Brooke examines the current arguments over ownership and intellectual property with the help of a chair that collapses after just eight uses.

Camper Van Beethoven - Good Guys and Bad Guys

David Lowery of bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven thought the internet would become a vibrant new marketplace for creators. Instead, he says, the internet era is worse for artists than the infamously unfair record company system. Brooke talks to Lowery about what's wrong and how to fix it.

The internet has supercharged the world of fan fiction - stories written by fans based on their favorite works. Bob talks to Rebecca Tushnet, head of the legal committee at the Organization for Transformative Works, about the collision of fan fiction and fair use.

"Happy Birthday to You" is one of the most popular songs in the English language. It is also copyrighted. On the Media producer PJ Vogt investigates the long, surprising, and contentious history of the argument over just who owns the rights to the song.

On this week's show, we are asking our listeners to share their experiences with new Copyright Alert System (CAS), also known as "Six Strikes." We wanted to know what this system looks like in practice - whether people are getting these alerts accidentally, what they look like, etc. This week, we're getting the first glimpse.

The Copyright Alert System (CAS), known colloquially as "Six Strikes" is being launched today. This program will enact punitive measures against people sharing copyrighted material, up to and including temporarily slowing down their internet and blocking certain cites.

We want to track this program - see how well it's working, whether it's throwing false positives, and what these measures look like. We need your help to do that.

Sometime in the next few months, the five major US Internet Service Providers will implement what is called the "Copyright Alert System," known colloquially as "six strikes." Brooke talks to Jill Lesser, Executive Director of industry group the Center for Copyright Information, about how the six strikes program will work.

Acid Pauli - Mst

A few weeks ago, singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton was surprised to learn that his arrangement of the Sir Mix-A-Lot song "Baby Got Back" was covered note for note by the cast of the Fox TV show Glee. Coulton talks with Bob about having his melody stolen with impunity and the legal gray area between copyright law and cover songs.

Mos Def - Ms. Fat Booty

In December of last year, we spoke to lawyer Mark Lemley, who was representing a Spanish sports website called Rojadirecta, which had it's domain names seized by the US Government. Rojadirecta, a Spanish website, was accused of knowingly allowing users to post links to infringing content. But according to Wired, yesterday, the U.S. Government quietly dropped their case against Rojadirecta.

Here's our interview with Lemley:

Over the past few years, a global pact meant to curb online piracy and the trade of counterfeit goods called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, has been negotiated in secret. After popular outcry it seems ACTA may not materialize. While 9 countries and 22 European Union member states have signed on, none have ratified it, and last month, the EU parliament roundly rejected it. Brooke asks Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain if ACTA is actually dead.

In the new farcical sci-fi book Year Zero, aliens, having discovered how wonderful Earth music is, learn that they owe the all the money in the universe to the United States because of its harsh copyright penalties. Brooke talks to author Rob Reid about taking the great copyright debate to absurd new heights.

Earlier this year, two bills that would've curbed privacy in the US were killed following a campaign by some big names on the internet (Google, Wikipedia, dozens of others) and a tidal wave of popular opposition. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), would have deputizes internet service providers and search engines in blocking websites that would host infringing content.  This week, the Japanese legislature took a different tack in fighting piracy, passing an amendment to the country's copyright law which will result in penalties including jail time for illegal downloaders.

If someone's downloading your copyrighted work illegally, suing them is no easy task. The only public facing information that identifies you to the internet are just numbers in the form of IP addresses. To actually get the name of the person doing the illegal downloading, intellectual property owners have to request or subpoena the information from Internet Service Providers like Verizon or Time Warner. But earlier this week, Comcast, the largest cable provider in the country, refused to honor court ordered subpoenas of customer identifying information.

On last week's show we spoke to German media professor Nikolaus Peifer about Hitler's Mein Kampf entering the public domain. Listener Chuck Strinz wrote in to tell us a story about how in 1939, Adolf Hitler's American publisher engaged in a copyright lawsuit against an American journalist who published a tabloid version of the book without permission.

Before Alan Cranston became a US Senator for California, he was foreign correspondent in Germany for the Independent News Service. In a particularly colorful 1988 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Cranston recounts seeing an English-language version of Mein Kampf on display at Macy's bookstore in 1939, but when he picked it up,"[he] knew it wasn't the real book because it was much less weighty, it was much thinner.  It turned out it had been edited so that a good bit that Hitler wrote was left out."

This week, a British high court declared the self-described "most resilient BitTorrent site" guilty of "massively infringing on copyright", and ruled that British ISPs must block access to the site. Since The Pirate Bay is infamous for telling legal interlopers to sodomize themselves with retractable batons, the team at The Pirate Bay doesn't seem too concerned.

This week saw more then its share of internet drama. The US Government led a massive operation against the website MegaUpload. And dozens of major websites staged a blackout in protest of two proposed laws - the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. Bob talks to Techdirt's Mike Masnick about the implications of the proposed legislation and the foment online.

In the face of strong criticism, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP act have been shelved for the time being.  But the movie, music, television and video game industries continue to argue that they offer much needed protection against pirates outside the reach of American law enforcement. Steve Tepp of the business lobbying group the US Chamber of Commerce tells Bob that despite criticism, these bills are narrowly targeted and would protect copyright holders against pirates. 

Ramblin' Man - New Country Rehab

Since the summer of 2010, the US Office of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been seizing the domain names of websites around the world that it believes have engaged in copyright infringement or sold counterfeit goods. Mark Lemley, a lawyer defending one of the websites seized by the government, talks to Bob about whether ICE has the legal authority to make these seizures and how they might be netting sites that haven't done anything wrong.

The Dodos - Companions

This weekend, we will be airing an interview with Mark Lemley, who is representing a website called Rojadirecta that had its domain name seized by the US government for copyright infringement in February of this year. But several blogs are reporting today that the Justice Department, which has worked with the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a domain name seizure operation known as Operation In Our Sites, has returned a mistakenly seized domain after a year of legal wrangling.