Tag: copyright

World’s Fair Use Day

By MB

On January 12, 2010

In Distribution, Law, Music, Policy, Society, Tech

It’s World’s Fair Use Day! Err, what’s that?

Worldâ€™s Fair Use Day (WFUD) is a free, all-day celebration of the doctrine of fair use: the legal right that allows innovators and creators to make particular uses of copyrighted materials. WFUD will take place at the Newseum in Washington D.C. on Tuesday January 12, 2010, and will be organized by Public Knowledge (PK), a Washington D.C.-based non-profit, consumer-advocacy group. PK works to ensure that communications and intellectual property policies encourage creativity, further free expression and discourse and provide universal access to knowledge. As part of its campaign to return balance to copyright law, PK hopes to use WFUD to educate the public about the importance of fair use in an information society.

That’s where I’ll be all day. Sound interesting to you? You can watch the proceedings below, and participate via the connected chat and Twitter hashtag #wfud (which I expect will be projected behind the speakers for most of the day).

(moved embed to the flip b/c it’s autoplaying)

Warner Music? Forget Them.

By MB

On March 23, 2009

In Distribution, Law, Music, Society

You’ve seen my occasional grumbling about Warner going out of its way to pull down music videos in which it has some rights from YouTube.Â Well, it seems they’ve really stepped it up, now:

In early December, Juliet Weybret, a high school sophomore and aspiring rock star from Lodi, Calif., recorded a video of herself playing the piano and singing â€œWinter Wonderland,â€ and she posted it on YouTube.

Weeks later, she received an e-mail message from YouTube: her video was being removed â€œas a result of a third-party notification by the Warner Music Group,â€ which owns the copyright to the Christmas carol.

[ . . . ]

In addition to Ms. Weybretâ€™s video, family home videos that included a portion of a song playing in the background have been removed, as have any number of videos that use music in goofy ways, from montages to mash-ups.

When a man posted a video of himself using music to teach sign language, the audio was switched off because he lacked the proper copyright clearance to use Foreignerâ€™s 1980s song â€œWaiting for a Girl Like You.â€

Yeah.Â Next time you’re tempted to buy a CD or download a track from iTunes/Amazon, check out the publisher/label, and decide if you want to reward this kind of behaviour.

Sen. Feinstein Wants To See Your Packets

By MB

On February 10, 2009

In Distribution, Policy, Politics, Tech

Just got this from Public Knowledge:

Hollywoodâ€™s lobbyists are running all over the Hill to sneak in a copyright filtering provision into the stimulus package. The amendment [presented by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) will] allow ISPs to â€œdeterâ€ child pornography and copyright infringement through network management techniques. The amendment is very, very controversial for a couple of reasons:

First, infringement canâ€™t be found through â€œnetwork managementâ€ techniques. There are legal uses for copyrighted works even without permission of the owner.

Second, it would require Internet companies to examine every bit of information everyone puts on the Web in order to find those allegedly infringing works, without a hint of probable cause. That would be a massive invasion of privacy, done at the request of one industry, violating the rights of everyone who is online.

Right now, we need you to contact a few key Senators: Majority Leader Harry Reid, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee Daniel Inouye, and Chairman of the Commerce Committee Jay Rockefeller, Chairman of the Finance Committee Max Baucus, and senior member of the Appropriations Committee Senator Barbara Mikulski, and tell them to leave out this controversial provision.

Click here for Public Knowledge’s suggested letter/fax.Â Also, California, can you please do us a favor and make Feinstein your governor so the rest of us don’t have to suffer her any more?Â And don’t give me any noise about what a bad governor she’d be.Â We already know you have no standards.