Copyright and Mickey Mouse's Long Tail

Michael Mount, a copyright lawyer, joins the Geeks for a discussion on Intellectual Property. And we cover some GeekNews of the week.

Pickles Coffee Cellphones Cancer Risks

“What do coffee, cell phones, and pickles have in common? According to the World Health Organization (WHO), they all pose a similar level of cancer risk to humans.”

Lulz? Sony hackers deny responsibility for misuse of leaked data

“Hackers from Lulz Security (‘LulzSec’) broke into Sony Pictures servers, grabbed one million user accounts and plaintext passwords, then released a large sample of this data online yesterday. The data set seen by Ars Technica included names, home addresses, passwords, and e-mail addresses—perfect for malicious exploitation, since many people reuse passwords on multiple accounts. To make matters worse, the sample that LulzSec released contained data almost exclusively on (allegedly) elderly users born in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.”

UN report: "three strikes" Internet laws violate human rights

“China’s not the only Internet bad boy; a new UN report (PDF) calls out even developed democracies for slapping restrictions on the Internet.”

Stealing "entertainment services" now a crime in Tennessee

“Tennessee governor Bill Haslam has signed legislation that for the first time makes the theft of subscription entertainment services like Netflix a crime on par with stealing satellite television or walking out of a restaurant without paying your bill. And ‘theft’ now includes sharing your account password too broadly.”

Let's make illegal streaming a felony

“On her first day as the new Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante trekked across the street from the Library of Congress to the Rayburn Office Building for a House Judiciary Committee hearing on whether unauthorized Internet streaming should become a felony. ‘Copyright policy is never finished,’ she told the assembled Representatives, adding that it’s time for another tweak to the law.”


! Our Guest: Michael Mount

Michael is an attorney in Santa Cruz focusing on Intellectual Property including Licensing of Intellectual Property. Michael, formerly Senior Counsel for Sun Microsystems, is currently an Attorney at Axiom servicing companies like Accenture and eBay .

This is Michael’s second appearance on GeekSpeak, you can checkout the [August 12th, 2005 episode of GeekSpeak|http://geekspeak.org/shows/2005/08/12/] to hear more.