Category Archives: Fair Use

Is the bill current traversing the French legislature a bad thing?
bq.Apple broke a week of silence late Tuesday, attacking a proposed French law that would open up proprietary music services as equivalent to “state-sponsored piracy.” However, the company stopped short of suggesting that it would pull out of the French market in order to avoid complying with the new legislation. – Ed Oswald Or a good thing?
bq.There are few Mac users prepared to argue that Microsoft’s monopoly in desktop PCs has been a good thing for the technology industry; why would an Apple monopoly of digital entertainment be any different? Vive la France. – Leander Kahney DRM is always a bad thing. I will say this about Apple, though: As bad as the tension between FairPlay and PlaysForSure is, personally, I think things would be a whole lot worse if Microsoft had been able to establish a stranglehold on the market. As things stand right now, Apple has a huge lead and Microsoft is relegated to being a fringe player with huge aspirations. I think we may all benefit from this. I think we would benefit even more though if content companies would realize that they are costing themselves more in lost sales than they are gaining in the potential of selling us multiple copies of things we have already bought. Full disclosure: I haven’t written about this before, but my parents gave me an iPod Nano for Christmas. Mainly what I use it for, though, is listening to podcasts (which it truly excels at). The only thing remotely DRMed I have stored on it is some Audible content… which I still haven’t listened to yet. I have yet to buy a single song from the iTunes music store and I have no plans to do so.

When does one steal music? It seems like it is much easier than it used to be.
bq.Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted, necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization. In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the MGM v. Grokster case is simply a statement about authorization, not about fair use. – RIAA Okay, so you can’t transfer your own CDs to your iPod. What if the music is already there?
bq.Selling an iPod preloaded with music is no different than selling a DVD onto which you have burned your entire music collection. Either act is a clear violation of U.S. copyright law. The RIAA is monitoring this means of infringement. In short: seller beware. – RIAA You notice that they don’t even make an exception for non-RIAA Music, Apparently, there are looking out for the rights of independents artists whether they want them to or not.

Which works better for a member of Congress: trying to explain something to them or letting them figure it for themself?
bq.But in yesterday’s Commerce hearings, two Senators altered the course of events. First MIT grad John Sununu of New Hampshire said that government mandates “always restrict innovation” and then 82-year-old Ted Stevens of Alaska talked about the iPod he’d gotten for Christmas and put the RIAA’s Mitch Bainwol on the spot about whether his proposal would break Stevens’ ability to move digital radio programs to his iPod and listen to them in the most convenient way (it would). – Cory Doctorow The logical next step, then, is to see that more members of Congress actually understand just what an iPod is and what it can do for them. Ipac has stepped in to do just that. That seems like a good idea to me.

Is Google Print about maintaining access to human knowledge? .bq The world’s libraries are a tremendous source of knowledge, much of which has never been available online. One of our goals for Google Print is to change that, and today we’ve taken an exciting step toward meeting it: making available a number of public domain books that were never subject to copyright or whose copyright has expired. We can show every page because these books are in the public domain. (For books not in the public domain we only show small snippets of the work unless the publisher or copyright holder has given us permission to show more.) – Adam Mathes Or destroying any incentive to create new works? .bq Not only is Google trying to rewrite copyright law, it is also crushing creativity. If publishers and authors have to spend all their time policing Google for works they have already written, it is hard to create more. Our laws say if you wish to copy someone’s work, you must get their permission. Google wants to trash that. Google’s position essentially amounts to a license to steal, so long as it returns the loot upon a formal request by their victims. This is precisely why Google’s argument has no basis in U.S. intellectual property law or jurisprudence. Just because Google is huge, it should not be allowed to change the law. – Pat Schroeder and Bob Barr Actually, I think rewriting copyright law back to the way it used to be is an excellent idea.

With all the talk of publishers suing Google this week, there are some who don’t actually get what the argument is about.
bq.Now they want to scan all the printed books and read them into its cache and let us find things in the books. Clearly for people who love information, this is a good thing. But the people who own the copyrights on the books think not. They think Google should get their permission before doing this, and if they don’t get the permission, they shouldn’t do the scanning, caching, and searching. Google almost agrees, but they say that the publishers have to opt-out of the program, instead of opting-in. They spin it so that the publishers sound dumb for not “getting” it, but if it’s really no big deal, why can’t Google flip it around and require an opt-in? – Dave Winer First off, the publishers can easily invoke the opt-out clause and I am sure most of them will. So, then, why are they so eager to launch a case against Google for something they aren’t even directly affected by? Because of their business model. Think about it for a moment: We have all been told for years that Microsoft isn’t competing against OpenOffice or WordPerfect or any other product these days when they launch a new version of Office; rather, they are competing against their own installed base. Why buy the latest version of Office if your current version does everything you want? I still use Office 2000 everyday and have no compelling interest in upgrading at all. Publishers have developed an unreasonable hatred of libraries over the years for much the same reason. Even though we are some of the main, and in many cases, only purchasers of their products, because of us, they have to compete with their own installed base. And they get even more upset when we lend books in ways they don’t like, or worse yet, lend items between libraries. Their problem isn’t that Google is acting like a business; their problem is that Google is acting like a library. If Google limited their service to books that had been opted-in, that would leave the question of works that had fallen out of copyright. It should be a simple question as to which books those are, but as Lawrence Lessig has shown in the past, it is not. And the publishers know this. This isn’t about protecting their content, it is crippling the service. And by forcing Google to research the copyright status of every single work they attempt to add to it, they would be making their best try at doing so. If Google loses this fight, we all lose. And when I say “we,” that included authors.

bq.Cultural monopolists desperately want us to believe that without copyright we would have no artistic creations and therefore no entertainment. That is nonsense. We would have more, and more diverse ones. – Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel

Remember my old idea for Real-Time Reruns? Apparently ABC and Apple really liked the idea.
bq.TV and Movies are in the same spot music was four years ago. If you missed a show last week your only legitimate means to see it are waiting months for a repeat or a year to buy the show DVD if they release one. But you can often find shows available for download online. Given that iTunes is selling them for $2, the low price quickly outweighs the work of finding a show and waiting for a bittorrent download (not to mention any legal risks in doing so). Here’s to hoping that ABC is the first of many networks to sign on and that movies are next. – Matt Haughey I complete agree with Matt. $2.00 is not too much to pay when you consider that you are buying it commercial-free. My advice for the other networks is pick up the phone and call Steve Jobs this very afternoon. Before it is too late. And if the only thing stopping you is your contracts with content providers, call them as well.

bq.Digital technologies have made it easy-indeed, too easy-for creative work in the private domain to spread without permission. Piracy is rampant on the highways of digital technology. In response, code writers (both legislators and technologists) have created an unprecedented array of weapons (both legal and technical) to wage war on the pirates and restore control to the owners of culture. Yet the control these weapons will produce is far greater than anything we have seen in our past. So, for example, the United States has radically increased the reach of copyright regulation. And through the World Intellectual Property Organization, wealthy countries everywhere are pushing to impose even tighter restrictions on the rest of the world. These legal measures will soon be supplemented by extraordinary technologies that will secure to the owners of culture almost perfect control over how “their property” is used. Any balance between public and private will thus be lost. The private domain will swallow the public domain. And the cultivation of culture and creativity will then be dictated by those who claim to own it. – Lawrence Lessig

bq.We have to truly look more aggressively at (exhibition) window changes … not only for the studio business but for the TV business. The notion that a product airs on a television network and remains exclusive, in effect, until its rerun airs some six months later, is just one example of what has to change from a windowing perspective. We can’t stand in the way, and we can’t allow tradition to stand in the way, of where consumers can go or want to go. – Robert Iger If this means that Hollywood will stop treating their customers like criminals, this is a good first step in the right direction.

bq.I now have a solution to this problem, but I’d rather not have to use it. The solution is mplayer, an open source media player. Among its protean capabilities, it can save a stream while playing any of its supported audio and video formats, which include progressively-downloadable WMV (e.g., Channel 9) and streaming RealVideo (e.g., JavaOne). It can extract the audio channel from these video streams to an uncompressed WAV file, which can then be encoded to MP3 using lame. So now I can both media-shift and time-shift these videos, and listen to them at my leisure. – Jon Udell