Okay, one more thing...

Because I want to have SOMETHING to read up here other than just "Hey, I'm switching to Blogger.com".
I'm really looking forward to this week - Wendy Gordon, an IP professor from back East (Boston) is going to be visiting the law school. Members of the IPSO were invited to have lunch with her tomorrow, and I signed right up. I'm always interested in talking about copyright, learning more about the nuances of fair use, etc. (And hey, click on the above link, and consider buying a beer glass to help our fundraising, eh?)
Especially with all the anime downloading I do. Now, let me say right now, IANAL yet, so I can't comment on whether or not fansubbing and downloading is legal or not. What I WILL say is that the anime publishers/distributors here in the States are VERY much aware of the phenomenon, and they seem to have developed an understanding where they agree not to sue the fansubbers, and the fansubbers agree to
stop translation and distribution as soon as a series becomes licensed for distro here in the States. That doesn't always go smoothly, and I think the community is just sort of waiting for some idiot to ruin things for everyone, but at least so far, that's how the fansub community has survived.
And that's the reason I have to wait until April for Cartoon Network to run Gundam SEED so I can see what's going to happen to Kira, Asran, Frey, and the rest of them. Hopefully, it'll run as part of their Adult Swim programming block, as the consensus is that the editing there will be lighter, if any is done at all. I seem to recall that they ran FLCL and bragged that they only made one edit for the whole series. (Of course, it's a short OAV, and it was showing really late at night). Let's hope that holds true for G:S, and that the dub is decent.