U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton’s decision against Viacom and in favor of Google and YouTube placed the onus on copyright holders to identify specific instances of infringement and then inform websites to remove the pirated content. If the sites do so promptly, they are shielded from liability.
Tag: Copyright
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EFF’s Teaching Copyright
EFF’s TEACHING COPYRIGHT was created to help teachers teach copyright in a fair and balanced way. Check it out.
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Citizen Media Law Project
As their site explains:
CMLP’s legal guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training and focuses on the wide range of legal issues citizen and online media are likely to face, including risks associated with publication, such as defamation and privacy torts; copyright; trademark; access to government information; newsgathering; and general legal issues involved in setting up a business and finding a web host. You can access the guide here.
Knowing your legal rights and responsibilities is important for anyone who publishes online. The CMLP’s legal guide addresses the legal issues you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work. The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues.
The good folks over at Tribeca asked me to post on the NY State Film & TV Tax Credit debacle. So I did and surprisingly I was able to come up with a few more things to say…
Read the whole post on their blog. Let me know your thoughts.
My gist is we all have to be a hell of a lot more vigilant about the issues that may effect us if we want to be able to earn a living working in this field. I list out a starter course, but really the question is what can we go to dinner on? And let me know what you think I left out.
Here’s the menu:
Net Neutrality—Our ability to access and distribute work and ideas, organize around it, is dependent on this core democratic principle.
Media Consolidation—The lack of an antitrust action has created an environment that is virtually impossible to compete in.
Labor Union Stability—The unrest of this year across the guilds has helped no one.
Copyright Law Revision—The rules are antiquated, protecting corporate interests over the creators, while limiting the audience’s access to new art forms.
Copyright Protection—The blatant disregard for artists’ rights across the Internet make a bad situation even worse.
Government Funding For The Arts (or lack thereof)—The only work artists can expect to be compensated for are the most blatantly commercial endeavors.
Social Network Rules—The Draconian control different networks exert over user content does not bode well for community hopes of sharing information and content.
Data Portability—Everyone’s right to the information their work generates is a necessary principle if artists are ever going to have a direct relationship with their audiences.
Demystification of Distribution and Exhibition Practices—The last twenty years were about demystifying the production process, but there will be no true independence unless the cycle is made complete.
Exhibition Booking Policies and Practices Revision—Distributors require exhibitors to book on full weeks, restricting their ability to become true community centers, providing their audiences with what they want, when they want it.
New Blood Recruitment for Distribution and Exhibition—Since virtually all of the specialized distribution and exhibition entities are run by people who came of age in the days of pure theatrical exhibition, they yearn for a return to those days and are resistant to new practices. Or are they?
Ratings Structure—The current system is not applicable to the diverse work being made today.
Loss of Film Critics’ Old Media Platforms—Our critics were our curators, letting audiences know what to see when, and now most have been fired. Where will our new curators be found? We’ve started HammerToNail to help audiences find the best in true indie American narrative work, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Filmmaker Re-education for this New Media Universe—Let’s face it, we are all a bunch of Luddites. Until we recognize what tools are available and how to use them, we are depriving both ourselves and our audiences from the quality of work we all deserve.
Creation of Indie Film Promotional Portals—How can we see good work when we don’t even know it exists?
Broadband Availability and Strength—America lags behind the rest of the developed world not just in terms of broadband penetration, but also in the quality and level of that broadband service.
Digital Film Archive—As more and more filmmakers move to a digital medium to both originate and finish that work, how will this work be preserved for future generations?
Indie Film History Archive—The history and process of how this work we are now creating will be remembered will be impossible without some joint effort to preserve it.
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The Google Book Supplement
Scott Macauley over at the Filmmaker Magazine Blog hipped us to this podcast.
Link to it here.
Host Jonathan Kirsch, an attorney specializing in intellectual property and publishing law, moderates a panel discussion on a landmark literary-legal settlement. It allows Google to scan and make available online many out-of-print but still-copyrighted books. The settlement portends a viable digital future for authors, publishers and libraries. Is there any downside?
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Lessig’s New Copyright Rules
Unfortunately Lawrence Lessig doesn’t make the rules, but we are lucky we have him to fight for us. Last week he published five recommended changes to the copyright law designed to help those who create to continue to create. When the law starts to do the opposite of what it was intended you have to wonder.
Deregulate amateur remix: We need to restore a copyright law that leaves “amateur creativity” free from regulation. Before the 20th century, this culture flourished. The 21st century could see its return. Digital technologies have democratized the ability to create and re-create the culture around us. Where the creativity is an amateur remix, the law should leave it alone. It should deregulate amateur remix.
What happens when others profit from this creativity? Then a line has been crossed, and the remixed artists plainly ought to be paid — at least where payment is feasible. If a parent has remixed photos of his kid with a song by Gilberto Gil (as I have, many times), then when YouTube makes the amateur remix publicly available, some compensation to Mr. Gil is appropriate — just as, for example, when a community playhouse lets neighbors put on a performance consisting of a series of songs sung by neighbors, the public performance of those songs triggers a copyright obligation (usually covered by a blanket license issued to the community playhouse). There are plenty of models within the copyright law for assuring that payment. We need to be as creative as our kids in finding a model that works.
Deregulate “the copy”: Copyright law is triggered every time there is a copy. In the digital age, where every use of a creative work produces a “copy,” that makes as much sense as regulating breathing. The law should also give up its obsession with “the copy,” and focus instead on uses — like public distributions of copyrighted work — that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.
Simplify: If copyright regulation were limited to large film studios and record companies, its complexity and inefficiency would be unfortunate, though not terribly significant. But when copyright law purports to regulate everyone with a computer, there is a special obligation to make sure this regulation is clear. It is not clear now. Tax-code complexity regulating income is bad enough; tax-code complexity regulating speech is a First Amendment nightmare.
Restore efficiency: Copyright is the most inefficient property system known to man. Now that technology makes it trivial, we should return to the system of our framers requiring at least that domestic copyright owners maintain their copyright after an automatic, 14-year initial term. It should be clear who owns what, and if it isn’t, the owners should bear the burden of making it clear.
Decriminalize Gen-X: The war on peer-to-peer file-sharing is a failure. After a decade of fighting, the law has neither slowed file sharing, nor compensated artists. We should sue not kids, but for peace, and build upon a host of proposals that would assure that artists get paid for their work, without trying to stop “sharing.”
This was in the Wall St. Journal. It’s gotten a lot of play in the blog world already, but I’ve been a bit swamped lately. Lessig’s got a new book coming out, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive In The Hybrid Economy. Let me know if you’ve read it and what thoughts you have.
