artflaw» Technology Archive | artflaw

Copyright Office and Librarian of Congress announce six DRM exemptions — good news for fair use in filmmaking

artflaw — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 05:28:02 +0000

The U.S. Copyright Office and Librarian of Congress announced six new exemptions to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Digital Rights Management (DRM) measures stating, “Persons making noninfringing uses of the following [...] classes of works will not be subject to the prohibition against circumventing access controls (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)) until the conclusion of the next rulemaking.” The six classes of works include:

1. Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System;
2. Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications;
3. Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network;
4. Video games accessible on personal computers and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully obtained works;
5. Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete; and
6. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.

Of note is the fair use exemption for circumventing copyright protection technology on DVDs — when accomplished solely in order to incorporate short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment in the following instances:

i. Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;
ii. Documentary filmmaking; and
iii. Noncommercial videos.

Piratbyrån, the Pirate Bay founding organization dissolves

artflaw — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 06:05:00 +0000

BBC news reports that the Swedish anti-copyright group which founded The Pirate Bay has disbanded. The Piracy Bureau, or Piratbyrån website states, “STÄNGT FÖR EFTERTANKE” which means “closed for reflection” in English.

The announcement follows the recent death of co-founder Ibi Kopimi Botani.

Apart from launching the infamous BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay in 2003, Piratbyrån was the creator and advocate of kopimi — a copyright alternative:

kopimi (copyme), symbol showing that you want to be copied. use kopimi in your own fancy. kopimi may be put on homepages or blogs, in books, in software, as sound logos in music or whatever.

Botani developed the kopimi concept and logo in 2005.

Girl Talk talks artistic freedom and fair use

artflaw — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:00:18 +0000

Public Access Media interviews Girl Talk (Greg Gillis) prior to his performance at the Capitol Hill Block Pary in Seattle, WA (2008). “With my work,” Gillis says, “there’s a thing called fair use in United States copyright law that allows you to sample without asking for permision if it falls under certain criteria — if the work is transformative, doesn’t negatively impact potential sales — so that’s where I stand and the label [Illegal Art] stands.”

How YouTube thinks about copyright: Margaret Gould Stewart talks digital rights management

artflaw — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:40:15 +0000

YouTube’s head of user experience, Margaret Gould Stewart, talks about how the site manages copyright and contributes to an “ecosystem of culture.” Stewart notes that content owners deliver “assets” into a database. Uploads are compared to reference files in the YouTube database.

Interestingly, content owners provide a usage policy on how to handle matches. “Most rights owners,” she says, “instead of blocking, will allow the copy to be published, and then they benefit through he exposure, advertising and linked sales.”

For example, Sony allowed the infamous JK Wedding Entrance Dance to use Chris Brown’s Forever. With over 50 million views to date, the video catapulted the single back to #4 on iTunes.

ROUNDUP: LimeWire owes RIAA millions?; Judge questions copyright lawsuit jamming; NYT: all your RSS belongs to us

artflaw — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 01:54:56 +0000

LimeWire owes RIAA millions billions?

Thirteen music industry giants and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are looking freeze the assets of P2P file sharing service LimeWire post copyright suit: via Reuters.

Judge questions copyright lawsuit jamming

US District Court Judge Collyer demands a justification for the US Copyright Group joining 4,577 defendants into a single lawsuit: via Ars Technica.

NYT: all your RSS belongs to us

The New York Times forced (DMCA) Apple to pull the Pulse News Reader from its app store claiming it, “makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com [...] in violation of their Terms of Use”: via BNET.

DMCA takedown targets 35 Tetris® clones in Android Market

artflaw — Fri, 28 May 2010 03:18:18 +0000

I was just having a conversation about the joy of vintage NES clones and now this. The Tetris Company, LLC, licensee of various Tetris copyrights and Tetris trademark, sent Google a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice Tuesday demanding the removal of 35 games from the Android Market:

Google’s facilitation of the distribution, without permission, of ‘Tetris’ games is [] in violation of trademark and unfair competition laws [...] also violate the copyright in the Tetris® game because thaty are substantially similar to [the Tetris Company LLC's] game.

As such, the Tetris Company demanded that Google immediately remove or disable access to the infringing games. As of 8PM on Thursday, the games mentioned in the notice (below) were suspended and absent from the Android Market.

FCC allows MPAA to disable your TV’s analog signal as piracy deterrent

artflaw — Sat, 08 May 2010 21:54:28 +0000

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently approved the use of Selectable Output Control (SOC) to prevent viewers from recording newly- and recently-released movies via an analog signal.

Said Wired, “The reason: Analog video signals can easily be recorded, while digital video standards include a copy protection scheme that lets providers set a no-copy flag on the signal.”

The result of Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) bargaining with member studios, the decision has digital rights groups miffed as it appears the FCC is allowing the MPAA (through cable/satellite providers) to control your television set.

A Tangle of Thorns: Literary mashup of Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ and Lessig’s ‘The Future of Ideas’

artflaw — Sat, 01 May 2010 19:16:58 +0000

Willem B. pointed me towards a great post by David Bollier from On The Commons. It explores transformative literature via a mashup of Nabokov’s Lolita and Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Otto Lambert’s A Tangle of Thorns Or, the Fair Use of the Commons in a Transformative World “improbably manages to blend the warped, salacious obsessions of Humbert Humbert with Lessig’s earnest polemics about intellectual property.”

I agree with Bollier — Lambert’s juxtaposition of Nabokov’s anxiety-ridden prose with Lessig’s musings works uncannily well. An excerpt from A Tangle of Thorns:

I am dead against the changes we are seeing, but it is too much to believe I could convince you that the full range is wrong. My aim is much more limited. My hope is to show you the other side of what has become a taken-for-granted idea: the view that control of some sort is always better.

An example: to control my urges, I decided to take a wife, leveraging the money from my inheritance and my somewhat brutal good looks. Let me be honest here, in these temporarily infixed notes: I’m slow-moving and tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but seductive demeanor.

More from OnTheCommons.org (Thanks, Willem!). Read A Tangle of Thorns. Download Lawrence Lessig’s Future of Ideas.