Rowlings v Harry Potter Lexicon

The Harry Potter Lexicon case has been decided in favor of JK Rowling. In the Sydney Morning Herald report on the case Rowling stated that:

“The (Lexicon) took an enormous amount of my work and added virtually no original commentary of its own. Now the court has ordered that it must not be published”…

“Many books have been published which offer original insights into the world of Harry Potter. The Lexicon just is not one of them.”

The problem was that the Harry Potter Lexicon failed to show fair use (more on this aspect).

(via The House of Commons)

Technollama has written a much better review of the whole affair so hop on your broom and wiz over and read it…. This is a hot issue online right now check out the article Fans and Copyright Issues on Plagiarism Today and JKR/WB vs. RDR Books Trial: Findings of Fact & Conclusions of Law (pt 1) and the trial transcripts at the Leaky Cauldron.

My licensing book is out

My short book on open licenses in Swedish Copyright – Copyleft: En guide om upphovsrätt och licenser på nätet is finished and it is online at the IIS, the organisation who commissioned the work. The book covers seven licenses and the Creative Commons system.

The licenses discussed/explained are the Free Art License 1.3, GNU Free Documentation License, the Sparc Author Addendum, the Ethymonics Free Music License, the Common Documentation License, the, the BSD Free Documentation License and the Open Game License.

I am happy that the work is done and I hope that it will serve to help the curious learn more about licensing.

Terms of Use

My friend, collegue and fearless explorer of the public domain Eva has sent me a copy of her new book “Terms of Use

Love the tigers on the front… If it is anything like her last book it will be great. I will be reviewing it here later but I just wanted to give anyone a heads up straight away – this is an interesting book.

You didn't check the EULA ?!?!?!

Google’s new browser Chrome is receiving a lot of attention lately. I was not really wowed but did actually jump when I read the Google Chrome EULA. This of course goes to show that I am not totally jaded – yet!

11. Content licence from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms
of those Services.

Obviously the text formatting to bold was added by me.

It is totally amazing what companies are prepared to demand in their EULAs. Why don’t they even demand use of any/all physical material you may have lying about on your desk while you use their browser?

Update:

The license now reads

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services.

The text remains in the old version in Swedish but I guess that this will be changed soon. It was more a question of Google’s lawyers not reading the EULA but being a bit too quick on the old cut & paste 🙂

Copyright in Strange Arts

There is a wonderful argument between photographers being conducted over at Shutterstock. The argument is over whether or not photographers need release permission from graffiti artists to make sure they have the right to reproduce their copyrighted material.

The basic argument is well represented by comments such as:

I don’t think that graffiti need an “artist” (LOL) agreement for a reproduction. By definition it’s a public domain like piece of used gum on a sidewalk 🙂

I didn’t need a release for the grafitti photo’s I uploaded here. And I agree about it’s illegal to paint the walls, so the artists have no rights on their art.

A lone brave photographer Hilary Quinn is facing a barrage of angry photographers and trying to teach them the ins and outs of copyright law. But I couldn’t resist joining in. Unfortunately I needed to log into Shutterstock to be allowed to participate so I decided to fill in my arguments here since the log in procedure took too long.

Some of the arguments may have appeared here earlier in other versions.

First let me just get the artist debate out of the way. Some people feel annoyed by the term graffiti “artist”. I am not bothered. The way in which you choose to express yourself artistically is your own problem. There are artists who dabble in oils who do not deserve the term. It is not an honor to be termed artist – it is a designation of intent. By the way not too long ago it was considered unimaginable to call a photographer an artist.

1. Illegal activity and copyright

It does not matter whether or not you break into a building to paint a work of art. It does not matter if you steal the oils or other materials to create a work of art. It does not matter if you steal a camera to take a photograph. In each case copyright resides with the creator. Naturally in all cases the person may be prosecuted for his/her actions. But even if he/she is found guilty he/she still retains copyright in the work.

2. Who owns the work?

I would risk theory that the owner of property (wall) should have the copyright 🙂

The owner of the wall owns the original work. He/she has the right to destroy or sell it. A recent wall painted on by grafitti artist Banksy was sold on ebay for over 200 000 GBP. But the owner of the wall does not have the right to make reproductions of the work without permission from the artist.

3. Tattoos

I have written earlier about tattoos and copyright and highly recommend Hatcher’s article (2007). But the short version is that their is copyright in tattoos. The question is who the owner is? The artist? the person sporting the tattoo? the tattoo parlour? or the original artist if the tattoo is a copy of someone elses work? In addition to this there is an interesting question as to whether a collection of tattoos on the body can be seen as a work of art – like a collage.

What a great Friday afternoon argument!

Interesting course offered at Lund

Intellectual property tends to be taught by and to lawyers which is a shame since they tend to focus on addressing the questions of how the law works. This handyman approach is necessary since most of the students are going to go out an apply the law – the idea is that they do not really need to understand the law beyond its application. We do not educate law students we simply fill them with facts.

So when law courses are taught outside the auspices of the law department it’s time to sit up and listen.

The course Intellectual Property and Digital Information: Law, Politics, and Culture is being offered by the section for ABM (Archive, Library, Information and Museum Science) of the Department of Cultural Sciences. Here is part of the course description:

The course is intended to deal with these issues from a number of different perspectives, specifically considering cultural, political, legal, but also economical aspects, including those relevant outside a Western context. It will provide an overview of the legal situation in a national, European, and international setting and also look at some hotly debated disputes and international agreements. We will gain an understanding of the various forms of intellectual property (copyright, patent, trademark, etc.) as well as concern ourselves with alternative concepts including the creative commons, open access, open source, and also file-sharing and piracy, and anchor them in a cultural and political context.

See what I mean? Lawyers would hardly be interested in the wider perspective in this manner. I wonder if I should apply to the course…

Licensing Hacking

Finally! The Creative Commons team (Kalle and I) have spent two days drinking strong coffee, arguing and laughing in an effort to update the Swedish licenses from version 2.5 to 3.0. Now the license drafts are done and we have invited people, organisations and government bodies to read and comment on the work.

If any of you readers want to join in the bags of fun then feel free to surf in to www.creativecommons.se/drafts/

Right now I am looking forward to drinking a congratulatory beer or two. Since I am totally brain-drained and coffee-pickled.

Free licenses upheld

Lessig reports:

So for non-lawgeeks, this won’t seem important. But trust me, this is huge.

I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE “IP” court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them “open source”) copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. (The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.) This is a very important victory, and I am very very happy that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society played a key role in securing it. Congratulations especially to Chris Ridder and Anthony Falzone at the Center.

In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

Important clarity and certainty by a critically important US Court.