Copyright Commerce and Culture

It's disarming that even in 1944, a song copyrighted over 100 years prior required a copyright notice.

It is dense legislation, is it active or inactive; relevant or irrelevant? These are the questions that I wish to answer.

Google worries that the 2009 ruling against isoHunt will affect its own services and services of its website, YouTube. While Google believes isoHunt is liable, they would like the court to be more precise. They would like to see isoHunt charged with only specific instances of inducing. Google is also pushing to see isoHunt protected by safe harbor under DMCA. "It's clear this court thinks the DMCA online safe harbors only insulate against direct infringement, not secondary infringement," writes intellectual property attorney Eric Goldman on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog. "The interplay between the safe harbors and secondary infringement remains a multi-billion statutory ambiguity."

Interesting Read about the Mashup model, fair use and girl talk - NY Times

The Twilight poster and album cover have an undeniable resemblance to each other, however, I think Summit's interference and influence on pulling his music from YouTube and iTunes was unnecessary. If Summit believed that the artist had stolen material for his album cover, then the company should have sued him instead. Also, if Twilight had inspired his music, then technically, this is not copyright infringement. I do not think that the music itself was a violation of intellectual property.

Creative Commons is facilitating the use and reuse of educational materials. According to this post written by a policy coordinator at the nonprofit organization, it can potentially allow students to save money they would be spending on textbooks. A professor at the University of MIchigan published a $10 book in 11 days because he adapted a book "offered under an open content license"

The use of Creative Commons licenses to broaden access to educational materials represents a general shift in academia. Although universities have often controlled this access to knowledge, these open source resources allow most people to educate themselves without the high barriers to entry, such as tuition. Like the MIT Open CourseWare, "iTunes U" compiles lectures from various universities. NYU actually just sent out its IT newsletter e-mail today, which contained a notice about its Open Education Pilot program. http://www.nyu.edu/its/connect/w11/openedpilot.html Even though it seems like universities are open to sharing lecture materials and other educational resources under the Creative Commons license, how lenient do you think these schools will be? Would they truly offer alternative textbooks in which the college has to forfeit their profit from their bookstore, for example?

As soon as the photograph is taken, Lady Gaga requests that the copyright is turned over to her. Unlike other artists, like Madonna or Radiohead, Gaga is limiting how photos of her performances are distributed. Is this demand justified and if so, does it exclude people who cannot afford to attend live performances?

The operator of popular live streaming site channelsurfing.net, has allegedly made $90,000 from sold ad space on the site since 2005. "Brian McCarthy allegedly hid behind the anonymity of the Internet to make a quick buck through what is little more than high-tech thievery". This is true, but then he got arrested and is facing a maximum 5 year jail sentence...

Sahi, a commuter science major at Princeton, Class of 2010, was able to collect more concrete data regarding shared torrents or large files across the sharing site. Looking at the identification numbers of anonymous users, this February, Sahi found that perhaps only ten out of a 1000 files were actually legal. Although it is a known fact that BitTorrent contains pirated material, this project will help identify which files are being accessed most frequently, which may ultimately aid in efforts to prevent piracy.

It appears that even professors often overlook the legality of distributing copyrighted materials. Although it's no question that fair use applies to a small excerpt or one chapter of a book, the legality of distributing multiple chapters or an entire work is, what this article calls, "cheating a legitimate economic interest." Students might disagree based on the cost of textbooks and course readers, though from the standpoint of the publisher and author, if an academic intends to use an entire work, it should not be copied, but purchased as the entire original work.

Companies are suing other websites that fail to hyperlink copyrighted materials. However, it seems excessive if it's just over a single photo.

Free documentary (good).

Harvard students rally alongside the MPAA.

Really neat series, lots of information...!

I think Mr. Gordon may have a good chance of winning the lawsuit. If you look at the original picture he drew, you can see that it was more than just an idea that was taken and used to make Kung Fu Panda. He even titled his own drawings "Kung Fu Panda Power." When comparing this to Rihanna's infringement for her S&M music video, I feel that Rihanna has a better chance of escaping charges for infringement than does Dreamworks, because Rihanna was able to take photos and recreate them originally into a different form of media. Kung Fu Panda, on the other hand, is an animated film, which means that these photos weigh more heavily because they were not really originally transformed, they are the same pictures, just moving. This will be an interesting case to follow.