Films such as the Twilight saga resonate because they show us complex characters grappling with big issues. …

Pictures, videos and slogans on T-shirts are tools of modern expression, and with a phenomenon as omnipresent as Twilight, fans should be free to engage, manipulate, remix and remake. Free speech is just too important for anything less.

Fans of any kind of cultural artifact, Twilight or otherwise, should agree with that.

via Washington Post – The Twilight copyright saga: Forbidden love and forbidden T-shirts.

Curious about how a verdict against Georgia State might play out, Smith recently asked Duke’s e-reserves staff to give him random examples of recent permission fees. “For the 2007 book No Caption Needed, we paid $150 for permission to make just 17% of the work available to 12 students. This amounts to over $12 per student to gain access to less than a fifth of a work that sells for $35 retail. …
These are not extreme examples, Smith insists. In another example, fees exceeded $1,000, more than $25 per student.

Considering that most courses require multiple readings per week, the costs indeed would mount quickly. While campus licenses cover the majority of requests (one would hope), the problem is exacerbated by the complexity of the clearance system and the fact that faculty usually make requests close to the start of the term.

A recent study in the UK found that the peer review system “amounts to a £209,976,000 subsidy from publicly funded universities to private, for-profit journals, who then charge small fortunes to the same institutions for access to the journals.” Open journals are a great idea, but the tenure pressure to publish in elite journals have made this a tough nut to crack.

Hopefully a balance can be forged between the time and money invested in the publication process, and the social benefits of research and learning.

So what should you do in real life if you and your friends, inspired by Glee, want to make a mash-up, or a new music video for a popular song? Should you just leave this creativity to the professionals, or should you become dirty, rotten copyright violators?

Glee is a fun show that is doing a great job of encouraging kids to be creative and be themselves.  Unfortunately, this poster is right in questioning what kind of message the show sends about acceptable boundaries of copyright.  While the show is (I would assume) getting permission or paying royalties to mash songs up, this fact is invisible to the uninitiated viewer.  I would not call it a bad thing — perhaps these are the types of creative copyright norms we want to create in our culture. It’s OK to quote (even extensively)!

Ars Technica presents a great overview of the, now public, ACTA treaty text and history.  Perhaps most concerning are the 3 strikes and “imminent infringement” rules.  Both seem to run afoul of one’s First Amendment right to receive information (another example, your landlord can’t completely prohibit satellite dishes) and the great deference courts give prior restraint (there has to be imminent danger for the government to stop your speech).

While I’d wholeheartedly recommend the show, there was one thing about it that I feel is likely to be ignored by many: the only way a movie of this sort, rich with Disney animation clips, could ever be made was through official channels. There is no way that an unofficial documentarian could ever secure the copyright permission the volume of material that Schneider and Hahn were able to use–especially from a company like Disney. It’s an unfortunate sour note that, to me, colors the experience of an otherwise great movie.