Are the Fine Arts Exempt from Copyright Lawsuits?

While groups like the RIAA and the MPAA do everything in their power to stamp out creativity in the name of protecting some glorified sense of intellectual property, it looks like painters are having no problem profiting from work that clearly borrows the images of previously copyrighted content.

A great example of this is the Crazy 4 Cult 3-D Artwork show put on by Gallery1988.  All the work in the show was based on a number of cult film favorites including “Edward Scissorhands” and “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.”  Below is an example of one of many paintings based on “The Big Lebowski”

Now, there is absolutely no question that this is The Dude himself and one highly doubts that the artist, Misha, would have been able to sell the painting for $800.00 if it was just some random guy, instead.

So, here’s the question: why is this work protected but not, say, the work of musical mashup DJs?  Both are creating original work from existing content and both benefit from the public awareness of the underlying works.  Or how about the ridiculous case of J.D. Salinger suing to stop publication of a book that explores the character of Holden Caufield as an old man?

The point is that we’ve truly lost our way in terms of copyright law.  While creativity and technology have come together to allow for an exponential growth in the reach of diversity of new art the lawyers and those paying their wages are doing everything in their power to shut down the whole process.

Apple Approves Marijuana Finder for iPhone, Still No Boobs.

It’s becoming redundant to question the logic behind those apps that Apple approves for the iPhone and those that are rejected.

Still, when they do something like this it forces a reaction:

Apple has approved a new $2.99 iPhone app, aptly named Cannabis [iTunes link]. It’s made by the also appropriately-named Ajnag.com. The purpose of the app is to help locate legal medical marijuana in states and locations where it can be found.         LINK

Now, I don’t personally have a problem with people having more convenient ways to find pot but the truth is that, according to Federal law, the stuff is still illegal, no matter how many Californian’s with a touch of “insomnia” and a note from their doctor beg to differ.

Meanwhile, last I checked, there were no laws against adults looking at naked pictures of each other.

So, just to recap: illegal drug finders are allowed in the iPhone App Store but anything displaying a pair of naked boobs is banned.

Got that?

The Music File-Sharing Dilemma Revisited

So, here is a simple example of why groups like RIAA and groups like, say, the general public, are butting heads in and out of court over the issue of “sharing” music.

Let’s rewind to, say, 1986.  I was a freshman in high school.  My buddy was trying to school me on some more alternative tunes and made me a mixtape of stuff including things like The Dead Kennedys and Captain Beefheart.  Cool stuff.  Really opened up my idea of popular music.

Now, RIAA would not have liked my friend’s behavior but because it happened in a physical exchange between two private citizens there isn’t much anyone could or would do about it.

Cut to today.  You just heard an amazing band and you want to tell all your friends about it.  You buy a copy of their album and immediately put up a link to your favorite song on your Facebook feed.  Bam!  You are now an illegal file-sharer under the eyes of the current law, at least as the RIAA would like it to be interpreted.

Far from trying to undercut record sales, you were just trying to help promote a band you love.

That’s where heads start to butt.  Where do we draw the line between the very human (and economically beneficial) act of sharing and the clearly illegal line of distributing content to which you do not hold the rights?

This is a battle we are going to see fought in the music world first, but the same discussions hold true for film, TV and even the mainstream press.

The internet has made the act of sharing, sometime with millions of “friends” as easy as pressing a button.  The thing is, most people still feel that when they do that it is just sharing and nothing more.

MacGyver Should Sue MacGruber. Right?

Considering the way that judges have been ruling lately, seemingly bending over backwards in an effort to “protect” intellectual copyrights against evil writers (see: J.D. Salinger v. John David California), musicians (see: GirlTalk) and artists (see: Shepard Fairey) I am waiting for the next law suit to be filed in MacGyver v. MacGruber.

See, MacGyver was a TV from the 80’s where a guy would somehow extricate himself from a bad jam with nothing more than a stick of gum, a ballpoint pen and his belt.

MacGruber is a Saturday Night Live skit in which Will Forte plays a guy who tries to do exactly what MacGyver did, but fails.

Now, there would be absolutely no entertainment value at all to MacGruber if it weren’t for the existence of MacGyver.  One could easily argue that the producers of MacGruber should pay the producers of MacGyver for having taken their premise and turning it into a mockery.

Of course, MacGruber is a parody and should be protected from such a law suit.

In fact, I’ll bet the MacGruber people are already figuring out how much it is going to cost.

RickRoll and Micropayments Used to Fight “The Man”

There were two stories this week about plans to get revenge on corporate entities by doing some version of what is known as a DDo$ or “denial-of-service” attack.

Basically, this means a plan to overwhelm a system and thus to shut it down.

First, there was Michael Silveira’s response to a constant barrage of calls from a single telemarketer.

Mr. Silveira began calling back an auto-warranty company that has become the focus of an Internet crusade. He left it voice-mail messages that contained nothing but a recording of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Using phone numbers for Auto One Warranty Specialists Inc. that users posted to a Web site called Reddit.com, Mr. Silveira joined dozens of activists who have peppered the warranty company with messages including elevator music, threats and offers of rude services.

“I thought, if you get a bunch of people together, you could blow up their voice-mail boxes,” says Mr. Silveira. (LINK)

Next, there was a plan by one of the Pirate Bay founders, Gottfrid Svarholm, to bring down the law office that had prosecuted him.  Facing a fine of 30 million SEK, Svarholm:

encourages all Internet users to pay extremely small sums around 1 SEK (0.13 USD) to Danowsky’s law firm, which represented the music companies at the Pirate Bay trial. The music companies will not benefit from this, instead it will cost them money to handle and process all the money.

Any internet-fee payments made after the first 1000, which includes the law firm’s ordinary transfers, will instead of giving 1 SEK, cost 1 SEK to the law firm. Since Danowsky & Partners Advokatbyrå is a small firm, all the transactions are handled by hand. Handling all payments will be time consuming, costing the law firm in productivity. (LINK)

In some ways, this is a lot like trying to pay a parking ticket you didn’t deserve with a sack full of pennies.

Both of these acts show the power of the internet to rally people to cause and should be a real concern for corporations who no longer hold a monopoly on our attention or our support.

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TweetMic Should Give RIAA Nightmares

There is a cool little iPhone App called TweetMic that I read about in Mashable earlier this week.  The App allows you to easily publish live recording to your Twitter followers:

The interface is simple: click on “record,” talk (you don’t really have to talk, you can play an instrument, a lute, for example), click “publish” and that’s it.

Cool, right?

What I really found interesting, however, was how the Mashable reviewer thought that he might use this handy application:

While I don’t record audio too often, I must admit that having the possibility to quickly record something and tweet it while you’re on the go is very interesting; being an avid concert goer, I might just start using TweetMic for those special “awww, they’re playing my favorite song” moments.

Now, a normal human being reading that might think, “Hey, what a neat idea,” because, hey, that’s a neat idea.

Of course, it probably never occurred to either the reviewer or our normal human being that this was just the sort of dangerous thinking that could DESTROY MUSIC FOREVER!

You see, if you were a lawyer for RIAA you would understand that giving a concert-goer the ability to immediately upload and broadcast their personal concert-going experience, why that’s simply stealing! By sharing how awesome the concert it with friends you are single-handedly murdering music! (don’t try to follow this logic – it is like religion, you just have to accept it and move on)

Interesting, isn’t it, that the reviewer never even considers that his idea is both illegal and likely to kill that which he loves? I wonder why that is…

Now, you have to ask yourself, do you want to side with the RIAA, who want to stop you from being able to share a one-of-a-kind awww moment and who’s longterm goal appears to be suing anyone claiming to be a fan of music or would you rather work to reform our outdated and misguided copyright laws?

Best Rebuttal Ever to the Three-Strike Internet Laws

Just a short post to point out the brilliance of Ed Felten’s satiric proposal that France should extend its online three-strike law to the world of print:

My proposed system is simplicity itself. The government sets up a registry of accused infringers. Anybody can send a complaint to the registry, asserting that someone is infringing their copyright in the print medium. If the government registry receives three complaints about a person, that person is banned for a year from using print.

As in the Internet case, the ban applies to both reading and writing, and to all uses of print, including informal ones. In short, a banned person may not write or read anything for a year.

If you haven’t been following this issue, France is on its way to signing a bill into law that would require ISP’s to ban people from the internet for one year if they are accused of downloading copyrighted content more than three times.  Yes, accused of downloading, not convicted of it.

Read the whole post here.

Justice Scalia Learns Privacy is a Myth

I love this story about a Fordham Law class in which one assignment was for students to collect all publicly available information on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In a result that was surprising to Scalia but not to those of us familar with the tragic state of “privacy” in the digital age:

Professor Joel Reidenberg and his class now have a 15-page dossier on Scalia, including his home address, the value of his home, his home phone number, the movies he likes, his food preferences, his wife’s personal e-mail address, and “photos of his lovely grandchildren.”

The students did this, in part, as a response to comments made by Justice Scalia in which he seems to say that personal privacy doesn’t need more legal protections.  Of course, he’s still not pleased with the students’ findings.

It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible. That appears in the First Amendment context all the time. What can be said often should not be said. Prof. Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any.

While it is interesting to see the lines Scalia draws between personal responsibility and legal responsibility there would seem to be plenty of relevant issues raised by this classroom exercise and that those issues deserve more than a petulant reply from Scalia.

How do you feel about the state of your privacy in the digial age?

LINK

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X-Men Origens: Wolverine Leak Exposes Vast Grey Areas of Copyright Law

Late last week a “work print” of the upcoming 20th Century Fox feature film “Wolverine” was somehow released into the wilds of the internet.

All sides responded quickly and exactly as expected.  The filthy, dirty pirates of the world facilitated this heinous criminal action by seeding torrents of the video file and the obviously freedom-hating people of the world downloaded the video by the thousands.  20th Century Fox and the MPAA responded by unleashing the hounds, swearing they would track down and prosecute every horrible pirate out there and they even got the FBI involved.

In an interesting little twist, a FoxNews.com reporter, Roger Friedman, was either fired or will shortly be fired for writing a review of the contraband “Wolverine.”

This opens up a slew of questions that highlight why copyright law is such a mess and makes it nearly impossible for anyone to safely wander the internet without fear of prosecution.

For instance, is Roger Friedman guilty of a crime?  To answer this question, you must ask how he got his copy of the video.  From his own account it appears that he downloaded it from the internet.  Under a strict reading of copyright law this is clearly a crime and one for which he could be taken to court.

Of course, by the time Friendman got his copy there were litary thousands of links floating around the web.

Let’s say you’re just some kid in Kansas and you see a link that says “Watch the new Wolverine right NOW!  Click here!” Now, let’s say you click that link because you want to see the new Wolverine.  Suddenly, there in front of you is the new Wolverine.  Awesome!  Unfortunately, the MPAA was tracking this link and now they are filing papers to threaten your parents with legal action if they don’t pay up a large sum of money.

Sounds ridiculous, right?  Well, it is no different than what has happened to hundreds of music downloaders across the country thanks to RIAA.

The problem is, how was this kid to know that this was not a “legal” link?  Should he just know that 20th Century Fox would never be so crazy as to, say, raise awareness by “virally” leaking a work print of Wolverine?  Ok, ignorance of the law is not a defense, but in this case, how do you even guage what is acceptable “general knowledge.”

While the studios will try to hold this up as proof that we need stronger laws and harsher penalties for “piracy” I think this demonstrates that the laws simply do not reflect current technology or consumer expectations and trying to legislate against these forces is a losing battle (see the “war on drugs” for similar outcomes).

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Feds Want to Jail Guns n Roses Album Leaker

In yet another completely over-zealous attempt to stop those evil pirates from destroying the music industy, the US Attory General is not satisfied with the crazy $30,000 in fines Kevin Cogill is being made to pay for leaking a copy of Guns n Roses latest album onto the internet before its official release:

The prosecutor in the case is demanding prison time, even though the probation department recommended a sentence of probation. Why? The U.S. Attorney’s Office says probation won’t adequately protect the music industry: “The recommendation does not reflect — or discuss — the gravity of the offense and will do nothing to deter other would-be leakers in this rapidly expanding threat to the music industry,” the prosecutor argued in papers filed with the court.

Let’s put aside the fact that this is a losing (or lost) battle that the Feds are fighting on the behalf of RIAA.  Instead, let’s consider how successful a similar approach against drug users and small-time dealers has been in curbing drug use.

The whole situation is infuriating.  It makes no sense that the US government is wasting tax-payer dollars trying to “send a message” on behalf of a group, RIAA, that is currently being counter-sued for lovely things like intimidation and using false evidence.  Not only that, but considering there probably isn’t an album out there that hasn’t found its way to a P2P site (often after being “leaked” by a member of the band or even of a label b/c it boosts sales) it seems unfair to prosecute Cogill in this way.

(via MediaPost)

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