not sure the petition format is best for this, but it's what we've got, so you should do this.
What I regret is the constraints of the Berne Convention. As I said in my petition signature (I am signer 1054), copyright law had more useful tools available to it before the Berne Convention -- most especially registration and deposit. My father used to tell me that the Library of Congress had every work published in the United States, and that used to be approximately true -- when he was growing up.
In other areas where there's no Berne Convention to constrain the law, we have a filing requirement (patent and trademark), filing fees (patent and trademark and copyright, but you don't have to file copyrights), and renewal requirements and renewal fees (currently only trademark). That, in turn, helps make it clear to the public whether anyone cares about preserving some monopoly right -- and who it is who cares. If, for example, a trademark is completely disused, it will lapse. (I wish the law were more aggressive about encouraging trademarks to lapse -- but lapse they do.)
The Eric Eldred Act is the economically reasonable and useful thing which can be done quickly within Berne to have a dramatic effect and keep the public domain growing rapidly.
I have also suggested that copyrighted works being out of print at all should be seen as a problem by copyright law. For one thing, a copyright holder should not be able to use copyright to suppress a work and make it unavailable to the public; for another, if one publisher is unwilling to exploit a market, another publisher may well wish to do so.
Sumana is signer 8076, just two spots away from Jim Fruchterman.
"I saw a young woman tell the soldiers that they are the people's army, and that they mustn't hurt the people," a young doctor said after returning from one clash Sunday. "Then the soldiers shot her, and ran up and bayonetted her. I ran away, so I couldn't tell if she lived or died."
Contact: Seth David Schoen
