A lot of details lacking in this story about Virginia social workers nabbing a couple teenagers from Oregon and putting them into foster care, but it sure seems pretty ironic given the commonwealth’s history of staunch support for states’ rights.

The lead story in this New York Times report about YouTube pulling videos that include copyrighted music is about Juliet Weybret, a young woman who recorded herself performing “Winter Wonderland” and uploaded it.

You might be thinking to yourself, “Surely ‘Winter Wonderland’ is in the public domain,” but surprise! It is not. The song was written in 1934, meaning the copyright will not expire until 2029. 

So never fear Juliet!  Hang on to that video another 20 years and you can upload it then, assuming congress doesn’t extend copyright terms again in the meantime.

For anyone wondering why a geek like me would go to J-School, I hope this Q&A I did over at IdeaLab helps.

The New York Times nut graph hits on a key point:

But The P-I, as it is called, will resemble a local Huffington Post more than a traditional newspaper, with a news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it had, and a site with mostly commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting.

Meanwhile, Publishing 2.0 wants to know what the paper’s print advertisers will do.

Copyright law is broken.  This is a fundamental contributor to the implosion occurring in the media industry.  Let’s use the music industry as an example.

The problem is that copyright law was never designed to deal with “personal” infringement (i.e. illegally dowloading a song for your own listening).  Instead the law was largely designed to keep other publishers from commercially distributing works on a mass-scale, without paying royalties.  Recent attempts to fix the law have not attacked that basic issue.

How do you fix it?  Make personal infringement a criminal offense, but radically decrease the penalties.  Make it comparable to a parking ticket, less than that, say $3 per song.  Maybe put a $50 cap on it.  Give people immunity from civil action by record labels.

Then ticket violaters like crazy, and have an expidited appeals process, something like traffic court.  By reducing the legal costs of prosecution, it would be possible to prosecute many more individuals.  While fines will be smaller, they will reach far more people.  Those who are fined will pass the message to their friends, who will discontinue illegal downloading as well.

Have law enforcement work with ISP’s to target downloaders, and make a big announcement before the program begins to give fair warning.

Obviously there are some remaining issues with copyright, which I will leave for another post.

Update:  I should note that one unaddressed issue with this proposal is who would enforce the law.  Currently the federal government is not in the business of prosecuting parking-ticket-like offenses.

Yep. I’m moved the site from to . The change should have been fairly transparent, but do drop a comment if you come across any issues.

Apparently in Win7 Build 7048, IE8 is removable. In related news, the EU softens monitoring of Microsoft.

From the Wall Street Journal:

I’m adding Disqus as my comment system. Old comments are in the process of migrating and should be back up soon. I have also been forced to disable the OpenID plugin.

Update: I’m holding off on Disqus, at least for now. However, I have switched over from the OpenID plugin to ClickPass. So now you can comment with your Facebook identity in addition to OpenID.

Here is a really interesting idea about using hyperlinks in laws that reference sections of other laws. Is anyone doing this kind of thing? Seems like it is right up Open Congress’s alley.