Some articles from the past few days:

Courts question anti-piracy rule: “The US broadcast regulator has been told by appeal judges it has “crossed the line” with an anti-piracy tag which stops programmes being copied.” More here.

Off The Shelf notes that you pay orders of magnitude more for violating copyright than for stealing a physical item. (In a somewhat related story, you pay more for indecent material on the airwaves than you do for dumping toxic waste in the river.)

Happily, Lexmark’s DMCA aspirations are all but dead: “The company’s request for a re-hearing of their case against North Carolina-based Static Control Components (SCC) has been denied.”

Via BoingBoing, an article on artists’ earnings and copyright: “Only a small minority of artists reaches ordinary living standards from copyright income… If an artist wants to include a sample from another record, major rights holders often insist on a controlling interest of 50 to 100 percent of the rights in the new track.”

Nice connection between two concepts that are on my mind a lot lately: Long Tail vs. Lessig.

What you need to encourage this multiplicity of commercialization potential is tiered alternatives to one-size-fits-all copyright, from allowing derivative works (good marketing!) to shorter terms for the sake of the remix-culture social good.

We’ve been talking about the long tail (and situated software and other stuff) at JotSpot for a few months now. It’s good to see people thinking about how to make the long tail consistent with the copyfight.