Over at Ars I report on NBC’s decision to “allow” bloggers to make use of debate footage:
skeptics might question whether the networks had the right to restrict use of the footage in the first place. Under the principle of fair use, copyright law permits the reproduction of excerpts of copyrighted material for criticism, comment, and news reporting. Although determining the precise scope of fair use is never an exact science, showing a clip from a presidential debate is about as clear-cut an example as we can imagine. In most cases, bloggers will be legally entitled to use debate excerpts without paying any attention to NBC’s license restrictions.
Nevertheless, NBC’s announcement (and ABC’s and CNN’s announcements before them) will give rank-and-file bloggers peace of mind. That’s important because in the past, the networks have sometimes been trigger-happy in sending takedown notices. Even if the law was on their side, some bloggers might have been reluctant to take the risk of prolonged copyright litigation.
Via TechDirt, Wired reports that SoundExchange, the cartel for the major labels collective licensing authority for digital music, has been lobbying for Congress to make terrestrial broadcasters pay royalties for playing music on the air. That despite the fact that radio stations have been legally entitled to play music without royalties (to the band—I believe they have to pay statutory royalties to the songwriter), and despite the fact that the labels beg and plead with radio stations to play their songs more.
Cato chairman Bill Niskanen wouldn’t be surprised.
Erstwhile TLF blogger Tom Pearson draws an analogy between Harry Potter and copyright law:
One of the most interesting passages in the new HP is on page 517 regarding Goblins’ views on property. I may be reaching a bit, but the first thing I thought of was intellectual property law. According to the passage, Goblins consider the maker rather than the purchaser of an object to be its true owner. Indeed, the purchaser is seen as merely renting the property. This sentence seemed particularly apt: “They [Goblins] consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard-to-wizard without further payment, little more than theft.” That strikes me as the approach taken by the RIAA and MPAA toward copyrights and is fairly close to the Randian conception of IP as well.
So, am I grasping at straws here?
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Mike Masnick points to this excellent post on Jon Healy’s blog at the Los Angeles Times. According to Live365, RIAA music accounts for less than half of all music webcast.
The problem is that, as Jamie Plummer explained in an issue of TechKnowledge a couple of months ago, every artist and every Internet radio station has to participate in the RIAA’s cartel collection agency, SoundExchange, whether they want to or not. As I understand it, artists are not permitted to sign separate contracts setting lower webcasting rates for their music, nor are artists allowed to give blanket permission to play their music for free.
This is a classic example of industry incumbents using the legal system to maintain artificially high prices. In a free market, lesser-known artists would offer webcasters discounts in the hopes of getting more play time. That, in turn, would put pressure on the majors’ royalty rates, as more webcasters shifted to playing less expensive music. But thankfully, Uncle Sam has stepped in and rescued them. Like the ICC of old, SoundExchange legally prohibits artists from charging unfairly low prices, ensuring that the labels don’t face unfair competition.
Dave Weigel reports on one of the unintended consequences of the copyright lobby crusade to criminalize anything vaguely connected to piracy. Some college kid wanted to capture a 20-second clip of the movie Transformers and so she brought a camcorder into the theater. Now she’s facing a fine of $2500 under “zero tolerance” anti-camcording laws.
The darknet critique applies to anti-camcording laws as much as it does to the DMCA. Once one copy of a movie leaks onto peer-to-peer networks, it rapidly spreads throughout the darknet. So unless you can get the rate of camcording down to zero, which is essentially impossible, these sorts of laws won’t stop anyone from getting ahold of pirated movies.
On the other hand, they can impose disproportionate penalties college kids who commit the crime of not being sufficiently familiar with the minutia of copyright law to know that taping a 20-second clip of a movie is a federal crime.
I earlier posted our amicus brief in the Cablevision case, along with most of the others, here.
The brief of Americans for Tax Reform, affiliated with the Property Rights Alliance, is here in two parts:
Part I
Part II
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Today, the Well Connected Project of the Center for Public Integrity is excited to launch an issue portal jointly with Congresspedia. This issue portal is a wiki, like Wikipedia, creating a collection of articles on telecom, media and technology policy, in a single location. Anyone can read, write and edit these articles.
This issue portal builds on the great telecom and technology reporting done by the members of the Well Connected Project staff. This venture into collaborative journalism is a first for our project. It adds a new element to our investigative journalism endeavor. First of all, we have the Media Tracker, a free database of more than five million records that tells you who owns the media where you live by typing in you ZIP code. If we win our lawsuit against the FCC, we’ll also include company-specific broadband information in the Media Tracker.
Second, our blog features dozens of quick-turnaround stories on the hottest topics in telecom and media policy. Recent stories have broken news on the battle over 700 Megahertz, on the lobbying over the proposed XM-Sirius satellite radio merger, and also over copyright controls on electronic devices. We also do investigative reports – like this one about Sam Zell, the new owner of Tribune Co. – that build on the data that is freely available in Media Tracker.
Now, with the addition of this Congresspedia wiki, our project aims to incorporate citizen-journalism on key public policy issues near and dear to the blogosphere. These are issues like Broadband availability, Digital copyright, Digital television, Regulating media content, and Spectrum are at the core of what techies care about in Washington. We hope you will add others articles, too. In fact, I’ve already started my own wish list: articles about Patent overhaul legislation, Media ownership, the Universal Service Fund, and Video franchising. Our reporters can summarize these issues and debates, but so can you.
Take a crack at them!
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TechCrunch has a write-up of a Belgian court ruling, based on the EU copyright directive, that Internet Service Providers bear responsibility for stopping illegal file-sharing on their networks. Apparently, though, the ruling doesn’t create a general obligation to monitor.
We get a lot of benefit from treating ISPs as common carriers, empty vessels without any obligation other than to serve their customers. I wrote a piece in Regulation magazine a while back arguing against imposing a responsibility on ISPs to control viruses. Though they can do so as a service to customers, requiring it of them sets a precedent that leads to all kinds of regulation and monitoring being imposed through the ISP bottleneck.
Tom Lee has a great post on this New York Times article, which looks at the pressing problem of culinary piracy. Tom points out that the law is very clear—you can’t prevent other people from copying your recipes—and that’s a good thing:
All of this ignores the public domain innovations that Ms. Charles benefits from, royalty-free: the cocktails her bartenders serve, the system of reservation-making she presumably employs, and, most amazingly, the Caesar Salad recipe that she says her mother got from another restaurant, but which she’s now suing her sous chef for using. Diffuse borrowing seems to be okay; borrowing too much from one place isn’t, I guess. But where do you draw the line?
The story mentions that nondisclosure agreements are coming to more and more kitchens, but fails to point out why this is: as screwed-up as our IP system is, it actually dealt with these questions before the food industry was sufficiently powerful to corrupt the process. That’s why lawyers are now trying to shove all of this stuff into contract law, where you can get away with much more. In other words: it’s because the sorts of claims Ms. Charles is making are untenable under IP law.
There’s no question that the sous chef is being tacky by copying Charles’ restaurant, but it would be very silly to open a Pandora’s box by punishing him for copying paint colors. IP laws are there to encourage people to make new things; the market’s there to get them to make those things better. These distinctions can get blurry in the world of novel cuisine. But restaurants are fundamentally in the business of selling food, not seeking rent on ideas about food. This story is asinine, and Pete Wells would have done better to highlight how stupid everyone involved is being instead of just making the guy getting sued sound like a jerk.
Update: Oops, forgot to actually include the link to Tom’s entry. My bad!
Steven Levy’s column for Newsweek bemoans the trouble that some fellow has gotten himself into, selling mash-ups of hip-hop songs without licensing. Fair use? Transformative use? Why bother with the technicalities? Levy and a legislator likes the fellow, so they weigh in on the side of legislating (yet another) exception. Maybe jam transformative and fair uses together into a whole new category, “rave” use, with a safe harbor for “hipster” use and for the older set “cool” uses? The principle behind it might be that if you offend only a little, you are liable, but if you offend multiple players a lot, you are home free.
The problem of how to license a whole bunch of stuff (167 artists in this case) all at once for a reasonable fee is a daunting one. Not so daunting that one ought not to try. But is proposing yet another exemption or exception or compulsory license or combination thereof really an intelligent approach to the problem? It is not. It is flatly embarrassing that legislators and experienced commentators on copyright cannot do better than this perpetual handing out of legal privileges to the favorite information cause du jour, simultaneously screwing creators and leaving the next innovative
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.