Word: copyrighter
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...safe for parents. But the toy industry has been changing. Girls are trading in traditional favorites for video games at younger ages while tweens flock to hipper dolls like Bratz, which launched in 2001 and quickly chewed into Barbie's market share. Mattel last year won a copyright-infringement case against Bratz owner MGA Entertainment, but that didn't change the fact that, over the past five years, Mattel's domestic sales of Barbie-related products have fallen by an average of 12% annually, according to estimates from investment-banking firm Needham & Co. At age 50, Barbie is clearly...
...what will that fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer--electronic books aren't bound by physical constraints--and they'll be patchable and updatable, like software. We'll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don't linger on the language; you just...
...gray area between copyright and trademark is just one of many in the complex field of international intellectual-property law, which is currently grabbing public, not to mention legal, attention as many of the icons of the 20th century - from cartoon characters to rock 'n' roll artists - lose copyright protection in Europe. The issue generating the most publicity is Europe's briefer copyright period - record labels and publishing houses argue that it degrades copyright protection in the U.S. by allowing cheap and illegal European CDs and Internet downloads into the American market...
...There's an urgency to harmonize Europe's laws with America's. We are just getting to the stage where what is still considered 'contemporary culture' has started to fall into the public domain. Even the Beatles' recordings will begin to come out of European copyright in 2012 under the current law," says Mark Owen, intellectual-property partner at the London-based law firm Harbottle & Lewis. "The differing laws are causing tensions, particularly on the Internet, where it's unclear how they should be enforced." (See pictures of the Beatles in Liverpool, England...
...European Parliament is currently studying whether it should extend from 50 to 95 years the copyright term covering sound recordings, thereby bringing European law in line with that of the U.S. But opponents of extending copyright say shorter copyright periods benefit consumers by eliminating hidden costs - European publishers are able to sell books at a much cheaper price, for instance, if they are not required to pay a licensing fee. Consumer groups accuse European politicians of swooning for the handful of crooners currently lobbying for copyright extension. French singer Johnny Hallyday - a close friend of French President Nicolas Sarkozy...