Good Copy Bad Copy is a documentary about copyright and culture, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. It features interviews with Danger Mouse, Girl Talk, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Lawrence Lessig, and many others with various perspectives on copyright.
Download the torrent for the XviD version of the whole movie at goodcopybadcopy.net.
Open Source Cinema is a collaborative documentary project to create a feature film about copyright in the digital age.
Several years ago, I began researching the intersection of culture and creativity – exploring how in the digital age, everything we know about copyright has been turned upside down. From mash-ups to filesharing, creation to distribution, everything is in flux.
This all came in to sharp relief when I attended the MGM vs Grokster oral argument in 2005. Outside, the music industry and file-sharing supporters alike protested in large numbers. One music industry veteran declared â??music is like a donut. Pay for the donut, you get to eat itâ??. Meanwhile, a 16 kid told me â??I donâ??t think you can own music – its just feelings. How can you own that?â?? So whoâ??s right? Is culture a product? Will the next generation ever settle for anything less than free? Thats what I want to explore in this documentary, which is tentatively titled Basement Tapes.
For more information about The Film – check out the WikiFilm.
For more information about the philosophy of the project, check out the Maninfesto
Have you been following the recent blog craze on the topic of Digg and the HD DVD key? Basically the Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demand and all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.
Naturally this just made things more exciting and the number now appears on over 50 000 websites, as a set of colors, a poem and at least one t-shirt!
Many of the blogs reporting this news have been in anguish over the fact that numbers should not be copyrightable but this is acutally missing the point. Fred von Lohmann (EFF) clarifies the situation in a neatly written post:
Is the key copyrightable? It doesn’t matter. The AACS-LA takedown letter is not claiming that the key is copyrightable, but rather that it is (or is a component of) a circumvention technology. The DMCA does not require that a circumvention technology be, itself, copyrightable to enjoy protection.
Not bad. The Economist is against DRM making bold statements in a recent article:
Belatedly, music executives have come to realise that DRM simply doesnâ??t work. It is supposed to stop unauthorised copying, but no copy-protection system has yet been devised that cannot be easily defeated. All it does is make life difficult for paying customers, while having little or no effect on clandestine copying plants that churn out pirate copies.
and
While most of todayâ??s DRM schemes that come embedded on CDs and DVDs are likely to disappear over the next year or two, the need to protect copyrighted music and video will remain. Fortunately, there are better ways of doing this than treating customers as if they were criminals.
Nice to see that serious media has begun to realise that rhetoric alone is not enough to legitimize DRM. Articles such as this show that media is beginning to practice journalism and report not only what is written in corporate press releases but are looking at what is happening all around them.
(via Boing Boing)
Copyright has a tendency to make library work difficult. This is a growing trend and many of the larger libraries in the world are struggling to come to terms with copyright issues.
Yesterday the EU’s High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries – which includes, inter alia, stakeholders from the British Library, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Federation of European Publishers and Google – presented an advisory report on copyright issues to the European Commission.
The group also discussed how to ensure more open access to scientific research and how to improve public-private cooperation. The work of the High Level Group is part of the European Commission’s efforts to make Europe’s rich cultural and scientific heritage available online. For this purpose, the group advises the Commission on issues regarding digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation of cultural material.
Read their Report on Digital Preservation, Orphan Works and Out-of-Print Works, Selected Implementation Issues available here and the annex Model agreement for a licence on digitisation of out of print works available here.
The third annual iCommons summit will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia (15-17 June) and this year I have the good fortune to be able to attend.
The event includes people like Creative Commons CEO, Larry Lessig, CC Chairman and Digital Entrepreneur, Joi Ito, Wikipedia Founder, Jimmy Wales and CTO of Linden Labs, Cory Ondrejka. We have also add some new voices to the debate this year including Indiaâ??s Lawrence Liang who has become renowned for his considered commentary on the positive impact of piracy in developing countries, Jonathan Zittrain discussing themes from his new book â??The Future of the Internet and How to Stop Itâ??, Benjamin Mako Hill from MIT who will talk about competing visions of â??free cultureâ?? from the free software perspective, and Becky Hogge from the Open Rights Group, who will talk about successful campaigns to rid the world of restrictive IP laws.
I am really looking forward to it and to meeting all the other commoners. Naturally the event will be blogged 🙂
I cannot believe it. It’s 28 degrees in Mumbai and I have managed to catch a cold. A summer cold is tiring thing to have but this is made worse by the fact that we have several days worth of meetings left and a conference at the end. Not to mention the long flight home.
The meeting today is particularly lively moving from philosophy of copyright (and in extension property), learning and teaching. The crux of the discussion is what is it we are attempting to achieve. Purity for purities sake or striving for higher principles.
The settings of the day are the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR Colaba) at the most southern end of Mumbai. The research center is set within the Naval base which therefore increases security but it also has a beautiful garden by the sea.
So when you have tired of the good company, food and presents here is a hot tip on what to take a look at. Its a pdf entitled “Best Practice Guide” for “Implementing the EU Copyright Directive in the Digital Age” written by Urs Gasser and Silke Ernst released in December 2006. Here is a short extract from the intro:
At a time where the existing EU copyright framework is under review, this best practice guide seeks to provide a set of specific recommendations for accession states and candidate countries that will or may face the challenge of transposing the EUCD in the near future. It is based on a collaborative effort to take stock of national implementations of the EUCD and builds upon prior studies and reports that analyze the different design choices that Member States have made.
I shall be saving it for Boxing day 🙂
Resistance to fashion is a topic that occasionally appears. Such resistance can take the form of animal rights activists protesting against the fur trade (e.g. Coalition to abolish the fur trade), it can take the form of protests against the use of anorectic models (e.g. the Spanish Association in Defense of Attention for Anorexia and Bulimia has managed to obtain the world’s first ban on overly thin models at a top-level fashion show in Madrid), or it can deal with protests against the conditions of workers in the textile trade (the most famous example must be Naomi Kleinâ??s work No Logo)
But what about the fashion of resistance? This is can be seen both as a reflection on what is fashionable to resist at any given time and as the actual fashion statement of the resister. The former is a fascinating subject since the world attention is fickle. The focus of popular attention varies even if the reason for resistance may remain â?? maybe a book here for someone to edit? (nudge, nudge).
However, it is the latter which is the focus of this post. Fashion and style can in themselves be both a form and a symbol of resistance. Styles of dress such as punk and hiphop are seen as resistance to the norm â?? punk went even further since its purpose was to provoke.
But even in the less extreme resistance has a fashion. Styles which identify, unite and exclude. Occasionally these styles establish themselves in the mainstream and there ability to provoke/resist are almost lost. One such controversial symbol is the image of Che Geuvara. On 5th of March 1960 Alberto â??Kordaâ?? Gutierrez took two pictures of Che Guevara. In 1967 the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli received two copies of the famous print at no cost.
Feltrinelli started making posters from the prints with the notice â??Copyright Feltrinelliâ?? down in the corner. The image was on itâ??s way to become an international icon â?? it has been transformed, transplanted, transmitted and transfigured all over the world. Korda never received a penny. For one reason only – Cuba had not signed the Berne Convention. Fidel Castro described the protection of intellectual property as imperialistic â??bullshitâ??.
Since then the image has gone from being a symbol of resistance and revolution to being a fashion statement. Today the image has achieved iconic status and is (ab)used on everything from posters to carpets. The image has even had an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The question therefore, as symbolized, by the Che icon is: How does an iconic symbol of resistance spread to a mass audience without becoming pop-culture and lacking in the symbolic value which was the original purpose? Or is resistance fashion a paradox since once it becomes a fashion it loses its resistance quality?
TechnoLlama wrote about a Spanish Creative Commons case:
A Spanish court in Pontevedra has ruled in favour of the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE) against a café named Direccion000. SGAE initiated action against the cafe to claim royalties for de public performance of music in the locale, while the owners claimed that they did not have to pay because they were only using â??free musicâ?? under Creative Commons licences.
The SGAE could show that the cafe was not entirely truthful in their claims. The music they were playing included that of members of the SGAE.
What is more interesting is that the court apparently commented on the CC licenses in the decision â??â?¦it is worth to point out that the document presented by the defendants-appellants as a licence for free use of music does not constitute anything other than a mere informative leaflet about its own content, lacking any form of signature, and therefore bereft of legal value whatsoeverâ??.
OK – let me come clean from the beginning: I am not a Spanish lawyer. But I find it incredibly hard to believe that the Spanish legal position on licenses & contracts is such that they need to be completed with the formality of the signature to be valid.
Additionally I would also like the court to explain what the value of a “informative leaflet” is under contract law.
OH NOT AGAIN… Where did these people go to law school?
The Creative Commons licensing system does not really require the status of a license to be able to survive. Under legal principles the fact that the creator has stated in an “informative leaflet” that she will not enforce her rights under copyright law is enough for me to follow the permissions and conditions stated in the Creative Commons documentation.
If I follow the documentation and the creator attempts to sue me for copyright violation (therefore claiming that the Creative Commons is not a license) the courts would naturally understand my actions as being carried out with permission.
An analogy. Supposing a theme park which charges admission puts up a sign that admission on 1 January 2007 is free. If they (despite their previous idea) attempted to sue all visitors who did not pay admission on this date for trespassing the courts would hardly support the claims of the theme park.
Go and read:
Charles Fried Contract as Promise (We enforce contracts because they are promises â?? and we have a moral obligation to keep our promises).