If you thought YouTube's ridiculous copyright lesson was bad, you haven't seen anything. Copyright lawyer Ray Dowd points us to this hysterically awful copyright "public service announcement" that appears to have been put together by a schoolteacher, but which gets a bunch of basic things wrong (or relies on some questionable "suggestions" about what constitutes fair use). It also appears to use a bunch of music that it almost certainly did not license. I don't think Britney Spears' reps licensed "Oops I Did It Again" to this teacher. Oh, and then there are the zombiefied children. As Dowd notes, he originally thought it was a parody, but it appears to be serious. Misguided. But serious. It includes no mention of the public domain, and even suggests you can't show more than five images, even though they're in the public domain. As Dowd explains:

The video shows children chanting that a teacher can show no more that 5 images from the artist Wassily Kandinsky in a classroom. Really weird. Even when things are in the public domain, teachers are brainwashing children that use of the images are verboten. And then using music samples in a way that is clearly NOT fair use...

John Temple, the former editor, president and publisher of the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News, has been running a great blog about issues from the newspaper industry over the past few months. He consistently has been saying stuff that made me wonder why the Rocky Mountain News didn't seem to do the sorts of things he seemed to constantly talk about... and now he's explained why. He recently gave a talk at Google about lessons from the collapse of the Rocky Mountain News in both text and video form. It's long, but well worth watching/reading: You should take in the whole thing, rather than just reading my summary, but he basically goes over the last decade and a half or so of mistakes that the Rocky Mountain News made in terms of trying to figure out the online business. The key takeaways aren't that surprising if you're a regular reader around here. The company kept defining itself as a newspaper company, not a news organization (or, better yet, a community builder). Everything it did was based on how it would impact the paper edition. The focus was not on competing with web properties and services, but on the other major newspaper in town, the Denver Post. Things got so bad that when the Columbine Massacre happened, the newsroom refused to give any news to the web people, because they were afraid that the Denver Post would "steal" it.

It seems like pretty much everything was based on looking backwards, not forward. There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset.

The talk is amazingly honest, coming from someone who accepts a share of the blame for what happened, and should be required reading/viewing for anyone in the media business, new or old. The same game is playing out not just in newspapers, but in a number of other businesses as well. Like the Rocky Mountain News, those businesses are looking backwards and defining themselves on the wrong terms, while newer startups don't have such legacy issues to deal with.

We've talked about how both Hasbro and Mattel seriously screwed up in dealing with Scrabulous, the online version of Scrabble written by two brothers in India and placed in Facebook where it became a huge hit. While the companies did make overtures to working with the brothers, eventually they sued to shut down the game, pissing off plenty of legitimate fans, leading to widespread boycotts of Hasbro and Mattel games, and allowing the brothers to create their own new game that has also won fantastic reviews.

It appears that not every game company is so short-sighted. Reader Doug Schneider writes in to let us know about a guy who created a virtual copy of the popular casual game Bejewled inside the virtual world World of Warcraft. Yet, rather than shut the guy down or threaten to sue him, the makers of Bejewled, Popcap Games, hired the guy to create an official version for World of Warcraft, saying that the original version lacked polish, so they figured it made sense to just hire him to clean it up and make an official version. What a concept.