Archive for the ‘copyright’ Category

Over the weekend we visited the Toledo Museum of Art.  It’s an impressive facility with pieces from many famous artists.  The spaces available in the galleries offer exceptional viewing environments.

As with many museums, most of the art can be photographed as long as no flash is used.  Modern art is normally off limits because the copyright has not expired.  The cutoff for copyright protection is 1923.  Anything before that time is now in the public domain.

We like paintings from the impressionist era (late 1800’s).  TMA has a wonderful collection with pieces by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne and Pissarro.  Moving through the exhibit toward 1900, we ran across a Van Gogh and other post-impressionist paintings.  We were told not to photograph the last painting before the door. 

Why?

It’s still under copyright.

I looked at the description next to the painting.  The picture was painted in 1919.  I asked the docent if there was something special about this particular painting as everything else created in 1919 is now in the public domain.

Apparently this caused a bit of confusion.  The docent explained that everything less than one hundred years old was still protected by copyright.  This picture still had a few years left.

Fortunately I happen to have all human knowledge available to me on my iPod.  I showed (the growing crowd of docents) that 1923 was the magic year.  Anything created before that year is now unconditionally in the public domain.

They still wouldn’t let me take a picture.  The director was not there and he would have to change the policy.  Oh well, at least a few more people know about copyright and the public domain.

Last year a group of students decided to fight back against the plagiarism tool being used by their school.  Before submitting an assignment to Turnitin, one of the students submitted all the legal documents to register the original paper as a copyrighted work.

Turnitin is a service that scrutinizes papers to determine if any part of the work has been plagiarized.  Turnitin does this by comparing all submitted papers with what is on the Internet in addition to all other documents submitted (about 100,000 per day) by subscribers to the service.

The argument by the students was that Turnitin was infringing on the copyright holder’s exclusive rights and also making money in the process.  To prove the point, the students jumped through all the hoops required to register a paper with the US copyright office and then filed a suite against Turnitin for copyright infringement.

It didn’t work.  Judge Claude M. Hilton has thrown the case out in a US District Court in Virginia.

Hilton found that iParadigm’s use of the students’ essays was transformative and valuable. In contrast, student essays in their normal form were viewed as having no market, and their reuse by turnitin did not in any way diminish the students’ “incentive for creativity”—namely, their grades.

Until a teenager writes a best seller, the market for high school creative writing assignments isn’t likely to expand.

Here is something most teenagers don’t know.  Stealing a CD from Wal-Mart isn’t nearly as bad (based on the magnitude of the fine) as downloading the same CD using an illegal P2P networking.  See chart below.

If the height of the “steal” bar is twelve inches, the “download” bar is as tall as the Empire State building.  The exact difference will depend on where you live.  The “steal” bar could be 1/4 as tall (three inches) in your state.

It took me a while to get this online. The audio doesn’t sound great, but I think most of it is understandable. I’ll post something tomorrow to explain how I created this video resource.

I switched blog servers a year or two ago and never updated the latest version to be licensed under a Creative Commons license.

The whole process is fairly simple. 

1 - Decide on the license you want to use.  I decided that anyone could use my work for anything except commercial use.  I don’t plan to make money with anything on my blog, but if someone does figure out a way to monetize this thing, they will have to get special permission from me to use my stuff.  That’s one of the nice things about Creative Commons.  Anyone can use my work for anything non-commercial, but if someone does want to go through the traditional process of getting my permission, they can (only with my permission) use my work commercially.

The list of Creative Commons licenses is here.

2 - Edit your blog footer.  This is little more complicated.  Start by copying the HTML from the Creative Commons license page.  All the HTML is provided.  High light it and copy.  Then open your blog’s footer.  You can find this in the dashboard under the Presentation menu.

Presentation - Theme Editor

and select Footer from the menu on the right side of the page.  See picture below.  Click for larger picture.

I have circled the link to the footer in the right menu.  When you click this link, the code for the footer will show up in the edit window on the left.  This is where the “be careful at this point” comes in. 

What I did to protect myself from a full meltdown is high light all the foot code, copy it and paste it into a Notepad file for safe keeping.  If things get totally messed up, that original code can be pasted back into the edit window.

To add the Creative Commons license code to your blog, find where the original copyright information is and delete it out.  In its place, paste the code from the CC site.  I have circled this in red in the picture above.  Click the Update File button to save your work.

3 - Take a look at your blog to ensure the footer is correct.  Remember, you can always go back to the original code if you need to.