Navigation
Who's online
There are currently 0 users and 2 guests online.
From the Center for Social Media, American University:
* Copyright & Fair Use in Documentary Film -- the best material on this topic currently available, especially the "Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use"
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on Lenz v. Universal, and a fair use application regarding preemptive takedown orders under the DMCA: "a federal judge ruled Wednesday that copyright holders can't order one of their songs removed from the Web without first checking to see if the excerpt was so small and innocuous that it was legal."
Here's a link to the court order, via the EFF. [PDF]
Quotes:
As reported in the L.A. Times (reg. required) and elsewhere, "officials with the Los Angeles Boy Scouts and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) on Friday unveiled the Respect Copyrights Activity Patch — emblazoned with a large circle C copyright sign along with a film reel and musical notes."
Boy scouts curriculum here (PDF).
From today's Chronicle of Higher Ed.:
Industry Executives and Copyright Activists Debate File Sharing at a Cornell U. Colloquium By BROCK READ Wednesday, April 20, 2005
When a who's who of entertainment-industry executives and digital-rights activists descended on Cornell University for a colloquium on downloading, they found Cornell's students more than eager to debate the past, present, and future of music and movie piracy.
The colloquium, "The Downloading Debate Strikes Back," pitted some of the chief architects of the entertainment industry's antipiracy campaign against two of the industry's most vocal opponents.
[From the issue dated April 8, 2005] By ANDREA L. FOSTER Washington
U.S. Supreme Court justices struggled in a lively debate last week with how to balance the competing interests of the entertainment industry and developers of file-sharing technology. Some justices sharply questioned whether it was fair to hold inventors of a distribution technology liable for copyright infringement, while others suggested that it was wrong for a business to thrive on illegal copying.
In the case, MGM Studios Inc. vs. Grokster Ltd., movie and recording companies hope to put an end to the swapping of songs and videos online by holding the producers of peer-to-peer file-sharing software responsible for the copyright violations of users. Scholars, college administrators, and students are closely following the case.
From Negativland's mailing list (Forklifters: http://www.negativland.com/touch.html):
In 2003 and 2004 Negativland worked with Stanford based Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org) to write the "Creative Commons Sampling License", an alternative to existing copyrights. These licenses are in increasingly widespread use by many artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, bloggers and websites. For a short film that explains Creative Commons and the sampling license Negativland helped create, go to -Â Â http://creativecommons.org/about/sampling-movie.
In October of 2005 the new issue of WIRED magazine worked with Creative Commons to publicly launch the use of these alternative copyright licenses in an even bigger way, including a CD with each issue of WIRED of music released using various Creative Commons licenses. Surprisingly, most of the musicians chose to use the sampling license. For more on this project, go to-Â http://creativecommons.org/wired/
WASHINGTON -- Several lobbying camps from different industries and ideologies are joining forces to fight an overhaul of copyright law, which they say would radically shift in favor of Hollywood and the record companies and which Congress might try to push through during a lame-duck session that begins this week.
The Senate might vote on HR2391, the Intellectual Property Protection Act, a comprehensive bill that opponents charge could make many users of peer-to-peer networks, digital-music players and other products criminally liable for copyright infringement. The bill would also undo centuries of "fair use" -- the principle that gives Americans the right to use small samples of the works of others without having to ask permission or pay.