The teachingcopyright.org Launch Manifesto

In America, laws describe how freedom should work--but for the most part, we understand that freedom in America is really an idea with flexible definitions and many, many ways of being expressed. Similarly, we use copyright laws to describe how creativity should work in our society.

The California State Legislature passed a law requiring the teaching of copyright in schools applying for technology grants, and I raised an eyebrow... Maybe even two eyebrows. When we teach the idea of freedom through the study of documented laws, like studying the Bill of Rights, we're at our best when we teach that freedom works in diverse ways for different groups of people. So the same should go for copyright--if we're going to be teaching the idea of creativity through the study of laws like copyright, then we'd do well to take the same route--teach that creativity works in a lot of different ways for different people.

But I'm worried that that's not going to happen, and I'm not the only one. I worry that a generation of smart California kids, all attending schools ambitious enough to embrace technology, are somehow going to fall short of learning about creativity--that creativity's primary motive is profit, or that profit from creativity can come only through ownership. Those views may have been true in the past, they probably have some relevance today, but there are other ways of thinking about creativity, how it works, and how humanity benefits from it.

Although requiring copyright education is currently just a California law--there will be more and more reasons to teach about copyright in schools. Creativity through technology is a powerful theme for the beginning of this new century--the proliferation of tools used to create and manipulate words, pictures, and video has played a crucial role in democratizing creativity.

So I'm launching teachingcopyright.org as a tool to help teachers and administrators learn, talk, and teach copyright. Laws are a noble attempt to give strong ideas a living presence in our daily lives--but we fail to educate when we just describe laws and not the strong ideas that inspired them.

Educator, academic, or otherwise--please visit the site, comment on the blog, and help to build a strong body of knowledge for teachers to build upon. Creativity drives our human universe of industry, entertainment, and achievement--so let's get this copyright thing right.

White Paper on SCA Copyright Policy

For my end of the year project I wrote a white paper critiquing USC School of Cinematic Arts' (SCA) copyright policy (found here - PDF) as it represents a non-academic and corporate approach to content ownershipthat is detrimental to both SCA students and SCA itself.

The white paper (PDF) focuses on understanding SCA's current policy, why it must change its IP policy on a very basic level, and finally why adopting Creative Commons licences presents SCA and it its students with a myriad of positive outcomes. The paper contains important information that isn't discussed on a regular basis with the SCA student body, hopefully acts as a valuable resource for these students in helping them contextualize their rights to ownership.

If you guys agree ideologically, please don't forget to sign the petition online asking SCA to change their policy.

Want to sell your CDs? I'll need your fingerprints.

New pawn shop laws springing up across the United States are threatening to make the process of selling used CDs back to willing record stores significantly more complicated. All to make sure that record stores aren't buying counterfeit CDs - as if this were a serious problem.

In some states, for a seller to make a sale to a record store, the store will be required to take the seller's fingerprints and personal information. In Florida specifically, many record shops are getting out of the used-CD business because they don't want to have to pay the 10,000 dollar bond for the right to interrogate their customers every time they want to sell back a Linkin Park CD.

To give some perspective, in Florida, Utah, Rhode Island and Wisconsin it is more of a pain to sell a used CD than it is to get a driver's license.

This appears to be a growing trend in the United States. Media "producers" control the laws, and because of this we are entering media lock-down. Gotta have every penny, I suppose.

(via ars)

Spiderman 3: Webisode Contest Encourages Remixing

Target has teamed up with the creators of Spiderman 3 (and it's hip-to-the-youth-culture marketing department) and jumped on the student-film-maker/youtube bandwagon with their "Spiderman 3 Make Your Own Webisode Contest" and sweepstakes.
It's cool that they're explicitely allowing people to mess with their copyrighted materials, but sort of sad that, predictably, there are also so many restrictions on what is "fair game":

WEBISODE COMPETITION
Overview. Eligible entrants compete for prizes by submitting an originally created
video portraying the Spider-Man character (and, at their option, other authorized Spider-Man movie villains) in
an audiovisual presentation in a digital format, including but not limited to pre-recorded video, instantaneous
webcam recording, claymation, or animation (“Webisode”) that the entrant submits to the contest site located at
target.com/spiderman3 (the “Contest Site”). Sponsor hereby grants permission to each eligible participant in
the Webisode Competition to portray the Spider-Man character, and the authorized Spider-Man movie villains,
and to use the approved music tracks, sound effects and background imagery provided on the Contest Site to
create his or her Webisode(s), subject to these Official Rules and the Waiver (as defined below)...

1 iv. Their Webisode complies with each of the following requirements:
• It must portray the Spider-Man character.
• If the Webisode includes any characters other than Spider-Man, it may ONLY portray (a) one
or more of the following approved Spider-Man movie villains: Green Goblin, Doc Ock,
Sandman, Venom, and/or New Goblin; and/or (b) other characters that are the original, sole
and exclusive creation of entrant.
• If the Webisode includes any music, only the music provided on the Contest Site may be
used.


etc. etc.

What I'm wondering, is what happenst to the poor guy who works so hard on his webisode, accidentally uses a character not pre-approved or a song other than whats provided...Will he be merely disqualified or prosecuted?

Do DVRs Infringe on Copyright When Networked and Remote?

That's what a federal district court said about Cablevision's proposed DVR service. Apparently, while there is a long precedent of legal recording rights for media consumers (from cassette recorders to Tivo), those rights are invalidated by the subsitution of individual DVR appliances in consumers' homes for a DVR system controlled remotely in Cablevision's network.
Cablevision is appealing the ruling that prohibits it from launching the service:

"We continue to believe strongly that remote-storage DVR is permissible under current copyright law and offers significant benefits to consumers, including lower costs and faster deployment of this popular technology to our digital cable customers," Tom Rutledge, Cablevision's chief operating officer, said in a statement. "Our remote-storage DVR is the same as conventional DVRs, and merely enables consumers to exercise their well-established rights to time-shift television programming."

Could this also be a matter of first amendment rights to free speech, as an issue of prior restraint?
And how exactly could shifting the locus of a stored, recorded digital program be construed as copyright infringement?
Sounds kind of crazy to me...
[Not surprisingly, the suit that started this whole debate was filed by "several Hollywood studios and TV networks" (Marguerite, Reardon, "Cablevision to fight ruling blocking networked DVR" CNETnews.com)]

Cablevision Appeals DVR Ruling

Cablevision Systems Corp. appealed a federal court ruling today that blocked the rollout of a new DVR service. Cablevision is claiming the US District Court Ruling last month misapplied copyright law to its remote-storage DVR. Cablevision's system would allow any cable subscriber with a cable box to have a DVR-like service by storing an playig shows on computer servers maintained by Cableivion. This saves the need to install hardware in every home. They're arguing that the service was permissible since the control of recording and playback was in the hands of consumers. Cablevision is also using the Betamax decision to arguen in their favor. This case is being watched by a lot of people in the cable TV industry since it could increase the rate of consumption of dvr services.

Jonathan Lethem on Copyright

Jonathan Lethem, author and MacArthur Fellowship Grant recipient, recently was interviewed by Salon.com in which he discusses his new book, "You Don't Love Me Yet" and his opinions on copyright. An eloquent writer to say the least, Lethem is relinquishing the film rights to "You Don't Love Me Yet" to whomever can come up with the best script - giving them complete rights to his work. The stipulation is that after 5 years, the script will go back into the public domain. The book itself deals with a fictional indie band who has to deal with questions around content ownership. Pretty meta.

Lethem (who also wrote the extraordinary Ecstasy of Influence) bounces around in the interview from copyright law to David Byrne to art in general. It is an incredible read to say the least, but I have excerpted a particularly intriguing section below:

I make my living by licensing my copyright. Everything I've tried to say, in the Harper's essay and elsewhere, is that there is an enormous middle ground. It becomes one of those issues like, "If you don't favor wiretapping in the U.S., you must be for the terrorists." What I'm seeking to explore is that incredibly fertile middle ground where people control some rights and gain meaningful benefits from those controls, and yet contribute to a healthy public domain and systematically relinquish, or have relinquished for them, meaningless controls on culture that impoverish the public domain.

And my personal favorite:

Sure, but it wasn't strengthening of copyright control that allowed me to make more money after that; it was because I found some readers. Even if my rights were Kryptonite and lasted 1,000 years, if no one read my books, they wouldn't be worth a penny. The economy of human attention is a very precious one, much scarcer than any other. I'm lucky to be in the position of having anyone notice that I've given something away in the first place.

YouTube Getting Sued was Always a Matter of When, not If...

...now it's a matter of how many different companies sue them and for how much, since Viacom (owner of MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, etc.) dropped a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit on them today:

In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, Viacom says YouTube "harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale" and had "brazen disregard" of intellectual property laws.

Best of all, they didn't forget to take a jab at Google's motto:

"Finding a way of peaceful coexistence is quite a struggle," [intellectual property attorney Bruce] Sunstein said. "Google's motto is 'Don't be Evil,' and you could argue that with YouTube that motto is wearing a little thin."

Link to AP story on Yahoo! News

More Copyright Trouble for Google?

Recently, Thomas Rubin, associate general counsel for copyright, trademark, and trade secrets at Microsoft, called Google's business model "troubling" and accused Google of violating copyright law.

In a speech given Association of American Publishers, Rubin decried Google as having taken the wrong path because it "systematically violates copyright and deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetizing their works."

This condemnation was brought about due to a conflict between Microsoft's Live Search Books project and Google's Book Search. Rubin claims that Microsoft only indexes books out of copyright or in the public domain, while Google's Book Search freely copies a work until notified by the copyright owner to stop.

Coincidentally, Google today announced a partnership with the Bavarian State Library to digitize more than a million public domain and out-of-print works.

Good luck Google.

LINK

Carlos Mencia Claims Copyright Infringement

Earlier this week, Carlos Mencia was brutally exposed as an unoriginal hack at an LA comedy club by Joe Rogan (of Fear Factor fame), whom ade the claim that Mencia steals the majority of his work, calling the comedian 'Menstelia'.

In another age, these claims would resonate with some, and rub others as sour grapes, with no hard evidence presented at the time of the argument. Thanks to the beauty of digital technology, Rogan posted video of the incident, cutting between his claims of Mencia's blatant copying and the exact examples he referred to. Like anything on the 'darknet', it spread like wild fire and Mencia's already flimsy comedic-cred seemed to evaporate into thin air.

Where else could he turn then but to over-protective copyright law? Mencia claimed copyright infringement on the video and got it taken off YouTube. Unfortunately for Mencia, it isn't really going anywhere and keeps popping up on various other sites and even back on YouTube under different names. I've included a link to a current posting of the video, although I don't expect it to last through the night.

So what is to be done? As an excellent TechDirt article points out, Mencia seems to have plagiarized most of his work, but should he be punished for that legally? To what extent is the takedown notice a successful use of copyright?

MySpace Experiments with Video Filtering

Wired News picks up an AP article about MySpace's experimental video-filtering system. Through technology licensed from Audible Magic, MySpace hopes to keep copyrighted content off its members' sites. The filtering program works by searching video for unique digital fingerprints that it compares with a database of known fingerprints of copyrighted content.

Hilariously, MySpace officials claim that "the latest offering was unrelated to Universal Music's federal lawsuit in November, accusing MySpace of illegally encouraging its users to share music and music videos on the site without permission." MySpace then proceeds to refer directly to Universal Music as a beneficiary of the filtering software:

In the video-filtering pilot, MySpace said it would block unauthorized music videos and other clips containing Universal Music Group's music, while still allowing the Vivendi SA unit and its artists to circulate promotional audio and video they authorize. MySpace, a unit of News Corp., said the tools would be available for free to other content owners as well.

(via Wired News)