Archive for the ‘copyright’ Category

I met Lawrence Lessig this evening (he’s the skinny one in the picture).  He gave a lecture at BGSU – From Copyright to Corruption and Back Again.  The talk was a little less than an hour and in true Lessig style had more than 650 slides.  I talked with him for a few minutes before his presentation.  I only had time for a couple of questions.

Q1 – Who is the tougher crowd?  A room full of college students or the US Supreme Court?

A1 – Definitely the college students.

Q2 – Who will win in the end?  Shepard Fairey, Mannie Garcia or the Associated Press?

A2 – I actually represent Shepard, so I’m a little biased.  He will win.

It was a pleasure to meet the founder of the Creative Commons foundation.  Lessig said (for the first time in public) that more than 350,000,000 works have been licensed with some form of Creative Commons.  He talked mostly about copyright, but has shifted his energy to a campaign against corruption.  Combining the efforts of Change Congress with a new (yet to be named) group, the goal is to change the way money gets to politicians.  One statistic he gave was that the average investment with a lobbyist in Washington D.C. gives a 22,000% return.  He then gave example after example of how congress has made the wrong choice in legislation, choosing the side of the lobbyists over represented constituents.  If the money can be taken out of the equation, politicians should stop voting like idiots and start representing the people who elected them.

The talk was informative, entertaining and inspiring.  If you have the chance to sit in on a lecture, I highly recommend it.

When it comes to copyright infringement, it helps to be famous.  When artist Shepard Fairey wanted to create a poster during the presidential election, he went to Google.  There he found a picture of Obama, and without seeking permission from the photographer, he used the photo as the source of his artist work.

Under copyright law, this is called a derivative work and creation of such works is under the control of the owner of the original work.  Fairey did not know who owned the photograph he used.  He did not both to check.  He certainly did not have the permission of the work’s owner to create a derivative.

It took a year to determine that the photo was taken by Mannie Garcia, a photographer on assignment for the AP.  Garcia says he photographed Obama for twenty months and saw the poster many times.  He even snapped pictures of the poster.  He says it looked familiar, but he did not realize it was his picture until someone else figured it out.

If Garcia writes a book including famous photos he has taken, will he have to ask Fairey for permission to publish a picture of the poster based on the photo taken by Garcia?

Lawrence Lessig has a new book. Remix examines a culture where artists have gotten no more money, businesses have gotten no more profit and 70% of our kids have become copyright criminals. In the video below, Lessig talks about the book on The Colbert Report. Watch the video. Listen as Stephen pleads with the audience NOT to remix the video, especially with a great dance beat.

Of course, the next week, he had to show everyone the remix.

And there are even more if you look on YouTube.

I have always wanted to create a post with that subject and I finally have a topic that works.

Many of you probably watched the inauguration and heard “Air and Simple Gifts” performed by Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Itzhak Perlman (violin), Anthony McGill (clarinet), and Gabriela Montero (piano).  The piece was composed by John Williams famous for his Darth Vader march.

The piece was commissioned by the Presidential Inaugural Committee.  I think that means John Williams was acting as an agent of the federal government when he composed the work.  Does that make it automatically in the public domain?  Actually this is more complicated.  Williams used another source as inspiration for this work.  One of Obama’s favorite classical composers is Aaron Copland.  Copland’s 1944 ballet “Appalachian Spring” contains the source work, “Simple Gifts” with was written in 1848.  The copyright on the piece from the 1800’s has long expired, but it certainly has not for “Appalachian Spring.”

Here is something else that I find mind-blowing.  Take a look at the Wikipedia entry for Air and Simple Gifts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_and_Simple_Gifts

The article was created shortly after the piece was performed at the inauguration on Jan. 20.  Within 24 hours of “Air and Simple Gifts” original performance, dozens of people have collaborated to create an informative and well referenced article available to the whole world for free.  When “W” was sworn in as the 43rd President in 2000, Wikipedia had not been invented.  Imagine what the next eight years will bring us.

If you haven’t seen the Sarah Palin parody on Saturday Night Live, don’t go to YouTube. Here is the YouTube page where the video was.

As you might expect, content created on Saturday is still protected by copyright on Sunday. You can find the video over at NBC, although the link did not show up when I searched Google. It is posted on NBC’s main page right now. There are even embed codes so the video can be placed on my site (below).

The version on the NBC site had a pre-roll advertisement. I can embed it on my site, but NBC is getting the ad revue from the commercial (which seems to be gone from the embedded version of the video).

Here is something just as interesting. The one place you can find part of the video on YouTube is on Fox News’ reporting of the video. Fox News did not show all of the SNL video during their news show. They only played a small segment of the SNL broadcast. Because of the shorted duration, the Fox News version is protected by fair use. NBC may ask for another take, but it will be more difficult because Fox “played by the rules” when they showed the clip in the first place. So it will be up to Fox to decide if they want the clip taken down. The copyright protected commentary belongs to them.