Copyright

Lessig asks for help in Fairy defence

Lessig is asking for help in the Shepard Fairy/AP case. He writes on his blog:

As mentioned, the Fair Use Project at Stanford’s CIS is representing Shepard Fairey in his suit against the AP. To that end, we’d be grateful for some net-based knowledge. How many photos are there “like” the beautiful photograph that Mannie Garcia took (the one on the left; the one on the right is a CC licensed photo taken by Steve Jurvetson)? Can you send any examples to shep_use@pobox.com?

Also, please send any favorite examples of photos used as visual references for other works of art. We lawyers don’t know much, but we can learn pretty quickly.

Posted on by mklang

Pursuit of Efficient Copyright

Herkko Hietanen, project lead for CC Finland, has finished his PhD dissertation and it’s online (CC BY-NC-ND). The work is called The Pursuit of Efficient Copyright Licensing — How Some Rights Reserved Attempts to Solve the Problems of All Rights Reserved. Here are some extracts from the blurb:

This dissertation analyses the growing pool of copyrighted works, which are offered to the public using Creative Commons licensing. The study consist of analysis of the novel licensing system, the licensors, and the changes of the “all rights reserved” —paradigm of copyright law.
…
The study finds that the innovative Creative Commons licensing scheme is well suited for low value – high volume licensing. It helps to reduce transaction costs on several le¬vels. However, CC licensing is not a “silver bullet”. Privacy, moral rights, the problems of license interpretation and license compatibility with other open licenses and collecting societies remain unsolved.
…
The dissertation contributes to the existing literature in several ways. There is a wide range of prior research on open source licensing. However, there is an urgent need for an extensive study of the Creative Commons licensing and its actual and potential impact on the creative ecosystem.

This should be interesting and well worth reading.

Posted on by mklang

The trial of the decade! Or maybe a non-event?

Tomorrow the long awaited file sharing/internet piracy trial will begin. The Times Online called it the Internet piracy trial of the decade. It’s the Pirate Bay website (or rather four men behind the site) that go on trial for enabling millions of internet users to make illegal downloads of music, movies, games and software. The courts will look into subjects like

– what is a link

– what is a search engine

– aiding criminal offences

Most of the stuff is interesting from a legal-technical point of view since the outcome will hardly have any effect on file sharing on the Internet. The most probably outcome will be a court “victory” for the copyright industry and an appeal to the next level. The case will move towards the inevitable Supreme Court trial. The whole affair should be very interesting and yet, in practical terms, not relevant the total amount of file sharing online. User may have to switch to another provider or service but most probably the Pirate Bay will remain online in some form.

The story so far on ars technica, Times Online, Guardian. Also take a look at the Pirate Bays own dedicated trial site The Spectrial.

To understand how big this is take a look at the torrent user statistics on a map in real time here. Killing a website like the Pirate Bay will not stop this.

Posted on by mklang

YouTube & Creative Commons

YouTube has collaborated with Creative Commons to allow users to test the ability of users to upload & download video’s under Creative Commons licenses. Obviously users will be able to download the movies and be able to follow the licensing terms. Read more about this on the YouTube and Creative Commons blogs.

Posted on by mklang

Combining GPL and Proprietary Software

Bruce Perens has written an interesting article about combining GPL with proprietary software the main point of discussion concerns the problem of combining software under different licenses in embedded devices. The article ends with a paragraph on what not to do:

Don’t assume that you can put proprietary kernel drivers in a run-time loadable kernel module. The legality of such a practice is dubious, and there have not been sufficient cases to say reliably what would happen if you were to get sued.

Also, don’t look for, and use loopholes in the Open Source licenses. Nothing makes your company look worse than taking unfair advantage of people who provided their work to you without charge, expecting in good faith that you’d honor their license. It also tends to make Open Source folks reluctant to cooperate with your company, the next time you need help with their software. And it looks bad to judges, too.

Don’t try to do what I’ve discussed without legal counsel to advise and review your actions.

This is a particularly tricky subject and every time a writer tackles it we slowly move towards a better understanding – but there is still a long way to go. In fact that shortest answer to the problem of combining GPL & proprietary software in one device may be “don’t do it if you are not sure” but not many are going to follow that advice since free and open source software is too much of a competitive advantage for developers to ignore.

(via Slashdot)

Posted on by mklang

On the joy of reuse

Mike Linksvayer has written a post on the Creative Commons blog on the joy of having other people find and reuse material. And I agree. So ok I am a hobby photographer and like so many of us I take good and bad pictures and post them online. Well to be fair a large group of hobby photographers take brilliant photographs and post them online.

The fun part is that lots of my photographs have been used to illustrate stuff online on blogs (sweet things to say & your monkey called), discussion forums, encyclopedia (construmatica) and even as a title photo for a group on library thing. Some don’t get the whole attribution thing but most do and it is really a kick looking up photo’s that I have taken and finding them somewhere unexpected – sometimes on sites in languages I don’t understand.

For me it’s not about the mass recognition (well ok I admit it would be fun) but it’s about the everyday use all over the place that gives my work with the camera an extra kick.

Posted on by mklang

Rushdie on book copyright

In January, Salman Rushdie was 92nd Y in New York attending something called The Moral Courage Conversations together with Irshad Manji. A brief interlude among the questions was whether or not he saw copyright as an impediment to freedom of speech. So while I was waiting for a deep understanding from one of my favorite authors on a topic that interests me deeply.

Question: Have you considered copyright law as an barrier to free speech?

Rushdie: er,…no… but that’s because I write for a living…

Then Rushdie launches into an interesting perspective on book piracy. In particular to the problem of illegal copies of his work being made. Actually he does not throw any light on the role of Internet in this question but it does raise an interesting perspective which we digital copyright activists tend to forget in our focus on file sharing. Rushdie is is as eloquent as ever. humorous in the face of piracy.

The question comes a long way in the video at 1 hour 10 ten minutes 55 seconds (ends about 1 hour, 14 minutes 40 seconds)

Posted on by mklang

Viral Spiral, Bollier's new book

I have been a fan of David Bollier since I read his book Silent Theft so I was happy to see that he had written a new book on the importance of the public domain and the commons. The book, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a
Digital Republic of Their Own is also available for download under a Creative Commons license. From the website:

One of the big themes of Viral Spiral is the enormous value generated from making one’s work openly available on the Internet. While publishing traditionalists are skeptical of this new reality, a number of pioneering authors and publishers have shown the commercial appeal of posting their books online using one or another Creative Commons licenses. Among the more notable authors are Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, Yochai Benkler, Dan Gillmor and Peter Barnes. In the same spirit, New Press has authorized the following download of the text of Viral Spiral. I hope that anyone who has the chance to browse through the PDF version of the book will want to buy a hard copy.

Posted on by mklang

Scooby Doo is ancient and Chinese

Scooby-Doo was a childhood favourite of mine the cowardly, hungry dog always getting into scary situations provided lots of memorable occaissions. Common knowledge was that the characters in the series were created by Hanna Barbera in 1969 but I have made an important discovery on the streets of Göteborg today.

Photo Chinese Scooby Doo by Wrote (CC by-nc)

This stone statue of the great Scooby was, according to its dating certificate, fired somewhere between 1500 – 2400 years ago according to the Thermoluminescence Analysis Report. So here finally the massive conspiracy has been unmasked 🙂

Posted on by mklang