Category: Copyright/OCL

It had to happen sooner or later. I’ve emailed my contacts at APRA to find their position on this. It will be fascinating to see how this evolves . . . . Sony & Playlouder private P2P

Siva Vaidhyanathan on the recent Google Print u-turn.

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/001841.html

(more at . . . http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/001849.html)

He rightly points out the difference between Google and public libraries . . . .

I wish more libraries would push their rights under copyright. But corporations do not have the same leeway as libraries. Libraries work for us. Corporations work for themselves.

As I said in my talk “The Googlization of Everything” to the American Library Association in June, Google’s plan would have sparked a copyight meltdown. P2P was nothing compared to the fallout from this. And Congress would certainly have ensured that such a meltdown would not have ended well for readers, libraries, or the Internet — none of which have rich lobbyists.

Its a classic case of a failing business model and cultural elitism working hand in hand . . . . more interesting though is that the BBC is leading the action against these forces. Bring it on.

As the BBC prepares to announce the tremendous success of its free Beethoven downloads, the Independent reports that classical labels are less than rhapsodic:

This week the BBC will announce there have been more than a million downloads of the symphonies during the month-long scheme. But the initiative has infuriated the bosses of leading classical record companies who argue the offer undermines the value of music and that any further offers would be unfair competition.

The BBC made all nine of the Beethoven symphonies available for free download, with commentary, as part of their Beethoven Experience.

Read more.

Negativland are interviewed, and, not surprisingly have interesting things to say.

In the end, we came up with a sampling license that was saying, in effect, “You can reuse bits and pieces of our work for profit. You can sell it. But we’d like it if you mention where your sources come from.” And the only exception to this is that advertising can’t use it. It’s okay for anyone to use anything, except in advertising, because we don’t consider advertising to be free speech. It’s paid speech. And as artful as advertising can be, it is not art.

Some of you might remember that great 8 minute Flash thing I sent around about Googlezon and a projection to 2015.

Here’s an interesting commentary on it.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hilden/20050524.html

And, more importantly, Googlezon doesn’t even have to run afoul of journalistic ethics here: Its fact-stripping robots could easily (and automatically) provide citations to all their sources – each accessible by a link. Thus, rather than being an engine of plagiarism, Googlezon’s fact-stripping bots might be better seen as an engine of compilation.

Making compilations like this illegal, as copyright infringement, would challenge the status of a lot of traditional research – such as virtually any doctoral thesis, nonfiction book, academic paper, and on and on. For this reason, I agree with Sloan and Taylor that the Supreme Court would likely rule for Googlezon – not “old media” – in its Supreme Court case.

But it’s also possible the Court – or, ultimately Congress, in the wake of the Court’s decision – would rework copyright in a way that better fits the Internet.

Copyright is meant, in large part, to protect the market for a given work, and thus to protect incentives to create new works. Yet allowing people to read (for free) a fact-stripping bot’s compilation of news might undermine the market for newspapers and their online outposts. And that may lead newspapers to fight back in Congress for a broader version of copyright that would end, or limit, the reign of fact-stripping bots.

Lawrence Lessig – the king of Powerpoint, and Creative Commons guru – speaking at the Koppinor conference Norway about collecting societies. (I’ve mirrored the file here to save bandwidth)

Lessig is in fine form again and this is well worth taking some time out to watch. The video quality is good and as usual his slides and performance is ace.

“…the fight over intellectual property and rights to make copies is actually a struggle between the outlooks of the new economy and the old, a reason why they cannot both coexist forever, and thus a feature of the period of transition from old to new. ” Michael H. GoldHaber The Attention Economy and the Net

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/
http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/