From bavikatte at rediffmail.com Sun Sep 1 01:49:54 2002 From: bavikatte at rediffmail.com (sanjay bavikatte) Date: 31 Aug 2002 20:19:54 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] (no subject) Message-ID: <20020831201954.17507.qmail@webmail7.rediffmail.com> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020831/3c928c56/attachment.pl From ashish at cscsban.org Sun Sep 1 18:48:38 2002 From: ashish at cscsban.org (Ashish Rajadhyaksha) Date: Sun, 01 Sep 2002 18:18:38 +0500 Subject: [Commons-law] On Narrative Contract In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20020829222940.00ab6c48@mail.vsnl.net> References: <1.5.4.32.20020829100753.006e0a38@cscsban.org> Message-ID: <3.0.6.32.20020901181838.0090a3f0@cscsban.org> TRYING TO UNDERSTAND 'NARRATIVE CONTRACT': Thanks, Ranjani, for that intervention. I shall presume that you aren't asking for a basic 101 on Reception Theory, which you would know as well as me. (Those in this debate who are not clued in might like to look at Janet Staiger's 'Reception Theory', a standard work that explores how the institutionalising of narrative precisely exists in its ability to transform a heterogeneous mass of spectators into an audience, i.e. a specific standpoint from where the text becomes intelligible, and how that standpoint is rendered enviable or desirable by textual address. She also looks at the possible political problems that ensue - for example, when certain kinds of spectators are excluded, or disqualified, from that intelligibility process.) I shall carefully refuse to rise to the bait, and instead shall respond to the specific question Ranjani asks about a 'narrative contract', and what its validity would be given the diversity of spectators. Lawrence also mentions this issue, describing a narrative contract as an 'imaginary one', or one which 'operates at the level of a symbolic fiction'. I want to make this an important and central aspect of the discussion. I think that the questions and objections to this area would be as follows. 1. What IS a narrative contract? Is there (can there be) any such thing? Does it have any validity at all? Does it exist? In what spheres? 2. Assuming it exists only within the cinema (in this instance) and only during the duration of a film's story, does it then have any *legal* validity? Is it even visible, legally? 3. If there IS a matter of spectatorial rights involved here, and if there IS a star-spectator nexus implied, does it necessarily follow that you have to attribute certain rights to the star in order that they accrue to the spectator? 4. Even assuming that there IS a star-spectator nexus on the plane of the narrative, and even assuming further that it becomes narratively necessary to attribute rights to the star in order that the spectator avail of them - does it follow that the LAW should pay any attention to this transaction? Suppose it is accepted that while there ARE narrative rights, such rights can have no legal validity because they pervert the very idea of justice, or are simply unethical, then what happens? (I think that we should now accept the point, after Lawrence's research, that giving legal validity to gestures or styles or screen behaviour is problematic). 5. Is there however a consequent issue of LEGITIMACY involved (as SV seems to think)? Does any implied de-legitimising of the narrative contract serve to de-legitimise the institution of the cinema itself? Or is that hopelessly overstating the case? Obviously I don't have any answer to these questions, but here are a few materials that are likely to be related to the field. As a quick answer to the above, I should say that in my view, there is a very definite concept of narrative contract that we have at hand, and further that there is a definite question of its legality involved. My sense would be that this concept works as a sort of subset of the more ancient concept of the social contract - narrative here becoming the means by which otherwise social interactions are rendered intelligible, plausible, negotiable, eventually judiciable. I am sure there is considerable legal literature on this subject, and I certainly know that there is considerable political theory. To my knowledge, the most extended recent analysis of a political idea of narrative, in its hegemonic role that institutionalises the narratorial authority, was the entire volume of Subaltern Studies VII. Here Sudipto Kaviraj provided a rough-and-ready definition on 'narrative contract' as an explicitly non-universal thing: as something that 'draws lines, distributes people, unlike rational theoretical discourse ', speaking of a 'transaction of a narrative (that) creates a kind of narrative contract. For the recipient of narrative cannot be just anybody: it is only some people belonging to particular categories who are privileged by the narration'. He makes for a political link between such a form and the narrative history of India, which recognised that while 'people who opposed the British (did so) with ideas that were differently inflected, grounded, expressed, coloured, stylised, motivated, the major purpose of the concept of nationalism was to point to their level of historical similarity'. There is a lot of other writing in this book on the hegemonizing project of cultural nationalism. Even at the time, and certainly since [Sudhir Chandra ('Enslaved Daughters') and Partha Chatterjee ('A Princely Impostor?')] there has been a specific interest in exploring narrative issues around what Shahid Amin at the time called 'judicial discourse', and which he explained as follows (Amin, 'Approver's Testimony: Judicial Discourse: The Case of Chauri Chaura'): "The task of judicial discourse is to establish culpability. It seeks to fix responsibility, measuring out the 'legal' and 'illegal' contents of an action. It is concerned with 'just' and 'fair' punishment, with 'evidence', and hence with 'truth'. It is discourse of a historiographical nature. The JD established by certain well-defined procedures the *only true* narrative of past events. It is a discourse which is the product of Reason, and the one single, definitive, verifiable and proven meaning that it fixes onto events holds good." While I don't know of a comparable exploration of Kaviraj's 'narrative contract' in legal theory, I should mention that, interestingly, SS VII book ends with a statement by Upendra Baxi on the place of law in Subaltern Studies. Baxi here is responding to the Subaltern group's using of legal narratives that explore colonialism (directly Shahid Amin's 'Approver's Testimony: Judicial Rights', quoted above). In an interesting exploration of Amin's 'approver' as the witness to colonialism, Baxi calls for a 'wider canvas of law in order to identify both the constitutive and operational conventions for the adjudicative discourse of power'. The role of the cinema in providing the contours of the narrative contract has only occasionally been explored, I think, even by people who would generally recognise the political role of the 'institution of the cinema'. (This phrase comes from Christian Metz, but I think it develops a specific political purpose here that is well beyond Metz, but to which we would have access via recent political theory in India). I would propose that one of the central problems faced by the Indian cinema has been that the Indian state has simply refused to recognise this area of institutional/narrative functioning, and refused to recognise the possibility of the cinema making a contribution to such a discourse. THIS, if at all anywhere, is where the crisis of legitimacy in Indian cinema lies. And I think that, at least as far as legal understanding of the cinema goes, the Section 5 of the Indian Cinematograph Act, which seems to write in stone the sense that someone exhibiting a film is in an antagonistic relationship to the spectator, and that the State (the Censor Board) mediates this antagonism, is central to the problem. (I do not have to prove to this forum, I would imagine, the increasing absurdity of the very position occupied by the Censor Board in India: it is demonstrated every time that benighted institution opens its mouth.) Here is an interesting statement by Madhava Prasad, on how the narrative contract in the cinema would work with the 'aegis of legality': "The mode identified with Hollywood, and which serves as an ideal that the popular Hindi film sometimes strives to emulate, arises in the context of a desacralized social order where the free individual is the elementary unit. Here the determining factors include the organisation of society into a self-reproducing value-generating order, a mode of regulation of the free circulation of individuals by means of a symbolic equality and citizenship. The realist imperative in this context consists in according primacy to the features of a rationally-ordered society - relations of causality, progression along a linear continuum marked by motivation, credibility, and action submitted, in the ultimate instance, to the narrative possibilities arising from the operation of the rule of law. [T]his form of realism, contrasted with the melodrama of the standard Hindi film, bestows an immanent unity (as opposed to a unity that derives from a transcendental plane) on its content. Coming into its own with the consolidation of the modern state, it is distinguished by a transformation of the field of perception such that the spectator's gaze is attracted by the unfolding of a sequence of events focussed around a central character, and whose meaning is constructed through the diegesis, under the aegis of legality" ('The Absolutist Gaze', in Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, New Delhi, OUP, 1998, pg 62-63). One of the standard presumptions of reception theory is that of the 'site of intelligibility' as attributed to a certain spectatorial position, and one of the explorations of textual work is the way a narrative tutors its disparate spectators into the processes of how any particular text would require to be read. As Umberto Eco - in perhaps the early classic work on this area, 'The Role of The Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts' - shows, 'closed' texts (he's talking here of Superman, or Ian Fleming novels) 'apparently aim at pulling the reader along a predetermined path structured according to an inflexible project. Unfortunately, the only one not to have been inflexibly planned is the reader. These texts are potentially speaking to everyone. Better, they presuppose an average reader resulting from a merely intuitive sociological speculation - in the same way in which an advertisement chooses its possible audience'. It's interesting, as we explore this narrative contract idea, to see Sabhyasachi Mukharji's statements on how a text is read, and how those concepts of a fictional 'average reader' are imposed on judicial processes of dealing with texts. The case is on Nihalani's Tamas, and here is the Supreme Court judgement: "The learned Judges found that the message of the film was good. They have stated that the film shows how realisation ultimately dawns as to futility of violence and hatred, and how the inherent goodness in human nature triumphs. Dr. Chitale submitted that the Judges have viewed the film from their point of view but the average persons in the country are not as sober and experienced as Judges of the High Court. But the Judges of the High Court of Bombay have viewed it, as they said, from the point of view of 'how the average person for whom the film is intended will view it' and the learned Judges have come to the conclusion that the average person will learn from the mistakes of the past and realise the machinations of the fundamentalists and will not perhaps commit those mistakes again' Mukharji, elaborating on this claim, further asserts that the case should be judged from the view of the 'common man' or what he (quoting English law) calls 'the man on top of the Clapham omnibus': "the effect must be judged from the standards of reasonable, strongminded, firm and courageous men and not those of vacillating minds, nor of those who scent danger in every point of view." _________ An aside: here is Pratap Bhanu Mehta reconstructing the 'social contract' clearly as a concept preceding, and contextualising, the narrative contract in another field. "A new social contract - March 15 is over, we must deal with the crisis ahead" (The Hindu: 18 March 2002) 'The lesson for secularism is this. We have witnessed time and again that the form of a secular government can be made entirely compatible with the ends of a religiously biased one. Secularism became, in our politics, a high stakes game as the state got progressively more entangled in supporting one group against another, while legitimising all the passions with which a secular state ought not to have any truck. Congress invented this, first in Punjab, then over Shah Bano and tried even to dabble in Ayodhya. What the Congress started, the BJP is bringing to its ruinous and partisan completion. We now have to create a new social contract that forces the state to extricate itself from religion as a matter of principle, not as discretionary indulgence.' 'This means no more state meddling in religious trusts, no more granting legitimacy to dangerous groups like the VHP or unrepresentative historical relics like the Muslim Personal Law Board, no more subsidies for pilgrims and no preferential land allotments for religious groups. The object is not to dismantle religion; it is to protect religion from the depredations of the state as much as to protect the state from it. In a context where the government accepts pujas and shila dans, this may sound like swimming against the tide. But it is still not too much to hope that the failures of Indian secularism are a failure of our moral courage and attention, not a failure of the principle itself.' At 10:36 PM 8/29/02 +0530, you wrote: > Dear all in the Ranikanth debate, > > Too much has been discussed in the last few days. I need time to think >through this, but heres a quick response to some of the issues. > > I would first like to raise a question concerning the existence of a >“narrative contract” between the star and the audience, a point that has >been repeatedly made by Ashish. This is further extended by SV who writes >that “establishing the star's right over the gesture is important for >spectatorial rights. Demanding a legal status for the 'ownership' of the >gesture is a way of acknowledging the existence of the star-spectator >relationship”. > > What exactly is being proposed when a neat relationship between spectators >and the star is framed? It seems to me that you are suggesting that this so >called “narrative contract” must be protected at all costs, that is in >protecting Rajnikanth’s gesture, we are also protecting the rights of his >fans. Who is this spectator/fan we are talking about? Surely it’s a diverse >group of people? I don’t understand how a mass of people can so easily be >called “the spectator” and then theories churned out in the name of that >abstraction (this has been a major debate in film studies). > > Lawrence has very usefully drawn our attention to the multiple forces that >go into the production of a celebrity and also the myriad ways in which an >image is appropriated in sub-cultural and counter-cultural politics. To his >many examples, I would like to draw everyone’s attention to Akshay Kumar’s >appropriation as a gay icon or Meena Kumari’s popularity with gay and >lesbian groups. When questioned on this, Akshay Kumar was amused and >appreciated the fact that his image could be put to such diverse use! >Perhaps Rajnikanth should go and have a drink with Akshay and stop trying >to control the circulation of his gestures! > >"". Audiences are marked by differences and those differences make the >production and circulation of stardom very complicated. No icon transmits a >unidirectional sign system. It is because they are received in multiple >ways that makes it difficult to suggest an unmediated “narrative contract” >between the audience and the star. Rajnikanth wants to assert control over >his gestures, but have the audiences suggested that or can they ever do it? >So let us not get carried away with the idea that audience rights are also >getting violated. > > The “narrative contract” between the star and the audience will always >embody a shifting discourse. SV’s reference to Dyers point about Judy >Garland and Lawrence’s comments on James Dean and John Wayne clearly >indicates the tensions that may erupt if the star is not happy with the way >his or her image is appropriated. True audiences play a big role in the >construction of stardom, but they do so for different reasons. The >imitation of Rajnikanth’s gestures/style may upset some, amuse others and >be completely ignored by still others. But they will all still be part of >the audience/fan/spectator ensemble. So the contract between the spectator >and the star is multi-layered and complicated, an issue that has been >repeatedly raised by film studies and cultural studies (Jackey Stacey, >Hall, Fiske, Mcrobie). > > what happens to the issue of fashion? For instance, “Casual Wear”, a >major preoccupation of the Global fashion industry was appropriated from >the Hippie movement. Was the Hippie movement allowed to assert its rights >over their own clothing style? Secondly how do we respond to the imitations >of high fashion? Or are we going to participate in ensuring that clothes be >only manufactured by designer brands for those who can afford them? SV says >we must accept the fact that branding exists and stars will always be >involved in it. So if Rajnikanth is involved in the marketing of a >particular designer brand no one has the right to produce imitations! >Perhaps this issue needs to be clarified. > > At the beginning of the 21st these are here to stay for a long >time. They can be both empowering and debilitating. We need to understand >this paradox and recognize its value for cultural politics today. This >position does not lead to a desire for the abolition of cinema but on the >contrary recognizes the diversity of the experience of popular cinema. > _______________________________________________ Commons-law mailing list >Commons-law at sarai.net http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law Ashish Rajadhyaksha Senior Fellow Centre for the Study of Culture & Society 466 9th Cross Madhavan Park 1st Block Jayanagar Bangalore 560011 Telephone: 91-80-656-2986 Fax: 91-80-656-2991 email: ashish at cscsban.org website: www.cscsban.org From jeebesh at sarai.net Mon Sep 2 17:58:41 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2002 17:58:41 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] Culture and Trademarks Message-ID: <02090217584108.03673@pammi.sarai.kit> I think Rajnikant or many others like him will move towards a regime of not Copyright but Trademarks. I am sure that heavyweight IPR lawyers will argue that `style` can be trademarked. And they will get over the `ensemble author` problem/concern by vesting the trademark with a producing agency (a company or similar kind of legal entity). So effectively what this seek to will do is stop the `illegitimate` use of the `gesture` or `style`. Then, we will have IPR enforcers raiding cultural shows on `violations`. And will also be an effective way of controlling `comments` through parody or mimicking. (especially within the domain of poltics - relevant when discussing Rajnikanth... - this can be disastrous). An excerpt from a newstory: "...folks trying to teach yoga anywhere in America are finding that nearly all the formerly holy words of yoga have been trademarked. If you want to use them, you?ve got to shell out the dough. ..." Greed and lust make Yoga gurus tie themselves in knots http://www.indian-express.com/full_story.php?content_id=8673 more on this later. Jeebesh From rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com Wed Sep 4 18:18:00 2002 From: rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2002 05:48:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Commons-law] Copywriting silence In-Reply-To: <02090217584108.03673@pammi.sarai.kit> Message-ID: <20020904124800.92185.qmail@web14608.mail.yahoo.com> Maybe some of you saw this story - a composer who put a one-minute silent track on his CD was served a local notice for infringement of the copyright of John Cage's 4'33" - a silent work of that length. Two articles follow. For those that are interested I've pasted at the end some thoughts by Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) about the significance of Cage's silent works. http://www.chartattack.com/damn/2002/07/0404.cfm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2133426.stm http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0207/msg00138.html Loose Ends: Did John Cage Invent Silence? Thursday July 04, 2002 @ 04:30 PM By: ChartAttack.com Staff Music copyright infringement can be a fairly tricky thing. Some cases, like the fiasco over the similarity between Huey Lewis' "I Want A New Drug" and the Ghostbusters theme, are reasonable. Others are a little more iffy. For instance, can anyone own a copyright on the sound of silence? According to the estate of late avant-garde composer John Cage, yes. Cage, as you may remember, perplexed an audience decades ago with a "composition" called "4'33," which featured him sitting in front of a piano, in complete silence, for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds. Now, a classical composer by the name of Mike Batt has put a track called "One Minute's Silence" (which is exactly that) on an album by his protegees, The Planets. According to the British newspaper, The Independent, John Cage's people have served him with a legal document, claiming copyright infringement. And what does Batt have to say about it? "My Silence is original silence, not a quotation from his silence." Fair enough. 'Silent works' do battle Wombles creator Mike Batt has been accused of infringing the copyright of American minimalist composer John Cage, after placing a one-minute silence on his latest CD - and saying it was a Mike Batt composition. It's a gentlemanly dispute - but there is money involved On Wednesday morning Batt's A Minute's Silence was played alongside Cage's famous 1952 work 4'33", which consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, at Baden Powell House in central London. Cage's publisher Peters Edition and Batt hoped it would clarify the differences between the works. Marc Dooley, who performed 4'33" on clarinet, told BBC News Online that he felt he "performed it properly". "I did do a run through beforehand, to make sure I knew what the experience was like. "Four-and-a-half minutes is quite a long time to be performing like that - or not performing," he said. But he added that, despite discussions after the works had been played, the dispute was still unresolved. Amusement Batt, who conducted A Minute's Silence on Wednesday, told BBC Radio 4's Front Row the idea of the track was to separate some acoustic arrangements from rockier material on the CD Classical Graffiti by his group The Planets. "I thought for my own amusement it would be funny to call it something so I called it A Minute's Silence and credited it as track 13 and put my name as Batt/Cage, as a tongue-in-cheek dig at the John Cage piece," he said. After the record was released, he was contacted by Peters Edition who said he had infringed its copyright - and Cage's publisher was claiming a quarter of the royalties from the track. The Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) has so far supported the American composer's case - because, it says, the track was originally registered in his name. Pseudonym "When the record company registered the track with the MCPS it was credited to Mike Batt and John Cage, so royalties would have been due to John Cage," a spokesman told BBC News Online. "Only since has he come back to us and asked us to re-register it as Clint Cage, his pseudonym." The argument will be there is no work because there are no notes Batt is adamant that his silence is an original work: "I certainly wasn't quoting his silence. I claim my silence is original silence," he told Front Row. In any case, under English law it is unlikely the copyright in Cage's could be protected as it involves no actual notes, according to a music industry lawyer. Lawyer Duncan Lamont told Front Row the question was "Is it a work?" "Has it been written down, is it a literary, artistic or dramatic work? The argument will be there is no work because there are no notes." Mr Lamont added that Batt's defence that the track is a joke is not a defence in English law, though the defence of parody would be a different matter. Batt said that so far the argument had not become too serious - but this could change. "This is not an angry dispute - it's a gentlemanly dispute. But there is money involved," he said. I think about how John Cage used to just stare at the piano in his silence pieces. The instrument was a jumping off point - an interface that had so many routes available, that the infinity of possibility led to chance operations - it's stuff like that that II'm interested in these days - "Imaginary Landscape" and other pieces like that create open interpretations of what the compositional process is all about... Cage wanted to highlight that meditational aspect of the creative act. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com From saikrishnassociates at vsnl.net Thu Sep 5 12:01:04 2002 From: saikrishnassociates at vsnl.net (saikrishnassociates) Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2002 12:01:04 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] Copywriting silence In-Reply-To: <20020904124800.92185.qmail@web14608.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Dear Sudhir I need to speak with you urgently. Can I request you to give me your latest contact particulars so that I could reach you. Regards, Sai ----Original Message----- From: commons-law-admin at sarai.net [mailto:commons-law-admin at sarai.net]On Behalf Of Rana Dasgupta Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 6:18 PM To: commons-law at sarai.net Subject: [Commons-law] Copywriting silence Maybe some of you saw this story - a composer who put a one-minute silent track on his CD was served a local notice for infringement of the copyright of John Cage's 4'33" - a silent work of that length. Two articles follow. For those that are interested I've pasted at the end some thoughts by Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) about the significance of Cage's silent works. http://www.chartattack.com/damn/2002/07/0404.cfm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2133426.stm http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0207/msg00138.html Loose Ends: Did John Cage Invent Silence? Thursday July 04, 2002 @ 04:30 PM By: ChartAttack.com Staff Music copyright infringement can be a fairly tricky thing. Some cases, like the fiasco over the similarity between Huey Lewis' "I Want A New Drug" and the Ghostbusters theme, are reasonable. Others are a little more iffy. For instance, can anyone own a copyright on the sound of silence? According to the estate of late avant-garde composer John Cage, yes. Cage, as you may remember, perplexed an audience decades ago with a "composition" called "4'33," which featured him sitting in front of a piano, in complete silence, for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds. Now, a classical composer by the name of Mike Batt has put a track called "One Minute's Silence" (which is exactly that) on an album by his protegees, The Planets. According to the British newspaper, The Independent, John Cage's people have served him with a legal document, claiming copyright infringement. And what does Batt have to say about it? "My Silence is original silence, not a quotation from his silence." Fair enough. 'Silent works' do battle Wombles creator Mike Batt has been accused of infringing the copyright of American minimalist composer John Cage, after placing a one-minute silence on his latest CD - and saying it was a Mike Batt composition. It's a gentlemanly dispute - but there is money involved On Wednesday morning Batt's A Minute's Silence was played alongside Cage's famous 1952 work 4'33", which consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, at Baden Powell House in central London. Cage's publisher Peters Edition and Batt hoped it would clarify the differences between the works. Marc Dooley, who performed 4'33" on clarinet, told BBC News Online that he felt he "performed it properly". "I did do a run through beforehand, to make sure I knew what the experience was like. "Four-and-a-half minutes is quite a long time to be performing like that - or not performing," he said. But he added that, despite discussions after the works had been played, the dispute was still unresolved. Amusement Batt, who conducted A Minute's Silence on Wednesday, told BBC Radio 4's Front Row the idea of the track was to separate some acoustic arrangements from rockier material on the CD Classical Graffiti by his group The Planets. "I thought for my own amusement it would be funny to call it something so I called it A Minute's Silence and credited it as track 13 and put my name as Batt/Cage, as a tongue-in-cheek dig at the John Cage piece," he said. After the record was released, he was contacted by Peters Edition who said he had infringed its copyright - and Cage's publisher was claiming a quarter of the royalties from the track. The Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) has so far supported the American composer's case - because, it says, the track was originally registered in his name. Pseudonym "When the record company registered the track with the MCPS it was credited to Mike Batt and John Cage, so royalties would have been due to John Cage," a spokesman told BBC News Online. "Only since has he come back to us and asked us to re-register it as Clint Cage, his pseudonym." The argument will be there is no work because there are no notes Batt is adamant that his silence is an original work: "I certainly wasn't quoting his silence. I claim my silence is original silence," he told Front Row. In any case, under English law it is unlikely the copyright in Cage's could be protected as it involves no actual notes, according to a music industry lawyer. Lawyer Duncan Lamont told Front Row the question was "Is it a work?" "Has it been written down, is it a literary, artistic or dramatic work? The argument will be there is no work because there are no notes." Mr Lamont added that Batt's defence that the track is a joke is not a defence in English law, though the defence of parody would be a different matter. Batt said that so far the argument had not become too serious - but this could change. "This is not an angry dispute - it's a gentlemanly dispute. But there is money involved," he said. I think about how John Cage used to just stare at the piano in his silence pieces. The instrument was a jumping off point - an interface that had so many routes available, that the infinity of possibility led to chance operations - it's stuff like that that II'm interested in these days - "Imaginary Landscape" and other pieces like that create open interpretations of what the compositional process is all about... Cage wanted to highlight that meditational aspect of the creative act. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Commons-law mailing list Commons-law at sarai.net http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law From rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com Tue Sep 10 11:49:45 2002 From: rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 23:19:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Commons-law] Social authorship in a capitalist age Message-ID: <20020910061945.84912.qmail@web14604.mail.yahoo.com> Don't know if any of you saw this on Nettime so am posting here. R --- nettime's roving reporter wrote: > Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2002 11:17:55 -0400 > To: nettime-l at bbs.thing.net > Subject: Social authorship in a capitalist > age > From: "nettime's roving reporter" > > > > > > 28 August 2002 > http://www.opendemocracy.net/forum/document_details.asp?CatID=125&DocID=1744 > > Beyond romance and repression: social authorship in > a capitalist age > > Jason Toynbee > > > The imposition of punitive new intellectual property > regimes represents a > corporate assault on public culture. The connection > between capitalism and > copyright helps us to understand why it is > happening; while the reality of > 'social authorship' offers a way to open up new > possibilities for creative > workers in a reformed copyright system. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > The copyright debate is certainly polarised, as > Sandy Starr argues in a > recent contribution to openDemocracy's copyright > debate. But that surely > reflects the reality of the situation, namely a > conflict of interest > between the cultural industries, which market words, > sounds and images, > and the workers and consumers who make and use them. > Like Richard > Stallman, Siva Vaidhyanathan and others, I'm with > the latter group. But I > want to make the case from a slightly different > perspective. > > Cultural capitalism and the Romantic myth > > My starting point is that copyright emerged, and > continues to develop, as > a form of property. It was a response not just to > new technologies of > replication, but also a new economic order, > capitalism. On the one hand, > printing and its descendants such as cinematography > and sound recording > enabled the mass production of cultural goods. On > the other hand, the same > technologies allowed others to copy and cheaply sell > the work of > originators. To use economic jargon, cultural > artefacts came to take on > the character of a public good, potentially being > available to all at > marginal cost. What copyright law did in this > situation was construct a > form of property, a private good, in the work. In > essence, the work is > something that cannot be copied, at least without > the owner's permission. > > Who is the owner? Although attached to the author at > birth, copyright in > the work has always been assignable to another > party. The fact is that > rights that originate with a creator have to be sold > on to a business with > enough capital and technology to exploit them. So I > would take issue with > Richard Stallman's suggestion that there used to be > a golden age when > copyright 'let authors restrict publishers for the > sake of the general > public'. This is an idealised view of history. From > the Statute of Anne to > the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), > cultural capitalism has > driven the growth of copyright, always luring > creators with the promise of > rights income, while always conceding a degree of > 'fair use' to the public > in order to promote the circulation of its > commodities. > > Quite simply, then, copyright turns symbolic forms > into property, and > market conditions ensure it is held and exploited by > corporations. But > this is not a reality which sits very easily with > public opinion. For > while the concept of private property in tangible > goods, or chattels, is > deeply ingrained in Western societies, the same > cannot be said about > symbolic works. A strong consensus, emerging first > in the Enlightenment, > has it that culture should circulate freely. The > Romantic movement then > contributes the idea that art and commerce are > opposed, that the artist is > in heroic opposition to the drive for profit. > > It is something of a contradiction, then, that in > the modern era the > figure of the Romantic artist is invoked to justify > copyright - the very > basis of commerce in culture. Yet this mythology > lies at the heart of the > publicity and lobbying of the cultural industries. > In a prominent position > on the Recording Industry Association of America > (RIAA) website, for > example, we find these words from Sheryl Crow: > > 'Copyright protects the creative process�. It's > rough out there�. There is > nothing more inspiring to creativity than > independence and that requires > protection. If you're an artist that can do > something nobody else can, you > need to know that your work will not be diluted or > mass produced.' > > Now it seems to me that a key task for public > culture advocates is to > expose such rhetoric for what it is. Janis Ian's > contribution has been > really useful in this respect. She shows just how > little rights income > gets back to most artists and, conversely, the > extent to which file > sharing promotes CD sales for the great majority, > outside the palace of > superstardom. Still, I think a further debunking > move is required. We > badly need to blast away that Romantic paint job > which content owners keep > applying to copyright's rusty hulk. > > Social authorship: collaboration, combination, > accumulation > > We could start by showing how authorship is not at > all a matter of heroic, > individual creation. Rather it is a social process. > There are three > aspects to this. Firstly, there is collaboration, > the fact that creative > acts depend on interactive networks. These extend > way beyond the 'primary' > creator of songwriter, novelist or director, to > include intermediaries and > entrepreneurs, technicians and tea makers. Audiences > are part of the > creative network too, in that they play the role of > editor, rejecting some > works and trends while affirming others. > > Secondly, authorship is social in that it involves > the recombination of > existing symbolic materials from a > historically-deposited common stock. > These range from conventions such as the novel form, > shot-reverse-shot > editing in cinema or machine code in software, > through to realised pieces > of symbolic fabric such as War and Peace, the > opening scene of Aliens or > Word 2. The key point is that there is a practical > continuum between what > copyright law would keep as separate categories: > idea (something freely > usable by all) and expression (the privately owned > work). Symbol makers of > every hue are constantly re-using materials with > different mixtures of > these elements. > > A significant feature of contemporary culture is > that this idea-expression > series is actually being reversed. Digital sampling, > appropriation art and > the film essay (which uses existing footage) all > employ the fabric of > previous works to depict new ideas and emotions. > They therefore make a > nonsense of copyright fundamentalism. > > The third aspect of social authorship is its > incremental nature. > Significant new developments result from many small > innovations rather > than major breakthroughs by single creators. As a > result we can't say that > Charlie Parker was responsible for modern jazz any > more than 4 Hero > invented the musical style known as drum and bass. > Instead, the so-called > 'greats' are summarisers of collaborative research > and development work > undertaken over time. This echoes Richard Stallman's > point about the role > of continuous modification in software design. I > would simply add that > incremental change isn't confined to software. > Rather it is a general > principle encountered in symbol making everywhere. > > In all three aspects, then, the practice of social > authorship belies a > crucial part of the rationale for copyright, namely > that creativity is a > matter of individual and self-sufficient expression, > and that ownership > should be attributed accordingly. What can we do > with this argument? > > The corporate assault on public culture > > We are faced today with a major copyright offensive. > Just as content > owners fought for the extension of property rights > when earlier > technologies opened up access to existing cultural > forms (broadcasting and > the video cassette are the most important cases in > recent history), so too > the cultural industries today are fighting > intensively to commodify the > new communication system of the Internet. With the > Internet, the > difference is the vastly increased monopoly power of > cultural capitalism. > A short history lesson bears this out. > > In the early 1940s the radio industry struggled with > music publishers in > the US to break the latters' stranglehold on the > supply of songs for > broadcasting. The networks set up their own > publishing agency, boycotted > ASCAP (the organisation of the established > publishers) and finally forced > down music licensing fees across the board. A > Justice Department decree > then consolidated the new competitive environment. > In effect, conflict > over copyright between two sectors of capital had > opened up public access > to music on the airwaves, and to new kinds of music > too - R & B, country > and later rock'n'roll. > > We cannot rely on such a process this time around. > Content owners are more > powerful and more thoroughly integrated. They also > have the ear of > governments, which through international treaties > and national laws are > imposing an increasingly punitive intellectual > property (IP) regime across > the world - so much for 'free trade'. In the case of > webcasting, as Brian > Zisk points out, recent legislation extends > phonographic performance > rights to the digital domain. Over-air broadcasters > in the US have never > had to pay record companies in order to play > records. Now an extra, and > impossible, burden is being imposed on webcasters, > most of who will be > forced out of business. > > The fact is that each week the list of restrictions > and coercive measures > being proposed just gets longer. In this situation, > the key objective must > be to formulate a counter strategy to that of the > Motion Picture > Association (MPAA) and RIAA. So I entirely agree > with Siva Vaidhynathan > when he calls for the formation of a coalition and > 'a set of political > slogans and principles that can appeal broadly'. > This is a matter of > resisting extremely well-organised and powerful > interests. The libertarian > alternative - just keep hacking - is simply not > going to work. As > Vaidhynathan points out, the problem is that a > combination of > tightly-focused laws, tough sanctions and (in > prospect) legally protected > cyber-sabotage from the corporations means that only > a handful of > dedicated enthusiasts will be able to carry on > sharing files. > > Perhaps most worrying of all is the increasing > integration of software, > hardware and content. The implementation of > 'trusted' technology based on > protocols agreed between these rapidly converging > sectors would > effectively spell the end of the PC and the Internet > as we know them. The > new apparatus? A tightly-policed delivery system for > e-commerce, with only > files certified by 'trusted' corporate agents able > to move around the > network and, even worse, around the PC itself. In > this all-too-possible > scenario, encryption and coercive copyright are > ubiquitous. > > Restrict copyright, revive creativity > > Here's where the social authorship argument comes > in. Quite simply, we > must enlist creative workers in the campaign to open > up access to culture. > But we need to do so in a way that reflects the > reality of their role as > collaborators and remixers. If this runs against the > Romantic self-image > of some, it would actually benefit most artists in > economic and creative > terms. > > The high proportion of sales taken by a few stars > means that, for most of > the time, the great majority of creative workers > earn little. Clearly, > demand factors are at work here - people want stars. > But there's no doubt > that the existing system of copyright also boosts > the institution of > stardom by channelling rewards to the highly-visible > few, and by providing > an artificial incentive for success over time. > Long-term copyright > encourages the cultural industries to market > long-term superstars. One way > of 'flattening out' cultural markets, of increasing > innovation and > acknowledging the social nature of authorship would > be to radically reduce > term. Michael Fraase's interesting four-step > copyright solution includes a > fourteen-year proposal. There may be an argument for > making it even > shorter. > > Along with reduction in term, a reformed copyright > system should include > comprehensive digital rights management (DRM). At > the moment, rights > revenue distribution is extremely uneven. For > example, music performance > fees paid by broadcasters stream back to a few hit > makers in > disproportionate amounts because the crude sampling > systems currently in > use simply fail to register songs receiving lower > airplay. So, DRM would > not only enable more efficient collection, but also > a much fairer pattern > of distribution. > > Equity would be further enhanced by making rights > non-alienable. With > copyright in their own hands, authors and performers > would receive a much > higher proportion of rights income. Such a move > could also provide the > opportunity for renewing and extending mutual > collection societies. > Instead of corporate rights holders arranging > revenue collection and > management, this would be done by author-performer > co-ops. > > Of course, these reforms would radically change the > shape of the cultural > industries, reversing the balance of power between > creative workers and > the corporations. I don't have a problem with this. > > Let me make two final points. Like Michael Fraase, > I'd advocate repealing > the DMCA (in other countries this means forestalling > the equivalent > legislation). We need a fairer copyright system, and > that includes keeping > copyright out of the Internet and not-for-profit > digital replication. > These are, respectively, a public space and a > well-established fair-use > activity. On creative re-use of materials, copyright > clearance tribunals > should be set up in all sectors to ensure that > cultural workers are able > to get access to the stock of existing works quickly > and cheaply. Surely > we want more sampling, quotation, and parody. > > Of course some will squeal 'unwarranted regulation!' > at these suggestions. > I would say: if you want to see what partisan state > control of culture > really looks like, go no further than your local > legislature where new and > coercive IP measures are being drafted right now. > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > > > Copyright � Jason Toynbee, 2002. Published by > openDemocracy. Permission is > granted to reproduce articles for personal and > educational use only. > Commercial copying, hiring and lending is prohibited > without permission. > If this has been sent to you by a friend and you > like it, you are welcome > to join the openDemocracy network. > > Jason Toynbee is Lecturer at the Institute of > Popular Music, University of > Liverpool, and author of Making Popular Music: > Musicians, Creativity and > Institutions (Arnold, 2000). Some of the ideas in > this article are > developed at greater length in Creating Problems: > Social Authorship, > Copyright and the Production of Culture (2001), > available at �3 or $5 from > the Pavis Centre for Social and Cultural Research, > The Open University. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > # distributed via : no commercial use > without permission > # is a moderated mailing list for net > criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural > politics of the nets > # more info: majordomo at bbs.thing.net and "info > nettime-l" in the msg body > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime at bbs.thing.net __________________________________________________ Yahoo! - We Remember 9-11: A tribute to the more than 3,000 lives lost http://dir.remember.yahoo.com/tribute From lawrenceliang at vsnl.net Wed Sep 11 11:45:31 2002 From: lawrenceliang at vsnl.net (lawrenceliang at vsnl.net) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 11:15:31 +0500 (IST) Subject: [Commons-law] from your friendly neighbourhood...ooops can i say that Message-ID: <20020911061531.29F0A1FBAD@bom6.vsnl.net.in> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020911/3bb33ff2/attachment.pl -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: spiderman2.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 35349 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020911/3bb33ff2/attachment.bin From sunil at mahiti.org Wed Sep 11 11:28:18 2002 From: sunil at mahiti.org (sunil) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 11:28:18 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] Re: Commons-law digest, Vol 1 #52 - 1 msg In-Reply-To: <20020911114701.17845.14540.Mailman@mail.sarai.net> References: <20020911114701.17845.14540.Mailman@mail.sarai.net> Message-ID: Dear Lawrence, > language of IPR hasd entered into the contemporary. i have scanned the > image and am atttaching it, I think it is defintely worth having a look > at it. Did not get the file. Please resend! Thanks for all the lively debate...I am learning a lot. Thanks, Sunil ===== Sunil Abraham [MAHITI] 314/1, 7th Cross, Domlur Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka, INDIA Ph/Fax: +91 80 5352003. Pager: 9624 279519 sunil at mahiti.org http://www.mahiti.org From rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com Mon Sep 16 11:23:39 2002 From: rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 22:53:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Commons-law] announcement on MPEG licensing Message-ID: <20020916055339.95171.qmail@web14606.mail.yahoo.com> just saw this press release. am not sure if it's relevant... R MPEG LA Announces Plan for Licensing of Essential H.264 JVT/MPEG-4 AVC Patents Call for Submission of Patents for Evaluation by Independent Patent Experts is First Step Denver, United States, Thursday, September 12, 2002 -- (business2media) -- MPEG LA, LLC makes the following worldwide announcement of a plan aimed at providing fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory worldwide access under a single license to patents that are essential for implementing the digital video compression standard to be known as ITU-T H.264 and ISO/IEC 14496-10 ("Proposed JVT/AVC Standard"). The first step in the plan calls for those with patents that they believe are essential to the Proposed JVT/AVC Standard (as more specifically described below) to submit them for an evaluation of essentiality by independent patent experts. Following is a summary of the plan: 1. Objective To establish a portfolio of essential worldwide patents that are necessary for implementation of the Proposed JVT/AVC standard in order to provide all JVT/AVC users with fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory access to this technology under one license. 2. Licensed patents Essential patents will consist of those that are necessary for the Proposed JVT/AVC standard. Currently, the Proposed JVT/AVC standard is documented in the Joint Final Committee Draft (JFCD) ITU-T H.264 and the Final Committee Draft (FCD) ISO/IEC 14496-10 (MPEG-4 AVC) hereinafter "ITU-T FCD H.264" and "ISO/IEC FCD 14496-10". These documents are more formally known as: Joint Video Team (JVT) of ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG D157, "Joint Final Committee Draft (JFCD) of Joint Video Specification", Klagenfurt, July 2002, and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 N4920 "Final Committee Draft for Advanced Video Coding (ISO/IEC 14496-10)", Klagenfurt, July 2002. To be essential, an issued patent must have one or more independent claims that are necessarily infringed by use or implementation of the Proposed JVT/AVC standard. 3. Organization The patent portfolio may require at least the following functions: First, as Evaluation Facilitator, MPEG LA will make a call described in this announcement for the submission of patents for an evaluation of their essentiality by independent patent experts and inclusion in a joint license if determined to be essential and facilitate the evaluation process and convene the initial group of essential patent holders as described below. Second, an Evaluator (identified below) who is a third party patent expert will evaluate patents for essentiality to the Proposed JVT/AVC standard (ITU-T FCD H.264 and ISO/IEC FCD 14496-10). Any party that believes it has essential patents is invited to submit them for evaluation and inclusion in accordance with the standard terms and procedures governing submissions. For each patent submitted, an evaluation fee of US $8,500.00 will be paid to MPEG LA, LLC, (as below) to cover costs of the patent expert's evaluation. Third, an initial group of essential patent holders who have agreed to the terms governing the submission of patents and been found by the independent patent experts to have essential patents will be convened to prepare details of licensing terms. Evaluations will continue throughout the course of the License in order to include as much essential intellectual property as possible, but the initial group of essential patent holders/framers from among those who submit patents for evaluation by the initial deadline of October 11, 2002, will be determined and convened for the purpose of commencing the JVT Patent Portfolio License. Fourth, the Licensing Administrator who is granted non-exclusive sublicensing rights from patent owners under licensed patents in order to sublicense those patents to JVT/AVC users, will actively promote the licensing program and distribute collected royalties to the patent owners. The Licensing Administrator will be chosen by the initial group of patent holders. Fifth, an Administrative Committee consisting of representatives of the essential patent owners will monitor certain activities of a Licensing Administrator. 4. Licensing details To be determined by the representatives of the essential patent owners. 5. Schedule (Initial Plan) Initial patent submissions: by October 11, 2002 (although patent submissions may continue to be submitted after that date, owners of essential patents in the initial group of patents submitted by the October 11 date will form the initial group of Licensors that will select a Licensing Administrator and determine the terms of license). Evaluation: At least one patent submitted by each submitting party will be evaluated for its essentiality by November 11, 2002. MPEG LA will convene a meeting of the initial patent holder group shortly thereafter. Accordingly, MPEG LA hereby announces that any party that believes it has patents that are essential to the Proposed JVT/AVC standard (ITU-T FCD H.264 and ISO/IEC FCD 14496-10) and wishes to join the patent portfolio upon successful evaluation, is invited to submit such patents to the Evaluator (identified below), together with a statement confirming its agreement with the objectives and intention to abide by terms and procedures governing the patent submission process (initial patents to form initial Licensor group to be submitted by October 11, 2002), which may be obtained from Jane Tannenbaum, Director, Contract Administration (jtannenbaum at mpegla.com) or Jll McLain, Contract Administrator, (jmclain at mpegla.com), MPEG LA, LLC. Evaluator: Dr. Kenneth Rubenstein and his team of independent patent experts, PROSKAUER ROSE LLP, 1585 Broadway, New York, NY 10036-8299, Tel. 212-969-3000, Fax 212-969-2900, krubenstein at proskauer.com MPEG LA, LLC MPEG LA successfully pioneered one-stop technology standards licensing with a portfolio of essential patents for the international digital video compression standard known as MPEG-2, which it began licensing in 1997. One-stop technology standards licensing enables widespread technological implementation, interoperability and use of fundamental broad-based technologies covered by many patents owned by many patent holders. MPEG LA provides users with fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory access to these essential patents on a worldwide basis under a single license. In addition to MPEG-2, MPEG LA licenses portfolios of essential patents for the IEEE 1394 Standard and DVB-T Standard and soon will begin licensing the MPEG-4 Visual and Systems standards. For more information, please refer to http://www.mpegla.com, http://www.1394la.com and http://www.dvbla.com. MPEG LA is based in Denver, Colorado, USA. CONTACT: MPEG LA Lawrence Horn 301-986-6660 Fax, 301-986-8575 lhorn at mpegla.com __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! News - Today's headlines http://news.yahoo.com From shamnadbasheer at yahoo.co.in Mon Sep 16 19:56:58 2002 From: shamnadbasheer at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?Shamnad=20Basheer?=) Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 15:26:58 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Commons-law] announcement on MPEG licensing In-Reply-To: <20020916055339.95171.qmail@web14606.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20020916142658.4350.qmail@web8005.mail.in.yahoo.com> standard setting and conflicting proprietary right issues are becoming increasingly important talk points. in fact, the recent past has seen several companies participating in standard setting without disclosing patents that in some way cover the standard-an unethical practice-and one which helps these companies rake in huge royalties once the standard is accepted. of course, some of these unethical practices have been succesfully challenged in courts. regards-shamnad --- Rana Dasgupta wrote: > just saw this press release. am not sure if it's > relevant... > > R > > MPEG LA Announces Plan for Licensing of Essential > H.264 JVT/MPEG-4 AVC Patents > Call for Submission of Patents for Evaluation by > Independent Patent Experts is First Step > > Denver, United States, Thursday, September 12, 2002 > -- > (business2media) -- MPEG LA, LLC makes the following > worldwide announcement of a plan aimed at providing > fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory worldwide access > under a single license to patents that are essential > for implementing the digital video compression > standard to be known as ITU-T H.264 and ISO/IEC > 14496-10 ("Proposed JVT/AVC Standard"). The first > step > in the plan calls for those with patents that they > believe are essential to the Proposed JVT/AVC > Standard > (as more specifically described below) to submit > them > for an evaluation of essentiality by independent > patent experts. > > Following is a summary of the plan: > > 1. Objective > > To establish a portfolio of essential worldwide > patents that are necessary for implementation of the > Proposed JVT/AVC standard in order to provide all > JVT/AVC users with fair, reasonable, > nondiscriminatory > access to this technology under one license. > > 2. Licensed patents > > Essential patents will consist of those that are > necessary for the Proposed JVT/AVC standard. > Currently, the Proposed JVT/AVC standard is > documented > in the Joint Final Committee Draft (JFCD) ITU-T > H.264 > and the Final Committee Draft (FCD) ISO/IEC 14496-10 > (MPEG-4 AVC) hereinafter "ITU-T FCD H.264" and > "ISO/IEC FCD 14496-10". These documents are more > formally known as: Joint Video Team (JVT) of ISO/IEC > MPEG and ITU-T VCEG D157, "Joint Final Committee > Draft > (JFCD) of Joint Video Specification", Klagenfurt, > July > 2002, and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 N4920 "Final > Committee Draft for Advanced Video Coding (ISO/IEC > 14496-10)", Klagenfurt, July 2002. To be essential, > an > issued patent must have one or more independent > claims > that are necessarily infringed by use or > implementation of the Proposed JVT/AVC standard. > > 3. Organization > > The patent portfolio may require at least the > following functions: > > First, as Evaluation Facilitator, MPEG LA will make > a > call described in this announcement for the > submission > of patents for an evaluation of their essentiality > by > independent patent experts and inclusion in a joint > license if determined to be essential and facilitate > the evaluation process and convene the initial group > of essential patent holders as described below. > > Second, an Evaluator (identified below) who is a > third > party patent expert will evaluate patents for > essentiality to the Proposed JVT/AVC standard (ITU-T > FCD H.264 and ISO/IEC FCD 14496-10). Any party that > believes it has essential patents is invited to > submit > them for evaluation and inclusion in accordance with > the standard terms and procedures governing > submissions. For each patent submitted, an > evaluation > fee of US $8,500.00 will be paid to MPEG LA, LLC, > (as > below) to cover costs of the patent expert's > evaluation. > > Third, an initial group of essential patent holders > who have agreed to the terms governing the > submission > of patents and been found by the independent patent > experts to have essential patents will be convened > to > prepare details of licensing terms. Evaluations will > continue throughout the course of the License in > order > to include as much essential intellectual property > as > possible, but the initial group of essential patent > holders/framers from among those who submit patents > for evaluation by the initial deadline of October > 11, > 2002, will be determined and convened for the > purpose > of commencing the JVT Patent Portfolio License. > > Fourth, the Licensing Administrator who is granted > non-exclusive sublicensing rights from patent owners > under licensed patents in order to sublicense those > patents to JVT/AVC users, will actively promote the > licensing program and distribute collected royalties > to the patent owners. The Licensing Administrator > will > be chosen by the initial group of patent holders. > > Fifth, an Administrative Committee consisting of > representatives of the essential patent owners will > monitor certain activities of a Licensing > Administrator. > > 4. Licensing details > > To be determined by the representatives of the > essential patent owners. > > 5. Schedule (Initial Plan) > > Initial patent submissions: by October 11, 2002 > (although patent submissions may continue to be > submitted after that date, owners of essential > patents > in the initial group of patents submitted by the > October 11 date will form the initial group of > Licensors that will select a Licensing Administrator > and determine the terms of license). > > Evaluation: At least one patent submitted by each > submitting party will be evaluated for its > essentiality by November 11, 2002. > > MPEG LA will convene a meeting of the initial patent > holder group shortly thereafter. > > Accordingly, MPEG LA hereby announces that any party > that believes it has patents that are essential to > the > Proposed JVT/AVC standard (ITU-T FCD H.264 and > ISO/IEC > FCD 14496-10) and wishes to join the patent > portfolio > upon successful evaluation, is invited to submit > such > patents to the Evaluator (identified below), > together > with a statement confirming its agreement with the > objectives and intention to abide by terms and > procedures governing the patent submission process > (initial patents to form initial Licensor group to > be > submitted by October 11, 2002), which may be > obtained > from Jane Tannenbaum, Director, Contract > Administration (jtannenbaum at mpegla.com) or Jll > McLain, > Contract Administrator, (jmclain at mpegla.com), MPEG > LA, > LLC. > > Evaluator: Dr. Kenneth Rubenstein and his team of > independent patent experts, PROSKAUER ROSE LLP, 1585 > Broadway, New York, NY 10036-8299, Tel. > 212-969-3000, > Fax 212-969-2900, krubenstein at proskauer.com > > MPEG LA, LLC > > MPEG LA successfully pioneered one-stop technology > standards licensing with a portfolio of essential > patents for the international digital video > compression standard known as MPEG-2, which it began > licensing in 1997. One-stop technology standards > licensing enables widespread technological > implementation, interoperability and use of > fundamental broad-based technologies covered by many > patents owned by many patent holders. MPEG LA > provides > users with fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory > access > to these essential patents on a worldwide basis > under > a single license. In addition to MPEG-2, MPEG LA > licenses portfolios of essential patents for the > IEEE > === message truncated === ________________________________________________________________________ Missed your favourite TV serial last night? Try the new, Yahoo! TV. visit http://in.tv.yahoo.com From lawrenceliang at vsnl.net Tue Sep 17 12:48:49 2002 From: lawrenceliang at vsnl.net (lawrenceliang at vsnl.net) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 12:48:49 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-law] Memorials of the Raj Anand Moot Message-ID: <20020917071849.9CFA711491D@webmail.vsnl.com> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020917/7fddcf64/attachment.pl From lawrenceliang at vsnl.net Tue Sep 17 12:50:18 2002 From: lawrenceliang at vsnl.net (lawrenceliang at vsnl.net) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 12:50:18 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-law] Memorials of the Raj Anand Open source Moot Message-ID: <20020917072018.BF8D511491D@webmail.vsnl.com> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020917/a8593f3b/attachment.pl From tripta at sarai.net Thu Sep 19 19:27:34 2002 From: tripta at sarai.net (Tripta) Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 19:27:34 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] Fwd: TV under the GPL Message-ID: <200209191927.34484.tripta@sarai.net> a forwarded message. _____________________________________________________ This seems like an interesting experiment in terms of what constitutes value outside of copyright. OK, it's PBS, so it might be a bit different, but what Cringely offers as unique value is a) timeliness (he's the first to broadcast) and editorial authority (his way of editing the material is the best). This reminds me of J.P. Barlow, who once said that the closer you get to the source, the more expensive information becomes and as you move further downstream it becomes free. It seems like a good time to remind oneself that there used to be more optimistic scenarios for the Net and that not all of them were necessarily pure evil hype. Felix http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020912.html [...] We've been busy all this time -- John Gau and I -- doing anything for the show we could that didn't cost money. We chose a title -- "NerdTV" -- and figured out how to make a show remarkably like the one I described so blithely months ago. "NerdTV" will still be downloaded, not streamed, and a single technical standard will be used for all viewers no matter what kind of Internet connection they have or what operating system they are running. The show will appear each week in a dizzying total of five versions. Of the three video versions, one will be for nerds, one for suits, and the third version will be all the raw footage so you can edit your own version and make fun of me at parties. There will be two audio-only versions -- one MP3 and one Ogg Vorbis. Viewers will be free to share and redistribute the shows under the General Public License, which is something no other TV network in the world is doing. So there! I will now go into obsessive detail about the technology behind "NerdTV." If this bores you, I'm sorry, but the fact is that what we are attempting to do is something that really hasn't been attempted before at this scale. This is very difficult to do well and we are proud of what we've already accomplished. To make the video editable, it will be distributed as an MPEG-4 datastream. Right at this moment, an encoder shoot-out is taking place to determine what software we'll use. So far, Envivio appears to be winning the encoder battle, and NewTek's Video Toaster 2 looks to be the editing system of choice, but that could still change since new products and versions seem to be appearing daily. The "NerdTV" video player isn't a player at all, but an applet that is being supplied by the very nice people from IBM Research. This is not any shipping IBM product, but rather a custom applet IBM's Michelle Kim and her crew are whipping-up just for "NerdTV." Going with an applet means there is no player application to download and install. We don't have to make a choice between Windows Media, RealPlayer, or QuickTime (actually, I suppose what we've done is reject all three). And we'll run just the same under Windows, MacOS, Linux, Solaris, even on the odd IBM mainframe. No advantage is lost by going with this applet, which has surprisingly good performance and will run on even the grottiest old PC. You'll be impressed. In order to get the most out of our 120 kilobits-per-second -- a speed we chose because it would allow modem users to download a half hour show in approximately one hour -- some production habits have to change. Rather than using one very expensive camera, we're using five fairly cheap ones -- JVC miniDV camcorders. JVC is the only brand that offers true progressive scanned CCDs on its low end models. By going to progressive scanning, we save some bandwidth and avoid having to go through a de-interlacing process before encoding. By shooting in PAL, we save about 15 percent in overhead by displaying 25 frames-per-second rather than 30. Many streamed videos will run as slow as five to 10 frames-per-second, but we just found this to be unacceptable. It is perhaps ironic that in order to present a less-than-broadcast-quality show, we have to start with better-than-broadcast-quality video. Our raw video will be progressive-scanned PAL with 576 lines of vertical resolution -- slightly better than the quality Steven Soderberg got in his recent bad movie, "Full Frontal," which was shot using a Canon Dvcam. If any networks outside the U.S. would like to run a broadcast quality version of "NerdTV," please get in touch with me because we could sure use the money. Same for corporate underwriters -- we need a couple of those -- though don't expect me to not insult you. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo at bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime at bbs.thing.net ------------------------------------------------------- From tmr_s at netvision.net.il Wed Sep 18 00:10:29 2002 From: tmr_s at netvision.net.il (tmr_s) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 20:40:29 +0200 Subject: [Commons-law] in respond to: ...That people on the list write a paragraph about themselves and send it to me... Message-ID: <042201c25e79$b2b90980$0200a8c0@t> Untitled Documentto: Monica Narula List Administrator. I'm a new media artist and had been practicing the liaison between art and computers since 1990. I'm happy to see that the scene had matured (or maybe me...) and is now open to address content, meaning and feelings through interactivity. I'm an info addict of some sort and an archive hobbyist. My main interest is the gap between the digital and the physical realms. Freeing one self from this dichotomy and using evolving technologies that can now bridge that gap with a breeze in industry, performance and interactive installations has been a quest and a subject matter for a succession of project proposals I've developed in the last couple of years. I live in Israel where the new media scene is rather new. My point of view is poetic and I tend to look at technology as magic, along side an effort to obtain a clear view on the current affair of art/science/technology. I'm working on a circular model for mapping the theoretical aspects of the interactive installation craft. My favorite key words are: a-life, biomimetics, complex-systems, cartography, data transfer, emotional machines, hertzian space, hybrid anything, digital substance, nano technology, info-aesthetic, psychogeography, retro-futurism, sensual communication, haptic devices, tangible media, urbanism... Which is actually a good idea for defining a netizen identity. Tell my what your keywords are and I'll tell you who you are... My current project is Loomog and it is too young to be exposed in public. Do visit: http://www.doflash.com/schori.pdf for project proposals and http://www.doflash.com/portfolio2/home.html for early realized works. Greetings, Tamar Schori -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020917/72f7b439/attachment.html From vitro_----_color at yahoo.com Wed Sep 18 17:37:22 2002 From: vitro_----_color at yahoo.com (vitro_----_color at yahoo.com) Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 17:37:22 Subject: [Commons-law] presentation Message-ID: <557.109498.212304@yahoo.com> Hello, We are pleased to inform you that VITROCOLOR is a specialized company in producing decorative glass in traditional styles such us: E. Galle, Daum Nancy, Muller, Schneider and in modern styles, with creisser (small pieces of color glass) and color powder. All the pieces are entirely HANDMADE and are UNIQUES. If you want to know more about us please visit our Web page where you can find some of our models: vases, lamps, icons (we have ~300 different models). We work only by clear order.Please don�t hesitate to contact us for any further information. We have the lowest prices on the net, negociable for big orders. We are waiting with great interest your answer and we hope to establish a long and mutually advantageous cooperation with you. Our site is http://www.vitrocolor.ro For ordering send mail to: sales at vitrocolor.ro For any other questions: office at vitrocolor.ro Best regards, Adrian, Vitrocolor Team. If you are not interested in our products, you can easily stop further offers from Vitrocolor by sending an email with your emailaddress that you want to be unsubscribed IN THE SUBJECT LINE (this is the only way) to extractor at rol.ro From lawrenceliang at vsnl.net Fri Sep 20 13:15:29 2002 From: lawrenceliang at vsnl.net (lawrenceliang at vsnl.net) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 13:15:29 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-law] The daily life of Intellectual Property Ver 1.0 Message-ID: <20020920074529.029FE114965@webmail.vsnl.com> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020920/b3670de5/attachment.pl From info at artmarket.com Fri Sep 20 21:00:41 2002 From: info at artmarket.com (Artprice.com) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 17:30:41 +0200 Subject: [Commons-law] GIACOMETTI : 1 355 auction results - adjudications Message-ID: <200209201530.g8KFUfYe012274@mail.sarai.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020920/725a39b7/attachment.html From mroopam at hotmail.com Fri Sep 20 23:20:01 2002 From: mroopam at hotmail.com (Roopa Madhav) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 17:50:01 +0000 Subject: [Commons-law] The daily life of Intellectual Property Ver 1.0 Message-ID: Hi there, too Was researching for material for Babu and I cam across this piece in the Human Rights Quarterly...Robert L.Ostergard - IP: A Universal Human Right? You may want to add that to the list of guiding questions listed below, to maybe steer the debate a 'lil' that way... Hope things are good with you. A big hi to Namita! Love, Roopa >From: lawrenceliang at vsnl.net >Reply-To: commons-law at sarai.net >To: commons-law at sarai.net >CC: nsg at cusat.ac.in, jeebesh at sarai.net, sudhir75 at hotmail.com, >lawrenceliang at vsnl.net >Subject: [Commons-law] The daily life of Intellectual Property Ver 1.0 >Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 13:15:29 +0530 (IST) > > >Hi all > >We at Sarai and ALf are planning to have a two day workshop sometime in >December to think through the theme of "The daily life of IPR". I have >written out a small concept note that outlines what we mean by the daily >life of IPR and would like to welcome any suggestions, comments etc. on >the theme, suggestions for speakers > >We would also like the workshop to throw up some concrete sugggestions etc >on some of our existing projects like the copyleft registry, the IPR >archive and database, a manual on IPR for vendors etc. Will provide more >details of the same later but for now please send in your comments etc on >the note > >regards > >Lawrence > >===== >THE DAILY LIFE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY > >�If I don�t sell these books at 200 rupees, how will students afford to buy >them for more than 2 thousand rupees� > >- Street vendor selling photocopied medical textbooks outside AIMS while >being arrested > >"The conclusion that emerges is that though social factors like illiteracy, >unemployment etc. influence piracy, the phenomenon occurs more because of >economic reasons than anything else. For pirates it is an easy way of >making quick bucks. For the endusers it is a gainful arrangement for >buying/using a variety of info-entertainment products which otherwise >remain unaffordable at least to a vast majority. Basically, this 'Win-Win' >situation for pirates & end-users keep the piracy alive and active in the >society. Other socio-economic variables like poverty and high prices etc. >only add to the degree of the problem. But piracy entails a high cost to >the creative people and also to those who invest their scarce resources in >bringing out copyrighted materials for use by millions. Until the pirates >are scared by giving exemplary punishments in cases of copyright >violations and the common end-users realize that in the long run protection >of copyright is beneficial not only to tho! >se who are involved in creation and commercialization of intellectual >properties, but to all including themselves, piracy will prevail. What is >needed, therefore, is an effective enforcement machinery along with a wide >spread propaganda highlighting the adversities associated with piracy". >- Study on Copyright piracy in India, Ministry of Human Resources and >Development > >1. Introduction: > >It is a truism to say that the language of intellectual property (�IP�) has >entered into the realms of our everyday life both as consumers and >practitioners living in the material conditions of globalization. This >movement away from the initial description of IP as an esoteric techno >legal field into a discourse around property rights, legality and >illegality has been facilitated to some extent by the hype created over the >importance of IP in the new economy. > >IPR is both a product as well as a constituent factor in the formation of >the contemporary, a contemporary shaped within the realities of that geo >spatial arrangement which we call globalization. A survey of recent events >reveal to some extent the mode and manner in which IPR forms a part of our >contemporary. > >�Our everyday activities are now mediated by our consumption of and >interaction with various signs protected by IP law, from the toothpaste we >use to the clothes we wear. >�The contemporary urban space is saturated with billboards and >advertisements, or what someone has called the landscape of the modern >�Popular cultural icons like Rajnikant to Manisha Koirala to the Indian >cricket team have suddenly begun to articulate their interests in the >language of IPR. >�The enforcement of IPR has also taken on an almost performative >character with copyright raids occupying a sizeable portion of the page 3 >crime reportage of most newspapers. >�From the back alleys of New York to the Palika bazaars of New Delhi and >the national markets of Bangalore, there is an economy of the �informal >sector�, which engage and sustain �illegal� activities of �piracy� >�Chief Ministers of various states compete to portray their states as >being tech savvy by declaring their states to be �zero piracy states�. >�The book industry lobbies for stricter regulation of book piracy and �the >promotion of theft� amongst students un universities who freely photocopy >books. > >Along with this totalizing effect of intellectual property there are other >critical movements and practices that have emerged to strongly contest the >dominant tradition of intellectual property. > >�Despite the fact that there are strong penal sanctions against the >infringement of IPR, vendors continue with their trade. This has raised >pertinent questions especially for those interested in the political >economy of the �informal economy� about questions of livelihood rights and >what the discourse of IPR means for those living on the fringes of the >regulated economy. >�Legal scholars like Coombe, Aoki etc have attempted to depict the >cultural life that IPR signs have and the ways in which dominant signs >continue to be used, appropriated by more marginalized groups. >�Beginning with the free software and open source movement, and gradually >spilling over to the ways in which knowledge and culture are produced there >is an increasing demand for a rearticulation of the public domain. > > >2. The Problem > >Very clearly the process of globalization and the accompanying >restructuring of capital and intensification of flows of capital, goods, >imagery, people, and ideas raise serious questions about the relationship >between IP law and contemporary economic and cultural practices. >Globalization is a process �with spatial co-ordinates that links and >relates particular places through flows of people, information, capital, >goods and services. These spatial co ordinates are more often than not >located in the informal network of production and distribution within >cities. Thus The regardless of how global a process is, it has to be >realized very locally, in transformations in the social, demographic, >economic, and political structures of contemporary urban space. Some of the >question that need then to be asked include: What are the modes through >which the globalization unfolds in terms of the ways in which this global >flows of capital, goods, and information are managed. How do these pro! >cesses produce and deal with "informal economies" and how do the economies >become a particularly "legal" problem�? How do these material practices >link up with discursive challenges to the very basis of IPR? > >The problem can therefore be posed in the following manner: > >�At the material level IPR has emerged in the context of the global >economy as one of the important modes of ensuring that cultural and >economic flows occur within a given set of rules and regulations. This >necessitates the disciplining of the activities of those who operate beyond >the boundaries of the regulated formal economy. Thus IPR unfold itself >through in the lives of people on a day to day basis, determining what >economic activities they may or may not engage in. These boundaries are >also backed by an omnipotent threat of coercive violence in the fork of the >use of the police force as the agents enforcing IPR. >�At the conceptual level there have been a number of challenges posed to >the philosophical basis and material basis of IPR. These range from the >open source movement in software to the �open� revolution in content, >music, publishing etc. (the broad movement that can be called the movement >of the �creative commons�). What clearly inspires the open revolution is a >dissatisfaction with the philosophical premises of IPR (romantic >authorship, incentive theory, monopoly rights etc) as well as a recognition >that given the distribution of inequality implicit in the global economy, >how does one articulate a praxis that allows for more democratic modes of >participation within the global economy? > >3. Some themes and questions for us to explore > >1. How do we begin to understand the relationship between IPR and the >material basis of the global economy. (This could be done through an >analysis of the work that Sarai has carried out in relation to the informal >economy) ( Prof. NSG could also elaborate on Sec. 52 of the Copyright Act >and the attempts being made to restrict its scope in India) >2. What do these practices mean in our understanding of the idea of the >�contemporary� and the �public domain�? >3. How do we link these the conceptual challenges posed to IPR to these >material practices? >4. How do we theorize or conceptualize an alternative framework outside of >the current language of IPR to accommodate these different practices? >5. In the event that we have to work within the framework of IPR as it >exists, what legal innovations can we think of which will address the >concerns of the existing material practices as well as the challenge of the >new creative commons. >_______________________________________________ >Commons-law mailing list >Commons-law at sarai.net >http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com From jeebesh at sarai.net Wed Sep 25 13:57:37 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 13:57:37 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] The Cultural Anarchist vs. the Hollywood Police State Message-ID: <02092513573700.00765@pammi.sarai.kit> http://www.latimes.com/la-tm-copyright38sep22001450(0,3658280).story The Cultural Anarchist vs. the Hollywood Police State A Stanford Professor Is One Supreme Court Decision Away From Ending Copyrights on Thousands of Movies, Books and Songs. By DAVID STREITFELD Larry Lessig is a 41-year-old Stanford University law professor who still looks like a graduate student, someone who has spent years in library stacks researching arcane subjects, miles from the real world. He's very pale and very quiet, as if he doesn't want to bother the fellow in the next cubicle. His hair sometimes sticks straight up, but he doesn't notice. Lessig has a student's idealism, too; he wants to change the way the world does business. The entertainment industry, Lessig feels, is locking up old movies, books and songs that long ago should have transcended private ownership and become the property of the people, just as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution intended. At stake, he says, is not only our common cultural heritage, but also the freedom that writers and musicians and filmmakers must have to interpret, reinterpret, adapt, borrow, sample, mock, imitate, parody, criticize--the very lifeblood of the creative process. But Lessig doesn't merely want to free the past. He wants to free the future as well. That's something else that the entertainment companies want to lock up. The laws they are proposing and the technologies they are developing, he says, will make creativity on the Internet a wholly owned subsidiary of the Recording Industry Assn. of America and the Motion Picture Assn. of America. His immediate target is a 1998 law that extended copyright protection an additional 20 years. It was a measure so obscure that the Senate passed it unanimously, with no debate and little public discussion. But it so outraged Lessig that he mounted what has become the first constitutional challenge of copyright limits to ever reach the Supreme Court. On Oct. 9, the former Supreme Court law clerk will try to persuade the justices to end private ownership of hundreds of thousands of artistic works, including some of America's most cherished. If he gets the court to agree, both the past and the future will change. "The world won't end," he says. "Hollywood will just have to find a different way to make money." During the past three years, as his copyright lawsuit has wended its way through the courts, Lessig has been talking it up in forums around the country and Europe. Walt Disney, he is always careful to say, is his hero. Disney, one of the most popular artists of the 20th century, knew what a bountiful resource the past could be. He refashioned the Brothers Grimm's dark fairy tale "Snow White" into an upbeat charmer. He took Perrault's "Cinderella" and made it an enduring fable of pluckiness. "Alice in Wonderland," "The Jungle Book," "Pinocchio," "The Three Little Pigs," "Treasure Island" were all adapted from classics and became classics themselves. What outrages Lessig is that Disney and other entertainment companies don't want this process repeated with their own works. They want very much to continue earning money by keeping their copyrights forever. Toward that end, Congress has extended copyright 11 times in the past 40 years, effectively locking away everything that Disney and every other entertainment company have ever produced. If copyright laws lock up the past, they also are a very potent instrument for controlling the Internet. To a group of computer programmers in Monterey, Lessig recounts an anecdote about Sony's robot dog, Aibo. An Aibo fan wrote a software program to make the dog dance to jazz. When the fan posted the code on the Internet so that other Aibo enthusiasts could teach their own dogs to dance, Sony lawyers contacted him and told him he had violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Even though you've spent $1,500 for an Aibo, Sony still has control over how you play with it. "Ours is less and less a free society," Lessig says. "The law is trying to make creativity a regulated industry." Lessig was a professional singer as a child, which gives him a natural ease on stage. His audiences often applaud mightily. But no one writes to Congress protesting how copyright is being abused on the Net. No one holds demonstrations. "We have this culture of passivity," he says. "Most people like being spoon-fed culture. Look at the reaction to shutting Napster down. There was none. It's like we're the Soviet Union after communism. We've had 80 years of massive broadcast culture. It's the only way we know to experience the world." His lawsuit, officially titled Eldred v. Ashcroft, is a way of forcing the issue. It's a measure of the strength and importance of Lessig's case that he will be opposed in court by Theodore B. Olson, the U.S. Solicitor General himself, and not some government underling. Olson won all eight cases he argued before the Supreme Court last term. The court will consider the passage in the Constitution that states "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," Congress should grant copyright only for "limited times." For Congress in 1790, the limit was 14 years, plus another 14 if the creator was still alive. By that standard, "Snow White," made in 1937, would have joined Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Mark Twain in the public domain in 1965. Instead, "Snow White" is now due to enter the public domain in 2032--unless, of course, copyright is extended again. Lessig will argue that the extensions give the entertainment companies "a perpetual term on the installment plan." For the benefit of big campaign contributors, he contends, Congress is perverting what the framers intended. Olson will respond that since copyright is not literally perpetual, Congress' extensions are constitutional. There's another wrinkle, one that speaks to Lessig's anger over the broadening of all forms of copyright. Congress, by giving an additional 20 years to copyright holders, is also abridging freedom of speech, he argues. If the justices buy that point, new legislation would have to take Lessig's case into account. It could act as a brake on the entertainment industry's constant search for new legal tactics to put the Internet in lockdown mode while it frisks everyone for unauthorized content. "The Supreme Court isn't owned by Hollywood," Lessig says. "I'm quite confident they'll see that a free culture is a free speech issue. The law will be struck down." It's already getting hard to remember what it was like before the internet brought a million different voices into your home. If you grew up in the 1970s and lived in a small town, the way Lessig did, culture and news were one-way streets. If you wanted to react to something, you could write a letter to the newspaper that they probably wouldn't print, or send a screed to a fanzine that no one except a few like-minded souls would see. The local department store sold a few books and some popular records, but anything the slightest bit out of the mainstream had to be special-ordered--if you even knew about it and if it even existed. The Internet blew through all those barricades and limitations. In its mid-1990s heyday, the Net was all about experimentation and openness, a place where no one needed a printing press to publish an article or a record company to distribute music or Wall Street's approval to start a company, where the only constraint on innovation was the imagination. But nothing ordained that it had to stay that way. Very quickly, in fact, various interests got busy lobbying for laws and developing technology that would turn the Net into a closed system. It will bring entertainment directly to your eyeballs and eardrums for a moment, for a price. "Once you start down this road, there's only one logic, and that's the logic of total control," says Duke University law professor James Boyle. "It's a world of pervasive monitoring, because the creator has to get his money at every stage." One reason there's been little uproar about this is that the entertainment industry is very good at seizing the high ground. It long ago took control of all the good words in this fight: Pirate. Thief. Hacker. Stealing. It racheted up the invective, too. An Assn. of American Publishers official last year called librarians who believed in free content--a central principle of libraries for a few centuries--"Ruby Ridge or Waco types." Jack Valenti, chief executive of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, calls the struggle against unauthorized copying a "terrorist war." In a February op-ed piece in the Washington Post, he asserted that "the movie industry is under siege from a small community of professors." An industry with about $70 billion in worldwide revenues being thwarted by a handful of scholars, none of whom could get within a mile of Morton's on Oscar night? "When I read that," says Boyle, "I had a Monty Pythonesque image of a siege of this massive castle by a tiny number of individuals armed only with insults. 'Now open your gates,' they were yelling, 'or we shall taunt you once again.' " Yet Valenti might be right when it comes to Lessig. "He thinks we ought to rise up against Disney like the Serbians attacking Milosevic," says novelist and cyber-rights activist Bruce Sterling. Lessig doesn't boycott mass culture. His wife, Bettina, volunteers that he's always eager to see the latest blockbuster--"Minority Report," "The Sum of All Fears." He just wants to get rid of the lawyers. Disney's most enduring creation, he points out in his lectures, was directly derived from another work: Mickey Mouse was a parody of Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill." Nowadays, doing a parody like Mickey on or off-line would be an open invitation to a lawsuit. That's what Alice Randall got when she tried last year to publish "The Wind Done Gone," a parody of "Gone With the Wind" done from the slaves' point of view. The heirs of Margaret Mitchell slapped Randall with a lawsuit, claiming she was infringing on the copyright of the 1936 original. Publication of the novel was held up until an appeals court said it could be released on free speech grounds. When Mitchell wrote her novel, she expected it would enter the public domain in 1992. With the extensions, this key piece of American culture is off-limits until 2031. "Creativity always builds off the past," Lessig says, "and if you call that theft, you don't understand what creativity is." Valenti says that "what Larry and some of his cohorts believe is in the digital world everything ought to be available to everyone. No constraints on the rights of creative property at all." While this isn't what Lessig thinks, the strange thing is that it's pretty close to what the framers of the Constitution believed. Indeed, what's odd about the current copyright fight is how much it's a contemporary remake of an issue that was discussed, litigated and decided during the 18th century. Before 1710, the Stationers' Company, a guild of printers, controlled the publication and sale of all works in England, including those of authors who had been dead for thousands of years. The Stationers scoffed at the idea that their monopoly should be in any way limited. For one thing, they warned, if the system were dismantled it would ruin the economy. Equally important, they said, they had a moral right. No other property gets taken away after 10 or 20 years, they wrote in a broadside, so why should books? It's an argument that the music and movie industries are still making today. Nevertheless, the Statute of Anne in 1710 established a limited copyright term of 14 years. The Stationers spent the next 60 years alternately ignoring and challenging the law as they tried to suppress the Scottish publishers, who followed their own rules and were thus the Internet pirates of the era. But in a landmark case in 1774, the Stationers' monopoly was finally broken and the past was freed. When the U.S. Constitution was drawn up several years later, this history was still fresh. Jefferson wanted to put a "restriction against monopolies" in the Bill of Rights, right alongside trial by jury and freedom of the press. He, like the other framers, hated concentrating power in the hands of a few, and didn't like the idea of the past calling the shots on the future either. The earth belongs to the living, Jefferson wrote Madison on Sept. 6, 1789: "The dead have neither powers nor rights over it." The Eldred case, which could do so much to affect the nature of copyrights, was sparked by a book that had been out of copyright for a century. Emma, Annie and Bonnie Eldred, teenage triplets in Derry, N.H., were assigned "The Scarlet Letter" in school. They didn't like it. Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic tale of sex, shame and redemption seemed fussy and obscure--a slog, in fact. The girls grumbled to their father, a civilian computer contractor for the Navy who was retired on disability and thus had lots of time to ponder the problem. Eric Eldred wondered if the Internet could help, which wasn't as inevitable a thought in 1995 as it would be now. He found the entire text of the novel on the Net, but the typeface was so ugly and the typographical errors so plentiful it was a strain to read. So Eldred set about making his own online version. He scanned in the text, proofreading it and adding annotations and glossary definitions and features like an 1879 review of the novel by novelist Anthony Trollope. And since "The Scarlet Letter" is more easily understood in the context of Hawthorne's other works, Eldred scanned in "The House of the Seven Gables," "Twice Told Tales," "The Marble Faun," "A Wonder-Book" and just about everything else Hawthorne ever wrote, annotating them as well. By the time he was done, his site was getting about 3,000 visits a day from students around the globe. It had been applauded by Hawthorne scholars and won a commendation from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Eldred had also seen Bonnie, Annie and Emma graduate from high school. Never enticed by literature, they all became dancers. Their father, though, had found a calling. There's an old Ray Bradbury story about how, in a time of future suppression, literature remains alive by people essentially becoming the classic writers, literally embodying their work so it doesn't disappear. It was a tale Eldred took to heart. He was Hawthorne, preserving his words and presenting them to the future. He soon became Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ring Lardner, William Dean Howells, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, as well as lesser-known late 19th and early 20th century masters, including John Boyle O'Reilly, author of the forgotten 1890 classic "Canoeing Sketches," and H.M. Tomlinson's definitive 1912 account of life on a tramp steamer, "The Sea and the Jungle." Since all this work was in the public domain, Eldred didn't have to track down the author or ask anyone's permission or pay any fees. He was one small part of a movement that was putting thousands of old books online, for free, for the betterment of all. The Web was becoming a library. No student would ever be confused by Hawthorne again. Then the politicians got involved. On Oct. 7, 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, named after the late congressman and singer who believed, said his widow, Rep. Mary Bono, that "copyright should be forever." Before the Bono act, copyright limits expired 75 years after publication, which means that Eldred was only a few months away from posting Hemingway's "Three Stories and 10 Poems," first published in 1923. The following years, the door would have slowly open on modern culture: "The Great Gatsby," "The Maltese Falcon," early works by Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens, "The Sun Also Rises," "Winnie the Pooh," "Rhapsody in Blue," "Show Boat," the best of Irving Berlin, Ring Lardner and Virginia Woolf, the first talkies. And Mickey Mouse. The law when it comes to a creation such as Mickey is complex because trademark enters the picture. Still, Mickey, who first gained fame in "Steamboat Willie" in 1928, was too lucrative a part of the Disney company, too tied up in its corporate image, to risk. Disney donated money to 18 of the 25 sponsors of the Bono act in the House and Senate, and lobbied heavily for its passage. By extending copyright protection for an additional 20 years, the Bono act essentially functions as a dam, preventing any work from entering the public domain until 2019--an estimated 400,000 books, movies and songs. A handful of classics will remain available, in print or on CDs or DVDs. Everything else will quietly crumble--literally, in the case of the negatives of many films. And for what? Eldred wondered. Just to keep up Disney profit margins and enrich the heirs of Gershwin and Hemingway? It was a blow against the Internet, too. A traditional library with physical books can stock and lend out whatever it wants, whether the volume is in copyright or not; an Internet library like Eldred's is restricted to material in the public domain. "Companies don't want you to be able to get anything on the Internet for free," Eldred says. "They just want to sell you their own versions on pay-per-view." Annoyed and depressed by the Bono act, he contemplated civil disobedience--publishing works from 1923 and '24 until he was arrested. He announced he was shutting down his site. He wrote letters. He fulminated. He became, in short, an activist, which is how Larry Lessig, then teaching at Harvard, heard about him, sought him out and filed a lawsuit on his behalf. Patricia Lessig was pregnant with her third child in late 1960 when she went to see "Village of the Damned," a horror flick about a rural town whose womenfolk are mysteriously impregnated by aliens. The women give birth to a race of superhumans capable of reading minds and imposing their will on others. Four decades later, when Patricia contemplates her super-achieving son, the movie offers the only reasonable explanation. "I think he came from outer space." There is something unearthly about Lessig. He grew up in Williamsport, Pa., where his father, Jack, started a steel-fabricating business that ultimately employed about 150 people. Jack ticks off his son's most memorable qualities: Never indecisive, never seemed to fail in anything, and whatever he got into, whether it was starting a newspaper in the fourth grade or running a Jerry Lewis-style telethon, he became the leader. "He was always about four or five steps ahead of everyone," says Jack. Lessig wanted someday to be president, and made a good start. He was valedictorian of his high school class, president of the Pennsylvania Teenage Republicans and the youngest member of any delegation to the 1980 Republican convention. Lessig was a sophomore at Penn by then, running a state campaign for a man named Jim Ketcham. Despite Ronald Reagan's long coattails that year, Ketcham lost. If the campaign cured him of the desire for a life in politics, graduate studies in philosophy at Trinity College at Cambridge University undercut his Republicanism. Studying under the long shadow of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the dark prince of Cambridge philosophers, Lessig learned that the way to influence a seemingly intractable debate was by reframing it, getting both sides to confront something they hadn't seen before. It's a technique that has served him well in the Eldred case. While attending Yale Law School, Lessig did a summer internship at the highly regarded Chicago law firm of Miller Shakman & Hamilton. "He was the best any of us had ever seen, and our collective experience stretched back decades," remembers Barry Miller, now an assistant U.S. attorney. That ecstatic recommendation helped get Lessig a clerkship with Richard Posner, probably the best-known and most influential appeals court judge in the country. "He was rather like Ralph Nader, but brighter," says Posner. In addition to Lessig's intensity and moral zeal, Posner was struck by something else, something Nader doesn't exhibit: a restlessness. "You know that novel by Somerset Maugham, 'The Razor's Edge'? The fellow in that book was someone who was searching for something meaningful, just like Larry. He ends up at a monastery in Nepal. He doesn't want to or can't lead a normal life." Lessig used his spare energy to travel, trying to see what other people were taking for granted. He hitchhiked through communist Eastern Europe, smuggled a mechanical heart valve for a Jewish dissident into the Soviet Union by hiding it in his pants, read 30 classic novels in 30 days during a trip to Costa Rica. In the house he and Bettina, a lawyer with Bay Area Legal Aid, bought and are remodeling in San Francisco, his passport lies open on a table, as if it might be needed any minute. The final rung on his educational ladder was the ultimate for any law student: a Supreme Court clerkship, during the 1990-91 term. In his interview with Antonin Scalia, Lessig coolly critiqued the justice's recent rulings. Scalia, who likes to be challenged by his clerks, gave Lessig the job. That annoyed Scalia's other clerks, all of whom correctly suspected Lessig was not a judicial conservative. "We weren't on speaking terms for much of the year," says one of them, Chris Landau. Lessig first stepped onto the public stage in late 1997, when U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson appointed him a "special master" in the Microsoft case. His task would have been to conduct hearings and issue a recommendation to the court, which would have given him an enormously influential role in the most important antitrust case in a century. But Microsoft didn't want anyone to be a special master, and certainly not Lessig: The company claimed he was biased, and tried to prove it by digging up an old e-mail in which Lessig had teasingly equated installing a Microsoft product on his computer with selling his soul to the devil. Ultimately, an appeals court ruled against the involvement of a special master. Lessig has forgiven Microsoft but not himself for blowing his big moment. "There's a great song by Sarah McLachlan called 'Angel'--'You spend all your time waiting/ for that second chance/ for a break that would make it OK . . . ' There's a certain sense I'm always feeling that I'm making up for Microsoft. I just want the chance to do some work, some real work, which could do some good." After Clinton signed the Bono act, Lessig was in a hurry to challenge it. He thought the retroactive extension so obviously ridiculous, so clearly unconstitutional that he thought there would be dozens of suits. He wanted to be first. Eldred v. Reno, as it then was called, was filed Jan. 11, 1999, in U.S. District Court in Washington. Opposition by the Hollywood studios, the music companies and the book publishers was understandable. But even copyright lawyers fundamentally sympathetic to Lessig didn't think much of the case--which turned out to be the only challenge to the law. Peter Jaszi, an influential copyright scholar at American University, was one of the early skeptics. "It's not so much that we thought it was a terrible idea but that it was just unprecedented," he says. "Congress has been extending copyright for 180 years, and this is the first time someone said it violated the Constitution." U.S. District Judge June Green confirmed the skeptics' fears. Without letting the matter go to trial, she ruled in favor of the U.S. government on Oct. 28, 1999. The appeals court split its Feb. 16, 2001, decision, ruling 2-1 that Congress had not overstepped its bounds. Lessig appealed to the Supreme Court, but there seemed little reason for hope. The high court postponed a decision on taking the Eldred case three times last January. Lessig plunged into despair. He thought the court would decline but needed to give one justice time to write an opinion disagreeing with the decision. The likely candidate was Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who had written a Harvard Law Review article in 1970 suggesting "we should . . . hesitate to extend or strengthen" copyright. Larry and Bettina were in Hawaii. He slept a lot, stared into space. "He's a perfectionist. At everything," says Bettina. "He turned into an abyss of inconsolableness." On Feb. 19, the court decided to take the case, which meant at least four justices decided it was worth hearing. The legal community was surprised. Most major shifts by the Supreme Court are widely anticipated, arriving in the wake of broad-based social movements and multiple lawsuits spanning several years, says University of Chicago legal historian Dennis Hutchinson. "Solitary crusading individuals are very unusual, and law professors acting on their own don't fare very well either," he says. Hutchinson could recall only one case involving law professors: Tileson v. Ullman, from 1943, an effort by Yale law professors to make it legal for doctors to prescribe contraceptives if a woman's health was in danger. The case was dismissed on procedural grounds. The entertainment industry can only hope for a similar escape. The Supreme Court, Jack Valenti says hopefully, is merely having some "legal fun." The mere fact that the court took the case has affected the entertainment business. Peermusic, a major independent music publisher based in the Bay Area, has been putting a clause in catalog acquisition contracts saying that the value will be cut if Bono is struck down. But what's more problematic is a deal that was done before the court took Eldred. Peermusic had acquired the catalog of Hoagy Carmichael and was working to "rejuvenate it," as they say in the business. The studios were reacquainted with songs such as "Stardust" and "Georgia on My Mind"; negotiations were underway with a store chain to sell a line of products based on Carmichael's romantic allure; a musical is in the works. But if Bono falls, "Stardust" goes in the public domain immediately, and "Georgia" follows in three years. "There's no incentive for us to do what we're doing if we don't have an opportunity to earn renumeration," says chief executive Ralph Peer II. "I would predict interest in the Carmichael repertoire would take a nose-dive." Unless, of course, it increases as studios use work that they earlier would have had to pay for and singers record tunes that are suddenly freely available. Those who favor expirations for copyright point to what happened with Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden," the ageless tale of a boy and girl spiritually renewed after discovering a hidden garden on a Yorkshire estate. First published in 1911, the work entered the public domain in 1986. There are now at least 12 print versions of the book as well as two online versions. There has been a TV adaptation, a musical, a big-budget Warner Bros. movie, a cookbook and, undoubtedly, numerous student reworkings. No one owns "The Secret Garden" anymore, and consequently everyone owns it. Probably the same would happen to Winnie the Pooh and Mickey, but Disney would not give them up without a fight. "Winnie the Pooh" was published in 1926, which means if the law is overturned, it immediately comes out of copyright. This would shave millions off the bottom line of its publisher, Dutton, a division of the British conglomerate Pearson. What's less clear is how such a decision would affect Disney, which controls the merchandising rights and makes a billion dollars a year from Pooh fruit juice and other items. Could someone start selling their own Pooh fruit juice? Disney would say no, because it has a trademark on the Pooh characters, and trademarks, unlike copyrights, never expire. But at least one appeals court ruling, issued in Missouri in 1890, gives scant comfort to Disney. In that case, a publisher had reissued a Webster's Dictionary from 1847 that had gone out of copyright. They were sued by the G. & C. Merriam Co., the original publishers of both that dictionary as well as several subsequent Webster's. Merriam argued that their trademark on the Webster's brand was being infringed by an upstart. Samuel Miller, a Supreme Court justice who was sitting in on a circuit court, slapped them down, writing that he didn't believe that "a party who has had the copyright of a book until it has expired may continue that monopoly indefinitely, under the pretense that it is protected by a trademark or something of that sort." At the end of August, Lessig was speaking before what he swore would be his last audience, a gathering of the Free Software Foundation in San Francisco. He had the Eldred case to attend to; he was going to Japan for the fall semester; he was finally running out of energy. But he agreed to be a guest at a dinner for big donors to the foundation, and he spoke in a rented club for those who only had $10 to contribute. Introducing Lessig, software activist Henri Poole says he isn't even going to try to get people at the club to stop playing pinball for the next half-hour because he knows that's impossible. Lessig gamely begins anyway--warning, cajoling, trying to inspire. "Everything that Washington proposes gets worse than the thing they did before," he says. In March, Democratic Sen. Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina introduced legislation that would require CD players, televisions and computers to block unauthorized copyright material. Opponents dubbed it the "police state in a computer." On July 25, Howard L. Berman, the Democratic representative whose district includes North Hollywood and part of the San Fernando Valley, co-sponsored the Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act. It would allow anti-copyright vigilantism, giving Hollywood immunity for "disabling, interfering with, blocking, diverting, or otherwise impairing" home computers that might hold illegal copyrighted material. Not since the Licensing Act of 1662 reaffirmed the power of the Stationers' Company to conduct searches and seizures of illegal books and presses has the state given such authority to a private entity. "Hollywood is terrified" by the Eldred case, Lessig tells the programmers, "but whatever victory we can win in the courthouse they can take away with new legislation." He says he's pleading with them. "This war is being waged whether you participate or not. It will be won whether you're on the field or not. The question is by whom." After he is finished, a college student comes up and starts talking in a sort of animated fury. This fellow lives in Berman's district. What would be better, he wants to know: to talk sense into Berman or go work for his opponent? "What do we do?" he says. "When do we start?" A soldier has been enlisted for the battle. It's just one guy, and who knows if he'll even follow through. But Lessig considers it a successful evening. David Streitfeld is a Times staff writer based in the Bay Area. From jeebesh at sarai.net Wed Sep 25 14:22:17 2002 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 14:22:17 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] Help Protect Your Rights to the Great Works in the Public Domain! Message-ID: <02092514221701.00765@pammi.sarai.kit> http://www.law.asu.edu/HomePages/Karjala/OpposingCopyrightExtension/ Maintained by: Dennis S. Karjala, Professor of Law, Arizona State University Help Protect Your Rights to the Great Works in the Public Domain! On October 7, 1998, both the House and the Senate passed S. 505, the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act," extending the already-too-long term of copyright protection by another 20 years. The legislation purports to cover even works already in existence -- a windfall gift to special interests of what rightfully belongs to the public. President Bill Clinton, a self-proclaimed supporter of the little guy, signed the bill on October 27, 1998. Like the Congress,  former President Clinton sold out the interests of the American people to a few owners of valuable copyrights from the 1920's and 1930's. This web site shows how and why this action was a tragic mistake. It also supplies news on a judicial challenge to the constitutionality of the term extension legislation, now before the Supreme Court.  It also contains materials on the law and policy of longer copyright terms generally in the hope that, when this issue arises again (if the Supreme Court gets it wrong, this will be around the year 2015 or so), those seeking to defend the public interest will have some ammunition. Value of the Public Domain  Materials Focusing on the Importance of the Public Domain  (includes new additions to the Subverted Public Domain page added September 10, 2002, and some discussion of the copyright status of Charlie Chaplin's classic The Gold Rush added September 5, 2002)  From rmazumdar at vsnl.net Thu Sep 26 08:12:38 2002 From: rmazumdar at vsnl.net (Ranjani Mazumdar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 08:12:38 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract In-Reply-To: <02092514221701.00765@pammi.sarai.kit> Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20020926081112.00ac56c8@mail.vsnl.net> Hi everyone, I have been busy the last two weeks. Is it too late to post a response/ or continue with the narrative contract debate? best Ranjani From dwijenr at usa.net Thu Sep 26 08:37:41 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 03:07:41 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209260907.g8Q97KYe004966@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/6b94bd4e/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/6b94bd4e/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Thu Sep 26 09:37:47 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 04:07:47 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209261007.g8QA7eYe005321@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/09aad240/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/09aad240/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Thu Sep 26 20:13:23 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 14:43:23 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209262043.g8QKh3Ye009640@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/e8163a29/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/e8163a29/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Thu Sep 26 21:16:14 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 15:46:14 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209262145.g8QLjsYe010113@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/c2a3267b/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/c2a3267b/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Thu Sep 26 22:17:20 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 16:47:20 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209262247.g8QMl9Ye010558@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/e767e164/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/e767e164/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Thu Sep 26 23:18:07 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 17:48:07 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209262347.g8QNluYe011007@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/da4d8007/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/da4d8007/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Fri Sep 27 00:18:43 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 18:48:43 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209270048.g8R0mWYe011501@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/05427110/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/05427110/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Fri Sep 27 01:18:54 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 19:48:54 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209270148.g8R1mkYe011899@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/41b06e38/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/41b06e38/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Fri Sep 27 02:19:40 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 20:49:40 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209270249.g8R2nIYe012274@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/f619f955/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/f619f955/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Fri Sep 27 03:19:53 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 21:49:53 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209270349.g8R3niYe012650@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/45f000d8/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/45f000d8/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Fri Sep 27 04:20:16 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 22:50:16 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209270450.g8R4o7Ye013346@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/f1c7478e/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/f1c7478e/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Fri Sep 27 05:20:45 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 23:50:45 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209270550.g8R5oQYe013943@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/7642d662/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020926/7642d662/attachment.gif From lawrenceliang at vsnl.net Fri Sep 27 08:50:08 2002 From: lawrenceliang at vsnl.net (lawrenceliang at vsnl.net) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 08:50:08 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-law] Apologies for the Dwijen I am way mail Message-ID: <20020927032008.7F65A1149C5@webmail.vsnl.com> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020927/a1f37442/attachment.pl From fred at bytesforall.org Fri Sep 27 01:33:11 2002 From: fred at bytesforall.org (Frederick Noronha) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 01:33:11 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract In-Reply-To: <200209270148.g8R1mkYe011899@mail.sarai.net> Message-ID: Please unsubscribe this address. It seems to be getting caught in an infinity loop. Dangerous... FN On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Dwijen Rangnekar wrote: > I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen > > > > > > > From mukund at nls.ac.in Fri Sep 27 10:12:58 2002 From: mukund at nls.ac.in (mukund at nls.ac.in) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 10:12:58 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-law] Dwijen's repeated reply - causes ! In-Reply-To: References: <200209270148.g8R1mkYe011899@mail.sarai.net> Message-ID: <2477.202.54.87.179.1033101778.squirrel@mail.nls.ac.in> Dear Lawrence, and all - Hi. Dwijen has set an autorespond to his email while he is away on holiday (as all of us and our parents know by now !). Everytime, any mail from anyone on the list reaches his address, it will autorespond to the entire list and thus to all of us. To prevent this from happening - please DONT set your auto respond on while away unless you have unsubscribed from the list. Also, the moderator of this group should just unsubscribe him, telling him what happened by email. that way, when he returns, he can resubscribe. Thanks Mukund From dwijenr at usa.net Fri Sep 27 15:03:58 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 09:33:58 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209271533.g8RFXgYe018006@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020927/64ce70ad/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020927/64ce70ad/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Fri Sep 27 15:03:58 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 09:33:58 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] Dwijen's repeated reply - causes ! Message-ID: <200209271533.g8RFXjYe018009@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020927/92fd773d/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020927/92fd773d/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Fri Sep 27 15:04:12 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 09:34:12 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] narrative contract Message-ID: <200209271533.g8RFXnYe018012@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020927/ff8b3383/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020927/ff8b3383/attachment.gif From dwijenr at usa.net Fri Sep 27 16:04:57 2002 From: dwijenr at usa.net (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 10:34:57 -0000 Subject: [Commons-law] Apologies for the Dwijen I am way mail Message-ID: <200209271634.g8RGYnYe018462@mail.sarai.net> I am on leave till 30th September - Dwijen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020927/77687bbf/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 2011 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20020927/77687bbf/attachment.gif From zamrooda at sarai.net Mon Sep 30 10:36:52 2002 From: zamrooda at sarai.net (zamrooda) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 10:36:52 +0530 Subject: [Commons-law] Apologies for the Dwijen I am way mail In-Reply-To: <20020927032008.7F65A1149C5@webmail.vsnl.com> References: <20020927032008.7F65A1149C5@webmail.vsnl.com> Message-ID: <200209301036.52853.zamrooda@sarai.net> thank god some one realised it. From d.rangnekar at ucl.ac.uk Mon Sep 30 17:26:37 2002 From: d.rangnekar at ucl.ac.uk (Dwijen Rangnekar) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 12:56:37 +0100 Subject: [Commons-law] Dwijen's repeated reply - causes ! In-Reply-To: <2477.202.54.87.179.1033101778.squirrel@mail.nls.ac.in> Message-ID: <000001c26878$6f0ecb80$3db02880@uclxhbrie101as> Sorry to all for my use of basic facilities of this IT world! And, thanks to Mukund for sharing this information for other users Ps: being back; the auto-response is obviously off! > -----Original Message----- > From: commons-law-admin at sarai.net > [mailto:commons-law-admin at sarai.net] On Behalf Of mukund > Sent: 27 September 2002 05:43 > To: commons-law > Subject: [Commons-law] Dwijen's repeated reply - causes ! > > > Dear Lawrence, and all - Hi. > > Dwijen has set an autorespond to his email while he is away > on holiday (as all of us and our parents know by now !). > Everytime, any mail from anyone on the list reaches his > address, it will autorespond to the entire list and thus to all of us. > > To prevent this from happening - please DONT set your auto > respond on while away unless you have unsubscribed from the list. > > Also, the moderator of this group should just unsubscribe > him, telling him what happened by email. that way, when he > returns, he can resubscribe. > > Thanks > Mukund > > > _______________________________________________ > Commons-law mailing list > Commons-law at sarai.net > http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons> -law >