Darknet

Legal guide for podcasters

Attorneys Colette Vogele and Mia Garlick (general counsel of Creative Commons and treasurer of Ourmedia) were the legal minds behind the most comprehensive Legal guide for podcasters you'll find anywhere. It's also available in pdf format and they'll soon have it available for print on demand from Lulu.com.

'Just use podsafe music'

Colette Vogel (photo) had this summary of her panel with Denise Howell, Kelli Richards and Gerd Leonhard at the Portable Media Expo earlier this month.

Podcasting video is now live

The video of the Law & Public Policy panel at Duke University's Symposium on Podcasting is now online here.

Streams of all the other sessions are up here.

RIAA rep at Duke's podcasting conference

For me, the highlight of Duke University's Symposium on Podcasting so far has been the Law & Public Policy session (exclusive of my participation as a panelist). Other participants were moderator James Boyle, head of Duke's Center for the Public Domain; Jennifer Jenkins of Duke's Law School and a key executive at the same center ; Jason Schultz, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and a last-minute stand-in, the personable Michael J. Huppe, Senior Vice President for Business & Legal Affairs and Deputy General Counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America.

Jennifer and Jason did terrific jobs of outlining the contours of fair use. I gave a visual presentation that included a video clip I shot, an MP3 mash-up of President Bush, and an outtake from the DVD of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" -- the scene with the singing dolphins.

Huppe deserves kudos for stepping into the academic equivalent of the lion's den, and he took some tough questions. Some outtakes from Huppe's talk:

"We're aggressively for podcasting. … We're not the industry we were five years ago."

He said talks were now beginning to create "a simple, efficient, quick licensing structure for podcasting."

"We are not anti-fair use in any way," which drew shakes of the head from the audience.

I was surprised when he lauded Ourmedia.org, saying, "Ourmedia is a great concept, and we have no problem with that at all. When it's our stuff, it's a different issue."

Here's the schedule for the rest of the day. There's a live Webcast of the proceedings (yesterday's stream wasn't working properly).

Postscript: I forgot to mention that the RIAA's Michael Huppe seemed interested in the arguments we were making on the panel and he ponied up $15 to buy a copy of "Darknet" for reading on the return flight. I hope to be in touch with him early next year to discuss a mechanism that would allow podcasters and videobloggers on Ourmedia to license music from the major record labels.

Hollywood wants to control your podcasts

Anyone flying up to Portland next week for the Podcast Hotel?

From Podcasthotel.com: Questions Surface About Podshow License. Excerpt:

Cory Doctorow looks at the contract for PodShow and the Podsafe Music Network and comes up with some issues that he says should raise concerns about free expression.

Namely, it puts control into the hands of the music labels about what is said on any podcast show that uses the service.

The problem is that in return for access to PodCast music, you agree to a license that prohibits you from referencing “software piracy (warez, cracking, etc.), hacking, phreaking, emulators, ROM’s, or illegal MP3 activity” or saying anything “deemed unsuitable or harmful to the reputation of PodShow or the Licensor.”

This is pretty nuts. Since when does the guy who provides the music to the radio station get to dictate what you’re allowed to talk about? Is the price of commercial music in a PodCast that you have to yield unlimited, arbitrary editorial control to a music label?

And it gets worse — under the terms of the license, you also agree to pay legal costs and damages to PodShow if you say something that gets them sued — even if the judge eventually finds in your favor.

'G'Day World' podcast

I had a fine time on the Fourth of July chatting for an hour with Cameron Reilly, host of the Australian podcast G'Day World (part of the Podcast Network), talking about Darknet, Ourmedia, where technology is taking us, my favorite movies, and other sundry stuff.

He's just posted the podcast here (the direct link to the mp3 is here). And G'Day World's feed is here.

Cross-posted to New Media Musings.

On NPR today: 'On the Media'

I just came home from lunch in San Francisco when my 6-year-old ran up to me and said, "Dad, you were on the radio!" Ah, the lure and power of big media. Will it still hold true when Bobby is my age? I'm not so sure.

I did a quick interview at KQED's studios on Wednesday with Bob Garfield of NPR's On the Media about "Darknet," and it just aired. (The fact that I've been on the show a couple of times aside, I think it consistently ranks as one of the best-done programs on the creative destruction happening in the media world today.)

Here's the streaming mp3 of the program (I think you need Real to hear it), and a description of the segment from their website:

For every move that media industries have taken to protect their copyrights, there has been an equal and opposite countermove by consumers. In Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, J.D. Lasica explores the realm in which so-called pirates operate - slicing, dicing, and sharing media to their hearts' content. Lasica talks to Bob about how Hollywood is driving consumers further into the shadows and under the radar.

I was glad to see that they used a mash-up that I'd sent them of rx's My Name Is Rx, a remix of George W. Bush's speeches and presidental debate verbiage set to the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil. (Download it here.)

By coincidence, I was just coming back from lunch with ... Bob Garfield, who's in town to give the keynote at a marketing conference Monday, and Brendan Greeley, who's working with Christopher Lydon on open-source radio (and is in Berkeley this weekend to see his girlfriend). We wound up having brunch at Santorini, a new Greek restaurant near Union Square.

By further coincidence, Brendan was also on On the Media today (though he was interviewed by someone else). So natch, we chatted about blogging, podcasting, the future of media, advertising models, the remix revolution, why people go to blogging conferences, Jeff Jarvis's new job, and lots more, between gyros and moussaka and lots of caffeine.

Great to finally meet Bob G. (pictured above) in person (had I known Google Images would be so barren of photos, I would have brought my camera). And I'll be working with Brendan in the coming months to create a resource on Ourmedia for podcasters to learn about what they can and can't do under the law.

Podcasting and the future of radio

This morning I got up early and, before the coffee kicked in, participated by phone as a guest on the Diane Rehm Show, where we discussed the future of radio.

I lobbed a couple of grenades, such as suggesting that commercial radio is dead, and that podcasting - personalized, portable, on-demand Internet audio - is the wave of the future.

Diane Rehm wasn't in today, but Steve Roberts - erstwhile Washington journalist and hubbie of Cokie Roberts - served as a knowledgeable host. Also joining the roundtable were

The show's producers agreed to let us post the broadcast on Ourmedia, so now I've got to figure out how to grab the stream and convert it to MP3.

The Diane Rehm Show comes out of American University and is syndicated nationally on NPR. That makes my third NPR guest spot since last summer. Now, we just need to get some discussion of the personal media revolution on Fresh Air.

Cross-posted to New Media Musings.

Is it illegal to podcast copyrighted music?

New Communications Forum: Podcast Music Licensing Not as Financially Daunting as Bloggers Surmise.

Podcasts, podcasts everywhere - but is your podcast already illegal? That was the discussion opened on the Silicon Valley Watcher site earlier this month. However, while the article titled "Why Your Podcast is Probably Already Illegal" brings up the important issue of podcast music licensing, its quoted music license fee calculations were inaccurate.

It is true that podcasters, in order to play popular music in their podcasts, must pay a fee for the right to play these tunes. If you are a podcaster playing popular tunes in their entirety during your podcast but have not paid for a music license then, yes, your podcast may already be illegal. However, the article's quote that the cost to obtain a license is more than $750 is over-inflated. ...

Podcasting, music and the law

bestkungfu blog: Podcasting, music and the law.

ASCAP updated its Internet licensing to reference podcasts – oh, excuse me, pod-casts – last week. The move may have been intended to answer some questions as to the legality of using music in podcasts, but, as with the webcasting era, it left a lot of people scratching their heads. Is this all we need, just a $288 license to this agency, to be covered through 2005?

Well, there’s some bad news. The truth is that, no, that’s not everything. In fact, the landscape for music licensing is even more confusing than most people would imagine, and it at times consists of entities who may not even want to sell you a license. ...