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TechDirt Mar 30 09 The US Supreme Court has passed on the state of Virginia's appeal to keep its anti-spam law in place. The state's Supreme Court had ruled the law was unconstitutional, following the appeal of a spammer that had been convicted under it. He argued that the law overstepped the boundaries by outlawing non-commercial, as well as commercial spam, including things like political and religious speech that have generally been protected under the First Amendment. By not taking up the case, the high court appears to be extending that protection to cover spam as well. On balance, that's probably a good thing -- particularly as this "loophole" is unlikely to really make the spam problem any worse. Full story...
Summary of Parts One and Two: The essential balance of copyright between incentives for creators and the feeding of a rich and unlicensed public domain has been undone by a long series of misguided efforts to save copyright by making its rules both stronger and less enforceable at the same time.
Most people will be familiar with Moore's Law, usually stated in the form that processing power doubles every two years (or 18 months in some versions.
We know it's bad for our health, but somehow we just can't get enough of artery-clogging fried foods because they taste so good.
We've written a few times that the end goal behind ACTA and TPP is to put in place frameworks by the US and Western Europe for certain things, and then pressure the key developing nations to join in based on the framework that has already been established.
Bloomberg Law has put together a short video about Adam Yauch and the sampling lawsuit filed against the Beastie Boys the day before his death.
For years we've argued over and over again that stricter enforcement does nothing to slow down or stop infringement.
Okay, here's a bit of a two-fer. With all of the attention that Amanda Palmer has been getting for her massively successful Kickstarter campaign, we had some commenters here questioning whether or not she would freak out if people then shared her music.
While there have been some claims that Google has supported CISPA (whereas the company does not appear to have taken an official position), at least one top person at Google is not all pleased with the bill.
There have been plenty of studies showing how -- especially in developing nations -- patents for pharmaceuticals serve to keep important drugs (which are cheap to manufacture) out of reach for the patients who need them most.
The more you dig into Google's new copyright transparency reports the more eye-catching info you find.