Darknet

Legal Frontiers in Digital Media

The Media Law Resource Center, Stanford Publishing Courses and Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society present Legal Frontiers in Digital Media, a conference on the emerging legal issues surrounding digital publishing and content distribution.

When: Thursday & Friday, May 15 & 16, 2008
Where: Stanford University
Details: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5686
Register: http://publishingcourses.stanford.edu/legal-frontiers/

Recording industry loses infringement suit

The Inquirer (via Shelly Palmer): The recording industry lost a major ruling in Atlantic v. Brennan when a federal judge in Connecticut ruled that merely making music available to other users is not evidence of copyright infringement. The judge also found that no proof of infringement was supplied by the record companies that brought the suit. With two of three findings going to the defendant, the case was thrown out.

A rare victory for common sense.

AT&T may monitor Internet traffic for copyright infringement

NewComm Forum: AT&T may monitor Internet traffic for copyright infringement.

Big names at Legal Futures Conference

Google and The Center for Internet and Society present

Legal Futures Conference

Saturday, March 8, 2008
9 am - 4 pm
Stanford Law School
Room 290
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5685

Registration: http://www.seeuthere.com/rsvp/invitation/registration.asp
Directions: http://www.law.stanford.edu/directions/

Google and Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society are delighted to invite you to attend "Legal Futures": a conversation between some of the world's leading thinkers about the future of privacy, intellectual property, competition, innovation, globalization, and other areas of the law undergoing rapid change due to technological advancement.

Conference chairs:

- Larry Kramer / Dean, Stanford Law School
- Lawrence Lessig / Professor of Law, Stanford Law School; Founder and Co-Director, Center for Internet and Society
- Kent Walker / General Counsel, Google

Conference speakers include Jamie Boyle, Professor of Law, Duke Law School; Lauren Gelman, Executive Director, Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School; Joi Ito, Chair, Creative Commons; Alex Kozinski, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; Charles Nesson, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Xiao Qiang, Lecturer, U.C. Berkeley School of Journalism; Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law, UCLA Law School; Fred von Lohmann; Senior Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Kevin Werbach, Professor of Legal Studies & Ethics, Wharton School of Business; and several other stellar speakers. 

Lessig gives his last lecture on free culture

I was at Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig's last lecture on free culture Thursday at Stanford. Couldn't blog it because I was videotaping his talk.

Ellen Lee has a rundown in the San Francisco Chronicle: Digital visionary's new offline cause. Lessig leaves Internet matters to followers, takes on the influence of money in politics.

Still looking for the photos that Scoble took at the event, but here's the video of Lessig's talk he captured on his Nokia cell phone. A higher quality version will appear on Opensourcecinema.org, though no word on when.

Scrabble's owners want Facebook's Scrabulous shut down

Associated Press: Scrabble's owners want Facebook's Scrabulous shut down.

Lessig's last lecture on free culture

From an announcement on Facebook:

Creative Commons founder and Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig is giving his final presentation on Free Culture, Copyright and the future of ideas at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium on January 31. After 10 years of enlightening and inspiring audiences around the world with multimedia presentations that inspired the Free Culture movement, Professor Lessig is moving on from the copyright debate and setting his sites on corruption in Washington.

Lessig is giving a final talk at Stanford University on the subject, and it is being recorded for the upcoming feature film "Basement Tapes," an open source documentary (see www.opensourcecinema.org).

Free admission.

Guests will also be treated to a sneak preview of some upcoming scenes from "Basement Tapes," and remixed work from the Open Source Cinema website.

You can just show up, though if you're a Facebook member you can RSVP there.

Online video at risk of 'private censorship'

When college students make mashups of Hollywood movies, are they violating the law? Not necessarily, according to a new study on copyright and creativity from the Center for Social Media at American University.

It's a subject I've long been fascinated by and have wrestled with, both in Darknet and on Ourmedia.

The study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration. In short, they may be perfectly legal — the legal terrain is still murky. These uses — an exercise of freedom-of-speech rights — are now being threatened by anti-piracy measures online.

The study dentifies nine kinds of uses of copyrighted material, ranging from incidental (a video maker’s family sings “Happy Birthday”) to parody (a Christian takeoff on the song “Baby Got Back”) to pastiche and collage (finger-dancing to “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”). The study points to a wide variety of practices — satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups) — all of which could be legal in some circumstances.

I've read the report (22 pages, PDF) and it's the best look at the subject I've seen. From the announcement:

The researchers followed thousands of links for videos on 75 online video platforms and discovered nine popular kinds of use (extensive database of examples at centerforsocialmedia.org/recutvideos).

1. Parody and satire: Copyrighted material used in spoofing of popular mass media, celebrities or politicians ( Baby Got Book )

2. Negative or critical commentary: Copyrighted material used to communicate a negative message ( Metallica Sucks )

3. Positive commentary: Copyrighted material used to communicate a positive message ( Steve Irwin Fan Tribute )

4. Quoting to trigger discussion: Copyrighted material used to highlight an issue and prompt public awareness, discourse ( Abstinence PSA on Feministing.com )

5. Illustration or example: Copyrighted material used to support a new idea with pictures and sound ( Evolution of Dance )

6. Incidental use: Copyrighted material captured as part of capturing something else ( Prisoners Dance to Thriller )

7. Personal reportage/diaries: Copyrighted material incorporated into the chronicling of a personal experience ( Me on stage with U2 … AGAIN!!! )

8. Archiving of vulnerable or revealing materials: Copyrighted material that might have a short life on mainstream media due to controversy ( Stephen Colbert's Speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner )

9. Pastiche or collage: Several copyrighted materials incorporated together into a new creation, or in other cases, an imitation of sorts of copyrighted work ( Apple Commercial )

“Today, user-generated video accounts for a sizeable portion of all broadband traffic. Some of these videos add value to existing copyrighted material, usually without the copyright owner’s consent,” Aufderheide said. “This kind of work is the harbinger of an emerging era of participatory popular culture.”

The study is part of a larger participatory media project for the Center For Social Media’s Future of Public Media Project. As the report notes, next steps include further research and the convening of a blue-ribbon committee to establish best practices in fair use for online video.

Aufderheide and Jaszi are appearing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday to discuss the research. To watch some of the mashups that the researchers watched, click here. A copyright and fair use blog on the subject is here.

Cross-posted to SocialMedia.biz.

RIAA: It's a crime to copy your CD's songs onto your PC

Marc Fisher in the Washington Post: Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use. The recording industry  now says it's a crime for you to copy songs from your own CDs onto your own personal computer.

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing. ...

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer. ...

I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation." ...

New technologies don't usually kill off old media: That's the good news for the recording industry, as for the TV, movie, newspaper and magazine businesses. But for those old media to survive, they must adapt, finding new business models and new, compelling content to offer.

The RIAA's legal crusade against its customers is a classic example of an old media company clinging to a business model that has collapsed. Four years of a failed strategy has only "created a whole market of people who specifically look to buy independent goods so as not to deal with the big record companies," Beckerman says. "Every problem they're trying to solve is worse now than when they started."

On the Richter Scales' "Here comes another bubble" video dispute

Lane Hartwell: My statement regarding the Richter Scales “Here comes another bubble” video dispute.

Dave Winer: A flash conference on fair use?

Professor uses Youtube, Facebook in copyright fight

Computerworld: Professor uses YouTube, Facebook in copyright fight.

In an effort to combat the Canadian government's impending copyright reform bill -- legislation which some say could affect privacy and property rights for Canadian consumers and businesses -- one industry activist is taking his fight to the digital streets.

Michael Geist, research chair of Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said the Conservative's copyright reform bill is likely to include anti-circumvention provisions for technical provision measures (TPMs), a tool used to restrict the use of a digital work, making it illegal to modify, improve, back-up or make products that interact with any devices fitted with a TPM. He compared the impending legislation, rumored to be unveiled in the next few weeks, to the Canadian government's version of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). ...

Common sense and the PRO IP act

Jeremy Toeman:  A note to Nancy Pelosi regarding the PRO IP act. Excerpt:

Common sense tells me that the maximum penalty for transmitting an MP3 file should not be over 1000-fold the maximum penalty of shoplifting a CD from a store. Common sense tells me that if over 80 million people are transmitting files to each other, there is something wrong with our system that makes such an activity illegal. ...

Digital fingerprinting to ID copyrighted material

Shelly Palmer:

NIELSEN has partnered with DIGIMARC to create a service that both watermarks and fingerprints digital content, allowing it to be tracked across the web. Fingerprinting will be done by matching the audio track of a video to known content in the Nielsen database while watermarking will embed content information (such as when a show first aired). The service, called Digital Media Manager, will help video-sharing sites identify copyrighted material and apply rules established by the content owner. It is expected to launch this spring.

Monday: Lessig vs. Zittrain

If I were in Palo Alto on Monday I would doubtless be at this event:

The Center for Internet and Society, the Stanford Law and Technology Association and the Copyright Committee of the Intellectual Property Law Section of the State Bar of California present Faceoff: Lessig
vs. Zittrain. (Alas, no details of what they'll be debating.)

When: Monday, Dec. 3, 2007, 12:45-2 pm

Where: Stanford Law School, Room 190

Call-in: Listening lines available to the first 300 callers. Dial in 5-10 minutes prior to the start time. Toll free:  1-888-373-5705; toll: 1-719-457-3840; passcode:414026

Info: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5625

Bill would make colleges copyright cops

NY Times Bits blog: Bill Would Make Colleges Copyright Cops.

Protecting the university from copyright bullies

Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing points to Wendy Seltzer talking at Cornell on Protecting the University from Copyright Bullies. (RealAudio? Come on, Cornell, get real.)

Does your startup comply with the law?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation will be hosting a one-day Compliance Bootcamp on Oct. 10 for people who handle issues arising from users and user-generated content.

Meantime, in 9 Fun Ways Web 2.0 Startups Can Commit Legal Suicide,  Rafe Needleman points out two handfuls of other legal pifalls, including ignoring safe harbor rules (by not registering as a copyright agent), collecting data from children, and failing to create a reserve fund for settling trumped-up lawsuits.

Thanks to Nina Kaufman for the pointers.

Company patents playlists, sues everyone

Ars Technica: Company patents playlists, sues everyone. Thanks to Markus Sandy for the pointer.

Licensing the dead

San Francisco Chronicle: Licensing the dead. (Photo: Steve McQueen in a scene from "The Magnificent Seven," 1960.)

There is a bill pending in the California Senate designed to protect the images of dead celebrities. Essentially, SB771 will bolster a similar law enacted in 1985, devised to defend the "postmortem right of publicity" held by the heirs of famous people.

The bill would guard against the unlawful use of the likenesses, voices and even signatures of dead icons for commercial purposes. Naturally, there is plenty of opposition. If the bill passes, publicity rights held in the public domain for decades could be retroactively nullified, and the courts flooded with lawsuits. ...

What's legal and what's fair: two different things

From today's San Jose Mercury News (Merc illustration): YouTube copyright fight shows fair and legal different.

The column was insightful, even if it could have expressed a bit more forcefully how out of whack copyright law is with the realities of the Digital Generation. It recounts the story of  Chris Knight, an independent filmmaker and blogger in North Carolina.

During an unsuccessful run for school board, he made a goofy campaign commercial that spoofed the original "Star Wars" film. The one-minute television spot portrayed Knight as a Jedi warrior - complete with homemade light saber - who promised to take on the Death Star of government bureaucracy to save the children of Rockingham County.

Knight uploaded his video to YouTube, a unit of Google, in part to make it easy to embed in his blog (http://theknightshift.blogspot.com).

Someone over at VH1, a cable channel owned by media giant Viacom, stumbled on the clip and thought it was entertaining enough to mock on an episode of the TV show "Web Junk 2.0." (You can see both versions at blogs.mercurynews.com/vindu.)

Viacom never contacted Knight before using his work. It didn't need to because the company wasn't copying it, but instead excerpting it and adding comic commentary.

Knight didn't care. He loved his 58 seconds of fame. "I was really honored," he said.

So he did what anyone would do: He copied the VH1 segment from his digital video recorder, put it up on YouTube and blogged about it. ...

Viacom asked YouTube to take down the clip under a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and YouTube complied. ...

On Friday, Knight formally challenged Viacom's move, claiming he has every right to post the video that VH1 made from his video.

In the lingo of copyright lawyers, Knight argues that he made "fair use" of Viacom's clip, just as the company made fair use of his commercial by making fun of it on TV. ...

Alas, under the law, Knight is wrong - even though his argument makes sense.

Viacom based its clip on Knight's work, but the show's commentary and editing made it something distinct, with its own copyright protection.

Legally, that means Knight can't post Viacom's clip without permission unless he adds something that would create yet another video - in effect, a commentary on Viacom's commentary.

That's likely correct -- and shows the disconnect between copyright law and digital culture. Youtubers, brace yourselves for a harsh dose of legal reality.

Oh, bother!

In case you missed this a while back in Business 2.0:

Disney rejects the request of grieving British parents to put an image of Winnie the Pooh on their child's gravestone.

After outraged stonemason Aaron Clarke goes public, telling reporters he's been warned by Disney that carving the image of Pooh would amount to breach of copyright, Disney relents and agrees to let the parents use the bear.

What ever happend to pearLyrics?

I was looking for pearLyrics -- a way-cool program that hunted down the lyrics to any song in your iTunes library -- the other day (an old bookmark) and didn't find it. But I did find this explanation:

What ever happend to pearLyrics?

2006-12-06: Today it's exactly one year ago that I had to take a hard decision. Due to a legal threat I had to remove an application from my download page that, judging from the feedback I got (and still get), made a lot of people very happy. pearLyrics. A simple tool that automatically looked for lyrics for the song playing in iTunes. What made it different from the rest, and so popular, was that it actually did find a lot of lyrics due to it's unique search algorithm.

Finally it got too successful. Warner-Chappell had concerns that it was infringing their copyrights.

After an incredible amount of media coverage and an open letter of EFFs Fred von Lohmann it probably turned into too negative publicity for Warner Chappell, so finally, the unthinkable happened: the CEO of Warner-Chappel called me and said that he was sorry for the way they approached this issue. We even concluded that we should work together to bring lyrics to music fans all over the place.

Wow, so what an adventure, what a promise. Big times ahead. A highly idealistic goal and a big company promising their support. Critical voices already brought up the theory that this might just be a PR action on behalf of Warner-Chappel to get rid of the negative press - and honestly, that was also my thought. But hey, let's stay open minded and see what the future will bring. Well, fast forward one year and a couple of phone calls and emails. Presumably Warner-Chappel signed a deal with Gracenote (hey, good news, expect lyrics support in iTunes soon) and therefore doesn't want to deal with a little developer anymore. After all, pearLyrics and it's negative publicity for Warner-Chappel is long gone (well, ok, speculation on my part).

So what's up, where is pearLyrics? Well, sad to say, but I guess this is the final good bye to a piece of software I've put a lot of passion and hope into, that made a lot of people very happy and one or two a bit angry. It's not only Warner-Chappel, but also the rest of the music industry. No one out there could guarantee me that I was on the safe side if I released it again.

For me as a little freeware developer this whole experience was stunning and frustrating at the same time. On the one hand it feels a bit strange if your freeware app is shared on filesharing networks (of course, this is perfectly fine for me), that an application so small and unimportant captures so much interest. On the other hand it's a sad world, where money decides who is on the right side of the law. There is simply no way I could risk a law suit, even if I'm absolutely sure that I'm doing the right thing. I'm a software developer, not a law expert after all. This incident made me think twice before releasing any new software. ...

iPhone hackers could face legal battle

Associated Press: iPhone hackers could face legal battle.

Expanding the limits of fair use

San Francisco Chronicle: Debate heats up on what's protected by copyright laws. Excerpt:

The new documentary "War Made Easy" isn't just a searing critique of how administrations over the past 40 years have manipulated the media to build support for war. The 72-minute film is a media provocation itself - a challenge to federal copyright laws.

Based on a 2005 book by Bay Area media critic Norman Solomon and narrated by actor Sean Penn, roughly 90 percent of "War Made Easy" consists of archival news footage from major television networks that would cost a ton of money to license - if the filmmakers had paid for all of it; they bought only about 60 percent from distributors.

The filmmakers say they are protected under the "fair use" provision of federal copyright law, a measure that is being tested in ways unimagined when it was codified 30 years ago. ...

Over the past few weeks, CNN, ABC and NBC have announced they will allow footage of the presidential debates that they broadcast to be used on other media platforms under certain conditions. For example, NBC requests that debate footage not be used for commercial purposes, that the network's moderators or journalists not be used in campaign advertising and that its logo be prominently displayed when a clip is used.

But while some of those provisions sound similar to what's in federal copyright law, what is fair use remains the subject of debate.

"The similarities in all this is that we're all feeling our way in the digital era in the area of fair use," said Patrick Ross, executive director of the newly formed Copyright Alliance, a Washington trade group whose supporters include movie studios, television networks and artists interested in preserving copyright protection.

The networks' decisions "are fantastic for anybody who has anything to say about the presidential race," said Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at the Center for the Internet and Society at Stanford University. "What you're going to see in this election cycle is an explosion of people expressing themselves in different ways using video. This is going to get more people participating in the process."

After seeing how debate clips turned up on YouTube and blogs - and were mashed up into parodies - "the networks realized that you can either work with people or you can fight them," said Jason Schultz, an attorney specializing in intellectual property law at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. ...

Free content is being pitched as a civic offering, as CNN announced May 7: "The presidential debates are an integral part of our system of government, in which the American people have the opportunity to make informed choices about who will serve them. We believe this is good for the country and good for the electoral process."

In recent weeks, other networks - including NBC and ABC - have changed their policies to allow use of footage from the presidential debates. NBC's policy went into effect after last week's AFL-CIO debate in Chicago, which was broadcast on MSNBC.

Getting the networks to release their debate footage is a rare example of bipartisan media organizing; liberal organizations like MoveOn.org and conservative commentators like Michelle Malkin joined forces to pressure the networks.

"We know that people are going to do it. This just legitimizes it," said Mike Krempasky, a conservative who founded RedStateblogs.com.

Virtual sex machine spawns lawsuit

From the Associated Press the other day: Second Life's Virtual Sex Machine Spawns Lawsuit. (I devoted a chapter of Darknet to Second Life.) Excerpt:

The $45 SexGen animates amorous avatars in erotic positions. It is software code, written in the scripting language of "Second Life" and placed in virtual furniture and other objects. Avatars click on the object and choose from a menu of animated sex acts.

Alderman filed a civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Fla., last month alleging an avatar named "Volkov Catteneo" broke the program's copy protection and sold unauthorized copies. Alderman, who runs his business from home in a Tampa suburb, allows users to transfer his products, but prohibits copying.

"We confronted him about it and his basic response was, 'What are you going to do? Sue me?'" Alderman said. "I guess the mentality is that because you're an avatar ... that you are untouchable. The purpose of this suit is not only to protect our income and our product, but also to show, yes, you can be prosecuted and brought to justice." ...

At Alderman's "Second Life" shop, shoppers can try out a dragon bed powered by one of his SexGen engines. Along with programmers and designers, he employs a sales staff who hang around the shop like real salespeople to pitch the perfect sex toys. He is investing in a $25,000 motion-capture suit, a low-end version of one used to create digital characters in movies, to create more realistic sex moves for "Second Life" avatars. ...

Copyright reconsidered

Rick Falkvinge, head of the Swedish Pirate Party, Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Tony Falzone of the Fair Use Project, Mary Hodder of Dabble, and Karl Fogel of QuestionCopyright discussed copyright at the Cybersalon at the Hillside Club on July 29. The recording is in MP3, but if there is a purist out there who wants to transcode to ogg…feel free to rip, mix, burn.

Copyright blurb wrong?

San Jose Mercury News: Copyright blurb wrong?

WASHINGTON - Warning: Copyright threats on DVDs and TV broadcasts might be misstating the law.

A high-tech trade group made that charge Wednesday to the Federal Trade Commission, alleging deceptive trade practices for the copyright warnings before movies and during sports broadcasts.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association said it was trying to protect the public's legal rights from overzealous media companies, which in turn said they were simply trying to protect their content.

Movie studios, sports leagues and book publishers warn people about unauthorized uses of their content, but the trade group argued that many of them are permitted under "fair-use" provisions of copyright law.

"You don't have to put the whole damn statute in, but what you say has to be reflective of what the law actually says," said Edward Black, president of the group whose members include Microsoft and Google and Yahoo.

That's not what happens, he said, when a "for private use only" warning flashes on the screen before a DVD movie, or when an announcer during an NFL game intones the familiar warning that any use of the "pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited."

Copyright law allows some public uses, such as by a teacher or a student in a classroom, and does not require permission from the copyright owner for fair-use purposes, such as criticism, commentary or parodies.

The trade group wants that reflected in the warnings. ...

I spoke before the CCIA last year. They're fighting for the public's interests (as well as their members' interests).

Google talks a good game on copyright

WebProNews: Google Talks A Good Game On Copyright. Google will be one of the firms supporting a complaint to be filed with the Federal Trade Commission about sports leagues and other content companies violate copyright law and the first amendment.

When the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) drops its missive off at FTC headquarters today, some familiar names will be listed as supporting its listed complaints.

Google and Microsoft rank among the companies backing the complaint, the Wall Street Journal said in a report (free access). ...

As author J.D. Lasica noted in his book, 'Darknet', fair use has shrunk dramatically in the print world. Excerpt lengths have been challenged, and lawyers fear to tread too firmly upon the work of others. It's a radical departure from times gone by.

Cover yourself: A radical approach to copyright

David Battino of O'Reilly Digital Media has an audio interview with Webjay founder Lucas Gonze.

All Lucas Gonze wanted to do was upload some cover songs to his blog. But he quickly realized that digital copyright law would make that impossibly expensive, if not illegal. Fired up to share music fairly, this open source enthusiast dug deeper and deeper into history until he finally came across the mother lode of public domain songs.

Listen as the creative programmer behind the Webjay playlist service explains how he waltzed around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and why he thinks these heavy-handed restrictions on art could doom our culture.

YouTube responds to copyright suit

San Jose Mercury News: YouTube responds to copyright suit.

DRM cracked again - now we all will be punished

Lockergnome: DRM cracked again - now we all will be punished.

Hackers post new software to circumvent copy technology

San Jose Mercury News: Hackers post new software to circumvent copy technology.

A Second Life first -- avatar sues avatar

San Jose Mercury News: A Second Life first -- avatar sues avatar.

This is apparently the first time an avatar has sued another avatar in the virtual world.

Interesting, but is this true? (There are courts in Second Life?) Or does the Merc mean the real world?

Lessig switches career gears, takes aim at corruption

Dan Gillmor at Center for Citizen Media:  Lessig Switches Career Gears, Takes Aim at Corruption.

Digital copyright silliness on campus

EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann in an op-ed piece in the San Jose Mercury News the other day: Digital copyright silliness on campus. Excerpt:

What do Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke and UCLA have in common? Apparently, leaders in Congress think they aren't expelling enough students for illegally swapping music and movies.

The House committees responsible for copyright and education wrote a joint letter May 1 scolding the presidents of 19 major American universities, demanding that each school respond to a six-page questionnaire detailing steps it has taken to curtail illegal music and movie file-sharing on campus. One of the questions - "Does your institution expel violating students?" - shows just how out-of-control the futile battle against campus downloading has become.

As universities are pressured to punish students and install expensive "filtering" technologies to monitor their computer networks, the entertainment industry has ramped up its student-shakedown campaign. The Recording Industry Association of America has targeted more than 1,600 individual students in the past four months, demanding that each pay $3,000 for file-sharing transgressions or face a federal lawsuit. In total, the music and movie industries have brought more than 20,000 federal lawsuits against individuals in the past three years. ...

I Wrote It. Is It Mine for All Time? (7 Letters)

Reblogged from the Sunday NY Times:     I Wrote It. Is It Mine for All Time? (7 Letters). Another example of the wisdom of the crowd, in response to the ludicrous proposal from Mark Helprin to extend draconian copyright laws even longer: A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?

To the Editor:

Re “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” (Op-Ed, May 20):

Mark Helprin makes the alarming suggestion that copyrights should be extended as far as the Constitution will allow. He complains about treating intellectual property differently than other property. But different treatment makes sense.

Unlike land or a purse, an idea — the chorus of a rock song or a story from a book — can be picked up inadvertently without obvious loss to the “owner.” By creating a practically infinite pool of pre-existing copyrights to unwittingly infringe, Mr. Helprin’s suggestion would impose stifling costs on the generation of new ideas.

Besides, many laws discourage perpetual property ownership. Although the wealthy have often succeeded in dismantling those rules, they are important to democratic capitalism.

The open-source software phenomenon undermines Mr. Helprin’s premise. Human beings seem to produce high-quality ideas at a dizzying rate, even without proprietary incentives.

Michael Kron
Juneau, Alaska, May 21, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Mark Helprin argues that intellectual property should be granted the same protections as physical property. While the symmetry of this argument holds some aesthetic appeal, there is no economic rationale.

The economic rationale for perpetual protection of physical property is that such property cannot be used by two people at the same time. Society will not get any more holes if you take my shovel. And my incentive to invest in a shovel will depend upon my confidence that the government will protect my rights to its future use.

The economic rationale for treating intellectual property differently is that once discovered, intellectual property can be used by many people at the same time. If I invent a better way to tie my shoes, my use is not compromised by others tying their shoes in the same way. But this must be balanced against the benefit of incentives that encourage me to discover new ways to tie a shoe.

Ideally, copyrights and patents last long enough to encourage discovery of new ideas, but not so long as to allow monopoly use in perpetuity.

Michael J. Orlando
Denver, May 21, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Mark Helprin complains that “ ‘freeing’ a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses.”

Yet, as he also notes, “Barnes & Noble is able to publish price-reduced non-copyrighted works not so much because it saves the 10 percent to 15 percent of revenue that would go to the gruel-eating authors, but because it saves the 50 percent that would go to the publishers.”

In other words, the transfer of wealth on expiration of copyright is primarily from one media corporation to another (and, dare I mention, to the public), not from some writer’s suffering great-granddaughter.

It is surprising that a successful writer has not noticed that it is not he who benefits the most financially from his work.

Sarah Trombley
New York, May 20, 2007

•

To the Editor:

James Madison lived in an age of professional writers liberated from the demands of state licensing and the constraints of patronage. He followed the English precedent in balancing the benefit of copyright to authors with the public good.

Mark Helprin’s call for even longer term extensions would ensure that ever-increasing numbers of “orphan works” were kept out of print, and would retard rather than “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” as the Constitution desires.

To publish is to make public; if an author seeks perpetual control over his writings, he should toss them on the fire, lest they be read. Far better to have them enter the public domain so that centuries hence, other authors might take inspiration for their own creations.

Nick Sweeney
Asheville, N.C., May 20, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Mark Helprin’s proposal to extend copyright to infinity would make perfect sense if the ultimate aim of making art were to make money.

Not that artists don’t like money. Not that they are unwilling to pass it to their descendants. But ultimately, if it were riches they were after, they could find much easier paths.

Their art is themselves, their souls, their visions, and they make art to speak more powerfully to the world than they could to their neighbors across the fence.

Copyright is a tax on speaking to the world. It inhibits communication and is a fetter on art. A little of it is fine, so that artists can live and prosper and receive material recognition for their work. But Mozart’s heirs are his operas, not his offspring, and I think letting his music flow free is what he would have desired.

Stephen Brown
O’Fallon, Ill., May 20, 2007

•

To the Editor:

If Mark Twain’s copyrights were still valid, his works could not be taught in schools because of the prohibitive cost. The extension of copyright protection enlists the aid of the state in protecting authors for a time, but the lapse of this protection is not confiscation by the state.

The period of the author’s life plus 70 years is too long (it used to be shorter). Corporate interest, rather than benefits to authors, drove the change. The heirs of Mickey Mouse, not Hemingway, benefited.

William Barber
Missouri City, Tex., May 20, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Mark Helprin, like Samuel Johnson before him, evidently believes that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

And yet this page of letters to the editor — to say nothing of the blogosphere — is filled by the work of those willing to create for no reward except the chance to be heard.

Copyright protection should be granted only to the extent that it will “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” At some point — and reasonable people can disagree where that point lies — greater protection yields only monopoly profits for the rights holder and indeed impedes the progress that the founders sought to promote.

Joseph Bernstein, M.D.
Haverford, Pa., May 20, 2007
The writer is a founder of a wiki for orthopedic surgery.

Court: Google didn't infringe copyright

Associated Press: A federal appeals court said Google Inc. does not infringe the copyrights of adult entertainment company Perfect 10 Inc. by displaying small versions of its images in search results.

MySpace adds new anti-piracy feature

San Jose Mercury News: MySpace adds new anti-piracy feature.

MySpace and Dailymotion, a popular French video site, announced Friday separate initiatives to prevent copyrighted material from being misused, increasing pressure on Google to more aggressively police its YouTube subsidiary.

MySpace said it is adding a feature called "Take Down, Stay Down" that would prevent copyrighted content from being re-posted after it has been taken down by the copyright owner.

Dailymotion, a French site famous for full-length TV shows and movies, said it will begin automatically filtering unauthorized content.

Both MySpace and Dailymotion are using technology provided by Audible Magic, a Los Gatos company specializing in content management and anti-piracy services. Google reportedly has a deal with Audible Magic as well, but declined to talk about it.

Study: Students don't understand copyright rules

Broadcasting & Cable:  Study: Students Don't Understand Copyright Rules.