Earth: Mostly Harmless

Tiny Prince Fan’s Dancing Now Online!

April 29, 2008 on 2:14 am | No Comments
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: baby, copyright, dancing, dmca, fair-use, music, prince, universal

DMCA takedown notices, be gone! The Internet’s favourite young Prince fan can now be seen dancing his little heart out thanks to the EFF (who, having sued Universal over the takedown request, are currently pursuing the argument in court that the video constitutes fair use of the Prince song).

It still amazes me that Universal even bothered to file a takedown request for this in the first instance. Then again, the DMCA makes it so easy for them to do so that they’d be foolish not to file.

Anyway, here he is (along with his very busy sister):

Judge Dismisses DMCA-Abuse Lawsuit Over Video Of Baby Dancing To Prince (TechDirt)

Intellectual property, the content industries & the Internet

January 7, 2005 on 10:45 pm | No Comments
Categories: copyright, law, law, copyright and drm, politics, technology
Tags: bsa, business-software-association, copyright, dmca, larry-lessig, law, lawrence-lessig, lessig, piracy, politics, software, takedown-notice, technology

A few interesting stories going around the web today on the subject of copyright. Firstly, Arstechnica reports on that software-patent-peddling lobby group, the Business Software Association:

BSA doesn’t think the DMCA goes far enough:

“The Business Software Alliance has published a white paper that outlines their political aspirations for 2005, which unsurprisingly feature copyright and patent law reformation and enforcement at the top of the list. One of the complaints is that the DMCA doesn’t go far enough in granting power to intellectual property holders.

One of the quaint gems given to this fine country by the DMCA is § 512 of Title 17 of the United States Code. Titled as ‘Limitations on liability relating to material online,’ this section of the statute sought to shield online service providers from liability for what end users did on their networks. In short, it was legislated that an online service provider could escape liability if that provider both responded to subpoenas for the identification of a network user suspected of infringing activity,” and complies with properly formed subpoenas issued by a clerk of any United States district court, the provider could essentially avoid unwanted legal action.

Hence, the birth of the “take down notice,” and the subpoena for identification. The latter, however, has stumbled in recent years. While the argument of “secondary liability” brought down the likes of Napster, that same argument when applied to internet service providers completely failed.”

The number of DCMA take-down notices served recently is frightening. What’s worrying is that, as Ars points out, material can be removed simply on the accusation of copyright infringement - no injunction required. The BSA’s goal is apparently to extend this presumption of infringement to communications companies identifying infringing customers.

Free Culture

I’ve just downloaded Lawrence Lessig’s new eBook Free Culture, which is being released as a PDF under a Creative Commons license. Looks like a good read. Lessig argues early on in the introduction that too rigid an IP regime can lead to a negative incentive to innovate, contrary to the claims of the lobby groups:

But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal,so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it.That is what I fear about our culture today.It is against that extremism that this book is written.

Lessig, Lawrence (2004), Free Culture, http://www.lessig.org

In fact, any first year economics textbook will tell you that intellectual property protections, such as patents and copyright, are always a balancing act. Too light a regime will lead to anarchy and no incentive to innovate, yet as Lessig argues, allowing rights holders a pseudo-governmental role stifles cultural and economic growth, because derivative works are and always have been an important facilitator of human endeavour.

One of the most worrying provisions of the DMCA is that prohibiting the circumvention of copy-control measures, even for academic purposes. Its implications are obvious, but even from the content owners’ point of view, it makes no sense. How do they expect to get a strong crypto regime in place without the beneficial effects of the peer review process? The number of vendor-introduced DRM systems (remember the Cactus CD marker pen trick, or Fairplay, the iTunes store cracks) in the past couple of years would support this.