Patenting the use of all episodic media on the Web might sound absurd, but the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted just such a patent, to a company called VoloMedia. It’s a significant issue, one that could threaten the freedom of all media distribution online. Wherever you are in the world, you can help.

Intellectual property law was created in order to protect genuine inventions and innovation from exploitation. But predatory patents, based on bogus claims and attempting to stake out broad rights, threaten to do just the opposite.

Here’s a new idea: fight back.

Lawyers are the heroes this time. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s patent-busting project aims to take down unfair patents that threaten common-sense uses of technology. A number of these have applied to music and audio. The EFF has already won a big victory against what had been the worst offender – media giant Clear Channel actually successfully patented recording live shows. (No, really — recording a live gig, then burning them on the spot. The EFF was able to bust that patent.) The advocacy group also scored significant victories against patents on sending and receiving online streams and encoding media. (If someone thought they could patent your ears and charge you royalties for hearing, they probably would.)

Lawyers alone haven’t won these battles. The EFF’s clever twist is to crowd-source its case, by getting people like you to help the group document “prior art” – in plain English, to prove that something existed before the patent. (Without basic chronology, I could claim to have discovered electricity.)

In short, you can help save the freedom of online content.

Critics frequently attach the phrase “lock-in” to Apple’s iTunes Store – iTunes – iPod/iPhone combination. But, in the post-DRM age, what does that mean, exactly?

First, you have to recall that while for many of us the manual drag-and-drop music management is appealing, it isn’t so for many average consumers. They want sync. That means that music will be stored in iTunes and synced to Apple devices and nothing else. Apple is serious about locking you to their store and their devices, enough so that they frequently update their software with special keys that prevent the use of devices. iTunes is “free,” but Apple determines which mobile devices you can use and which you can’t. And Apple has gone after anyone who dares give you the ability to use your own music software or own devices, including efforts (ironically) to make their iPhone and iPod work with Linux and open source players.

These efforts don’t protect the music or prevent privacy – they protect users of Apple’s software and mobile devices from using anything but Apple’s tools. Yet Apple has used the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to take legal action over anyone who dares to even talk about how to use legally-purchased music and hardware:

OdioWorks v Apple

Perhaps suspecting their case was too thin to defend, Apple eventually backed off that particular claim — after, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “7 months of censorship and a lawsuit.”

Apple Withdraws Threats Against Wiki Site

But the software and hardware locks are unchanged. And Apple has won, in my view, an even more important battle: they have a monopoly over mindshare.

In pointing out Behringer’s clone of Apple’s homepage, I may have left some things unclear. I was honestly surprised to find a number of people rushing to Behringer’s defense. I wasn’t trying to score cheap and easy points against the brand, but while venting frustration, I may have underestimated the response of people who own Behringer gear. If you do, and it’s working for you, as always – that’s a good thing.

The conversation got me excited, and I stepped into the comment fray. I shouldn’t have in this case, and unless asked to, I’ll stay out of this conversation. I enjoy being involved in those threads, but there are times when I should keep my writing to this space and let you have at it in the space below – the one labeled “comments.”

I think the reason Behringer inflames some people boils down to two things. Those people may have been burned by gear that proved not to be a bargain, or offended by a history of gear designs copied from recognizable models, or both. The former, of course, can happen with any vendor, but it does illustrate that saving money doesn’t always save time or money. Caveat Emptor is therefore true with any vendor. The latter is really the sticking point. Here’s a loose timeline of the cases in question:

Look out: Behringer, already a notorious rip-off artist, is taking the “first step in [the] company’s reinvention of online presence.” I shudder to think what the coming steps will look like. But yes, the new site looks a wee bit familiar. It actually gets worse as you dig into the layout.

In fairness, for over a decade now, Apple’s site has perhaps the most ripped-off Website design on the Internet. But then, Behringer is special.

Back when the blog Music Thing was publishing, it was able to do an annual series on cloned Mackie and Roland/BOSS gear, some down to colors, typography, and control layouts. (Check out the MT archives for some of this hall of shame, or lack thereof.)

And Behringer doesn’t just copy the Apple layout like other sites. They actually send out a breathless press release that brags about their pixel-perfect, color-perfect clone.

Update: Apparently, you can thank readers of the Behringer Website for the choice. Mr. Tunes notes via Twitter that this design was chosen in a survey among other mock-ups, for which you could win a blatant rip-off of the Line 6 Pod. I could comment on that, but the things I might say would not make me a team player for “Team Behringer.”

MusicRadar’s Joe Bosso reports that the long-simmering controversy over alleged 8-bit music intellectual property theft has come to a lawsuit:

Timbaland, Nelly Furtado sued for plagiarism [MusicRadar]

The suit is being brought by the Finland-based Kernel Records, which acquired the song Acidjazzed Evening. The case again puts musical sampling in the spotlight. Timbaland’s response in 2007, which you can read in the MusicRadar article, basically amounted to “I didn’t know where it came from, so it’s not theft.”

Oh, and then there’s this gem:
“It’s from a video game, idiot.”

That’ll be Timbaland demonstrating that he doesn’t understand what 8-bit music (this tune is, of course, not from a video game) nor how sampling law works (video games aren’t subject to some different set of ethical and legal rules). I mean, if Timbaland were going all radical on us and declaring all content should be free, that’d be another matter.

One has to wonder if a different kind of sampling culture is possible, a third option, in which artists knowingly release work as Creative Commons so they provide explicit permission for people to sample — and get credited. Of course, that’s a touchy subject with the likes of a Timbaland or Nelly Furtado, whose massive commercial success at least implies that they may be able to afford to pay for their samples.

So much has been said on this particular case, let alone the underlying issues, that I’ll leave it to you to discuss.

Whatever your opinion, though, the message is clear that 8-bit music is not simply free for the taking.

Previously: Crystal Castles gets caught up in a similar sort of “we didn’t know, so it doesn’t count” (though unlike Timbaland/Nelly Furtado, their track was not widely released, let alone a huge chart hit). Original story / Crystal Castles responds to allegations.