If you're anything like me, at this point of the class you probably know how much you don't know about copyright, fair use, Creative Commons, and the grand media conspiracy to get government to legislate protections for the music industry. I never realized it was so complicated, and the very fact that it is so convoluted is a telling sign that something's not right.
Lessig summarizes his project by claiming a middle ground between "all right reserved" and "no rights reserved" with "some rights reserved" in the guise of the Creative Commons, where individuals can decide how much other people can use their creations. Presumably, if you come across a CC license, the creator of that work is giving you some permission to use that work/tool under certain restrictions. Will this lessen piracy and theft? Not knowing any better, the first time I came across a CC license I thought "Whoa. Hold on there. I don't want to get too close to this thing. I'd better back up nice and slow and everything will be okay." Rather than looking into the license, I thought it was copyright on crack, and I probed no further.
The hope is that by using CC, more work will be available for public consumption and the greater culture will flourish. Individuals will no longer have to "borrow" from corporations/institutions. However, don't forget that corporations "borrow" from individuals as well, as the case of the Chinese Olympic website stealing a game from a graphic designer without asking permission or offering compensation. Would this example had been averted if a CC license were present? Will people steal regardless of the restrictions? I don't know.
So we get to the end of Free Culture when we realize that the problem is alot bigger than we thought. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. What do we do? Take to the streets? Riot? Refuse to buy music? Join a cutting-edge p2p group? Ignore it? Lessig actually endorses this last option in regards to cracking down on illegal downloads when he says the ubiquity and speed of the Internet will soon make p2p file sharing obsolete; why be a content manager when it's easier to just subscribe to a service to listen to whatever you want? Though not exactly the same, Apple has been toying with a similar scenario by allowing new iPod owners to get unlimited lifetime use of iTunes for a one-time fee. Is this the future, all Internet, all the time? Abilene Christian University, that bastion of conservatism, recently announced that they're giving all incoming freshmen free iPhones. Is this the end or just the beginning?
Showing posts with label creative commons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creative commons. Show all posts
3/14/08
FW: Physics Journal May Reconsider Wikipedia Ban
Woopsie! Messed up posting via e-mail...
Physics journal may reconsider Wikipedia ban. on Slashdot.
Anyway, that is all.
Physics journal may reconsider Wikipedia ban. on Slashdot.
Anyway, that is all.
3/3/08
material relating to presentation tonight
Vuguru article (NYT)
Piracy article (involving a how-to guide for Miro)
Warner Brothers' China division, in a rare act of intelligence on the part of a major media company, demonstrated significant savvy last year when they began selling cheap, legitimate, high quality DVDs of movies within days of the theatrical release. By pricing the discs at around 12 yuan (approximately US$1.50), Warner is hoping to make cost a non-issue, thus allowing them to compete in one area where they hold the upper hand: Quality. Instead of taking a chance with on a low quality, shaky-camcorder copy of a film, Chinese consumers can get a high quality copy of the movie at a reasonable price, all while enjoying the warm fuzzy feeling that you can get knowing that you've helped to pay for some small portion of a a Hollywood star's private jet. (Source: Surveillance State blog at cnet.com, Sept. 2007)
There were some efforts in Congress to modify the DMCA – Rick Boucher’s Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA) and Zoe Lofgren’s BALANCE Act – neither successful.
Timothy B. Lee (Cato Institute): “The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders — and the technology companies that distribute their content — the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.” (Source: Wikipedia)
List of some recent fair-use legislation
Points from the BALANCE Act (2005) – Zoe Lofgren (CA) et al.
1. Copyright seeks to encourage and reward creative efforts by securing a fair return for an author's labor. Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151, 156 (1975). At the same time, `[f]rom the infancy of copyright protection, some opportunity for fair use of copyrighted materials has been thought necessary to fulfill copyright's very purpose, `[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts . . .' Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 575 (1994).
2. `[P]rivate motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts . . . When technological change has rendered its literal terms ambiguous, the Copyright Act must be construed in light of this basic purpose.' Twentieth Century Music Corp., 422 U.S. at 156.
3. On the one hand, digital technology threatens the rights of copyright holders. Perfect digital copies of songs and movies can be publicly transmitted, without authorization, to thousands of people at little or no cost. On the other hand, technological control measures give copyright holders the capacity to limit nonpublic performances and threaten society's interests in the free flow of ideas, information, and commerce.
4. The authors of the DMCA never intended to create such a dramatic shift in the balance. As the report of the Committee of the Judiciary of the House of Representatives accompanying the DMCA stated: `[A]n individual [should] not be able to circumvent in order to gain unauthorized access to a work, but [should] be able to do so in order to make fair use of a work which he or she has acquired lawfully.' House Report 105-551, Part I, Section-by-Section Analysis of section 1201(a)(1).
Piracy article (involving a how-to guide for Miro)
Warner Brothers' China division, in a rare act of intelligence on the part of a major media company, demonstrated significant savvy last year when they began selling cheap, legitimate, high quality DVDs of movies within days of the theatrical release. By pricing the discs at around 12 yuan (approximately US$1.50), Warner is hoping to make cost a non-issue, thus allowing them to compete in one area where they hold the upper hand: Quality. Instead of taking a chance with on a low quality, shaky-camcorder copy of a film, Chinese consumers can get a high quality copy of the movie at a reasonable price, all while enjoying the warm fuzzy feeling that you can get knowing that you've helped to pay for some small portion of a a Hollywood star's private jet. (Source: Surveillance State blog at cnet.com, Sept. 2007)
There were some efforts in Congress to modify the DMCA – Rick Boucher’s Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA) and Zoe Lofgren’s BALANCE Act – neither successful.
Timothy B. Lee (Cato Institute): “The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders — and the technology companies that distribute their content — the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.” (Source: Wikipedia)
List of some recent fair-use legislation
Points from the BALANCE Act (2005) – Zoe Lofgren (CA) et al.
1. Copyright seeks to encourage and reward creative efforts by securing a fair return for an author's labor. Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151, 156 (1975). At the same time, `[f]rom the infancy of copyright protection, some opportunity for fair use of copyrighted materials has been thought necessary to fulfill copyright's very purpose, `[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts . . .' Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 575 (1994).
2. `[P]rivate motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts . . . When technological change has rendered its literal terms ambiguous, the Copyright Act must be construed in light of this basic purpose.' Twentieth Century Music Corp., 422 U.S. at 156.
3. On the one hand, digital technology threatens the rights of copyright holders. Perfect digital copies of songs and movies can be publicly transmitted, without authorization, to thousands of people at little or no cost. On the other hand, technological control measures give copyright holders the capacity to limit nonpublic performances and threaten society's interests in the free flow of ideas, information, and commerce.
4. The authors of the DMCA never intended to create such a dramatic shift in the balance. As the report of the Committee of the Judiciary of the House of Representatives accompanying the DMCA stated: `[A]n individual [should] not be able to circumvent in order to gain unauthorized access to a work, but [should] be able to do so in order to make fair use of a work which he or she has acquired lawfully.' House Report 105-551, Part I, Section-by-Section Analysis of section 1201(a)(1).
1/25/08
Creative Commons
If you've been keeping up with the first link on our blogroll, you might wonder what's up with Lawrence Lessig, considering most of his recent posts have been about politics more than authorship and copyright law. I guess he's starting to focus more on political corruption, but I think [at least at this juncture] he is best known for starting Creative Commons.
CC makes a number of licenses available to artists and authors as an alternative to the "All Rights Reserved" method we see with traditional copyright law. I'm still learning about it, but it seems the the idea is to let others know in what ways you are OK with your work being shared, remixed, or otherwise altered.
So I might go home tonight, take a beautiful picture of the sunset, and decide that I wouldn't mind it being used by other people. I could upload this to my flickr page, slap a CC license on it, and bloggers around the world would be free to repost it in anyway they wish, provided they follow whatever stipulations I have--that my image is not used commercially, that you give me credit for the photo, et cetera. There's a giant pool of CC content available to work from already, and it seems like it will only get bigger.
The main question I have is this: how can I verify that the person who put the license on an object is the original author? How do I know that someone didn't just rip an image off somebody else's website, upload it to their flickr account, and slap a license on it that gives me the right to do as I list. Would I be held accountable if I used that image and the original, true author tracked me down and demanded compensation? I have no idea. I wonder if efforts like CC are making things easier or more complicated, but that's something that might lead to more specific questions that could be answered in a paper. Hmmmm...
CC makes a number of licenses available to artists and authors as an alternative to the "All Rights Reserved" method we see with traditional copyright law. I'm still learning about it, but it seems the the idea is to let others know in what ways you are OK with your work being shared, remixed, or otherwise altered.
So I might go home tonight, take a beautiful picture of the sunset, and decide that I wouldn't mind it being used by other people. I could upload this to my flickr page, slap a CC license on it, and bloggers around the world would be free to repost it in anyway they wish, provided they follow whatever stipulations I have--that my image is not used commercially, that you give me credit for the photo, et cetera. There's a giant pool of CC content available to work from already, and it seems like it will only get bigger.
The main question I have is this: how can I verify that the person who put the license on an object is the original author? How do I know that someone didn't just rip an image off somebody else's website, upload it to their flickr account, and slap a license on it that gives me the right to do as I list. Would I be held accountable if I used that image and the original, true author tracked me down and demanded compensation? I have no idea. I wonder if efforts like CC are making things easier or more complicated, but that's something that might lead to more specific questions that could be answered in a paper. Hmmmm...
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