Tag Archives: Copyright

Wikipedia leverages user-generated content for its own politics

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Information wants to be free… (so the Web gospel reads)

Wikipedia apparently has entered the political arena, closing the site for one day to protest the SOPA bill.

What’s interesting to me is the notion that the knowledge collected by Wikipedia, freely given by volunteers spending untold hours contributing to the site, can be leveraged by the site’s owners to support their own politics.

I don’t know that that meets the approval of the many, varied, unpaid writers that contribute freely to Wikipedia or so-called crowdsource or “open source” platforms.

In an article titled The importance of Wikipedia published Nov 30, 2011 on opensource.com, Susan Hewitt, a 63-year old contributor to Wikipedia says

“Wikipedia is self-organizing and self-correcting,”. “There is no boss and police force, yet at this point in its development it’s perfectly clear that it works really well.” Wikipedia calls to the better angels of people’s nature, and those angels respond.

No police force, but apparently a higher power.

It’s the downside of the concept of a free web. The truth is there are powers behind the free web and they can use their power when it suits them. Now it’s free, now it’s not. Who decides? Well, we saw this week who decides.

Interestingly, a paid product, Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, could not be so leveraged. Once you purchase it, it is yours. It can’t be removed from your home by the publishers because they don’t agree with your politics. Is that what we pay for? Ownership? Control? Privacy? Autonomy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris

Copyright: The Basics

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I’m happy to share this article about copyright written by Sarah Kolb. Sarah and her company, Click Industries, has helped thousands of small business owners, independent entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, and writers start new businesses, protect their intellectual property and find new ways to market and promote their business and creative works.

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Copyright: The Basics

When you create a new work, you own the copyright to that work. It happens automatically; you don’t have to do anything other than create an original work. Of course, this abstract idea looks great on paper, but the obvious problem is that who created a work is essentially one person’s claim against another.

Why should I copyright my work?

The fact that you’ve created a work doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re able to prove you’ve created the work — and if you’re not able to prove in a court of law that you created something, you’re not going to be able to sue someone for using it without your permission.

This is where registering a copyright comes in. It’s the only way to legally prove your authorship. You may have heard of the “poor man’s copyright” — the act of mailing a copy of the work to yourself, keeping the package unopened and the postmark intact — but as there is no language to support this, it simply is not a legal defense. Better to copyright your work, allowing no room for argument.

What types of works are eligible for copyright protection?

Any work of original authorship (meaning that it is not an exact copy of another work) that has been fixed in a tangible medium (either physically or digitally; in other words, it is a thing and not just an idea) can be copyrighted. Examples include:

Photographs
Paintings
Compositions
Poetry
Books
Sound Recordings
Audio/Visual Recordings
Software
Computer programs
Not all types of works can be protected by a copyright. Examples of works not eligible for this type of protection include:

Blank forms (graph paper, scorecards, address books, etc.)
Public knowledge (height and weight charts, tape measures, anything taken from common sources)
Ideas
Names
Titles
Short Phrases
Logos (unless there is enough original authorship to warrant protection as two-dimensional artwork; simply setting a name or title in a specific font or giving the letters some sort of artistic treatment does not contain enough original authorship to qualify)
However, you may be able to protect types of intellectual property not eligible for copyright protection in another way, such as with a trademark or a patent. It’s best to discuss this with your legal advisor, if you’re uncertain which type of protection is best for your work.

Can I Protect My Unpublished Work With A Copyright?

Absolutely. Publication was once a requirement, but the current Copyright Act no longer requires that a work be published to receive protection.

Incidentally, recent versions of the Copyright Act have removed one other previous requirement: that the copyright notice and symbol be present on the work. While a good idea to deter would-be copyright infringers, the copyright notice is no longer required to be placed on the work, even if that work is published. Ignorance of a work’s copyright protection is not a legal excuse to violate that protection.

Sarah Kolb, http://www.clickandcopyright.com.

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Since 2000, Click Industries, Ltd. has helped thousands of small business owners, independent entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, and writers start new businesses, protect their intellectual property and find new ways to market and promote their business and creative works. Our copyrighting division, Click and Copyright, offers copyright filing services for creative professionals.
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Ensuring Copyright Compliance the Easy Way

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Here’s two online videos that describe copyright and how to re-use content in a legal manner. Though the videos deal mostly with using printed materials, they are good as a guide for using music as well.

The videos were produced by the Copyright Clearance Center.

Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) is a global rights broker for millions of the world’s most sought after materials, including in- and out-of-print books, journals, newspapers, magazines, images, blogs, ebooks and more.

CCC’s six minute Copyright Basics video is a great way to get an overview of copyright. It covers everything from the origins and reasons for copyright laws to what is not protected under copyright laws.

The second video gives more specifics on how copyright laws can be inadvertently violated in your workplace. Watch CCC’s video Copyright @ Work. This video introduces you to the typical ways employees unintentionally (or intentionally) ignore copyright laws in the workplace and how you can easily resolve the problem to ensure you and your employees are within the law.

About the Copyright Clearance Center
Copyright holders simply enroll at Rights Central and they’re ready to earn royalties on the creative content for which they have copyrights. CCC makes the content easily searchable and then sends the copyright holder a single check for all royalties on all content the holder has in the CCC system. This saves companies from managing hundreds or thousands of royalty checks and working out details with hundreds or thousands of people who wish to use their content. Musicians will recognize this organization as similar to Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) ASCAP, BMI, SESAC

On the content user’s side, CCC eliminates the hassle of contacting copyright holders and waiting days, weeks, or even months for a reply that authorizes use of copyrighted content. Too often even people who are aware of copyright laws ignore them because getting permission is extremely time consuming.

With CCC, businesses or educational institutions can simply pay an annual fee that gives them authorization to use anything in the CCC database. No longer do you have to wait weeks for a response and pay out numerous checks to get authorization to use copyrighted material. With CCC you can pay once and help yourself to copyrighted materials all year long.

End of 2010 sees crackdown on copyright infringement and online piracy

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Here are 4 events that show what looks like a growing trend towards taking serious action against copyright infringement on the Internet.

1. LimeWire, the company that issued the popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software program is closing it’s doors
. LimeWire tried to retool as a legal music site similar to iTunes after the demise of its P2P service, but the company is now abandoning that effort and closing its doors for good on December 31, 2011. Last October a court-ordered injunction forced LimWire to disable ‘the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality; of it’s P2P file-sharing software,” the company said at the time.

2. In Sweden, the convictions of Pirate Bay founders are upheld on appeal
According to the Los Angeles Times, The Pirate Bay is “one of the world’s largest facilitators of illegal downloading“, and “the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright or pro-piracy movement”. The Pirate Bay website still exists. It has over 4.5 million registered users and is approximately the 89th most popular site on the Internet worldwide. In 2009, it’s founders were found guilty of assisting copyright infringement. The ruling was appealed. In November 2010 the convictions were upheld by a Swedish appeals court. They decreased the original prison terms but increased the fine to 46 million SEK (about 6.6 million dollars).

3. US Seizes 80+ Torrent and P2P web sites
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (a division of Homeland Security) has seized the web addresses of torrent-finder.com and about 80 other websites for copyright violation. The sites have been sharing copyrighted material for free download. The New York Times reported “By Friday morning, visiting the addresses of a handful of sites that either hosted unauthorized copies of films and music or allowed users to search for them elsewhere on the Internet produced a notice that said, in part: “This domain name has been seized by ICE — Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court.”

4. Google Upgrades it’s Copyright Infringement policy
A week after the US government’s torrent crackdown, Google issued its own policy changes regarding copyright infringement.

As the web has grown, we have seen a growing number of issues relating to infringing content. We respond expeditiously to requests to remove such content from our services, and have been improving our procedures over time. But as the web grows, and the number of requests grows with it, we are working to develop new ways to better address the underlying problem.

There are four key changes that will have some impact on how they handle copyright-questionable submissions.
1. Google will be trying to take action on takedown request within 24 hours of submission
2. They will prevent terms associated with piracy from showing up in the autocomplete feature of searches
3. They plan to improve AdSense anti-piracy efforts
4. They’ll look for ways to make authorized content more likely to show up in searches

Cook’s Source plagiarism fallout

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A recent pilfering of a writer’s intellectual property has caused more than a bit of a stir in the online community. Response was so heated, in fact, that the guilty party, Cook’s Source Magazine, has ceased publishing as of its November issue.

The Story

The editor of Cook’s Source Magazine published a story in both the print and electronic versions of their magazine. But, as it turned out, the story’s author hadn’t given permission for Cook’s Source to publish the article. In reality, the author didn’t even know the article had been published until a friend asked her about it.

Apparently, the editor simply copied and pasted the article from the author’s website. The page is on a domain that the author owns and there’s even a copyright notice at the bottom.

Needless to say, the author wasn’t happy.

In a polite response, the author asked for two very reasonable things.

1. An apology on Facebook and a printed apology in the magazine.
2. $130 donation to the Columbia School of Journalism.

After a colossal blunder like that, one would expect the editor to humbly acquiesce to the author’s more than reasonable demands. Instead, the editor made it clear she would do nothing of the kind, claiming that she and her staff had to do so much editing to the article that the author should thank her for such a good portfolio piece.

However, the really frustrating part of the whole story is the editor’s assumption’s about things that are published on the Internet. Boasting that she had 30 years publishing experience, she actually claimed that the Internet was public domain.

As shocking as this story is, the concept of the Internet as public domain is far too pervasive. The fact remains that anything published anywhere has a copyright owned by its author until that author relinquishes their rights (usually through a transaction of money).

It doesn’t matter which medium is used (print, video, audio, Internet), a copyright is a copyright.

The Fallout

In this case, the general public rose to the aide of the offended author, filling Cook’s Source Magazine’s Facebook fan page with so many angry posts that Cook’s Source was forced to pull down their Facebook page.

Cook’s Source had worked hard to build their fan page to over 6,000 members and with one simple infringement, it was all gone. They appear to be trying to rebuild with a Facebook group, but I doubt it’ll work. After all, the third post is already a call to pick up the discussion where it left off on the old Facebook page.

In fact, because of all the bad publicity, the editor of Cook’s Source decided to pull the plug and cease publishing the magazine. The last issue was the November issue.

One of my favorite blogs is the Copyright Alliance Blog written by Patrick Ross. Here is his take on the closing of Cook’s Source and this whole series of events.

This story went viral on the Internet. Some video spoofs have recently appeared on YouTube…

Can you copyright your name and face?

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That’s the question behind a class-action lawsuit aimed at video game publisher Electronic Arts. Sam Keller, a former quarterback at Arizona State, is bringing the case claiming that Electronic Arts profited from the use of his image and the images of other college athletes in their NCAA Football and NCAA Basketball video games. Amateur rules prevent the use of athletes’ names in commercial products but the games have the same team colors, team numbers, body-types and even athletic moves of the actual college athletes.

The case if blowing up beyond the right to use images of college athletes in video games. A ruling in the case could set a First Amendment precedent defining when a person’s right to control his image trumps the free-speech rights of others to use it.

An early attempt by Electronic Arts to have the case thrown out was rejected by US District Court Judge Claudia A Wilken. Judge Wilken argued that Electronic Arts did not sufficiently “transform” the images into a work that would qualify as free speech.

Major media companies, The Motion Picture Association of America, the Gannett Company, ESPN, Viacom, are lining up in support of Electronic Arts.

Keller has support from significant organizations too including the players unions for professional baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer. Each has filed a brief supporting Keller. Keller also has the support of the Screen Actors Guild, the AFL-CIO, and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

Nathan Siegal, who represents the media companies has said…

Treating the right of publicity as if it were a copyright – as if you could copyright your name and face – goes too far, and it would give people too much power to control the First Amendment speech of others

Representatives for the athletes and other famous figures say Electronic Arts has gone too far. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the general counsel of the Screen Actors Guild said

The real life consequence would be that anybody making anything other than a television commercial or a print ad – what is very clearly commercial speech – would essentially have the right to use people’s names and likenesses in those projects without any consultation.

Some scholars believe this case could eventually land in the US Supreme Court.

The Tricky Task of Defining “Fair Use” in an electronic world

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Almost every copyright infringement dispute regarding the Internet and electronic media comes down to the tricky task of defining what is Fair Use.

The Fair Use provision of US Copyright law was meant to ease the ways in which copyrighted material could be used to facilitate research. Teachers could reproduce portions of copyrighted material to illustrate a lesson, news reporters and broadcasters would not have to worry if copyrighted material was used incidentally during a news report.

This definition was crafted before the Internet was even a speck on the horizon. At that time using copyrighted material posed a bit of a challenge but in today’s world, where copyright infringement is a right-click away, Fair Use has blown up into a political issue with lobbyists now attempting to stretch the initial intent of the law to fit in digital world.

So far, determining how to apply Fair Use to the Internet and electronic media has proven to be a complex task for the courts. In the mammoth Google/YouTube v. Viacom copyright infringement case, the final decision of the court revolved around an interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which addresses the liability of the online service provider, while dancing around the proverbial elephant in the room…the definition of Fair Use.

Cory Doctorow has an interesting post in which he discusses a very concise definition of Fair Use put forth by Tim Wu. Wu’s proposed definition of Fair Use is as follows:

If it adds new value, it’s Fair Use. If it substitutes for the original, it’s infringement.

It’s simple enough, to be sure, but it’s far more favorable to the users of content than it is to the creators of that content. It tracks along the lines of the ideas in Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix which argues that creative content should become something freely available to all for the benefit of moving the culture forward (how did our culture ever move forward before Lessig?). With Remix Culture, content can be used and turned into something else without the permission or remuneration of the original creator. Take a Beatles song, put some new beats on it and viola, you’re a composer.

Lobbyists now talk of the Fair Use Industries and a Fair Use Economy. I would ask – Fair Use Economy vs. what? The Copyright Economy? There is some heavyweight positioning going on trying to broaden the interpretation of Fair Use. To me this is almost always being done to restrict or remove the existing rights of content creators.

To see how the digital world can quickly skew the concept of Fair Use, one need only look at homemade videos uploaded to YouTube. Here you have a non-commercial, family video that uses a popular song as a soundtrack (obvious fair use). But then it gets uploaded to YouTube and becomes site content. Fair Use? It’s now an issue of interpretation. Is the content still Fair Use because the user created the content for private use, or does it infringe on copyright because that content is now an asset of YouTube, a money-making enterprise.

Yes, things get murky in an electronic world. Here’s my understanding of copyright and Fair Use. It’s also a simple definition but it’s one that is being rigorously challenged.

If the content in question is not original to your project (not created by you/in-house or work-for-hire) and its usage is contributing to a commercial enterprise then it is not fair use and the media should be legally licensed.

Dispelling Confusion About Classrooms and Copyright

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Incorporating media into classroom presentations has become much simpler today. However, for educators, the vast array of materials online often creates confusion regarding the legality of its usage.

Media literacy expert Renee Hobbs’ great new book Copyright Clarity – How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning provides a complete and concise look at what is, and what is not, acceptable for classroom use.

The book explores:

• What types of usage are permissible for classroom use
• How to create class projects that follow copyright laws
• Fair Use of digital materials such as images, music, movies, and Internet elements found on sites such as Google and YouTube
• The latest trends in intellectual property law and copyright practices

“This long-awaited book relieves educators’ anxieties about the legality of using copyrighted materials during instruction and presentations. In addition to answering questions about fair use practice in an easy-to-understand manner, Hobbs offers examples of how technology supports essential literacy and communication skills in 21st-century classrooms.”
—Diane Lapp, Distinguished Professor of Education
San Diego State University

The book expresses legal concepts in a easily understandable fashion, allowing educators to confidently incorporate captivating media tools into their lessons and presentations without concern about infringing on copyright laws.

If you’re an educator, check out Copyright Clarity. It will settle any confusing issues you’ve experienced where you’ve not been sure if your usage of a given media was within the boundaries of copyright law.

Don’t ignore copyright infringement

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Just pointing out a great article by Patrick Ross at copyrightalliance.org that argues against the prevailing current of opinion that “Copyright owners should accept infringement as a reality and pursue other paths for compensation”

The article is titled Infringement is Real, Ignoring it is Unreal

Here’s a brief quote…

But it’s disingenuous to argue as even some academics such as Fisher, Lessig and Palfrey do that just because some people infringe, those being infringed should just give up their rights and hope for the best.

Copyright, Fair Use and the Internet

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This fine article from Forbes.com describes the current cloud surrounding interpretations of legal doctrine of Fair Use.  The Fair Use doctrine is a part of USA  Copyright law that describes the conditions that have to be in place when using copyrighted material without permission from the creators.

Digitization and the Internet have blown the issue of what is and what is not “Fair Use” up beyond anyone’s imagination.  When the concept was originally set as part of copyright law, Fair Use was to

  1. facilitate the quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment
  2. allow for the reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson;
  3. allow the reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports;
  4. to allow the incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.

The Forbes.com article, written by Dan Fisher and Dirk Smillie makes these important points…

The real problem? Copyright laws never anticipated a time when people would be able to broadcast essentially private content all over the world, including scraps of copyrighted material.

Yet for all its importance, [Fair Use] remains a tricky concept courts determine on an agonizing case-by-case basis–making it difficult to determine whether the Next Big Thing on the Web is providing a valuable public service or violating copyright law on a wholesale basis. Judges must consider the nature of the work that has been copied, how much of it has been copied, and whether the copying hurt the ability of the content owner to make money off of it.

Today’s tug-of-war is mainly between Internet content providers, who use the doctrine of Fair Use as the rational behind posting copyrighted material without permission and content creators who believe that some content web sites are infringing on their copyrights and thus their right to earn money from their creations.

In the end, it’s about money. You have web content providers using Fair Use to enhance their business model on one hand and on the other, you have the content creators who feel that today Fair Use is being used to take money away from them.