I subscribe to Stereophile magazine. Every month I take great pleasure in reading the latest product reviews, particularly those involving either of the following:
- Unobtainium plated interconnects sheathed in endangered panda skin for optimum voodoo-shielding
- Any devices employing any form of magnetic levitation technology
While thumbing through the June issue which arrived yesterday, I came across an ad for a new classical recording. It’s a Zenph Re-Performance™ of Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
From the ad:
Zenph takes audio recordings and turns them back into live performances, precisely replicating what was originally recorded. The software-based process extracts and encodes the details of how each note was played. The encoding is played back on an acoustic grand piano allowing listeners to experience the performance as if they were in the room when the original recording was made. This re-performance is then recorded afresh using the latest recording techniques. This release features new recordings of that experience specifically designed for surround-sound, stereo or headphone listening.
What are the copyright implications of doing this? A few things to consider:
- The Goldberg Variations are obviously in the public domain. Gould’s 1955 recording, as a derivative work, is not.
- Nothing you hear on this recording is in any way sampled. No audio from the 1955 recording persists.
- The original recording was essentially traced, so the exact timing and velocity of each note matches Gould’s performance perfectly.
- It’s being marketed as Gould’s 1955 performance.
Please post any thoughts you might have to the comments.
What is the position of the United States government on a proposed treaty, currently before the World Intellectual Property Organization, that would create a copyright-style protection for television broadcasts?
That is the key question that observers want answers for at the public roundtable discussion that will be held today, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., at the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress. The proposed treaty has been rife with controversy from the beginning. One reason is that it is being promoted as an update to the 1961 Treaty of Rome, which the U.S. never ratified.
During negotiations last year at WIPO in Geneva, the U.S. was the most significant government to promote extending the broadcaster treaty to cover webcasters. But the rest of the world balked at that. Failing that modification, the U.S. expressed dissatisfaction with the end-result.
In a column on the subject last September, I quoted PTO officials as follows:
“The U.S. does not believe that [the current treaty] provides a proper basis for going to a diplomatic conference, and intervened to say as much,” PTO spokeswoman Brigid Quinn said September 15. “The U.S. has always envisioned this treaty as one to provide the necessary protections for broadcast signals in the digital age.” As a result, she said, “there is no consensus and alternatives on at least half of the issues.”
Copyright issues generate a lot of controversy. But here’s a cause I think everyone on all sides of the copyright debate can agree on: the presidential debates should be free from copyright restrictions after they are aired. Larry Lessig has a petition up calling on the RNC and DNC to require any television stations airing the debates to release their copyrights into the public domain, or under a CC-BY (or its equivalent) license.
Makes sense to me. The debates are a central part of the national conversation that is our presidential campaigns. There’s absolutely no reason there should be any restrictions on viewing, re-distributing, or re-mixing them. I’ve left a comment expressing my support. You can call the DNC to express your support at (202) 863-8000, or call the RNC at (202) 863-8500.
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, Hance Haney, Tim Lee, Adam Thierer, and Mike Masnick of Techdirt.com. Topics include,
- The FCC releases its report on violence in the media
- Copyright and the economics of abundance
- Patent reform heats up in Congress with a new bill
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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One advantage the patent system clearly does have over the regulatory state is that you generally can’t go to jail for patent infringement, as you can for selling lobster tails that are the wrong size and packaged in the wrong kind of containers. Over at Ars Technica, I’ve got a story about legislation in Europe that could have taken the first step toward changing that. Fortunately, the good guys scored a partial victory by getting patents removed from the scope of the second Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive.
However, there’s still some scary stuff in there. “Inciting” copyright infringement can still be a criminal offense, opening the door to jailing the creator of the next YouTube or MP3 player. Moreover, it’s a criminal offense to infringe other “intellectual property rights” on a “commercial scale.” These include “geographical indication” rights, meaning that a winemaker from outside the Champagne region of France could not only be sued but thrown in jail for selling his sparkling wine as “champagne.”
What’s not clear is why any of this is necessary. Piracy isn’t an especially serious problem in Europe, and the authorities already have plenty of weapons in their arsenal. Politicians have gotten in the worrisome habit of throwing people in jail just to prove that they’re serious about whatever the problem-of-the-week happens to be.
Alex Tabarrok on Marginal Revolution posted an interesting comment on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter wealth. Though it’s been up for 2+ days and generated several comments, I don’t see a mention of copyright anywhere. I think it’s very relevant. This is a blog of smart and aware readers and writers.
Update: Commenter “candid” spots a reference to “IP” in comment #3 at Marginal Revolution, confirming my observation about their writers and readers, and drawing into question my own capabilities . . ./Update
To see discussion of copyright, one must go to Matthew Iglesias’ follow-on. It’s not him, but his commenters who surface the intellectual property issue. Commenter “Rich C” says:
If Rowling (and her publisher) could not rely on an internationally enforceable system of intellectual property rights, her income would be a good deal lower. Rowling’s wealth is a product of protectionist policies, not free trade or technology.
A system of support for creative artists that does not depend on current forms of intellectual property protection (such as that Dean Baker has proposed) would still allow Rowling to live an extraordinarily comfortable life, but would sharply limit the windfall gains to her and her publisher. A system of real free trade in creative products would not increase inequality to anything like the degree we see with our system today.
I don’t know anything about this Dean Baker or his proposal, but I do think copyright is very relevant to J.K. Rowling’s wealth, and I think more people should be thinking and talking about its role in creativity, wealth creation, and sometimes windfalls.
(Via Will Wilkinson.)
The Washington Post reports today on a couple of Virginia high school students who are suing anti-plagiarism service turnitin.com for copyright infringement. According to press accounts, the service is used by 6,000 schools, including Harvard and Georgetown. The way it works is that students turn in papers to their teachers by submitting them through Turnitin’s website. Turnitin then compares the submitted papers to a snapshot of the web, to databases of published articles, and to its own database of millions of other student papers. The problem is that the submitted papers are added to the company’s database of student papers without student permission. Plaintiffs in the case specifically marked their papers asking that they not be archived but they where nonetheless. The students have a website at dontturnitin.com.
What’s striking to me is how similar this is to Google Book Search. It remains to be seen whether Turnitin will make a fair use defense, but their past statements suggest that they will. (Here is a PDF of a legal opinion that Turnitin commissioned.)
Google is copying books without the copyright owners’ consent and storing them in a searchable database, just as Turnitin does with student papers. Google copies the whole book, but argues it’s a fair use because they only display a “snippet” of the text in search results. Turnitin also copies the whole work and only displays snippets to teachers if there’s a plagiarism match. Both Google and Turnitin make commercial use of the works they copy and they both arguably serve educational purposes. And If Google’s use doesn’t affect the “potential market” for licensing books to be included in searchable databases, then Turnitin’s use certainly doesn’t affect the potential market for licensing papers to be included in a plagiarism database.
So, can these cases be distinguished? If not, are they both fair use? I’m still thinking about this one, and I’d like to hear what your analysis is.
Based on my reading of the complaint, Tim Wu’s speculation on Viacom’s strategy seems about right:
Viacom seem to be preparing to argue that, since Youtube plays such a role in hosting the videos, and doing things like screening porn, the videos are not, in fact “user-directed content,” the hosting of which is protected by 17 U.S.C. 512(c).
The main challenge for that argument is the text of 512(c), which protects “user-directed content” or “the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider.”
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