Mr. Colting will need to demonstrate that his work falls into the exceptions established under the doctrine of fair use. In the meantime, Mr. Colting may want to look into the similar problems encountered by Alice Randal when she published “The Wind Done Gone” and promptly was sued by the estate of Margaret Mitchell for her “unauthorized parody”. (Just for the record, parodies don’t require authorization.)
Word to the wise–to avoid raising the ire of unexpired copyright holders, focus your commentary and parody on works that have entered the public domain. (See “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”)
In a full on, beat down of a woman who downloaded 24 songs (street value $23.76), a Minnesota Jury returned a verdict against Ms. Thomas-Rasset for $ 80,000 for each song she willfully downloaded.
Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, said the RIIA was “pleased that the jury agreed with the evidence and found the defendant liable.” “We appreciate the jury’s service and that they take this as seriously as we do,” she said.
I’m reminded of the Star Trek episode were Wesley Crusher is sentenced to death for crossing a white line and stepping on the grass. Some laws are just stupid.
COPENHAGEN - As a candidate for the European Parliament elections on Sunday, the Swedish Pirate Party has “good chances” of winning one, two or possibly even three mandates, it says, referring to Swedish opinion polls.
The Swedish Pirate Party’s platform has three components: It wants to do away with the patent system, it wants to reform the copyright system and limit protection (“Today’s copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money 70 years after he is dead,” it says), and it wants to protect individual freedom from the “surveillance state.”
While cruising the interwebs for the perfect way to explain copyright myths and realities to a group of high school students, I cam across the following article by Brad Templeton. Thanks for the summary!
Like the code, the video identifies six kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain limitations. They are:
Commenting or critiquing of copyrighted material,
Use for illustration or example,
Incidental or accidental capture of copyrighted material,
Memorializing or rescuing of an experience or event,
Use to launch a discussion, and
Recombining to make a new work, such as a mashup or a remix, whose elements depend on relationships between existing works
Artists in the U.S. have finally caught onto the fact that while you may have a copyright from the moment you fix your work in a “tangible medium of expression” (such as a CD, DVD, book, or painting), that copyright is fairly meaningless without a registration from the Library of Congress.
“Of the 10,000 applications that pour into the Copyright Office each week, the staff can process about 7,000, adding 3,000 untouched applications to a growing pile that currently totals about 523,000. Workers are now handling paper applications received in late 2007.”
Apparently, a lot of the problem stems from the Copyright Office’s move to the eCO (the Electronic Copyright Office) system, which was meant to speed up the registration of Copyright Applications. Instead the eCO system has been plagued with problems, while an increase in paper applications has simply overwhelmed the Copyright Office staff.
So, is it time for the United States to join the rest o the world and eliminate the requirment to register copyright to enjoy full protection?
Microsoft has signed a 3-year agreement aimed at making the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou “a model for innovation and protection of intellectual property.” Microsoft will set up a “center to focus on developing the local technology industry and for Microsoft to provide curriculum support, technology and training for teachers at Hangzhou Normal University through an institute set up to nurture local innovation.
Nice carrot, what about a stick?
Enter Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage program, which “turns the wallpaper of computers using pirated Windows software black and notifies users, urging them to get a legitimate copy.” I can only imagine how annoying this would be and I have to wonder: would this sort of approach work with other content, such as DVDs? Is guilt more powerful than threatened litigation? It will be interesting to see what kind of results the Genuine Advantage program generates.
Whether its “Global warming” v. “Climate change” or “File sharing v. Piracy”, setting the vocabularly of the conversation can set the tone. Here are two different views on the incomplete versions of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” that have been available on the Internet for the last month.
From the CNN point of view:
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By Lisa Respers France (CNN) — When the highly anticipated movie “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” opened Friday in theaters, many fans had already seen it.
The pirating and distribution of “Wolverine,” starring Hugh Jackman, is being investigated by the FBI.
The online leak of a pirated, unfinished version of the 20th Century Fox film a month ago sent federal authorities springing into action and stoked a heated conversation within the entertainment industry about digital piracy.
Piracy of upcoming films is not new, but the theft of “Wolverine” is especially troubling for an industry concerned with a stalled economy and the financial bottom line.
Within a week of “Wolverine’s” March 31 leak, more than a million people had downloaded the movie, according to TorrentFreak, a blog devoted to the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol….(read full article at CNN.)
(Underlines added. Notice how “file-sharing” is mentioned only as an adjective to “protocol,” while “piracy” is repreated until it is replaced with “theft”.)
From the Media Blogging point of view:
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In another interesting look at the issue, Jason Kotke looks at what happens to mainstream columnists who review such pirated works. Apparently, they never work in this town again.
“We’ve just been made aware that Roger Friedman, a freelance columnist who writes Fox 411 on Foxnews.com — an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox — watched on the Internet and reviewed a stolen and unfinished version of ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine.’ This behavior is reprehensible and we condemn this act categorically — whether the review is good or bad.”
A tip to freelance columnists out there–don’t admit that you watch torrents and don’t get caught reviewing one!
American University Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) in conjunction with the Center for Social Media at American University (CSM) is releasing a series of papers by copyright experts entitled Copyright & Documentary Film in the Commonwealth: Legal Scholar Reports from Six Countries.
The papers cover the extent of fair use or fair dealing exceptions to copyright applicable to documentary filmmakers in Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, India, Canada and Australia. The papers cover the extent of fair use or fair dealing exceptions to copyright applicable to documentary filmmakers in Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, India, Canada and Australia.
STOCKHOLM —
“The entertainment industry won round one Friday in a legal battle against file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay, with guilty verdicts and one-year prison sentences handed down to four men accused of running and financing the popular site.”
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