Instead of music consider another medium. Let's say you think of a hilarious joke (like the one about the three nuns in a taxi…..) and you tell a friend. She thinks it's the funniest thing she's ever heard and tells her friends and they tell all their friends and soon it spreads like wildfire. You go on a trip to another state and are at a party and someone asks you "did you hear the one about the three nuns in a taxi? " You say "hey that's my joke, you stole it. You can't tell it. You have to pay me."
Now it sounds ridiculous but digital content is somewhat like this. In economic terms it is non-exclusive, meaning it's not really possible to prevent it spreading. Try telling people not to tell your joke.
To be sure there are still differences between music. Oral jokes are not copyrightable; but if you wrote it down after you told it, then it would be. Also joketelling is not a commercial enterprise so you aren't expecting to be paid. But in terms of how easy it is to transmit and how unlikely you are to be able to prevent it spreading, it is very similar indeed.
That's the larger problem we are facing long-term, not copyright, but that with digital technology created content is becoming less like a private good, such as books and cars, and more like a public good, such as language, and we don't know exactly what to do about it
Ebert mentions "Competition from other forms of delivery" and you add "Competition from other forms of entertaintment."
More significant I think is competition from all the other movies made in the past.
You can't see them in theaters, but only via home rentals of some sort. With today's technology we are no longer restricted to seeing just the few films most recently released and being marketed, but can, at our leisure and on our own time, see any of tens of thousands of films.
I'd gladly have seen 3:10 to Yuma, Unforgiven, Gone With the Wind in theaters last year but they weren't showing anywhere so I watched them on Netflix.
There aren't enough cinemas to show even a fraction of films people want to watch and this is an inevitable consequence of today's technology.
What about the fact that they registered a trademark in the word Righthaven?
"IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Searching and retrieving information, sites, and other resources available on computer networks for others. FIRST USE: 20100301. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20100301"
Although SOPA refers to copyrighted material the motivation behind it is exclusively focused on Hollywood films and big label music.
Does anyone think for a minute that the Attorney General, or the ISPs or anyone else will be interested in, or capable of, identifying infringements of photographs, poems, fonts, children's drawings, quotations, logos and distinguishing them from licensed usages or fair use? Not a chance.
This in effect provides for elevated copyright protection for a very small subset of content, films and music, supported and paid for by MPAA and RIAA.
I read the NY Times quite often and enjoy it as one of my news sources along with BBC Reuters the Washington Post and (recently) Al Jazeera, and sohave no problem paying a small amount for doing so with ease.
$35 a month is way way too high in my opinion. When I found out you could get full digital subscription by subscribing the Weekend Book Review for $1.75 a week I signed up. That's about $7.50 a month, which is more reasonable (the right price, I'd say, would be $4.99 a month)
They since seem to have disabled the link, but you might still be able to get a subscription.
As for hacks, the easiest way of all I found was to go to nytimes.com and then instead of clicking on links, do a right-click-copy-link-open-new-window-paste. No ?args. No paywall.
Even so that's a pain and I chose the $7.50 a month instead.
I donate $1 + a month to you, Mike, and they write many more stories than you do.
Making it a highly porous barrier may turn out to be a fair compromise. Traffic will tell.
The Social Science Research Council’s study is a landmark in the copyright literature: an actual empirical investigation into what works and what doesn’t in the enforcement arena. If policy makers want to be guided by evidence and not rhetoric, they will begin with the Council’s study and stay with it for a very long time.
The argument (perhaps from the studios) that it would not be fair for Netflix to buy just one dvd of a movie and then stream it tens of thousands of times, does make some sense.
But a reasonable solution could be that if they buy (license) say, 10,000 copies at the dvd price, then they can stream up to 10,000 simultaneous showings of a movie.
It wouldn't be too much of a hardship for viewers to understand that all the available films are being watched at some particular time and Netflix could manage their purchased to meet demand just like they do now with physical dvds.
Not always. Trademarks are there to avoid confusion for the consumer.
I am a photographer. If I set up a website called "Red Cross Health Photographs" with a large red cross logo, I would expect customers to be confused and the real Red Cross to have an excellent case against me.
That said, there is no doubt a trademark owner can be overly agressive is asserting broad rights where there may be little or no real customer confusion.
Mike. your suggestion to "license" the trademark to other entities doesn't make sense. It would likely be considered "naked licensing" and they could lose their trademarks:
"licensing is generally permitted provided that the mark’s owner retains the right to approve the licensee’s use of the mark and supervise any element of quality control over the same. The logic is clear: if the mark is to have the import of signifying a particular source of certain goods or services and the public is going to have the right to rely on that mark for that significance, then when the mark is licensed to a party for use other than by the mark’s owner, the mark’s owner should be in a position to approve the use of the mark in relationship to the licensee’s good or services so that the public, upon seeing the mark in regard to those goods or services provided by the licensee, may rely on the same good will and quality it has come to know in relationship to that mark. " http://j.mp/g9gwOZ
ps I am not a lawyer. But I also agree that it seems the claims appear overly broad (e.g. objecting to use of the color pink)
Well it is very helpful to be very specific here. Since you didn't answer no, I take it that you want the entire blogspot.com domain to be subject to an in rem proceeding if COICA is passed.
Do correct me if I assumed wrongly.
So yes I have looked at blogspot. Here is a search for pages with U2 appearing in the URL in the blogspot domain http://j.mp/94kQF4 and here are the top ten pages (except the 2 non-band pages)
I have looked at all these pages and they seem to be primarily fan pages discussing, advertising for or just enthusiastic about the band. I see several embedded Youtube videos, plenty of photos and a few lyrics. I could not find any way to play or download any music directly from the blogspot domain.
There were a couple of links to third party file sharing sites like sharebee from which I presume one could download a track (quite possibly infringing I guess)
Now this is where I see a problem.
Blogspot/Google is not hosting any infringing music it seems. Some fans may talk about the band and they may even include a link to a file sharing site. So what do you want Google to do? Do you want to make it illegal even to link to a filesharing site, even to talk about where someone can download music. This is where it comes closer to a free speech issue.
Perhaps a parallel for the drug world: right now it is illegal to sell pot. But it is not illegal to say, "you can get some from Harry" or "You can get pot down on East 14th Street" (whether that is even true or not). There's a parallel here to forbidding links to "possibly" infringing sites. Do you want to make it illegal to say (point to a site) where perhaps some unlicensed content might be downloadable?
So how exactly is Google to know, let alone be responsible for, links to third party sites?
OK, well what about the images and videos they actually do host on blogspot. As you already acknowledged, DMCA takedowns can remove any copyrighted material on request from the owner. Is this not good enough?
You ask "Have you ever tried to file a DMCA notice? " The answer is yes, and it was not difficult, nor have my requests ever been ignored. Now I suppose if you have 100,000 them you might think it difficult if you though it worth your while to issue that many.
So what could be the alternative? There are thousands of U2 photos and videos and lyrics just in the Google search you suggested.
What would you have Google/blogspot do?? How on earth could they possibly know whether an uploader has a license to use a given photo or video. Perhaps some are free publicity shots, Perhaps some are licensed from Getty Images. Google cannot possibly know.
I license stock photography as a business and believe me it is not possible for a third party to identify infringements; it is not publicly available information. Aside from the fact that there is an existing §512 DMCA safe harbor, and aside from the complexities of fair use, the service provider, in this case Google/blogspot, simply is not in a position to know if a usage is infringing or not.
The suggestion that they monitor their user's pages for infringing material thus is completely unfeasible.
Now Youtube is an interesting example because they do allow content providers the option to fingerprint their videos and have Youtube automatically monitor uploads and even block some uploads. Even so many providers actually opt to allow their content on Youtube and get the exposure and ad revenue.
So getting back to blogspot, Youtube videos are not a problem and the copyright owner can choose to deal with other content if they want through DMCA
You ask "is that acceptable as the status quo".
Actually I think, yes.
Do I think it could be improved? yes, but not in the way you might expect.
In line with my comments above I do not believe it will ever be technologically feasible ro prevent all unauthorized use on the internet. What is the alternative? To take advantage of it. Here we have thousands of U2 fans eager to talk about the band and share their enthusiasm
Jeremy Williams, Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Warner Bros. Entertainment. addressed this phenomenon in a panel presentation at Berkeley
He suggests that companies like his should tolerate and support noncommercial uses — even tolerate some commercial uses. This is the approach he has taken, giving the okay to fan sites even when they use incidental advertising to support the site but drawing the line at fan merchandising.
So how to improve on the status quo?
Seek ways to take advantage of all this free publicity and enthusiasm. See it as an opportunity, rather than a curse.
All of a sudden the world will look quite different, and quite a bit more promising.
(sorry for the long response, but there was a lot to cover)
was it used
Mike, it is unclear from the article whether the researcher actually ended up publishing the image.
If not, why the reticence in discussing details?
(untitled comment)
There's probably a market opportunity then for non-SABAM books free from any such restrictions.
It's a joke
Instead of music consider another medium. Let's say you think of a hilarious joke (like the one about the three nuns in a taxi…..) and you tell a friend. She thinks it's the funniest thing she's ever heard and tells her friends and they tell all their friends and soon it spreads like wildfire. You go on a trip to another state and are at a party and someone asks you "did you hear the one about the three nuns in a taxi? " You say "hey that's my joke, you stole it. You can't tell it. You have to pay me."
Now it sounds ridiculous but digital content is somewhat like this. In economic terms it is non-exclusive, meaning it's not really possible to prevent it spreading. Try telling people not to tell your joke.
To be sure there are still differences between music. Oral jokes are not copyrightable; but if you wrote it down after you told it, then it would be. Also joketelling is not a commercial enterprise so you aren't expecting to be paid. But in terms of how easy it is to transmit and how unlikely you are to be able to prevent it spreading, it is very similar indeed.
That's the larger problem we are facing long-term, not copyright, but that with digital technology created content is becoming less like a private good, such as books and cars, and more like a public good, such as language, and we don't know exactly what to do about it
(untitled comment)
well I'll just charge them $3 for the privilege of receiving my payment
Competition from backlist
Ebert mentions "Competition from other forms of delivery" and you add "Competition from other forms of entertaintment."
More significant I think is competition from all the other movies made in the past.
You can't see them in theaters, but only via home rentals of some sort. With today's technology we are no longer restricted to seeing just the few films most recently released and being marketed, but can, at our leisure and on our own time, see any of tens of thousands of films.
I'd gladly have seen 3:10 to Yuma, Unforgiven, Gone With the Wind in theaters last year but they weren't showing anywhere so I watched them on Netflix.
There aren't enough cinemas to show even a fraction of films people want to watch and this is an inevitable consequence of today's technology.
Trademark
What about the fact that they registered a trademark in the word Righthaven?
"IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Searching and retrieving information, sites, and other resources available on computer networks for others. FIRST USE: 20100301. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20100301"
Movies and Music
Although SOPA refers to copyrighted material the motivation behind it is exclusively focused on Hollywood films and big label music.
Does anyone think for a minute that the Attorney General, or the ISPs or anyone else will be interested in, or capable of, identifying infringements of photographs, poems, fonts, children's drawings, quotations, logos and distinguishing them from licensed usages or fair use? Not a chance.
This in effect provides for elevated copyright protection for a very small subset of content, films and music, supported and paid for by MPAA and RIAA.
Not a good idea at all.
It's a question of price
I read the NY Times quite often and enjoy it as one of my news sources along with BBC Reuters the Washington Post and (recently) Al Jazeera, and sohave no problem paying a small amount for doing so with ease.
$35 a month is way way too high in my opinion. When I found out you could get full digital subscription by subscribing the Weekend Book Review for $1.75 a week I signed up. That's about $7.50 a month, which is more reasonable (the right price, I'd say, would be $4.99 a month)
They since seem to have disabled the link, but you might still be able to get a subscription.
As for hacks, the easiest way of all I found was to go to nytimes.com and then instead of clicking on links, do a right-click-copy-link-open-new-window-paste. No ?args. No paywall.
Even so that's a pain and I chose the $7.50 a month instead.
I donate $1 + a month to you, Mike, and they write many more stories than you do.
Making it a highly porous barrier may turn out to be a fair compromise. Traffic will tell.
(untitled comment)
The Social Science Research Council’s study is a landmark in the copyright literature: an actual empirical investigation into what works and what doesn’t in the enforcement arena. If policy makers want to be guided by evidence and not rhetoric, they will begin with the Council’s study and stay with it for a very long time.
— William Patry, senior copyright counsel, Google
ten ones
nice work he has there. funny that very few of the images are actually NY Times images. Most are artwork or historical
More at Volokh
There's a lengthy discussion over at the law blog
http://volokh.com/2011/02/25/suppression-of-jury-nullification-advocates-speech-outside-cour thouse/
(untitled comment)
The argument (perhaps from the studios) that it would not be fair for Netflix to buy just one dvd of a movie and then stream it tens of thousands of times, does make some sense.
But a reasonable solution could be that if they buy (license) say, 10,000 copies at the dvd price, then they can stream up to 10,000 simultaneous showings of a movie.
It wouldn't be too much of a hardship for viewers to understand that all the available films are being watched at some particular time and Netflix could manage their purchased to meet demand just like they do now with physical dvds.
(untitled comment)
So who has the copyright on the vuvu sounds. Surely they are creative, with beat and rhythm?
Did Ubisoft get licenses from the copyright holders, the vuvu players, or did they just take the recordings and use them?
Re: Owning color in a specific trademark
http://tess2.uspto.gov/
Search Term: Susan G Komen
Field: Owner Name and Address
Result Must Contain: All Search Terms
295 results don't seem to include the color. but lots of phrases.
Re: Re: Trademark license for different product??
Not always. Trademarks are there to avoid confusion for the consumer.
I am a photographer. If I set up a website called "Red Cross Health Photographs" with a large red cross logo, I would expect customers to be confused and the real Red Cross to have an excellent case against me.
That said, there is no doubt a trademark owner can be overly agressive is asserting broad rights where there may be little or no real customer confusion.
Trademark license for different product??
Mike. your suggestion to "license" the trademark to other entities doesn't make sense. It would likely be considered "naked licensing" and they could lose their trademarks:
http://definitions.uslegal.com/n/naked-license/
"licensing is generally permitted provided that the mark’s owner retains the right to approve the licensee’s use of the mark and supervise any element of quality control over the same. The logic is clear: if the mark is to have the import of signifying a particular source of certain goods or services and the public is going to have the right to rely on that mark for that significance, then when the mark is licensed to a party for use other than by the mark’s owner, the mark’s owner should be in a position to approve the use of the mark in relationship to the licensee’s good or services so that the public, upon seeing the mark in regard to those goods or services provided by the licensee, may rely on the same good will and quality it has come to know in relationship to that mark. " http://j.mp/g9gwOZ
ps I am not a lawyer. But I also agree that it seems the claims appear overly broad (e.g. objecting to use of the color pink)
(untitled comment)
@Josh plus monitoring Facebook and Flickr for infringements.
Except for one tiny problem. Aside from fair use, a copyrighted photo online may actually be licensed and there is no way to tell the license terms.
Links
Well one problem certainly is:
no print edition + no web edition = no history + no links
Rather than support creativity, this product makes the creative works disposable.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Well it is very helpful to be very specific here. Since you didn't answer no, I take it that you want the entire blogspot.com domain to be subject to an in rem proceeding if COICA is passed.
Do correct me if I assumed wrongly.
So yes I have looked at blogspot. Here is a search for pages with U2 appearing in the URL in the blogspot domain http://j.mp/94kQF4 and here are the top ten pages (except the 2 non-band pages)
http://u2-tour.blogspot.com/
http://top10mp3download.blogspot.com/2009/03/magnificent-m p3-download-u2.html
http://u2-blog.blogspot.com/
http://me-and-u2.blogspot.com/
http://secr etsun.blogspot.com/2009/02/u2-no-line-on-horus-zone.html
http://digitalmeltd0wn.blogspot.com/2007 /12/negativland-u2.html
http://live-bootleg.blogspot.com/2007/02/u2-salome.html
http://joyofso x.blogspot.com/2009/04/offday-outtakes-u2-achtung-baby.html
I have looked at all these pages and they seem to be primarily fan pages discussing, advertising for or just enthusiastic about the band. I see several embedded Youtube videos, plenty of photos and a few lyrics. I could not find any way to play or download any music directly from the blogspot domain.
There were a couple of links to third party file sharing sites like sharebee from which I presume one could download a track (quite possibly infringing I guess)
Now this is where I see a problem.
Blogspot/Google is not hosting any infringing music it seems. Some fans may talk about the band and they may even include a link to a file sharing site. So what do you want Google to do? Do you want to make it illegal even to link to a filesharing site, even to talk about where someone can download music. This is where it comes closer to a free speech issue.
Perhaps a parallel for the drug world: right now it is illegal to sell pot. But it is not illegal to say, "you can get some from Harry" or "You can get pot down on East 14th Street" (whether that is even true or not). There's a parallel here to forbidding links to "possibly" infringing sites. Do you want to make it illegal to say (point to a site) where perhaps some unlicensed content might be downloadable?
So how exactly is Google to know, let alone be responsible for, links to third party sites?
OK, well what about the images and videos they actually do host on blogspot. As you already acknowledged, DMCA takedowns can remove any copyrighted material on request from the owner. Is this not good enough?
You ask "Have you ever tried to file a DMCA notice? " The answer is yes, and it was not difficult, nor have my requests ever been ignored. Now I suppose if you have 100,000 them you might think it difficult if you though it worth your while to issue that many.
So what could be the alternative? There are thousands of U2 photos and videos and lyrics just in the Google search you suggested.
What would you have Google/blogspot do?? How on earth could they possibly know whether an uploader has a license to use a given photo or video. Perhaps some are free publicity shots, Perhaps some are licensed from Getty Images. Google cannot possibly know.
I license stock photography as a business and believe me it is not possible for a third party to identify infringements; it is not publicly available information. Aside from the fact that there is an existing §512 DMCA safe harbor, and aside from the complexities of fair use, the service provider, in this case Google/blogspot, simply is not in a position to know if a usage is infringing or not.
The suggestion that they monitor their user's pages for infringing material thus is completely unfeasible.
Now Youtube is an interesting example because they do allow content providers the option to fingerprint their videos and have Youtube automatically monitor uploads and even block some uploads. Even so many providers actually opt to allow their content on Youtube and get the exposure and ad revenue.
So getting back to blogspot, Youtube videos are not a problem and the copyright owner can choose to deal with other content if they want through DMCA
You ask "is that acceptable as the status quo".
Actually I think, yes.
Do I think it could be improved? yes, but not in the way you might expect.
In line with my comments above I do not believe it will ever be technologically feasible ro prevent all unauthorized use on the internet. What is the alternative? To take advantage of it. Here we have thousands of U2 fans eager to talk about the band and share their enthusiasm
Jeremy Williams, Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Warner Bros. Entertainment. addressed this phenomenon in a panel presentation at Berkeley
link here http://www.law.berkeley.edu/7731.htm audio here http://law.berkeley.edu/media/bclt/2010copyright/10-0345pm.mp3
and his observations were well summarized by Terry Hart of Copyhype here
http://www.copyhype.com/2010/11/drawing-distinctions
So how to improve on the status quo?
Seek ways to take advantage of all this free publicity and enthusiasm. See it as an opportunity, rather than a curse.
All of a sudden the world will look quite different, and quite a bit more promising.
(sorry for the long response, but there was a lot to cover)
Re: Re: Re:
Thanks JPJ.
Now you just mentioned www.blogspot.com
Do you consider them to be a site "dedicated to infinging" ?
Should COICA, if passed, take aim at Blogspot?
or any other Google property you can name?