Big news today: a ten-year-old lawsuit about Google Book Search has been resolved in Google's favor -- basically, the law has ruled that it was okay for Google to scan in-copyright books because it had no plans to publish the whole version of those in-copyright books online in http://books.google.com. Compare this to what we've heard about celebrity photographs and Pinterest. Here's a quotation from the story:
"When Google started work on its book search engine a decade ago, the company realized that getting the approval of copyright holders would be a logistical nightmare. Not only would major publishers likely demand high fees for permission to scan their books, but for many older works, it would be difficult to even figure out who the appropriate copyright holder was. So Google took a gamble, scanning library books without seeking copyright holders' permission and relying on copyright's fair use doctrine as a justification."
This is a somewhat old article (published in 2005) but still has some relevancy in how musicians are looking at the positives and negatives of creative commons licenses and copyrights.
This is just a Wikipedia article about the history of music publishing but I shared it because I remember my music prof. at Mason talking about Stephan Foster being the first songwriter who got copyright over his material and he is mentioned in this post. Its interesting to see how far back the laws go in different countries.
Here's a description of the "Safe Harbor" provision of the 1998 DMCA, which allows sites like YouTube and Pinterest to operate without (too much) fear of copyright lawsuits.
This is an article on the DMCA, so it may shine some light on my presentation yesterday on Pinterest and the copyright laws! It is also an interesting read and very informative!