The U.S. Supreme Court may have stopped broadcasts of California’s same-sex marriage trial, but that has not prevented filmmakers from re-enacting it for the Internet.
Two Los Angeles-based filmmakers have used transcripts, bloggers in the courtroom and professional actors to help recreate the trial. The first of 12 episodes - each covering a day of the trial - appeared on YouTube on Monday.
Filmmaker John Ireland says the goal was to allow Americans to judge the constitutionality of Proposition 8, which restricted marriage to a man and a woman. Ireland and fellow filmmaker John Ainsworth oppose the ban.
The Supreme Court last month blocked a plan to have testimony in the trial uploaded to YouTube, saying it could subject supporters of Proposition 8 to harassment.
Once upon a time, copyrights lasted for 14 years from the creation of an artistic or literary work. The purpose was to balance the societal interests between an author (encouraging the arts by giving a limited monopoly) and the public domain (increasing the works freely available to all). With the growth of large content owning publishers, studios, and record labels, the 14-year exclusive right has morphed into a lifetime right, plus 70 years. What was once meant to encourage artistic works has now become an annuity for people who were never involved in the creative process.
Enter Google’s Nexus One phone and the estate of Philip K. Dick.
“We feel this is a clear infringement of our intellectual-property rights,” said Isa Dick Hackett, a daughter of Mr. Dick and the chief executive of Electric Shepherd Productions, an arm of the Dick estate devoted to adapting the late author’s works. “Our legal team is dealing head-on with this.”
Which “intellectual-property rights” are we talking about here? Can you guess?
Mr. Dick’s 1968 novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” which served as the basis for the 1982 cult film “Blade Runner,” follows a bounty hunter chasing androids known as Nexus-6 models.
Get it? “Android” and “Nexus.” Used together! It must be a copyright violation.
Here’s hoping to get a copy of the letter sent to the Google legal department so that we can dissect the baseless claims one by one. In the meantime, Mr. Dick’s heirs will certainly see an uptick in their royalties as this story circulates.
Once this matter resolves itself, we can move on to the important issues about Blade Runner. Such as whether the film is better with the voice over, the unicorn scene, or both.
PARIS - A Paris court today found Google guilty of violating copyright by digitizing books and putting extracts online, following a legal challenge by major French publishers. The court ruled against Google’s French unit after the La Martiniere group argued that publishers and authors were losing out in the latest stage of the digital revolution.
Google was ordered to pay 300,000 euros ($431,700) in damages and interest and to stop reproducing any copyrighted material by French publishers. Read more…
Large content owners gushed with enthusiasm, making the case that “Intellectual property industries are an essential economic engine to the U.S. economy, and it is critical that the new IP Enforcement Coordinator now be given adequate resources to carry out her new responsibilities.” -MPAA Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman.
“It’s critical she be given the necessary resources to get the job done. Millions of Americans create, market and distribute content for a living. If we don’t address the piracy threat with vigor, cohesiveness and immediacy, we can’t create new jobs. In fact, we’ll lose even more.” -The Walt Disney Company President and CEO Robert A. Iger.
Consumer-oriented Public Knowledge also congratulated Ms. Espinel, stating that “she is well qualified for the position, having served as the assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Intellectual Property and Innovation, and we believe she will be fair in her approach to intellectual property enforcement issues. We look forward to working with her.”–Public Knowledge President Gigi B. Sohn.
Now the interesting question becomes will Congress a) give her the resources and support she needs to do her job and b) what exactly will her job be?
The most surprising thing about this story, is that it is news. However, Thursday’s move is a win for the entertainment industry as users of the site are now cut off from a major source of television shows, music, movies and other copyrighted content. The victory is likely to be short-lived, though, as peer-to-peer file sharers move on to other torrent sites and new technology.
Mininova, which was founded in 2005 in the Netherlands by five students, made the concession as the result of a court case brought forward by BREIN, a Dutch anti-piracy group. In June, a judge ruled that Mininova was not directly responsible for copyright infringement but ordered the website to remove links to such torrents within three months or face a fine of up to 5 million euros.
In the U.S., we call that “contributory infringement” and it’s the theory that essentially ended Napster. (Napster lives on as a Best Buy company that has copied the business model of Rhapsody.com.)
The question now becomes: what mode will folks use to rip off content? Will it be the more distributed peer-to-peer torrent network? Or will the entertainment industry take the initiative to innovate, using a model that permits more content to be accessible by folks who want it? Like the innovative collaboration between Netflix and Tivo:
Under U.S. Copyright law, a work that is “created” (fixed in tangible form for the first time), is automatically protected from the moment of its creation for a term lasting for the author’s life, plus an additional 70 years. For works made for hire, a copyright lasts for 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter. Once this time runs, the work is no longer copyrighted and becomes part of the public domain. No one controls it anymore.
What can you do with a work in the public domain? Pretty much anything you like.
Introducing the 50-page Creationist’s Introduction to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (read the Living Waters’ introduction here), a project of Conservapedia to remove “liberal Bias” from the Bible, and for nostalgia’s sake, one of the earliest attempts to edit religious text-the 19th Century Woman’s Bible.
While folks may have a knee jerk “thats-not-right” response to editing controversial works, it underscores the fact that any work in the public domain-from the Bible to On The Origin of Species-is free for anyone to make use of, however they see fit.
“So, we need to reflect on the fundamentally important question of how we are to finance culture in the future — the future evolution of the copyright system, is of course central to this debate.”
If the FCC agrees, the MPAA and the movie studios it represents would be able to “turn off” any output plug they choose, like those on the back of consumer electronics devices of an entertainment system, during special video-on-demand movies on cable television.
“It’s a natural impulse to want to support the little guy, the David who faces down a powerful Goliath. That’s why it’s easy to get behind this guy’s claims that a copycat business is suing him to force him to abandon his own copyrights. Wtf!, you might say when you read something like that. Is that even possible? It is, and the story is more nuanced when you look at both sides, which makes it a good example of why it’s sometimes hard to be a “good consumer” when deciding where to spend your money.” Read the full story at The Consumerist.
In further tales of corporations abusing the takedown notice provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Last month, BoingBoing blogger Xeni Jardin blogged about the photoshop disaster that is this Ralph Lauren advertisement, in which a model’s proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body (”Dude, her head’s bigger than her pelvis”). Naturally, Xeni reproduced the ad in question. This is classic fair use: a reproduction “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting,” etc.
Ralph Lauren’s law firm, Greenberg Traurig, dosn’t see it that way. According to them, this is an “infringing image,” and they sent a DMCA takedown notice to BoingBoing’s ISP, Canada’s Priority Colo. Priority Colo doesn’t automatically act on DMCA takedowns (FYI, Canada is not in the United States).
Instead of responding to Ralph Lauren’s legal threat by suppressing criticism of this rediculous marketing image, BoingBoing decided to mock them.
So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn’t give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better. And every time you threaten to sue us over stuff like this, we will:
a) Reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it, and;
b) Publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery, so that it becomes highly ranked in search engines where other people you threaten can find it and take heart; and
c) Offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models.
“It’s a natural impulse to want to support the little guy, the David who faces down a powerful Goliath. That’s why it’s easy to get behind 
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