Adventures in intellectual property law.

As we begin 2008, I would be remiss if I didn't take brief note of two intellectual property stories from the last week of 2007.

First, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities told reporters on December 25 that the country's parliament would likely pass a law requiring anyone who reproduces one of its famous monuments to pay royalties.

I am hardly an expert on international IP law but under U.S. copyright law, at least, the design of a building can be copyrighted, but only if it was created on or after December 1, 1990. Experts disagree on the exact completion date of the various pyramids, but it seems fair to say that we're talking about things built at least 3000 years before that. In any event, there is still the problem that the design of a pyramid involves making it in the shape of, well, A PYRAMID, and I don't think any nation recognizes that you can copyright a geometric shape. (If you can, let me know, because I'm going to claim "trapezoid.")

If this law passes, I guess the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas (shown) is going to owe the Egyptian government a lot of money.

In other IP news, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has decided that even more of their customers are thieves. The RIAA is apprently preparing to sue an Arizona man who copied over 2,000 songs to his computer, presumably for download to his mp3 player. The wrinkle here is that he legally purchased every one of the CD's from which he "ripped" the songs.

The irony I see here is that Sony Corp. is an RIAA member and in that role has pushed for RIAA's aggressive actions but if you happen to own a Sony Walkman Video mp3 player, the accompanying instructional video tells you how to load it with music as follows:

So you have your brand new Walkman video MP3 player from Sony. Now let's get some music on it. There are two main ways to get new music for your Walkman video player. You can rip CD's that you already own, and you can get music from multiple online stores. So let's rip some CD's.

I just went out and bought a new album. With the CD in the drive, I can navigate Windows Media player to the "rip" tab....

(They next demonstrate how to rip this Sony CD.)

Strangely, Sony neglects to mention that any of their customers who follow the company's instructions are thieves as far as Sony is concerned.