Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"ASCAP (the same folks who went after Girl Scouts for singing around a campfire) appears to believe that every time your musical ringtone rings in public, you're violating copyright law by "publicly performing" it without a license. At least that's the import of a brief it filed in ASCAP's court battle with mobile phone giant AT&T. This will doubtless come as a shock to the millions of Americans who have legitimately purchased musical ringtones, contributing millions to the music industry's bottom line. Are we each liable for statutory damages (say, $80,000) if we forget to silence our phones in a restaurant?"

They defended this idiocy, in an effort to allay fears of mass lawsuits, by telling people that it's the businesses selling tones they're after, not the people playing them. Instead, as the EFF notes, they've created a situation where they're pre-emptively accusing everyone of piracy and dodging royalties, but promising not to act.

If anyone wonders why people pirate music, here you have a big huge glaring reason: they hate the damn music business and the people in the offices that pull the strings and as much as I'd like to believe the artists themselves aren't behind this, I don't see any objections from bands over these sorts of shenanigans.

"President Obama reportedly gave an iPod, loaded with 40 show tunes, to England's Queen Elizabeth II as a gift. Did he violate the law when he did so? You know your copyright laws are broken when there is no easy answer to this question. Traditionally, it has been the job of the "first sale" doctrine to enable gift giving -- that's the provision of copyright law that entitles the owner of a CD, book, or other copyrighted work, to give it away (or resell it, for that matter), notwithstanding the copyright owner's exclusive right of distribution. In the digital era, however, first sale has been under siege, with copyright owners (and even the Copyright Office) arguing that it has no place in a world where "ownership" has been replaced by "licenses" and hand-to-hand exchanges have been replaced by computer-mediated exchanges that necessarily make copies."

If the RIAA and their ilk wonder why people pirate stuff, they can look no further than the mirror. It's unlikely that President Obama would be charged with anything, obviously, but we aren't all President Obama. There's a very informative post from the EFF linked here, so take a look and you'll be left with the same impression I was: I have no idea if what he did was legal, or not. How hard does this crap really need to be?

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted the news that Apple has filed comments with the US Copyright Office stating that the act of jailbreaking your iPhone is a copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, and therefore illegal. The EFF says that Apple is claiming that jailbreak apps still require modified versions of Apple's software, and Apple apparently believes that those versions are infringing on their copyrights."

It took awhile, but Apple has finally made their opinion very clear in this briefing filed with the US Copyright Office. The EFF is taking a stand on the opposite side stating "reverse engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software." How in the world is Apple going to enforce this one you might ask? Good question, and I'm not sure either. However at this point it is just a formal complaint, I'm sure more is to follow!