Posts Tagged ‘copyright’

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.

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.

John mentioned this mosaic program during EdTechWeekly last night.  AndreaMosaic is free.  You provide the program a directory of your pictures and one target image.  Above is something I created today.  I pointed AM to the folder with our pictures from Disney’s Magic Kingdom.  As the target, I found a GIF of Mickey Mouse.  The program went to work and in a few minutes created a collage (click picture for higher resolution) of our Disney pictures in the shape of that famous mouse.

The big question is whether or not my image is a violation of copyright law.  I know the image of Mickey Mouse is protected by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.  But what about my pictures arranged in the shape of Mickey?

Here’s a gem from Techdirt about a professor that is suing someone for selling notes of his lecture.  He is claiming he has a copyright on what he says in class and someone else can’t take his ideas, write them down in outline form and sell them for profit.

Apparently this is an actual business in large campus communities.  Einstein Notes seems to be all over Florida.  They show up in lectures, take notes and then sell those notes to students who cannot make it to class.

The lecturer claims what he says is protected by copyright.  I don’t know if that is factual.  Nothing is protected by copyright law unless it is fixed.  Unless the professor is reading his lecture word for word from a piece of paper, I doubt his lecture meets the minimal requirement of what it takes to protect a work.

Let’s suppose he has written down his lecture and is reading it word for word during class.  Facts, ideas, systems and methods of operation are not protected by copyright.  I have to believe most of the lecture will contain elements of this type and not the instructor’s personal poetry or musical works.

How many times have you witnessed someone using a personal recording device to record a lecture?  If writing notes constitutes copyright infringement, recording that same lecture is certainly against the law.

Maybe we should all transfer to MIT.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/av/

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.