Copyright

Happy Public Domain Day

The first of January is Public Domain Day. The purpose of celebrating this day is to remember the wealth of culture that enters into the public domain every year. The list this year includes notables such as  Walter Benjamin his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is incredibly thought provoking, Mikhail Bulgakov – yes its time to reread The Master and Margarita, the artist Paul Klee and the Swedish Selma Lagerlof.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University has a webpage dedicated to the day. The Center also points out that while in Europe works are entering the public domain changes in US law are preventing this from happening:

What is entering the public domain in the United States? Sadly, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st. Not a single published work is entering the public domain this year. Or next year. Or the year after. Or the year after that. In fact, in the United States, no publication will enter the public domain until 2019. And wherever in the world you live, you now have to wait a very long time for anything to reach the public domain. When the first copyright law was written in the United States, copyright lasted 14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the author wished. Jefferson or Madison could look at the books written by their contemporaries and confidently expect them to be in the public domain within a decade or two. Now? In the United States, as in most of the world, copyright lasts for the author’s lifetime, plus another 70 years. And we’ve changed the law so that every creative work is automatically copyrighted, even if the author does nothing. What do these laws mean to you? As you can read in our analysis here, they impose great (and in many cases entirely unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, they impose costs on our entire collective culture.

“We are the first generation to deny our own culture to ourselves. Almost no work created during your lifetime will, without conscious action by its creator, become available for you to reproduce or build upon.”

We have little reason to celebrate on Public Domain Day because our public domain has been shrinking, not growing. Samuel Beckett’s English-language version of Waiting for Godot, his existentialist play in which two characters wait for a Godot who never appears, was published in 1954 and would once have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2011. To quote Vladimir from the play: “But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come—” 56 years later, we are still waiting.

Posted on by mklang

Privilege and Property

Copyright is a never ending area of fascinating discussion. Just when you think that you have read enough another interesting work sails across the screen. The collection of essays Privilege and Property. Essays on the History of Copyright recently came to my attention. The web blurb begins with:

What can and can’t be copied is a matter of law, but also of aesthetics, culture, and economics. The act of copying, and the creation and transaction of rights relating to it, evokes fundamental notions of communication and censorship, of authorship and ownership – of privilege and property.

The table of contents looks like this:

Introduction. The History of Copyright History: Notes from an Emerging Discipline by Martin Kretschmer, with Lionel Bently and Ronan Deazley
1. From Gunpowder to Print: The Common Origins of Copyright and Patent by Joanna Kostylo
2. ‘A Mongrel of Early Modern Copyright’: Scotland in European Perspective by Alastair J. Mann
3. The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright: Areopagitica, the Stationers’ Company, and the Statute of Anne by Mark Rose
4. Early American Printing Privileges. The Ambivalent Origins of Authors’ Copyright in America by Oren Bracha
5. Author and Work in the French Print Privileges System: Some Milestones by Laurent Pfister
6. A Venetian Experiment on Perpetual Copyright by Maurizio Borghi
7. Copyright Formalities and the Reasons for their Decline in Nineteenth Century Europe by Stef van Gompel
8. The Berlin Publisher Friedrich Nicolai and the Reprinting Sections of the Prussian Statute Book of 1794 by Friedemann Kawohl
9. Nineteenth Century Controversies Relating to the Protection of Artistic Property in France by Frédéric Rideau
10. Maps, Views and Ornament: Visualising Property in Art and Law. The Case of Pre-modern France by Katie Scott
11. Breaking the Mould? The Radical Nature of the Fine Arts Copyright Bill 1862 by Ronan Deazley
12. ‘Neither Bolt nor Chain, Iron Safe nor Private Watchman, Can Prevent the Theft of Words’: The Birth of the Performing Right in Britain by Isabella Alexander
13. The Return of the Commons – Copyright History as a Common Source by  Karl-Nikolaus Peifer
14. The Significance of Copyright History for Publishing History and Historians by John Feather
15. Metaphors of Intellectual Property by William St Clair

The book is edited by Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer & Lionel Bently and published by Open Book Publishers and has a Creative Commons NC-ND license the pdf is here. Even after a quick scroll through the file the book seems to be a must read.

Posted on by mklang

The Corvette argument

Techdirt reports that a newspaper publisher is suing 22 websites for copyright violation. Nothing really new here except the action that these bad sites have carried out is quoting text (with links back to the original articles). Apparently they even used the “you wouldn’t steal a car, so why are you stealing my content” analogy:

Say I owned a beautiful 1967 Corvette and kept it parked in my front yard.

And you, being a Corvette enthusiast, saw my Vette from the street. You stopped and stood on the sidewalk admiring it. You liked it so much you called friends and gave them my address in case they also wanted to drive over for a gander.

There’d be nothing wrong with that. I like my ’67 Vette and I keep in the front yard because I like people to see it.

But then, you entered my front yard, climbed into the front seat and drove it away.

I’m absolutely, 100% not OK with that. In fact, I’m calling the police and reporting that you stole my car….

Yet, when it comes to copyrighted material — news that my company spends money to gather and constitutes the essence of what we are as a business — some people think they can not only look at it, but also steal it. And they do. They essentially step into the front yard and drive that content away.

Do they even believe what they are saying?

Posted on by mklang

The end of Hitler parodies…

Picking the strongest internet meme is impossible – but if there was such a list the Hitler bunker scene remix must be one of the most recurring. Check out this short list of examples from YouTube.

Unfortunately TechCrunch reports that Constantin Film, the German film company, who made the movie has begun removing the parodies. Attempting to see them on YouTube often results in the text:

“This video contains content from Constantin Film, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.“

The amount of files will rapidly disappear once YouTube’s smart content system begins to locate and remove the clips. The question is not whether Constantin has the legal right to act the way they do but the effect of the action. TechCrunch again:

Downfall is a great movie, but it’s also in German which sadly means that many people outside that country will never watch it. But I’d bet these clips have sparked an interest in the film beyond what any type of traditional marketing could have done.

One could also ask what damage the making of the clips has. The clips don’t make less people see the movie or affect sales in any way. Are the clips creating a negative image of the serious movie? This is a doubtful argument as anyone watching the movie will realize the enormous difference between the comedy and the tragedy.

Constantin Film has acted with questionable legality (parodies are within the law) and have definitely not helped in promoting creativity.

Naturally I fully expect someone to create a Hitler parody to express the outrage we all feel at the loss of this important social commentary!

Update: Read the commentary from EFF Everyone Who’s Made a Hitler Parody Video, Leave the Room

Posted on by mklang

Copyright & thumbnails in screenshot

Way back in 2008 I wrote about a copyright case that was decided at the Swedish Court of Appeal (Svea Hovrätt).

The case (2008-07-01, FT 685-08) concerned the question whether a screendump of one web page (containing pictures) being displayed on another web page constitued a violation of copyright of the pictures.

The court found that, first of all, the pictures displayed on the webpage which was pictured and displayed on another web page were not protected under 1§ of the Swedish Copyright Act (English version Pdf) but under Photolaw 49 a§ Swedish Copyright Act.

This difference is a remnant of the time when photographs were not covered by Copyright law at all. Today photographs are covered by Copyright law but the length of protection differs from other typical works protected under copyright law.

Since the images were small and hardly distinguishable to the naked eye they made up an unessential part of the the exception in 20a§ is applicable. According to this exception there is no need for permission to use works which appear in the background or are an non-essential part of the picture.

But last week the Swedish Supreme Court decided to go another way and decided that the use of a screenshot which contains small photographs is a copyright violation of the photographer and not covered by fair use. The decision T 3440-08 is available in Swedish from the Supreme Courts website.

Posted on by mklang

Enforcing Copyright to ensure heterosexuality

It’s always amusing (and a bit worrying) to read the reactions to claims that fictional characters may be gay. In the beginning of last year articles like Of course Tintin’s gay. Ask Snowy caused an uproar.

And now the pressure is on Sherlock Holmes. He has always been a bit suspicious. His relationship to Dr Watson a bit too much. Even if he does fall in love with a client in an episode of the tv series he never marries, never has a girlfriend. Watson is more of a ladies man, but never really leaves the relationship with Holmes. In the latest movie with Robert Downey Jr as the detective and Jude Law as Dr Watson the characters wrestle and share a bed.

In an interview on Downey Jr wondered whether Holmes was “a butch homosexual”. This has apparently annoyed Andrea Plunket the copyright holder who threatens to withdraw permission for a sequel if Holmes and Watson become gayer.

“I hope this is just an example of Mr. Downey’s black sense of humour. It would be drastic, but I would withdraw permission for more films to be made if they feel that is a theme they wish to bring out in the future. “I am not hostile to homosexuals, but I am to anyone who is not true to the spirit of the books.” (Times Live)

Using Copyright to ensure heterosexuality is an interesting application. I doubt whether this was the reason for the law. For us copyright nerds Arthur Conan Doyle died 7 July 1930 – in other words almost 80 years ago. But then on sherlockholmesonline.org explains their licensing grounds and also has an interesting heredity of the Conan Doyle Estate.

In the EC, the entire work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle enjoys copyright protection until 31 December 2000. After that date, a number of characters created by the author will enjoy trademark protection.

In the US, the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1997 (105th Congress, 1st Session H.R. 604 ) has extended the renewal term of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works among others for an additional 20 years. This means that all works published after December 31, 1922 are protected for 95 years following the date of publication.

So no outing of Sherlock is allowed without Andrea Plunket’s permission. As for her argument about “not true to the spirit of the books” – the new film shows Sherlock doing many things that are not in the books so even this seems to be an arbitrary choice.

UPDATE 6/1

StudioBriefing.net

Claims by Andrea Plunket, the ex-wife of the late Sheldon Reynolds, who produced a Sherlock Holmes TV series in the 1950s, that she controls the Holmes copyrights and can withhold her approval of a sequel if she regards the content to be unacceptable were denounced Tuesday by Chicago attorney Jon Lellenberg, the administrator of the Estate of Dame Jean Conan Doyle. In an email statement, Lellenberg said that the estate signed three contracts with Warner Bros.: one for character rights in the Sherlock Holmes movie, another for merchandising rights, and  the third for a related Tom & Jerry cartoon. He noted that the estate has won numerous federal court cases filed by Plunket and is currently trying to collect on several judgments against her for attorneys fees and costs in those cases. Asked whether it is possible that Plunket also signed a contract with Warner Bros., Lellenberg replied that if the studio “paid her something re nuisance value … we will go after it to discharge the judgments against her.” Attempts to reach a spokesman for Warner Bros. to comment on the matter were unsuccessful.

Posted on by mklang

Public Domain Day or welcome out Sigmund Freud

January first is not only the day for a global hangover. Its also Public Domain Day!

The Public Domain Day is a worldwide celebration of the wealth of human culture and more specifically the expiration of copyright protection of works. This is the way in which copyright works – eventually the term of protection ends and the work becomes free. It belongs to us all.

Every year on New Year’s Day, in fact, due to the expiration of copyright protection terms on works produced by authors who died several decades earlier, thousands of works enter the public domain – that is, their content is no longer owned or controlled by anyone, but it rather becomes a common treasure, available for anyone to freely use for any purpose. (Public Domain Day)

Some of the “big” names coming out this 1 January are

Unfortunately most of the names (long list here) are unknown to most of us. Even the links to wikipedia are empty. Maybe we should use this day to revive their works and bring them back to life. Otherwise the expiration of copyright simply proves that they are no longer relevant to our lives.

Posted on by mklang

Collecting Societies & Creative Commons

Moa Bergsten has written her final thesis for the completion of Masters in Law on the topic of collecting societies and Creative Commons licensing. But the essay is more than a theoretical standpoint it is an analysis of the situation in Sweden where the main copyright collecting  society has begun to allow member to use Creative Commons licenses. Thus the title of Moa’s work is Stim & Creative Commons Licensing.

Thus, the purpose of this paper is to analyze judicial problems that may arise when a copyright collecting society draws up conditions for the use of CC licenses within the scope of their right management mandate. (p6)

And from her conclusions we may read that the collecting societies are forced to accept both digital realities and to proide a continued service to their members.

The initiative of STIM to allow CC licensing is an outflow of flexibility and adaption to the digital reality. As a result a new member category is created and STIM is obligated to carry out the management with respect to the member group with due diligence and fulfill its responsibility as a trustee.

No doubt the new opportunity will cause complex interpretational determinations. However, this fact does not deprive STIM from its obligation to carry out the management in best manner possible. (p76)

Congratulations Moa on a well written, insightful and important work! Thanks for writing it in English. And thank you for allowing me to post it online. I only wish you had licensed it under a Creative Commons license.

Posted on by mklang

Being a papal pirate

(via BoingBoing) Just in time for Christmas the pope decided to give himself a gift (large enough to suit is ego?) He decided to make his brand exclusive and in a weird mix of trademark and copyright law declared (Catholic News Agency)

“it alone has the right to ensure the respect due to the Successors of Peter, and therefore, to protect the figure and personal identity of the Pope from the unauthorized use of his name and/or the papal coat of arms for ends and activities which have little or nothing to do with the Catholic Church.”

What does this mean? Well according to the pope commoners may not use his name, title, coat of arms or basically “anything referring directly to the person of office” without permission.

“Consequently, the use of anything referring directly to the person or office of the Supreme Pontiff… and/or the use of the title ‘Pontifical,’ must receive previous and express authorization from the Holy See,” concluded the message released to the press.

Its enough to confirm the atheist in me… and bring out the pirate so here it is… my first violation of papal law…

an unauthorized copy of the papal insignia

Posted on by mklang