A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars: symposium at The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, April 28-30, 2006 [slides, audio, transcripts]
THE FAIR USE NETWORK: INFORMATION & RESOURCES FOR FREE EXPRESSION
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Bordeaux Judge Reopens Decade-Old Child-Porn Charge
Against Curators Marie-Laure Bernadac, Henry-Claude
Cousseau, and Stéphanie Moisdon
Indicted at the end of 2006, after six years of investigations, long
period during which no element was produced that could have fed the
prosecution (the specialized unit for minors and the rectorship gave a
favourable opinion) and after the attorney general of Bordeaux called
for a not guilty decision in march 2008 the trial judge Jean-Louis
Crozier has just decided to refer before the magistrate's court
Marie-Laure Bernadac, Henry-Claude Cousseau, and Stéphanie Moisdon, for
having, within the exhibition entitled "presumed innocent- contemporary
art and childhood " organized 2000 in the CAPC contemporary museum of
art in Bordeaux exposed "violent and pornographic art works "*.
With this decision—which, in an extremely unusual move, disregards the
conclusions of a Parquet investigation—the entire national and
international artistic and professional community, together with the
cultural image of France, have come under attack and stand accused,
offended.
For the first time in France, two museum directors and a curator are to
be tried in a criminal court for exhibiting works of art that have
already been shown throughout the world or put on view since the
Bordeaux exhibition in art shows that have not elicited the least
unfavorable reaction from the public. The thinking that went into
preparing the incriminated exhibition, focused on a major subject of
art history, was developed collectively and was shared by the relevant state oversight authorities.
This court case from an earlier century, fiercely, relentlessly
prosecuted by a single judge in contempt of artistic creation and
individuals' right to accede freely to all forms of art, is indicative
of a dangerous obscurantist attitude. The trial will take place in Bordeaux under pressure from a local child protection association named La Mouette, in turn supported by an extremist press that has already been found guilty of libel against one of the accused.
How is it possible that what is considered viewable and acceptable
everywhere else should not be so in Bordeaux? What will be put on trial
in the Bordeaux magistrates' court a few months from now is the work
and personal and professional conviction of three figures of the world
of art and culture unanimously recognized for their commitment to that
world. They have already received thousands of messages of support from
all horizons.
This attempt to "criminalize" artists and other actors for their
creative work, together with the cultural sites that diffuse that work,
requires us to be extremely vigilant about censorship
of this kind, whose perpetrators are ever ready to use noble causes
such as child protection to authoritarian, liberticidal ends.
* including works by Christian Boltanski, Gary Gross, Paul McCarthy,
Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elke
Krystufek, Carsten Höller, Annette Messager, Ugo Rondinone…..
As a whole bunch of you have sent in, the musician Moby has put up a blog post where he suggests the RIAA should be disbanded for its $1.92 million win over Jammie Thomas. While (unfortunately) he gets a few of the facts wrong (they didn't sue her for
$2 million, but it's what the jury chose -- though it is accurate that
the RIAA has clearly suggested it has no problem with the statutory
rates for infringement in the past), his overall point is sound. It's
ridiculous that the RIAA thinks this is the proper strategy:
argh. what utter nonsense. this is how the record
companies want to protect themselves? suing suburban moms for listening
to music? charging $80,000 per song?
punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong
way to protect the music business. maybe the record companies have
adopted the 'it's better to be feared than respected' approach to
dealing with music fans. i don't know, but 'it's better to be feared
than respected' doesn't seem like such a sustainable business model
when it comes to consumer choice. how about a new model of 'it's better
to be loved for helping artists make good records and giving consumers
great records at reasonable prices'?
i'm so sorry that any music fan anywhere is ever made to feel bad for making the effort to listen to music.
the riaa needs to be disbanded.
This isn't new territory for Moby. Way back in 2003, he got angry
after finding out that some of his songs were being used by the RIAA to
sue people, and stated: "I'm tempted to go onto Kazaa and download some
of my own music, just to see if the RIAA would sue me for having mp3's
of my own songs on my hard-drive."
Still, we're seeing more and more artists react poorly to the
RIAA, who still claims to represent them. Why is it that our
politicians still buy that clearly incorrect story?
There are currently two high profile RIAA lawsuits taking place. One of them involves a Harvard professor and the other involves Jammie Thomas-Rasset.
Now the lawyers in both cases are forming a partnership to file a
class-action lawsuit against the RIAA to get back the $100 million that
they claim the recording industry stole.
Kiwi Camara represents Jammie Thomas-Rasset in a lawsuit that the
RIAA filed against her. There is a retrial taking place in Minnesota
next week. Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson is representing Boston
student Joel Tenenbaum in an RIAA trial as well. Kiwi and Charles are
the ones getting together to file the $100 million class action lawsuit
against the RIAA.
Camara did an interview with Ars Technica earlier this week and
revealed two pieces of evidence that will help his case. MediaSentry
was hired by the RIAA to track down the IP address of those who share
files. Camara is arguing that MediaSentry is not licensed as a private
investigator in Minnesota. This makes them running an illegal “pen
register” and their evidence should be barred.
Another approach that Camara is considering is making the RIAA prove
that they own the copyrights in question. If the RIAA or MediaSentry
cannot prove any of the above scenarios, then the cases will fall apart
for them. Camara’s approach is quite unorthodox.
Camara said that the RIAA basically committed a “technical screw-up”
when it came to claiming the proper copyright ownership. The RIAA
lawyers provided courts with “true and correct” copies of the evidence,
but they were not “certified copies” required by federal rules of
evidence.
The RIAA asked the judge to take judicial notice for these claims,
but the judge refused. The recording industry will now have a limited
amount of time to file for the certified copies. Camara already has
rebuttals in mind just in case the RIAA is able to get all of the
certified copies necessary for the case.
More news on the trial as it develops. Kudos to Ars Technica for their thorough coverage of this case.
You
are killing our creative industries. "Downloading costs billions," said
the Sun. "MORE than 7 million Brits use illegal downloading sites that
cost the economy billions of pounds, government advisers said today.
Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in
ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of
material."
That's about a tenth of our GDP. No wonder the Daily
Mail was worried too: "The network had 1.3 million users sharing files
online at midday on a weekday. If each of those downloaded just one
file per day, this would amount to 4.73bn items being consumed for free
every year." Now I am always suspicious of this industry, because they
have produced a lot of dodgy figures over the years. I also doubt that
every download is lost revenue since, for example, people who download
more also buy more music. I'd like more details.
So where do
these notions of so many billions in lost revenue come from? I found
the original report. It was written by some academics you can hire in a
unit at UCL called Ciber, the Centre for Information Behaviour and the
Evaluation of Research (which "seeks to inform by countering idle
speculation and uninformed opinion with the facts"). The report was
commissioned by a government body called Sabip, the Strategic Advisory
Board for Intellectual Property. On the billions lost it says:
"Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative
industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited,
reach £10bn (IP rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from
2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs."
What is the origin of this
conservative figure? I hunted down the full Ciber documents, found the
references section, and followed the web link, which led to a 2004
press release from a private legal firm called Rouse who specialise in
intellectual property law. This press release was not about the £10bn
figure. It was, in fact, a one-page document, which simply welcomed the
government setting up an intellectual property theft strategy. In a
short section headed "background", among five other points, it says:
"Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and
piracy cost the UK economy £10bn and 4,000 jobs." An industry estimate,
as an aside, in a press release. Genius.
But what about all these
other figures in the media coverage? Lots of it revolved around the
figure of 4.73bn items downloaded each year, worth £120bn. This means
each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3, ebook, is worth about £25.
This already seems rather high. I am not an economist, but to me, for
example, an appropriate comparator for someone who downloads a film to watch it once might be the rental value, not the sale value.
In
any case, that's £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being
spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the
economy, as reported in the press? Plenty will have been schoolkids, or
students, and even if not, that's still about a third of the average UK
wage. Before tax.
Oh, but the figures were wrong: it was actually
473m items and £12bn (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong
figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release.
They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC
journalist.
I asked what steps they took to notify journalists of
their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of 10 and
were reported around the world. Sabip refused to answer questions in
emails, insisted on a phone call, told me that they had taken steps but
wouldn't say what and explained something about how they couldn't be
held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after 10
minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the call was off the
record. I think it's OK to be confused and disappointed by this. Like I
said: as far as I'm concerned, everything from this industry is false,
until proven otherwise.
Associated PressJ.D. Salinger, now 90 years old, is suing to stop the publication of “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.”
Updated | 9:20 a.m. An author who is being sued for a coming novel that J.D. Salinger says is “a rip-off pure and simple” of “The Catcher in the Rye” will argue that his book is a legally protected literary commentary on Mr. Salinger’s original novel.
The book “explores the famously reclusive Salinger’s efforts to
control both his own persona and the persona of the character he
created,” according to the brief. “It also scrutinizes and criticizes
the iconic stature of Salinger and his creation by comparing the
precocious and self-satisfied 16-year-old Holden with a 76-year-old
version of himself fraught with indecision and insecurity.”
Earlier this month,
Mr. Salinger, 90, filed suit against Mr. Colting, a Swedish author who
wrote “60 Years Later” under the pseudonym John David California. The
book, published in Britain and scheduled for release in the United
States, centers on a 76-year-old character called Mr. C, who wanders
the streets of New York after he escapes his nursing home, in a manner
similar to Holden Caulfield’s escape from an elite prep school. Opening
arguments in the case are scheduled to begin Wednesday in U.S. District
Court in Manhattan.
In their brief, Frankfurt Kurnit, the lawyers for Mr. Colting, say
that his book is a literary commentary on “Catcher in the Rye,” Mr.
Salinger and his Holden Caulfield character, and is a parody protected
by fair use laws. They say Mr. Colting’s book “imagines the interaction
between two narrator/protagonists: ‘Mr. Salinger,’ a bitter and angry
reclusive author, and Mr. C, the fictional character he has created.”
In a written declaration filed with the brief,
Mr. Colting writes, “I am not a pirate.” He adds that he did not write
“60 Years Later” as a “cheap rip-off of one of the most famous works of
modern fiction” but rather as “a critical exploration of such themes as
the relationship between J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author,
and Holden Caulfield, his brash and ageless fictional creation.”
Mr. Colting also writes in his declaration that Mr. Salinger has
“exercised iron-clad control over his intellectual property, refusing
to allow others to adapt any of his characters or stories in other
media.”
He says that several scenes in “60 Years Later” comment on the
uneasy relationship between his imagined version of Mr. Salinger and
the Holden Caulfield character: “In order to regain control over his
own life, which is drawing to a close, ‘Mr. Salinger’ tries repeatedly
to kill off Mr. C by various means: a runaway truck; falling
construction debris; a lunatic woman with a knife; suicide by drowning
and suicide by pills.”
Mr. Colting acknowledges that three original characters from
“Catcher in the Rye” appear in his novel: Mr. C, his sister Phoebe and
Stradlater, Holden Caulfield’s prep school roommate. He also provides a list of more than two dozen original characters he has created for his novel, including Mary, Mr. C’s deceased wife, and Daniel, his son.
The legal filing also included a written declaration
from Aaron Silverman, the owner of SCB Distributors, a California-based
company that planned to release “60 Years Later” in the United States.
In his declaration, Mr. Silverman included a mock-up of the book’s
cover, which features a rough sketch of the Manhattan skyline, with
disclaimers that read “A Fictional Examination of the Relationship
Between J.D. Salinger and His Most Famous Character” and “This critical
literary speculation has not been approved, licensed or endorsed by
J.D. Salinger.”
In additional written declarations, Martha Woodmansee, a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, writes that Mr. Colting’s novel is a work of “meta-commentary” and “is thus a complex work, more complex than” Mr. Salinger’s novel. Sara Nelson, the former editor of Publishers Weekly, writes
that a US release of “Sixty Years Later” would not adversely affect
sales of “Catcher in the Rye.” “Anticipated sales of ‘60 Years,’ a
critical analysis by a little-known author, pale in comparison to
‘Catcher’’s success,” Ms. Nelson said in her declaration.
In
response to the many complex issues relating to information and
ownership in the digital age, Iona College will host its inaugural
Conference on Intellectual Property (CIP) from June 12-13, 2009. The
conference, which will feature more than 30 scholars from Africa, Asia,
Europe and North America, is open to the public and will explore
intellectual property in a cross-disciplinary setting, as both a
concept and as a reality in numerous academic and professional fields.
New Rochelle, NY (PRWEB)
June 5, 2009 -- In response to the many complex issues relating to
information and ownership in the digital age, Iona College will host
its inaugural Conference on Intellectual Property (CIP) from June
12-13, 2009. The conference, which will feature more than 30 scholars
from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, is open to the public and
will explore intellectual property in a cross-disciplinary setting, as
both a concept and as a reality in numerous academic and professional
fields.
The conference will feature keynote addresses by Laura M. Quilter,
an attorney and researcher in technology and information law and
policy, and Joy Garnett, a painter who appropriates news and
documentary photographs from newspapers, the internet and other media
and re-invents them as paintings.
Calls for papers on intellectual property were sent out last fall,
and a number of papers were selected from those submissions. Following
the conference, the organizers plan to publish an edited volume of
papers on the topic.
"There is a vast amount of research and discussion on intellectual
property and its implications in academic and professional situations,"
said Amy D. Stackhouse, Associate Professor of English at Iona College,
who is organizing the conference. "This conference is a chance to
examine the issues across the disciplines, enabling us to learn from
one another and further our progress in this ever-changing world of
information."
Fees for the conference are $125 per person with academic
affiliation and $165 per person with non- academic affiliation.
Accommodations are available on-campus for $85 per night, or at the
Radisson in New Rochelle for $129 per night. For complete information
or to register, visit www.iona.edu/cip.
Founded in 1940 by the Congregation of Edmund Rice Christian Brothers,
Iona College is a private, coeducational institution of learning in the
tradition of American Catholic higher education. Iona, currently listed
in the US News and World Report's annual "America's Best Colleges 2008"
and The Princeton Review's Best Northeastern Colleges 2008 edition,
offers undergraduate degrees in liberal arts, science, and business
administration, as well as master of arts, master of science and master
of business administration degrees and numerous post-graduate
certificate programs.
Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld
has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one
day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of
critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the
first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty
EDITOR's NOTE: Apparently, GQ saw fit to WATERMARK these images...ha ha! which adds a priceless layer of irony, however inappropriate that may be.
Does GQ think that they own the copyright? These are declassified US military documents, which means they are in the Public Domain.... GQ scooped everyone and has the exclusive slide show -- cool -- they should be bent on disseminating them far and wide.
via NYTimes, Op-Ed, May 16, 2009, by Frank Rich: {excerpts}
TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we
were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing
so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the
previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and
true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year
nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new
administration’s high ambitions. [...]
There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site
an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald
Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American
lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a
partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead
Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing
(and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws
on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.
Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination
to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s
most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to
undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection
of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of
Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest
prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often
delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself.
These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of
the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and
they are seriously creepy.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just
as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1,
a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account
of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of
setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the
United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page
that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide
Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I
not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do
not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you
go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)
What’s up with that? [...]
Important links/more info on Psyops and its history:
I was lucky enough to catch Larry Lessig's talk "Copyright Wars," at the Sophiensaele on my last night in Berlin. It was sponsored by the Heinrich Boll Foundation.
I finally got a chance to watch this great documentary on my flight home from Berlin yesterday -- perfectly fitting after participating in the ECLA State of the World Week conference on the Politics of Cultural Ownership, and then catching the surprise talk by Lessig at the Sophiensaele along with some of "my" students on my last night in town.
(I'll be remixing some screen grabs from this film for my powerpoint keynote at Iona College's inaugural Conference on Intellectual Property in June -- more on that soon!)
When it comes to remix culture, copyfight and crowd-sourcing, Brett
Gaylor walks the walk. The director of “open source documentary” RiP: A Remix Manifesto
released his feature-length film under a Creative Commons license and
even adopted Radiohead’s name-your-own-price business model when he
made the movie available online.
“We’ve gone to really great lengths to make this film as accessible
as possible,” Gaylor explained in an e-mail interview conducted after
announcing the download Monday. “It’s already on the Pirate Bay, and
that’s great — it’s another delivery format. We didn’t put it there
ourselves, though; we didn’t need to. Had we gone that route, it’s
fairly likely, given the realities of the film-distribution universe,
that we wouldn’t have these other opportunities to get the film to
people who still watch TV, rent DVDs or go to movies, which is, in
fact, most people. We wanted those people to watch this movie.”
Featuring mashup artist Girl Talk and luminaries like Lawrence Lessig, Gilberto Gil and Cory Doctorow, RiP: A Remix Manifesto debuted in Amsterdam and Canada last year and in North America last month. It opens theatrically Friday in New York.
The movie’s compelling analysis of sampling, sharing and
copyfighting was pieced together over six years, during which Gaylor
shared his raw footage with other filmmakers, some of whose remixes he
spliced into the film. Given the realities of remix culture, where
there is no such thing as a final cut, Gaylor subsequently offered the
movie online as a remix experiment at Open Source Cinema, which he founded and beta-launched in 2004.
Since then, the little doc that could has nabbed awards, screened at
panels and walked the tightrope between theatrical and internet
distribution, original art and open-sourced amalgam, without falling
off.
Gaylor talks about copyfight crusaders, the trials and tribulations
of the distribution war, and the joys of messing with the media.
RiP: A Remix Manifesto director Brett Gaylor asks fans to pay what they will for his downloadable doc. Photo: Mila Aung-Thwin
Wired.com: The pay-what-you-want initiative makes
perfect sense for this film, but I’m betting it wasn’t easy to pull off
from a business perspective.
Brett Gaylor: It’s been a peculiar road to get to
the point where we could release the film as a download, because
obviously this is something we wanted to do right from the get go. But
since we have so many partners that helped us make the film, including
theatrical and television distributors, it was a delicate balancing act
to make sure the good faith they showed in making the film would be
rewarded, that we wouldn’t undercut their efforts to promote and recoup
on the film by giving it away. So we waited a while before launching
the various online permutations. The National Film Board [of Canada]
put up a chaptered version during our U.S. premiere at South by
Southwest in March, and we embedded calls to action into each chapter.
Around SXSW, we partnered with two American partners —
Disinformation for our DVD release, and BSide for the theatrical side
of things. And at the first meeting I had with them, it became clear
that we needed to go down this road. We knew the film would appear on
file-sharing networks immediately and we knew the audience for the film
wanted and expected it to be online. So knowing that, we wanted there
to be a method for those who wanted to pay to do so.
Wired.com: Are you satisfied with the arrangement so far?
Gaylor: It’s still not moving as fast as I’d
ultimately like. The pay-what-you-can is at the moment just available
for those in the U.S., while some of the other world territories do
their thing theatrically or on DVD. And we, being the National Film
Board of Canada, and our production company EyeSteelFilm, want those
territories to be able to have a chance to define their own business
model, so it’s fair. Its been a lot of tricky e-mails.
Wired.com: How has the theatrical run gone, and how are you feeling about the New York City opening?
Gaylor: The theatrical run so far has been amazing.
In Canada, it played literally coast to coast, and there is something
immensely satisfying as a filmmaker to see your film’s title on a
marquee and have people watch it together on a big screen. We went to a
lot of lengths for it to work well in that format; it’s got big sound,
beautiful graphics and animation, and the cinematographer Mark Ellam did an amazing job.
It’s also really challenging to engage the public in theaters,
because you’re playing your film to this broad demographic. We had
people in the lineups at the AMC trying to decide if they’d go see Benjamin Button
or this crazy copyright remix movie, so that was a surreal pleasure. It
also generated a ton of press for the film, mostly great, but the film
enraged the right-wing papers in the country who took a lot of umbrage
with its central themes.
Battle lines over free culture are drawn in this RiP collage, entitled Copyright vs. Copyleft.
Wired.com: Tell us about the New York screening, which coincides with a panel from the Open Video Alliance about standards and practices.
Gaylor: We’re doing a sneak preview on Friday and
then following up with the launch at the Open Video Conference, which
I’m extremely excited to participate in. I was part of the initial
planning sessions for this group back in the fall, and it really feels
like a culmination of all this disparate work that has been going on in
the free culture world for years. Filmmakers, free software geeks,
remixers, lawyers, academics — all these different people who have been
working on these parallel tracks are starting to feed their work into
one another, and I find it incredibly inspiring. So it will be an honor
to show the film there. It’s a tough crowd, too!
Wired.com: What are your thoughts on the future of open video?
Gaylor: I’m generally optimistic about it. There
are a lot of challenges, for sure: Lack of universal standards,
third-party rights, bandwidth, access for the developing world, and a
lack of basic media literacy among users. On the flip side, I think the
internet will very quickly overtake TV as the content-delivery medium
of choice, and with that comes the opportunity for a genuine
participatory experience. I think the time is now for developing the
tools, standards and practices to make sure we don’t just see TV 2.0.
Party music remix champ Greg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, fights the good copyfight in RiP: A Remix Manifesto. Photo: Andrew Strasser
Wired.com: Talk about working with Girl Talk’s
Gregg Gillis and Negativland’s Mark Hosler on this film and its various
openings. What role have both played in the evolution of remix culture?
Gaylor: Working with Gregg was a lot of fun. One of
the reasons I wanted to include him in the film is because he doesn’t
see himself as a copyright crusader. He’s a serious musician whose work
points out a lot of flaws, contradictions and challenges in current
copyright law. The fact that he’s been able to reach such a level of
success without a lawsuit has created a lot of elbow room for musicians.
When you think about Negativland,
which had a fairly major lawsuit filed against them over a decade ago,
it’s obvious that things are changing. Negativland had a huge influence
on my life. Watching it take such an intelligent, activist stance was
very inspiring, and you could tell they were taking such joy in fucking
with the media. It was something I looked at and said, “Yeah, I could
do that! I want to do that!”
Wired.com: How about Lessig and Doctorow?
Gaylor: Their writing put some meat on the bones,
and framed the debate for a whole generation of copyright activists.
For a lot of people, it was like suddenly realizing: “That’s what kind
of activist I am.”
Wired.com: You’ve said in your blog that
“theatrical distribution is a war.” Can you elaborate? And what does
internet distribution, legal and otherwise, offer in terms of an olive
branch?
Gaylor: It’s a war in that you have to do so much
to get the proverbial butts in the seats. It’s extremely costly and the
stakes are high, whereas I think the internet gives some opportunities
to speak directly to an audience. With RiP, we tried to have
the best of both worlds. It was important that folks who weren’t
exposed to these issues were able to see it, but we also wanted to try
and lower the friction as much as possible to those who were active
online and who would really see themselves in the film.
Wired.com: Now that you’ve made a film on these
issues, has your mind changed about intellectual property or ownership?
What’s the tightrope there?
Gaylor: The classic copyright ones: Providing an
incentive, while at the same time ensuring the public’s access to the
work. Ultimately, that’s what I, and most people in this movement, are
pushing for — a balance. So the film release was a lot more “free as in
speech” than it was “free as in beer,” because it was important for me
that average folks could see the film on TV or in theaters. And
eventually, after a limited term (measured in months!), the film will
fall into the public/pirate domain and be copied freely.
Wired.com: Do you envision a day when theatrical distribution is a dinosaur, and we’re all paying to stream films online?
Gaylor: We’ll see how I feel about that in a year.
The remixing is just starting to take off, and I envision a time when
these sorts of interactions will create an environment where a
theatrical screening is to filmmakers what live performances are to
musicians. The ability to create something unique for a particular
screening or event allows you to offer an added value to that audience
member, as well as have something unique that’s different from what you
can get on a DVD or online.
Legal
scholar and copyright reform advocate Lawrence Lessig was unhappy to
discover that one of his presentations on YouTube was hit with a bogus
DMCA takedown notice from Warner Music. Lessig intends to fight back
and give Warner some schooling on fair use.
By
Ryan Paul
| Last updated April 29, 2009 9:05 AM CT
Lawrence Lessig, the well-known legal scholar and copyright reform advocate who founded Creative Commons, was surprised to discover that Warner Music issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice against one of his presentations on YouTube.
Lessig, who is a leading expert on the legal principle of fair use and an outspoken critic of DMCA abuse, intends to fight the takedown notice.
Warner Music just flunked out of common sense 101 and is about to get
some unpleasant remedial schooling from the irate professor.
The growing volume of infringing content on YouTube has made it a
major target for DMCA takedown notices. Unfortunately, the content
producers that are flooding the site with takedowns are rarely taking
adequate steps to ensure the validity of their claims and are
indiscriminately targeting videos that fall within the boundaries of
fair use.
In some cases, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other organizations have stepped in
and filed lawsuits against takedown abusers in an effort to protect
fair use. Such efforts are time-consuming and often fraught with
difficulty. It's pretty clear that the content companies aren't really
getting the message, as their claims continue to descend into increasingly ludicrous territory.
Big content believes
that it should be permissible to issue takedowns whenever it wants,
regardless of whether the content is fair use, and that there should be
no consequences or liability for doing so, even when the basis for the
takedown is clearly bogus.
Lessig is strongly committed to educating the public, lawmakers, and
the content industry about the importance of protecting fair use from
DMCA abuses, so it seems likely that he will take advantage of Warner's
mistake to raise awareness of the issue. The fact that the notice was
issued at all serves as yet another reminder of how easily the barrage
of poorly considered DMCA takedowns can hit innocent bystanders.
Hat tip to TechDirt for first noticing the tweets.
"Can a noncommercial website use the trademark of the entity it critiques in its domain name?
Surprisingly, it appears that the usually open-minded folks at
Wikipedia think not. The EFF reports that Scott Kildall and Nathaniel
Stern have created a noncommercial website at Wikipediaart.org
intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. Since
'Wikipedia' is a trademark owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, the
Foundation has demanded that the artists give up the domain name
peaceably or it will attempt to take it by legal force. 'Wikipedia
should know better. There is no trademark or cybersquatting issue
here,' writes the EFF's Corynne McSherry. 'Moreover, even if US
trademark laws somehow reached this noncommercial activity, the
artists' use of the mark is an obvious fair use.' It is hard to see
what Wikipedia gains by litigating this matter, but easy to see how they lose."
