copyright

Documentarians spend most of their time digging up materials that few people know exist. They frequent basements and dark storage rooms, endure conversations with crazy collectors, and typically develop vitamin-d deficiency and light sensitivity in search of what they need.

Their reward for finding the material? A bill from the original creators (the ones who lost and forgot about the work in the first place) for the privilege of using it.

Ars Technica reports a story about filmmaker David Hoffman who had to pay $320,000 for materials used in a film about Sputnik hysteria that swept the US in the 1950s. Unfortunately, the best The History Channel would pay for the entire film is $200,000.

YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.

Anybody who thinks Free Software is anti-copyright or disrespectful of intellectual property should take a look at Mark Jaquith’s post, What a GPL’d Movable Type means. Let’s be clear, Anil Dash takes issue with Jaquith’s interpretation, but the point is Jaquith’s offense at what appears to be Six Apart’s grabbiness for any code somebody might contribute.

Freedom 0 was one thing, the willingness of a person to pour his or her sweat into something, then watch somebody else (or even risk watching somebody else) profit from it is another.

From The Chronicle:

Copyright law, a constant thorn in the sides of scholars and researchers, is generating a lot of public discussion this week, thanks in part to a new 10-minute video that parodies the law. “A Fair(y) Use Tale” has been downloaded from YouTube about 145,000 times since it was posted online Friday. The video uses 400 cuts from 27 different Disney films to mock copyright law as overly protective of the interests of copyright owners — Disney among them.

Eric Faden, an assistant professor of English and film studies at Bucknell University, who produced the video with help from seven of his students, said it took eight months to make. “The most important thing is that it’s getting people to talk about these issues” of copyright and fair use, Mr. Faden said today. Worried that Disney may sue him for copyright infringement, Mr. Faden has retained Stanford University law professors.

Rather read a tale of copyright tyranny than watch one? Try “The People Who Owned the Bible.”

Michael Sauers pointed out Q-Unit, a mashup of Queen and 50 Cent. They’re sure to have Disney (the rights owner for Queen’s catalog) on their back soon. At least, it didn’t take Disney long to shut down The Kleptones, whose “A Night At The Hip-Hopera” has a spot on my iPod.

And that’s where the story comes around, are we at the point where we can say Queen’s music has taken on the status of a modern fairy tale? And are these artists — The Kleptones and Q-Unit — the new Disneys, remaking old tales for new times?

Back when I was looking things up for my Digital Preservation and Copyright story I found a bunch of info the University of Texas System had gathered on issues related to copyright, libraries, and education. In among the pages on copying copyrighted works, A/V reserves, and electronic reserves I found a document titled: Educational Fair Use Guidelines for Digital Images.

It’s some interesting stuff — if you get excited about copyright law. Beware, however, that they cite Texaco a bunch, and Laura Quilter has issues with that.

With all the talk about Google scanning or not scanning copyrighted books, I was happy to see Laura Quilter talking about Google as a library.

The Internet Archive is certainly a library. […] Libraries may be private, semi-private, public; for- or not-for-profit; paper or digital. Why is Google not a library?

More interestingly, she casts a critical eye on the Texaco decision that everybody points to as the guiding law on fair use. This, and the rest of her blog are good reading.

At least that’s the only thing a person can conclude from the stories at Copyfight earlier this week. This post reports on two stories where the photo services concluded that the photos to be printed were too good to have come from an average customer. Upon trying to order prints of her child, one Ofoto user found the following:

Your order has been cancelled because it appears your order contains one of the following… 1. Professional images.

And Wal Mart told another mother:

We can’t release the pictures to you without a copyright release form signed by the photographer.

At least Ofoto gave the mother the opportunity to sign an affidavit warranting that she was the photographer or had permission from the copyright owner. Wal Mart wouldn’t even accept that.

So, like I noted in the headline: Professionals apparently don’t use Ofoto or Wal Mart. I wonder if they promote that as a selling point…

Seltzer’s post notes the new copyright warning that Canon is putting in their camera manuals and the trouble{#157&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0} that the developers of the open-source Gallery image management software project found themselves in recently.

I’m not sure what to think about Steve J’s WWDC announcement (video stream) of Apple’s switch to x86 processors. Coverage at MacNN, Mac Rumors, Ars Technica, etc. I’m not sure, but it would be easier to take if I wasn’t the only one who saw conspiracy in it. Does this relate to Intel’s recent shoehorning of DRM onto the CPU?

It wasn’t long ago that I was praising Apple for making devices that served the remix world that exists in the void between fair use and copyright infringement, but moves since then have concerned me. I live with iTunes DRM, but can I tolerate DRM throughout the OS all the way down to the hardware? Can I tolerate something that eliminates the (entirely legal) me2me sharing that I expect (and is revered in the analog world)?

Anyway, there’s some mixed news about PPC on X86 emulation that will be part of the next OS release, and I expect the jabbering about the effect of this announcement will last all summer. Here’s some now from MacNN, and PowerPage{#14641}. And here’s something I can laugh at.