Journal entries - March 2010
Control over information
If there is one issue in our information society, where we generate information at every moment, it’s the issue of control over information.
People want their private information to remain private until made public by themselves, but once the information is made public, there is no way for them to control this information any more. On the internet, especially, it is hard to erase information that you would want to see disappear, notably if the information in question does not cause harm to your reputation.
Companies want to protect trade secrets as well as much commercial information, but while we tend to speak of information being “given”, “transferred”, “licensed for use”, the law doesn’t recognise information as being remotely similar to property, and this can lead to certain issues. Indeed, if reverse engineering is possible and if it is impossible for the company to obtain a patent, it may be easy for a competitor to find the information, and there’s nothing the company can do about it.
What can we do about it?
The cutest legal provision
My life is complete: I have found a cute legal provision. Not just cute, actually: really cute.
Four words: copyright in Peter Pan.
Normally (in the EU), copyright in a work expires 70 years after the author’s death. Previously, this tended to be 50 years rather than 70.
The author of the play Peter Pan, Sir James Matthew Barrie, died in 1937, and at the time, the rule of 50 years applied, i.e. copyright was to expire in 1987. It turns out that Sir Barrie bequeathed copyright in his Peter Pan works to the Hospital for Sick Children, later renamed Great Ormond Street Hospital, in 1929.
While copyright in the works expired in 1987 (only to be later extended to 2007, when the “70 years” regime came into force), the Brits decided to create an exception to the standard rule, and included in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 a “Section 301″ and a “Schedule 6″.
The substance of these rules? They confer on the Hospital the following:
a right to a royalty in respect of the public performance, commercial publication or communication to the public of the play “Peter Pan” by Sir James Matthew Barrie, or of any adaptation of that work, notwithstanding that copyright in the work expired on 31st December 1987
In other words, perpetual royalties, at least within the UK.
Now I dare you not to find that cute…
Three new songs
I’m currently in Brussels, for interviews with law firms, and this was the perfect occasion for me to… record music! Indeed, during my stay in London so far, I have been somewhat productive in musical terms, and it was about time I recorded a few of these pieces.
As such, I invite you to take a look at the music page, or to view the relevant pages directly: