Technological Backbone

The University of Maine has evidently told the Recording Industry Association of America to stuff it. RIAA has tried to harrass campuses by asking them to deliver their demand letters to students they suspect of infringing on their claims of copyright for downloads of recorded music. "It's not the university's role to, in effect, serve papers on our students for another party." Bravo!! Ditto for the University of Wisconsin.

The University of Nebraska has gone one step further and threatened the RIAA thugs that it will charge the association some dough for taking up employee's time. All this is quite good! Thanks toTechdirtfor continuing to follow this story. The RIAA should be embarrassed and harrassed in the same way they have tried to extort funds from students.

Were that not also enough - the holders of the copyrights of George Orwell's novel 1984 have filed an infringement suit against the Obama-Hillary ad that used old footage from the 1984 first Macintosh ad. According to one source ""The political ad copies a prior commercial infringement of our copyright," said Gina Rosenblum, president of Rosenblum Productions Inc. "We recognize the legal issues inherent under the First Amendment and the copyright law as to political expression of opinion, but we want the world at large to know that we take our copyright ownership of one of the world's great novels very seriously."
I really wonder what kind of dope Ms. Rosenblum is smoking. Indeed the reproduction of the novel's contents is protected until 2044 but that does not mean the images that were created when one read Orwell's powerful fiction. It is almost as if Ms. Rosenblum was doing a parity of the novel. "Four legs good, two legs bad!" (Oh wait, that was from Animal Farm and is being used as fair use.