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Star Wars: Collecting | Lucasfilm Wins Lawsuit Against Stormtrooper Pirate

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California has awarded Lucasfilm Ltd. $20 million in damages in a copyright infringement and unfair competition case against the British firm Shepperton Design Studios and its owner, Andrew Ainsworth. The court found that Shepperton Design Studios had been marketing unlicensed copies of stormtrooper helmets and costumes, and TIE fighter pilot helmets from the Star Wars films, as well as making misleading claims about the authenticity and origins of these items.

It was a relief though to see that Lucasfilms weren’t going to stop fans from making their own replicas.

“Lucasfilm vigorously protects its intellectual property rights in Star Wars,” said Howard Roffman, President of Lucas Licensing. Roffman noted that many Star Wars fans around the world produce replicas of Star Wars costumes for their own personal use and enjoyment, an activity to which Lucasfilm Ltd. has no objection.

There’s one called Sydney Life which is a blog of “student experience” which is predictably irritating (though less so since they’ve gotten on more bloggers), but more interestingly, academics and research groups are being encouraged to start up their own blogs so hopefully some more readable blogs might come out. You can find a list of Sydney Uni blogs here.

In the trend of youniversal branding*, this is interesting spin on the threadless.com model: innerTee - Where art and apparel become one. The idea is users can be artists or mixers - artists create design elements and mixers put them together into shirts which people can buy. When shirts are bought, presumably there is some payback in the form of money or t-shirt credit to the artists/mixers.

For a novel way of selling traditional merchandise, this is pretty neat: Fashmatch | Find clothes and make matches. You can create “matches” (outfits) using a wardrobe of available onine clothes and accessories and then share your “matches”. You can practice being a fashion stylist to your heart’s content! Unfortunately the production values are extremely poor (worst graphic resolution ever!) and the site is clunky, they also haven’t worked out a way of rewarding “matchers” other than giving them the satisfaction of people taking up their recommendations.

*coined by trendwatching.com a Dutch based group of cool chasers who like coming up with terribly clever monikers. Also home of “tryvertising”.

I have made myself a yahoo avatar:

It’s really great to see that you can also get “plus sized” avatars unlike Stardolls Medoll app where you can go as far as slightly curvy (albeit somewhat breasty) as the maximum setting on body type. Apparently, the Stardolls service, social networking via paperdolls, is growing in popularity and has recently attracted an extra US$6million from venture capitalists. Its main selling point is that you can dress celebrities like Orlando Bloom and Paris Hilton as paperdolls.

The quote’s from this GigaOm story on Marvel and Cryptic’s new found mutal appreciation society. Marvel caused a bit of a stir a couple of years ago when it sued Cryptic Studios for copyright infringement because its superhero online game City of Heroes (they also do City of Villains) allowed users to customise their avatars so they were too similar to Marvel superhero franchises. Anyway, they settled and now, Cryptic have been hired by Marvel to create the “Marvel Universe Online” (you can now download a trailer). Shall be interesting to see how they manage to resolve the dilemma that not everyone can be Spiderman or Magneto (I imagine you can only have one of each character per server). The GigaOm mentioned the Star Wars Galaxies flop, but that actually had more potential in that playing a jedi is theoretically pretty cool in itself, you don’t have to be Luke Skywalker. Maybe the Marvel Universe Online will involve playing archetypes based on the original characters, so you can have spiderman’s powers but be able to tweak the costume, that could very well appeal. I’d play the demo anyway.

I like this one from PostSecret:

What I don’t like so much about them is their awful submission rules. Basically, you send them free content (your clever and charming postcards) and they won’t share it with it anyone. You are allowed to post ONE image as a link only, which is pretty stupid because it means that once you’ve linked to them once, you’re outrightly banned from giving them any further publicity (other than text links which are nowhere near as appealing), however much you might like a future postcard. They have made a book from it and I suppose plan future ones but it’s simple enough to attach a Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial license to it and then maybe it would feel a lot less like exploitation.

By submitting information to PostSecret, you grant PostSecret a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and otherwise exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to that information at its sole discretion, including storing it on PostSecret servers and incorporating it in other works in any media now known or later developed including without limitation published books.If you do not wish to grant PostSecret these rights, it is suggested that you do not submit information to this website. PostSecret reserves the right to select, edit and arrange submissions, and to remove information from the PostSecret website at any time at its sole discretion.

No image from this site may be used for any purpose without expressed written authorization, with one exception; you may post one image as a link to this site.

Well, at least the US economy if you believe the latest report funded by the US entertainment industry. Not content with previous estimations of $6billion in lost sales, they have now examined the “ripple effect” and found that:

movie piracy causes a total lost output for U.S. industries of $20.5 billion per year, thwarts the creation of about 140,000 jobs and accounts for more than $800 million in lost tax revenue.

Fortunately, Jason Shultz from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (one of the major free use/digital rights activist organisations) was on hand to make the perfectly valid point that all because Hollywood doesn’t get the cash/jobs, doesn’t mean it gets taken away from the economy:

“In other words, let’s say people are forgoing paying for $6 billion in movies by downloading or consuming illegal goods but end up spending that $6 billion on iPods, computers and HDTV sets on which to watch the movies, which leads to $25 billion in job creation in the computer/software/consumer electronics field,”

But for the moment, it does look like US politicians are being taken in by Hollywood’s scaremongering.

The University of California, Berkeley has made a number of lectures freely available online through a partnership with Google: UC Berkeley on Google Video A number of courses are available, but perhaps more interesting are videos from guest lecturers in Global and Public Affairs:
Graduate School of Journalism Presents Distinguished guests discuss their role in global affairs and the media.
Goldman School of Public Policy Presents Prominent speakers discuss vital policy issues.

Diana Eng*, Emily Albinski and Audrey Roy won the top Yahoo Hack Day prize with a project called Blogging In Motion which “combined a camera, a handbag, a pedometer and the Flickr API to create a device that takes a picture after every few steps and then automatically blogs those pictures.” The most amazing thing is that they haven’t got some stupid team name and they haven’t made a glamour calendar (yet). Wow, women can be involved with computers and still be relatively normal!

*I think she was a contestant on Heidi Klum’s Project Runway (a reality show where fashion designers vie for some fashion design prize, it was pretty funny).

It really does annoy me when people sue search engines and aggregators for copyright infringement, talk about biting the hand that feeds you. It’s hardly as if they are getting a free ride, I don’t want to even think about the many millions it costs to keep the Google servers going. Fact is, they provide an essential service and make the internet a much easier place to navigate.

Google in Tussle for Digital Rights

In early September, a Belgian court ruled that the search giant could not reproduce certain copyrighted titles and summaries on its Belgian Google News or Google.be Web site, throwing into question the entire concept of online news aggregation, and even search indexing… No question, portals and search engines funnel huge amounts of traffic to editorial Web sites. But there’s growing concern among publishers that they’re getting eyeballs but little or no revenue from news aggregators. At worst, their material is being expropriated and reproduced outright, with no return whatsoever to the copyright owner.

Maybe these publishers are jumping the gun a little soon, products such as Feedvertising (Text Link Ads) are now starting to provide the opportunity to monetise RSS feeds. Though it is depressing to think there are even more places for advertising to creep.

Not that I’m necessarily a huge fan of Google, I think you always have to be wary when a company is that big and powerful, however good its original start up philosophies might have been. There are a couple interesting posts on ZDNet (Google speak on copyright: content owners beware and Google: Web friend or Web foe) following on the above Belgian case and Google’s blogpost “Our Approach To Content”.