in gravyland » online rights

The ORG Party and the Raffle

Gra — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 22:11:54 +0000

I’m just heading home on the train from the Open Rights Group Party. What a great Do it was, too.

I joined ORG is an aspirational frame of mind, I was heading to live in the UK, still in Australia at the time, and after being an early member of the EFF and seeing just what great work they’d done I had great hopes for ORG. So, I pledged my £5 per month and joined up, hoping that something good would happen.

And it did. See here and here and here and how you can help.

And there was a raffle. For the first time in my life I scored first prize in a raffle. And the prize is naming rights to a character in Cory Doctorow’s next novel, Little Brother.

Wow.

I’m speechless.

Update: Becky sums up the raffle and the night over on the ORG Blog. And tagged photos of the night on flickr.

Australian Creative Commons Animation

Gra — Wed, 18 May 2005 13:53:58 +0000

Here’s an Australian Creative Commons Animation that really beautifully explains creative commons through a conversation between a couple of whacky characters.

I can’t believe how good it is to hear Australian accents talking about Creative Commons.

Congrats to Pete Foley (animation), Chris Perren (music) and Elliott Bledsoe (co-ordination).

Govt initiates copyright “Fair Use” review

Gra — Wed, 11 May 2005 03:09:00 +0000

The Attorney-General’s Department has initiated an examination of the concept of “Fair Use” in copyright with a view to extending or altering the “fair use” provisions in the Copyright Act. This is a good thing.

They have released an issues paper about fair use in Australia and are seeking public submissions closing on 1 July 2005.

Important: This is a chance to help influence the formation of the fair use execptions to maybe even allow us to make backup copies of our CDs or legally put songs from our own CDs onto an iPod, right we currently don’t have. All submissions help.

I can’t find a place on the Attorney General’s website to make submissions. However, there is contact information on the press release.

I’m going to try and crank out a submission in the next couple of weeks. I don’t know how (I’ve got that much else going on), but I will try anyway :-)

Chilling effects: leave my blog alone

Gra — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 03:36:58 +0000

I got an email this morning from the CEO of TRUCK ADS LLC, asking me to change content of this post on our freo.com group blog because it supposedly infringes on a trademark held by TRUCK ADS LLC. My post was criticising the use of trucks to cruise Fremantle where the only purpose of the truck was to carry an advertisement on the back. Here’s the guts of that email:

From: TRUCKADS < … >
To: info@freo.com
Subject: TRUCKADS TRADEMARK 2838348
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:34:28 -0500
Organization: TRUCKADS

Hi –

Do you think you could do me a favor and change the title in your blog? Perhaps TRUCK ADVERTISING or MOBILE BILLBOARDS.

TRUCK ADS MUST GO! http://freo.com/archives/2004/11/19/truck-advertisments-must-go/

This is not exactly helping our business. Your reference to TRUCK ADS is an assault on our trademark without just cause.

Best Regards… Rod

Rod Harris
President / CEO
mailto: …

Thanks for the email Rod. You start off nice and politely, but what is this “… an assault on our trademark without just cause”? I’m not sure about that. I’m not inclined to change my post on freo.com without a really good reason. I don’t think I’ve assaulted anybody’s trademark by using the words Truck and Ads next to each other in the title of a blog post.

Thankfully, there is place that can help with this sort of thing. I’ve reported the email to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, which is a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, and George Washington School of Law clinics. They keep a database, and provide some limited legal comment on emails and notices like this. Will be interesting to see what they say.

I’ll report back what happens…

Historical note: I did get a similar email from some months ago complaining about the URL for the post in question. At that time I changed the relevant bit of the url to truck-advertisments.

[Update 10/5/2005: The cool-named chillbot at chillingeffects.org emailed me to let me know that the original notice I received has now been put up on chillingeffects.org. There are no annotations or comments there yet, though.]