Month: October 2015

Leaked records hint at how much ISIS makes on antiquities

Image of some of the objects seized in the May raid, returned to the Baghdad national museum in July, Vivian Salama/AP
Some of the objects seized in the May raid in Syria, returned to the Baghdad national museum in July, Vivian Salama/AP

On Monday, on the blog Jihadology, we got some fresh insight into how ISIS makes its money. They have a short-term financial strategy that relies primarily on seizures and confiscations they classify as taxes. Relatively little comes even from oil revenues, and an even smaller amount comes from the sale of antiquities. The information comes from terrorism researcher Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, who has secured leaked documents from the IS’ financial ministry for a portion of Eastern Syria.

As he pointed out, without firm numbers, estimating just how much revenue ISIS can scrape together from its territories has been a guessing game. Estimates are based on potential revenue from sales of oil and gas; antiquities; taxation; and other streams of revenue. But now we have some firmer figures.

Zelin analyzes the data and concludes based on these documents:

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Buccafusco on Copyright authorship

Christopher Buccafusco, a Professor at Cardozo Law School has posted on SSRN a draft of his work forthcoming in the Virginia Law Review titled “Copyright Authorship”. From the abstract:

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to grant rights to “Authors” for their “Writings.” Despite the centrality of these terms to copyright jurisprudence, neither the courts nor scholars have provided coherent theories about what makes a person an author or what makes a thing a writing. This article articulates and defends a theory of copyrightable authorship. It argues that authorship involves the intentional creation of mental effects in an audience. A writing, then, is any fixed medium capable of producing mental effects. According to this theory, copyright attaches to the original, fixed, and minimally creative form or manner in which an author creates mental effects.

After setting out the theory, this article applies it to a series of current copyright disputes. My authorship theory both expands and contracts the scope of potentially copyrightable works. Some media that have previously been excluded from copyright law, such as gardens, cuisine, and tactile works, now fall within the constitutional grant of rights. By contrast, aspects of copyrightable works, including photographs, taxonomies, and computer programs, may not constitute copyrightable authorship. This theory resolves a number of current and recent copyright cases, and it offers a new approach to the emerging challenges associated with artificial intelligence, the Internet of things, and, ultimately, the impending revision of the Copyright Act.

Buccafusco, Christopher, A Theory of Copyright Authorship (September 23, 2015). Virginia Law Review, 2016, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2664891