I had just sat down to post a note about an interview with J.D. Lasica in On The Media (listen to MP3) this week when I found David Rothman beat me to it. The interview was one of the better treatments of copyright issues that’s I’ve heard/seen in the (relatively-) popular media.

Here’s the summary from the OTM site:

For every move that media industries have taken to protect their copyrights, there has been an equal and opposite countermove by consumers. In Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation, J.D. Lasica explores the realm in which so-called pirates operate – slicing, dicing, and sharing media to their hearts’ content. Lasica talks to Bob about how Hollywood is driving consumers further into the shadows and under the radar.

One of the best features of OTM interview, is the way they ran it along side a story about Backstage BBC, the new developer interface/API for the worlds most popular news website. How’d it work? It worked because — just like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and others — they saw value in opening up their copyrighted material to see how others might “remix” it.

But because Rothman reported on the Darknet/Lasica interview first and better, I’m taking the easy way out by throwing down a few links and calling it good:

Lasica’s book: Darknet.

Lasica on Darknets –“private, encrypted spaces where social groups can communicate with each other and exchange files.” His concept, ten examples, and Wikipedia’s take.

Lasica on digital libraries: top 10 assaults on digital liberties.

Technorati Tags: api, bbc, bbc backstage, copyright, copyright issues, copyrights, darknet, david rothman, developer interface, on the media

Alan Wexelblat at Copyfight pointed out this story that talks about increasing limits on public photography.

If you’re standing on public property, you can shoot anything the naked eye can see, explains Ken Kobre, professor of photojournalism at San Francisco State University and author of one of the seminal textbooks on the subject.

…But that apparently doesn’t stop security guards, cops, and others from intimidating and sometimes arresting those who try it.

Lawrence Lessig had a little bit to say about this in Free Culture, though his real point there was about copyright issues related to photography. Here, at the bottom of page 33, he makes the point that I’m getting at:

[E]arly in the history of photography, there was a series of judicial decisions that could well have changed the course of photography[...]. Courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print whatever image he wanted. Their answer was no.

Various forces have been chipping away at this basic presumption of freedom to photograph ever since, but Lessig rightly credits this early decision with creating the cover necessary for consumer photography to emerge and boom as it did.

Technorati Tags: consumer photography, copyright issues, ebooks, free culture, history of photography, ibiblio, judicial decisions, lawrence lessig, naked eye, photojournalism