2000-12-14

3:13:30 PM

• No baking allowed. The Clinton-Gore administration oversaw a vast expansion of rights for intellectual-property holders at the expense of the public's right to fair use of materials in which someone claims IP ownership. I'm curious how Bush-Cheney will treat this subject; best guess would be a continuing expansion of IP rights claims by benign neglect of the commons. [discussion]

  Here are a couple of recent examples of overreaching IP claims.

  John Kristoff reports an effort by food giant Pillsbury to get an IETF working group to stop using the term bakeoff to describe its interoperability events. SIP, the working group for IP signalling, has been using the term for 20 years, according to messages posted to an IETF mailing list. A poster at Columbia claimed that Pillsbury had sent the university a cease-and-desist letter because of this site. The official site for SIP bakeoff events now sports a mailto: link for questions about the domain name sipbakeoff.com.

  Updated 2000-12-14, 4:25 pm: I've withdrawn the second example originally posted here, because it seems to have been a misunderstanding. TBTF Irregular Art Medlar wrote with an even more incredible claim -- that Adobe's Glassbook reader can be made to display what appears to be a prohibition of reading the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland aloud. As clarified in a Slashdot discussion (see especially this thread), "no reading aloud" refers to technical capabilities, not permissions. That is, for the downloaded Alice, one could not cause Glassbook Reader to read the book aloud to one in a synthesized voice. A Slashdot poster suggested that Adobe might better word its warning, "This book cannot be read aloud using text-to-speech software."

  Updated 2000-12-14, 6:55 pm: TBTF Irregular David Weinberger sends this update:

  I just downloaded Alice in Wonderland from the Adobe site and they've changed the permissions. Now you are allowed to read it aloud.