Professor Charles Nesson, Founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has come to the defense of Joel Tenenbaum, who was among dozens of people who appeared in court in RIAA cases without legal help.

The 24-year-old Tenenbaum is a graduate student accused by the RIAA of downloading at least seven songs and making 816 music files available for distribution on the Kazaa file-sharing network in 2004. He offered to settle the case for $500, but music companies rejected that, demanding $12,000. (See RODRIQUE NGOWI’s story on myway.com–exerpt below.)

“Professor Nesson is argueing that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group - the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA - carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. He also says the music industry group abused the legal process by brandishing the prospects of lengthy and costly lawsuits in an effort to intimidate people into settling cases out of court.”

According to Professor Nesson’s blog, this case is about more than standing up to a Mafia-like RIAA that is out to teach kids like Joel Tenenbaum, “that there is a real world out here. It’s a world of pain imposed on you by power. [It's] time for the recording industry to see that reality has changed, and all their lobbying power in the congress, and all their litigating power in the courts, and all their manipulation of the public mind to equate sharing music with theft, cannot stop the growth of a digital environment in which peers have ability to gather and share.”

Godspeed. 

Liked This Article? Bookmark It

This week the Copyright Alliance issued a press release that it had filed an Amicus Curiae Brief with the United States Supreme Court.  The Alliance asks the Court to review a Second Circuit ruling in the case of Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings, Inc. According to the press release, “the Copyright Alliance has never before filed a brief in any court, but is impelled to do so in this case because the decision below could be so detrimental to the health of our copyright system…Although this case arose in the context of reproduction and public performance of audio-visual works by a cable systems operator, its potential impact across copyright industries is much broader.”

The case was complicated, but boils down to this:  cable operators may record on their own servers content for their customers to watch at a later time.  DVRs that provide time-shifting of content don’t have to sit at your home, cluttering up your entertainment center.  They can exist in the “cloud” on Internet server farms owned by cable operators such as CableVision.  (TiVo is already wincing…)

The Copyright Alliance argues that the Second Circuit’s decision in Cartoon Network fundamentally undermines the laws protecting content owners. In fact, the holding was recently used successfully to challenge the Copyright Office’s guidelines for mechanical royalties applicable to Internet radio.  The new Interim Rulewas released for comment on November 7, 2008, and states that “a Server-end copy that is the source of a transmission of a performance that does not result in the making and distribution of a [Digital Phonorecord Delivery] would not fall within the scope of compulsory license.”  For those of you who don’t read Governmentese, that means that listening to music on Pandora is not the same as buying the same music from Rhapsody.  Or in the real world, listening to the radio isn’t the same as buying a CD.

Liked This Article? Bookmark It

On Tuesday, the Google Book Search Copyright Settlement website was launched to adminster the settlement agreement reached between Google and the Authors Guild.  The Guild had sued Google in September 2005, after Google struck deals with major university libraries to scan and copy millions of books in their collections. Many of these were older books in the public domain, but millions of others were still under copyright protection.

If approved, the Settlement will authorize Google to continue to scan in-copyright Books and Inserts; to develop an electronic Books database; to sell subscriptions to the Books database to schools, corporations and other institutions; to sell individual Books to consumers; and to place advertisements next to pages of Books. Google will pay Rightsholders, through a Book Rights Registry (“Registry”), 63% of all revenues earned from these uses, and the Registry will distribute those revenues to the Rightsholders of the Books and Inserts who register with the Registry.

Liked This Article? Bookmark It

According to a press release issued today by American University’s Center for Social Media, the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education will be released November 11th in an attempt to educate educators about the types of materials they can use without permission in classrooms.  The code was developed by the National Association for Media Literacy Education, the Action Coalition for Media Education, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Visual Communication Studies Division of the International Communication Association, and the Media Education Foundation.  It will focus on five principles, each with limitations:

Educators can, under some circumstances:

1. Make copies of newspaper articles, TV shows, and other copyrighted works, and use them and keep them for educational use.

2. Create curriculum materials and scholarship with copyrighted materials embedded.

3. Share, sell and distribute curriculum materials with copyrighted materials embedded.

 Learners can, under some circumstances:

4. Use copyrighted works in creating new material

5. Distribute their works digitally if they meet the transformativeness standard.

As part of the project, a video has been produced to help students understand how they can use copyrighted materials. Although the full video will not be available for viewing until November 11, preview/teaser clips are online and ready for viewing.

More to come.

Liked This Article? Bookmark It