Tag: Copyright

The U.S. Copyright Office should allow the courts to decide the crucial issue of whether a temporary copy of a song or other copyrighted work made by a computer must be subject to copyright royalties, public interest groups said today.

The Copyright Office should not try to decide the issue, a group of public interest organizations led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge (PK) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) said in a filing with the Office in response to a proposed rule published July 16. In addition, Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, and U.S. PIRG signed onto the pleading, as did the Computer & Communications Industry Association.

Yesterday, a federal district court in San Jose refused to dismiss a suit brought against Universal Music for improperly demanding that YouTube remove a home video from its site.

In this case, Stephanie Lenz was sent a takedown notice for posting a home video on YouTube. Lenz had made a video of her toddler stumbling through her kitchen, then hearing and bobbing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” which was playing tinnily in the background on a countertop stereo. Despite the obvious fair use of the work, Universal sent a takedown notice to YouTube anyway. YouTube took the video down and notified Lenz that she had been accused of infringing copyright. After Lenz consulted a lawyer and issued a counter-notice, the video was put up again some six weeks later. After this, Lenz sued Universal.

Visual artists say they have a problem, that no one can find their work, or at least match them as the owner of their work. We’ve said it time and again, the Copyright Registry fails visual artists, because images are not part of the online registry—so users can’t search by image, or even see a sample image of the work they’re looking for.

We’ve promoted the idea of visual registries, to help owners upload digital images to a site like Flickr so that services like TinEye.com can index them and return meaningful comparative search results for users. Among the push-back we’ve had from the visual artists community with this idea, besides the cost and time issues of digitizing and uploading, is from the physical visual artists — like sculptors. Even though I believe that simply taking a few photos of the work would suffice to help users find the original owner, it hasn’t satisfied some.

Enter Microsoft’s Photosynth, which just went public this morning.

While there are a seemingly infinite number of ways to share and discover new music, few are as mythologized as the mixtape. From Nick Hornby's romanticizing of the format in High Fidelity to Library of America editor-in-chief Geoffrey O'Brien's assertion that the mixtape is "the most widely practiced American art form," no other amateur medium commands the same level of respect from fans and critics alike. While the general principles of mixtape making continue to live on in even the post-iPod era, with the exception of a few purist holdouts, most mixtape curators stopped using magnetic audiotapes long ago, in favor of the more convenient CD-R. Recently, however, even more advanced tools have emerged on the web, allowing would-be mixtape traders to widely disseminate their tastes while easily tapping into those of their friends.

One such site, Muxtape, allows users to upload, sequence and stream 12 MP3s in order to create virtual mixtapes. Web radio services like Pandora, meanwhile, allow users to discover new music--as mixtapes once did--based on their existing tastes. And social music sites like Last.fm allow users to broadcast their tastes automatically, by generating radio stations based on the user's listening habits. All of these technologies provide fans with new ways to interact with and discover music and have the potential to generate quite a bit of excitement for both independent and major label artists. That last fact seems to be lost on the recording industry, however, which, as usual, is too busy trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle to know a good opportunity when it sees one.

In my last post, I discussed the recent decision in Jacobsen v. Katzer and how it helps uphold the validity and strength of free and open source licenses.

The key innovation in these licenses is their ability to use the power held by the copyright holder—the power to restrict the flow of information—and turn that around (“intellectual jujitsu,” in a Stallman phrase) so that it enforces openness in spreading information and content.

Licenses can do that precisely because they are flexible—they can be drafted in any number of ways to require specific conditions before the follow-on user can perform any of the acts (reproducing, distributing, adapting, etc.) reserved to the copyright holder.

For the second straight year, I addressed the EDUCAUSE/Cornell Institute for Computer Policy and Law, held at Cornell’s beautiful campus. The Institute gathers 50+ higher education information technology (IT) professionals – usually campus CTOs, librarians and legal counsels, and teaches them the substantive particulars of IT policy issues and advises them how to be strong advocates.

Last week PK was sent an email by a concerned artist on, you guessed it, orphan works. Brian, as a painter and a writer, was very concerned about the proposed legislation, it’s impact on artists, and PK’s our stance on it. I replied to his email, trying to address his worries about the cap on damages we originally proposed (though we do not promote this any more since “reasonable compensation” is now where the ball has moved), and some of his specific concerns about what would be considered a qualifying search.

In his reply, he invited me to try to break down the orphan works legislation and issue on a blog he writes for at MyArtSpace.com, a website that empowers artists to make a place for themselves on the web, to display their creativity, get exposure, discuss and critique ideas with others, and maybe even sell some art. It’s a social network for artists.

I, sadly, could go on for days on the topic of orphan works, so I suggested that the format be focussed on the concerns he believes artists really care about. He sent me a number of to-the-point questions and here are my replies.

Thanks to Brian Sherwin for reaching out and his willingness to expose some potentially different views on MyArtSpace.com. I encourage anyone interested in the issue to leave a comment on Brian’s blog, so we can ensure a good discussion of the issues.

Good news out of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit yesterday—the court ruled that a failure to meet the conditions of a free / open source license was an infringement of copyright. While defendants argued that the conditions of the license (that the author be credited and that modifications to the original be noted) were separate agreements that were at most breaches of contract, the court found that violating these conditions meant that the author’s copyrights had been infringed.

Free and open source licenses are ways for authors and other creators of copyrightable works to distribute their works openly, while still retaining some rights over the work.

I just wanted to make a quick note of a piece by Danny O’Brien (found via boingboing), which, among other things, notes that artists’ interests in copyright are frequently more nuanced than the law—for instance, in a lot of circumstances, attribution is more important than remuneration:

One behaviour I see a lot is a general tolerance towards copying, mixed with an absolute moral fury at passing-off. The fact that both activities are seen as straightforward violations of IP law both by the general public and by the legal system I think is confusing for everybody. Let me give an example. I have a friend who is a reasonably successful DJ. Her continuing success comes from the distribution of her mixes, which she lets be passed around online and off.

- or -

Do We Really Like the Taste of Apple's Remote-Kill KoolAid?

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story about Apple’s App Store for the iPhone. Clearly, having an easy way for mobile users to download apps is a good way to spur development and make money. According to Apple, over the past month the App Store has sold $30 million in iPhone and iPod touch apps. Of those sales, Apple should take in about $9 million, as it keeps about 30% of each app sold. While some application developers have complained about the revenue split, when one considers the costs associated with hosting the applications, cost of money changing hands, and general maintenance of the store, 30% is not unreasonable. What is increasingly unreasonable is the way Apple is controlling the App Store, both to the detriment of developers and consumers.