BLACA, PIES AND PRIVATE COPYING

BLACA meeting

BLACA Chair, Uma ‘Copyright’ Suthersanen has asked the IPKat to tip his readers off about the forthcoming BLACA meeting entitled ‘Music Piracy: “Past and Present: Learn the Lesson”’. On the panel are Dr Isabella Alexander (University of Cambridge) and Hubert Best (Best & Soames).

It all takes place on 9 November at 6.15pm. You can go along without remunerating Uma or the BLACA coffers, even if you’re not a BLACA member, as long as you’re interested in becoming a member.

More details here (though note that the start time is 6.15, and not as shown on the website).


Would you like coffee to go with your humble pie?

Spotted in today’s Guardian:

A story headlined Starbucks, the coffee beans and the copyright row that cost Ethiopia £47m, page 1, October 26, confused two entirely different legal rights: copyright and registered trademarks. We said Ethiopia had filed copyright applications to trademark its most famous coffee names, when we should have said it had filed applications to register its most famous coffee names as trademarks...

Quite right, says the IPKat. There’s no excuse for such a mistake (though lots of people make it). What Merpel wants to know is, is there an irate IP lawyer out there who’ll admit to having tipped the Guardian off about its mistake?


Time for a private copying exception?

The Institute of Public Policy Research think tank is calling on the Gowers Review to ‘update the 300-year-old copyright laws to take account of the changes in the way people want to listen to music, watch films and read books’ by introducing a private copying exception. The IPPR cites survey evidence that 55% of the public have made such copies, and 59% think it is legal to do so.

The IPPR also calls for the review to reject the extension of the term of protection for sound recordings and for a cautious approach to DRM.

The IPKat favours such an exception. Why should consumers be forced to shell out to ‘upgrade’ their music collections each time a new medium is developed? He thinks it’s a bit misleading though to refer to the ‘300-year-old copyright laws’ as if things were frozen in aspic at the beginning of the 18th Century – a proposition that is clearly eroneous, bearing in mind the non-availability of recording music for another 200 years or so.