The fan-translations of my short-short story Printcrime keep on rolling in: today there's one in Hiligaynon (an Austronesian language spoken in Western Visayas in the Philippines) and another in Romanian, contributed, respectively, by Lorna Belviz-Pajo and Alex Brie. It's just so wicked-cool to see your work take on a life of its own -- I didn't even know that Hiligaynon existed until a few minutes ago! Krimen nga pang-imprenta (Hiligaynon), Crima Printării (Romanian)...

Friday's post announcing that a fan named Eduardo Mercer had translated my story Printcrime into Brazilian Portuguese sparked two more translations; Luis Filipe Silva translated the story into European Portuguese and Paul Pajo translated it into Filipino. I'm particularly excited about the Filipino translation; I think it might be the first story of mine to be translated into Filipino! Filipino fan-translation European Portuguese fan-translation See also: Printcrime in Portuguese...

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: Cinema Pygmalion, fine art blended with stills from famous movies. Shown here, Saving Private Van Gogh. Cinema Pygmalion 3...

Eduardo Mercer's just produced a Brazilian Portuguese fan-translation of my story Printcrime -- making five translations in total (as well as two audio adaptations, a mini-comic and some wicked 3D fan-art). For a 700 word story, it's sure attracted a lot of attention and fan activity! Os tiras destruiram a impressora do meu pai quando eu tinha oito anos. Eu me lembro do cheiro quente de rolopack no microondas, do olhar de concentração furiosa do papi enquanto ele a enchia de geleca fresca e da sensação de recém tirado do forno dos objetos que saíam dela. Os tiras entraram brandindo os cacetetes, um deles lendo o mandato através de um megafone. Um dos clientes do papi tinha vendido ele. A polícia pagou em drogas de alto nível - anabolizantes, suplementos de memória, aceleradores metabólicos. O tipo de coisa que custa uma fortuna na farmácia; o tipo de coisa que você pode imprimir em casa, se não se importar com o risco da sua cozinha se encher de corpos grandes e musculosos com cacetetes balançando no ar acertando tudo e todos em seu caminho. Printcrime - Copie esta história...

The LA Times's Joseph Menn has a great, well-researched feature article on the history of the copyright for the image of Mickey Mouse as portrayed in the earliest Disney cartoons -- and the theory that Disney made mistakes early on with its copyright registration, placing images of that specific Mickey (not the Mickey we know today) in the public domain. Prominent legal scholars like Peter Jaszi agree, but who will shell out the millions in legal fees to prove it? After all, the company's already threatened legal action against law-students who publish papers investigating the question! Brown went searching for flawed formalities -- and found one. It was on the title card at the beginning of a "Steamboat Willie" cartoon that had just been rereleased on a 1993 LaserDisc honoring Mickey's 65th birthday. It said in full: "Disney Cartoons Present A Mickey Mouse Sound Cartoon Steamboat Willie A Walt Disney Comic By Ub Iwerks Recorded by Cinephone Powers System Copyright MCMXXIX." [...] The authoritative legal treatise "Nimmer on Copyright" says that a copyright is void if multiple names create uncertainty, and courts have agreed. In 1961, a federal judge in Massachusetts cited the "accompanied by" rule in throwing out a copyright claim by newspaper cartoonist Art Moger. Moger's name was included in the title above his panels, but the name of another artist ran inside the boxes. Disney's rights to young Mickey Mouse may be wrong (Thanks, Xeni!)...

Plan59's 1950s space-art gallery has some real gems! Space Art (via Neatorama)...

Veronica from ItchyStitchy has the pattern needed to make this child-sized Katamari Damacy Prince of All Cosmos hat thing. Someone get my smelling salts, I just went into a cute coma! The kid will be wearing it to GenCon (natch). FO and Pattern: Katamari Damacy Prince of All Cosmos Baby Hat! (via Craft)...

Marilyn sez, "Olympic logo police workers are tasked with vigilantly going around all facilities and putting masking tape over the logos for any product where the company is not an official sponsor. 7 To ensure that only the companies that pay millions of dollars to be official Olympic sponsors enjoy the benefits of exposure in Olympic venues, organizers have covered the trademarks of nonsponsors with thousands of little swatches of tape. In media centers, dormitories and arena bathrooms, pieces of tape cover logos of fire extinguishers, light switches, thermostats, bedroom night tables, soap dispensers and urinals. The Taiden Industrial translation headsets in a large conference room have had their logos covered, as have the American Standard faucets in the bathrooms nearby, and the ThyssenKrupp escalators down the hall. At the Athens games, people wearing logoed t-shirts were asked to remove them or turn them inside-out before entering the stadia. Nothing says "incorruptible international competition" like a bunch of bullshit rules about what your t-shirt is allowed to say and whether an elevator can display its manufacturer's mark. Ignore That Logo Under the Tape! (Thanks, Marilyn!)...

Earlier this summer, I heard from Anne Lagacé Dowson, a 20-year veteran of CBC Radio who had quit her post to run for the New Democratic Party in a by-election in the Quebec riding of Westmount-Ville-Marie. I've known Anne all my life (literally -- she was my babysitter when I was an infant) and so I was glad to hear that she was doing this amazing thing, but I was even more delighted when she said that her campaign and her party were both passionate about the digital freedoms issues that I campaign on and she asked if I'd be willing to offer her my endorsement. I've just spent half an hour on the phone with Dowson and I'm happy to say that based on what she told me about her platform, I'm absolutely delighted to offer her my unqualified endorsement. Dowson pointed out that the NDP is the only federal Canadian party with a dedicated digital affairs critic: the always-sharp Charlie Angus, a former punk musician late of the band L'Etranger, who I used to see headlining punk shows when I was a teenager. Angus and the NDP have led the political criticism of the Tory Bill 61, a Canadian version of America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a copyright bill that was drafted in secret, without input from Canadian stakeholders, including coalitions of Canadian creators and music labels. The NDP has also led the pack on criticising the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, another secretly negotiated proposal, this time for a global treaty on copyright that would dramatically increase the search, seizure and surveillance obligations to Canada and other signatories, forcing them to spy on everyday individuals to protect the profits of a few giant record companies. Dowson also endorsed the NDP's activism on net neutrality -- Canada's major ISPs, Bell and Rogers, have led the world's Internet companies in a race to the bottom, imposing secret caps, spying on users, blocking protocols, and even blocking downstream ISPs' customers (so that ISPs that buy their backhaul from Bell are subject to the same filtering as Bell's own retail customers). Dowson's riding is close to Outremont, where an NDP candidate upset the longstanding Liberal incumbent, and Dowson's bet her future on a similar result in Westmount-Ville-Marie. She tells me that she's already met people at their doors who told her that issues of digital freedom were key to them, and she points out that the current Liberal opposition has had dozens of opportunities to boot out the truly loathsome and autocratic Tory government and have instead voted with them on issues from Canada's war involvement to Canada's positions on network freedoms. As mentioned, I've known Anne and her family all my life, and know her to be trustworthy, incisive and principled, an impression reinforced by her impressive reporting on CBC. I'm even more impressed, though, by her sophistication on digital issues. I talk to a lot of politicos in my routine, and it's rare to meet someone who really understands these issues as well as Dowson does. There are only 75,000 voters in Westmount-Ville-Marie; I don't know how many of them read Boing Boing, but if you're in that riding, I hope you'll go to the polls on September 8 and cast your vote for Anne Lagacé Dowson. Anne Lagacé Dowson...

A US appellate division court has thrown out a DMCA claim against the Air Force (a former soldier wrote some software on his own time for the USAF, added in a time-bomb that made it stop working, and quit and sold the software's copyrights to a company that sued the Air Force for defusing the time-bomb rather than buying a license) and has made it clear that the DMCA doesn't apply to the US government at all. But the court also addressed the DMCA claims made by Blueport, and its decision here is quite striking. "The DMCA itself contains no express waiver of sovereign immunity," the judge wrote, "Indeed, the substantive prohibitions of the DMCA refer to individual persons, not the Government." Thus, because sovereign immunity is not explicitly eliminated, and the phrasing of the statute does not mention organizations, the DMCA cannot be applied to the US government, even in cases where the more general immunity to copyright claims does not apply. It appears that Congress took a "do as we say, not as we need to do" approach to strengthening digital copyrights. Link...