I honestly appreciate this LinkedIn endorsement I received earlier today though I’m pretty sure I’m reading it much differently than how it was intended.
And for the record, just because I may be good at something that doesn’t mean I do it with any regularity or intention. 
You’ll have a hard time finding a copyright monopoly maximalist who insists that public libraries should be banned. This would be political suicide; instead, they typically tell lies about why it’s not the same thing as online sharing. Let’s have a look. A concept that’s becoming increasingly useful is “Analog Equivalent Rights.” Culture and...
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By allowing limited use of copyrighted material for things like criticism, review, commentary, parody, or just personal non-commercial use, fair use has a widespread and often invisible impact on today’s social internet. Yet its very ubiquity means it’s often taken for granted by individuals — and the internet companies who benefit from it.
This is worrying because fair use is under threat, and one of the culprits is the DMCA takedown notice that provides copyright owners an easy tool to remove content they claim to be unlawfully posted. Copyright owners send these notices to web companies who host content; the companies must then remove the content or risk legal liability themselves. Meant to promote the quick removal of impermissible copyright infringement, the DMCA system works well in many cases.
Unfortunately, an increasing number of copyright holders misuse this system to target even lawful fair use of their work. And the current DMCA system enables these aggressive copyright owners by providing virtually no penalties for failing to consider common exceptions to infringement — like fair use.
Many times per week, WordPress.com receives such DMCA takedown notices that target what we can plainly see is fair use. An all too common example is a notice directed at a blogger who is criticizing a company or its products, and therefore using screenshots of the company’s website or a photo of the company’s wares in their post. This isn’t just an outlier case; given our unique vantage point, we see an alarming number of businesses attempt to use the DMCA takedown process to wipe criticism of their company off the internet.
Read the full article @ Wired.com.
You can dismiss pirates as just being greedy and surely able to pay if they wanted, just as you could dismiss the colonist tea drinkers as greedy bastards who surely could afford to pay the tax on their English tea. And in doing so, you’d be missing the point entirely, choosing to grotesquely mischaracterize a situation in order to stay comfortable but ignorant.
“But the Boston Tea Party was about taxation without representation!”, some would say. “The copyright monopoly issue is different!”
Is it, really?
Really?
Let’s review the facts at hand. The copyright monopoly laws were constructed to benefit the public, and the public only. In the U.S. Constitution, we can read clearly that the purpose of the copyright monopoly is “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts”. Nothing more, nothing less.
Read the full article @ Torrent Freak.
Here’s a bizarre one on so many levels. The FBI has a top secret 70-page “interrogation manual.” For years, the ACLU has been trying to get its hands on a copy, finally receiving a heavily redacted one. However, it turns out that if the good folks at the ACLU had just decided to wander...
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More proof that the current system does not benefit the public:
Dozens of demo recordings, studio outtakes and some 1963 BBC performances by the Beatles are temporarily released for sale online today, in a bid to protect the rare tracks from falling into the public domain next year.
Known as The Beatles: Bootleg Recordings 1963, the release encompassed a 59-track collection.
The featured songs include, for instance, alternate takes of classics such as She Loves You, live performances of Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven and other songs, as well as demos that the iconic Liverpool band recorded but eventually passed on to other artists, including Bad to Me and I’m in Love.
The tracks were never officially released, although hardcore Beatles devotees have traded lo-fi, bootlegged versions for years.
According to media reports, Apple Records and Universal Music Group staged a brief release of the Beatles cache via iTunes in Asia, Australia, the Middle East, Europe and North America today. The tracks were then removed shortly thereafter.
Read the full article @ CBC News.
After more than two years of community discussions and many drafts, the nonprofit Creative Commons has released a new version of its popular copyright license suite. These licenses allow rightsholders to release some of the exclusive rights associated with copyright while retaining others, in a way that’s easy for re-users, indexable by computers, and...
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I asked Christopher Ogino, who was my summer research last year, to look into the question of whether screenshots of video games used in academic publications would constitute fair use under United States copyright law. His conclusion was, generally, “yes.” I’m posting his Memo here because I believe there is some confusion about this issue and I haven’t found much else available on the Internet that addresses the fair use issue so comprehensively.
Get the memo @ the RIIPL Blog.
A summer course at the University of New Hampshire that uses the Harry Potter series to teach young students grammar and reading skills has prompted a cease and desist order from Warner Brothers, local CNN station WMUR reports.
While educational use of copyrighted works is legally allowed, Warner Brothers “doesn’t want people to think it sponsored the class,” according to WMUR. In the past, the course has been titled “Harry Potter as Storytelling” and is targeted at students from fourth to eighth grade.
Last Friday, we received an email from the Dean of the Rotman School asking us to think more carefully about HBR articles we put in our reading lists and asked students to read. Why? Because HBSP would now charge by the student for each of those articles that we use for ‘teaching purposes.’ And...
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