"This disconnect between the public's view of copyright and fair use and what should and should not be prosecuted, versus the 'copyright maximist' view of the law, is our generation's Prohibition," says Ben Huh, CEO and founder of Cheezburger and a loud voice in the recent backlash to SOPA and PIPA, two congressional bills aimed at curbing internet piracy.
Copyright exists to "promote the useful arts" according to the US Constitution. But is it still doing that? And should the government protect so-called "intellectual property" in the same way it protects other forms of property? Reason.tv posed these questions to Ben Huh, as well as a professor and a movie studio representative.
Comic author Rob Reid unveils Copyright Math (TM), a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists.
Over the past few years New York filmmaker Kirby Ferguson has been working on a project called Everything is a Remix, which looks at "remix" within our culture. His first video looked at remix remix within music, his second video looked at remix within film, focusing on Star Wars, and his third video looked at the elements of creativity.
Our system of law doesn't acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren't so tidy. They're layered, they’re interwoven, they're tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality... the system starts to fail.
Star Wars Uncut, a complete, feature-length replication of the original Star Wars film, completely crowd-sourced and edited together using submitted 15-second snippets, has been released online after years of production:
In 2009, Casey Pugh asked thousands of Internet users to remake "Star Wars: A New Hope" into a fan film, 15 seconds at a time. Contributors were allowed to recreate scenes from Star Wars however they wanted. Within just a few months SWU grew into a wild success. The creativity that poured into the project was unimaginable.
SWU has been featured in documentaries, news features and conferences around the world for its unique appeal. In 2010 we won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement In Interactive Media.
David Carr and Brian Stelter, in this TimesCast video, discuss the decision by Wikipedia to close on Wednesday to educate its audience about proposed antipiracy legislation in Congress that it considers a threat to an open Internet. Time to crack open those old copies of Encyclopedia Britannica.
Media Release: Senator Scott Ludlam, Wednesday January 18th, 2011
As Wikipedia goes on strike to protest the proposed ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ (SOPA) currently before the US Congress, the Greens have called on the Australian Government to take a stand in defence of Australian internet users and protect the viability of the medium.
Australian Greens communications spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam pointed to the global blackout of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia as an example of the depth of the campaign to prevent the bill from becoming law.
“Has the Australian Government made any representation whatsoever to the US Government on this issue? Do they recognise that there will be little purpose in investing tens of billions of dollars in the NBN if the US copyright industry cripples the medium itself?
“As an example of breathtaking overreach by US copyright interests, the SOPA proposal and its cousin PIPA are hard to beat. The bills will institutionalise far-reaching, unaccountable censorship in order to protect the commercial interests of a handful of powerful media companies. The bills risk the broad-scale criminalisation of filesharing, the decimation of the open source community and tactical use of financial blockades against commercial competitors or non-commercial sites.
“SOPA would block entire non-US websites in the United States as a response to select infringing material. This includes Australian sites, and the online operations of Australian businesses.
“Under SOPA, US courts could bar online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with allegedly infringing websites, bar search engines from linking to such sites, and require internet service providers to block access to such sites.”
Senator Ludlam said the bill would introduce extreme penalties for the unauthorised streaming copyrighted content.
“The bill makes unauthorised streaming of copyrighted content a criminal offence, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for ten such infringements within six months.”
Tonight I was on The Drum on ABC News 24 discussing the news of the day, including the Cabinet reshuffle, the latest book by climate sceptic geologist Ian Plimer, the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the US Republican race:
I've blogged a few times about a proect called Everything is a Remix by New York filmmaker Kirby Ferguson, which looks at "remix" within our culture. His first video looked at remix remix within music, his second video looked at remix within film, focusing on Star Wars, and his third video looked at the elements of creativity.
Every Monday morning I appear on Andrew Bartlett's 4ZzZ breakfast radio show to discuss some of the current public and political issues of the week. This week we discussed a few new website - The Talks, Everything is a Remix and Turntable.fm, the week in federal politics, internet filtering and some developments in the US and why they matter here, in particular Obama's troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and gay marriage in New York:
Last year New York filmmaker Kirby Ferguson started project called Everything is a Remix, which looks at "remix" within our culture. His first video looked at remix remix within music and his second video looked at remix within film, focusing on Star Wars.
Every Tuesday morning I have a regular weekly segment on Breakfast with Spencer Howson on 612 ABC Brisbane talking about technology and how it frames our world. In the segment this week we talked about the Google Books settlement, some controversial new iPhone apps, the New York Times introducing a paywall and OMG and LOL being added to the Oxford Dictionary:
Over the last week or so the internet has been buzzing about AOL buying The Huffington Post for $315 million. In part this has been controverisal because of the unusual business model The Huffington Post has adopted. The Huffington Post doesn't pay most of its contributors, it relies heaving on reposting and rewriting content available elsewhere on the internet, and search engine optimisation is alleged to drive its journalism. So it isn't surprising to see that Stephen Colbert has come up with the Colbuffington Re-post, which is The Huffington Post with a new banner:
While this is all quite amusing, there is a serious issue here about the aggregation and re-use of content on the internet. It seems to be me that The Huffington Post pushes at times what is permissible under copyright and, as a result, has been able to become hugely profitable, while the creators of some of the content they repurpose continue to struggle to generate income. There is no easy answer here, but it begs the question: does copyright law in the digital age achieve the appropriate balance between open access to knowledge and culture on the one hand, and rewarding creators to provide the necessary incentives for them to keep creating on the other.
Last year New York filmmaker Kirby Ferguson started project called Everything is a Remix, which looks at "remix" within our culture. His first video looked at remix remix within music:
Influential copyright scholar Larry Lessig yesterday issued a call for the World Intellectual Property Organization to lead an overhaul of the copyright system which he says does not and never will make sense in the digital environment.
A functioning copyright system must provide the incentives needed for creative professionals, but must also protect the freedoms necessary for scientific research and amateur creativity flourish.
In the digital environment, copyright has failed at both, said Lessig.
“And its failure is not an accident,” he said. “It’s implicit in the architecture of copyright as we inherited it. It does not make sense in a digital environment.”
The copyright system will “never work on the internet. It’ll either cause people to stop creating or it’ll cause a revolution,” said Lessig, citing a growing system of copyright “abolitionism” online in response to a worrying tendency to criminalise the younger generation.
“If and only if WIPO [the World Intellectual Property Organization] leads in this debate will we have a chance” at fixing the copyright system, he said.
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