CopyNight Toronto: Next Meeting is Wednesday, April 29

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Dear CopyNight Toronto,
It's time for another CopyNight! Note that we're still meeting on
Wednesday night, not the usual Tuesday night, this month. For the
new people, I'm the tall half-Asian guy with black hair and Nerd
Glasses. If you are planning to come, shoot me an email so that I
get a sense of the required table size. Here are the details:
Where: Victory Cafe
(typically the room on the north/left side as you
walk in, provided that it is not reserved)
When: April 29, 7 P.M.
Host: Ren Bucholz
(416 300 5316 if you get lost!)
See the attached general list email for some interesting bits of
copyright-related news. Hope this finds you well!
Ren Bucholz
CopyNight Toronto
+++++++++++++++++++
Dear CopyNighters,
This is a quick reminder that most chapters meet this week on
Tuesday, April 28th, in cities around the world. Springfield, IL
is the newest addition to the CopyNight crew. If you know any
copyright geeks in the area, let 'em know. Thanks to Liz Murphy
Thomas for taking the lead! Be sure to check the website for
details on your local chapter, and shoot us an email if you'd like
to start something in your city!
http://copynight.org/
Here are some recent news items that might be of interest:
Hypocrisy we can believe in?
The most iconic graphic of the 2008 US presidential campaign is
easy to spot: the red, blue, and white screen print of Barak
Obama's face was printed on everything from billboards to buttons.
The man who designed it, Shepard Fairey, has made a career of
borrowing, spinning, or stealing--depending on your
perspective--the work of other artists. It shouldn't have been a
surprise, then, that his campaign image was based on a copyrighted
photograph from the Associated Press. The ensuing legal imbroglio
has raised a host of interesting legal and ethical questions about
fair use and clean hands. Fairey maintains that his uses of
others' work is fair, not a violation of copyright. But Fairey
has also been quick to sue people who have subjected his work to
treatments that are similar to his own. Steven Heller at the New
York Times dissects some of the recent controversy as well as the
history of appropriation art that contextualizes Fairey's work:
<http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/graphic-content-shepard-fairey-is-not-a-crook/?hpw>;
File under déjà vu
The movie studios' latest effort to stop home recording of video
is underway in California. Judge Patel--the same judge who
presided over the Napster proceedings--on Friday heard arguments
against Real Networks, the makers of RealDVD. That program allows
people to record a single copy of a DVD to their hard drive for
backup or later viewing. The studios argue that it will allow
people to "rent, rip and return" videos without paying retail.
This technology took the studios by surprise, as nobody had ever
before conceived of a device that might allow people to record
their movie rentals.
**coughVCR**
It's not like such a device has existed for three decades, or that
it legality was previously affirmed by the US Supreme Court. And
it certainly couldn't be the case that, during the last three
decades, movie rentals became the movie industry's number-one
source of revenue. That would be crazy! But if you want to read
more about this newfangled technology and the lawsuit aimed at
killing it, here you go:
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iI2S0rhz4o6YljAeL6d11eMbeDjwD97P23002>;
Cheers,
Ren Bucholz
CopyNight Toronto