About 300 people drawn from the National Federation of the Blind and partner organizations protested outside the offices of the Authors Guild in New York Wednesday in hopes of reversing the Guild’s stance. The Guild claims that the text-to-speech feature of Amazon’s new e-book reader violates authors’ copyrights.

via Amazon’s Kindle 2 Pits Authors Versus the Blind | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

Version 2.0 of Amazon’s Kindle added a controversial feature that turns text into speech.  Supposedly it doesn’t sound too artificial and is tolerable for a time for most users, but more then tolerable for those with diminished vision who consider it a huge advancement in getting content to them in a usable format (text to speech isn’t new, the article above notes some of the issues surrounding the current systems, but part of Kindle’s appeal is the library of titles you can load up in seconds and listen to – makes you think there is a market for Kindles without screens.)  As with all developments in technology we are getting confronted with new issues (Google Book Settlement and DVD Ripping issues are just two other ones among the many).  The question remains, when I buy your bestseller what bundle of rights am I getting and is one of them the ability to have a synthesized voice convert the words to audio?  Somehow I feel there is a losing battle for the Authors Guild on this one, but they shouldn’t fret in my opinion as I don’t think this will ever replace the mainstream audiobook market where authors, actors and professional voices read the books.

• Coldplay is being sued for copyright infringement for their song Viva la Vida by guitarist Joe Satriani, (see a YouTube video comparison)  check out his much lesser known song in comparison – to me it seems like he has a pretty good claim.  (“[I]t is well settled that copying may be inferred where a plaintiff establishes that the defendant had access to the copyrighted work and that the two works are substantially similar.” Warner Brothers v. American Broadcasting Companies, 654 F.2d 204, 207)  It seems like Joe mike end up with a chunk of change from this, but only time will tell.  For more on this see discussion on The Volokh Conspiracy or article in Guardian (“On the one hand, you have Satriani’s six-and-a-half-minute instrumental from 2004, with cheese-ball guitar wailing, moments of shredding, and long bouts of soloing. On the other hand, you have Viva La Vida: Eno-produced, Grammy-nominated, full of strings, church bells, drum rolls, chorales. And a sort of harpsichord solo. Certainly Viva La Vida is cheese-ball as well – but it feels more cheddar than Dairylea.”
   
• The other day there was an article in the NY Times on the Arena District in Columbus and the success that Nationwide Realty has had in turning what was a dilapidated area of town into one of the highest rent office districts in the city as well as creating viable ground floor commercial space due in large part to Nationwide Arena (and soon Huntington Park).  See the article here.  ”A decade ago, a 75-acre area along the Scioto River less than a mile west of this capital city’s downtown was an industrial no man’s land, consisting of barren railyards, old warehouses and a shuttered 19th-century penitentiary. But that was before Nationwide Realty Investors, an affiliate of Nationwide Mutual Insurance, turned the area into the Arena District.”
   
• Being in a somewhat functional (though rarely meeting book club) I found an article “Fought Over Any Good Books Lately?” in the NY Times Sunday magazine kind of amusing as it recounted failed book clubs who couldn’t agree if they wanted to read high end literature or Dan Brown thrillers.  See article here

This is big for a few reasons, one of which it helps keep the cycle of development in free products moving.  It requires those who wish to update or use the code to publish their changes or provide attribution (pointing people back to the larger movement).  The reason the usage of copyright infringement to protect this is so useful is the strength of copyright infringement claims compared to the breach of contract claims the lower court limited them to.

The “attribution and modification transparency requirements directly serve to drive traffic to the open source incubation page and to inform downstream users of the project, which is a significant economic goal of the copyright holder that the law will enforce,” according to the appeals court.’ See PC World article

See story

Most Americans know Monsanto because of what it sells to put on our lawns— the ubiquitous weed killer Roundup. What they may not know is that the company now profoundly influences—and one day may virtually control—what we put on our tables. For most of its history Monsanto was a chemical giant, producing some of the most toxic substances ever created, residues from which have left us with some of the most polluted sites on earth. Yet in a little more than a decade, the company has sought to shed its polluted past and morph into something much different and more far-reaching—an “agricultural company” dedicated to making the world “a better place for future generations.” ’ – Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear

Vanity Fair this month has a good article by  Donald Barlett and James Steele on Monsanto, the chemical turned agribusiness who sells most of the GMO seeds in the world.  As you can imagine their business is booming despite backlashes from those oh so stubborn Europeans and Japanese who don’t seem to have a taste for GMO soy products.  In any event the article touches on a few issues and I’ll warn you it is a lefty leaning article so keep yourself balanced, but a lot of it is true about their campaign of fear, intimation and enforcement of their IP rights (over the seeds).  Unlike most companies they have found that their customers keep coming back despite hating Monsanto.  The article touches on some various issues including their history of toxic waste and harm (which may not be fully connected to the current company as they split into so as not to taint the seed business).  

One of the things I have always thought was garbage that Monsanto has been able to do is fight the labeling laws, trying to prevent dairy farmers from labeling their milk as being free of growth hormones.  Thankfully they haven’t gotten those through the FDA (though from the sound of the article they practically run it) but farmers are required to say the treated milk has not been shown to be any different (mind you no long term studies have ever been done)

Read it at Vanity Fair: “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear”

As you may know I am not a huge fan of our current system, its bogging down with too many patents for not enough innovation and I think that the patent is too long.  The battle over MP3 is evidence also that the system of patents isn’t aligned with the style of innovation that exists today, where a single inventor isn’t creating whole products anymore.

Also the Microsoft Alcatel has had another moment, with a Judge dismissing one of Alcatels charges for infringement.

“At issue is the way the Windows Media Player software from Microsoft plays audio files using MP3, the most common method of distributing music on the Internet. If the ruling stands, Apple and hundreds of other companies that make products that play MP3 files, including portable players, computers and software, could also face demands to pay royalties to Alcatel.

Microsoft and others have licensed MP3 — not from Alcatel-Lucent, but from a consortium led by the Fraunhofer Institute, a large German research organization that was involved in the format’s development, along with Bell Labs and the French electronics company Thomson.” (Court says Microsoft must pay… Int’l Hearld Tribune)

This case is largely far from over, likely to end up in DC at the DC circuit court of appeals that hears patent appeals, but if ashes of Lucent a company long known for their magnificent fall, the purchase by Alcatel may prove to have been a very good move.

 Veoh a privately held company backed by many entertainment insiders (suprisingly enough) has plans to distribute full length videos and has already caused more problems in the fight between technology companies and content owners.  YouTube has had plenty of problems on their own already, and this is with a limit on clips, keeping them at a maximum 10 minutes in an attempt to avoid the kind of problems Veoh is about to be hit with.

See also Veoh v. Piracy ,

 ”I took a different route. I downloaded TVUplayer, which seems to be a mass rebroadcast from a Slingbox Media device in San Jose, Calif. There was the NFL, complete with American sportscasters and commercials (“This is our country…”). I ignored that it was 8:30 a.m. and made popcorn.

I don’t understand how TVUplayer is legal, but if it ever becomes a paid service, it can have my money. ESPN and ABC disappeared midway through the season, so I lost the Sunday and Monday night games that I used to watch on Monday and Tuesday mornings, respectively, but Sunday night remained sleepless as I watched the day games.” (Internet throws to NFL fans overseas: For this writer living in China, life is much better after finding Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in the supermarket and the NFL on the Internet”)

The question I have then is that there was a paid service, he didn’t go for it and said that he would pay for it.  Not sure exactly what that says though.  For more on TVU see an article in Fast Company .  It seems that TVU removes networks who don’t want to show up (ABC, ESPN, HBO) but its still unclear if what they are doing is legal, they do post on their site (here) plenty on the DMCA and their compliance.