Category: Copyright

Bill would give Justice Department power to shutter piracy sites worldwide

Ars Technica reports about a bill that was introduced today:

If passed, the Justice Department could ask a federal court to for an injunction that would order a domain registrar or registry to stop resolving an infringing site’s domain name, so that visitors to PirateBay.org, for example, would get a 404 error.

The idea of an “infringing site” may be a legally tricky one.  While it may host some material that infringes someone’s copyright, it also likely hosts a great deal of original information.  This original stuff counts as speech, and as such receives a high deal of protection under the First Amendment.  I don’t think this kind of “prior restraint” would ever withstand judicial review.

From the bill:

an Internet site is ‘dedicated to infringing activities’ if such site:
primarily designed, has no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than, or is marketed by its operator, or by a person acting in concert with the operator, to offer—
‘‘(i) goods or services in violation of title 17, United States Code [a.k.a. copyright], or enable or facilitate a violation of title 17, United States Code, including by offering or providing access to, without the authorization of the copyright owner or otherwise by operation of law, copies of, or public performance or display of, works protected by title 17

As suspected, the “primarily designed” language is potentially difficult to nail down. The infamous Pirate Bay even includes links and information about copyright which I believe may legitimately be considered political speech (especially given that they have a party, as well as the Bay).

More from the bill:

On application of the Attorney General following the commencement of an action pursuant to subsection (c), the court may issue a temporary restraining order, a preliminary injunction, or an injunction against the domain name used by an Internet site dedicated to infringing activities to cease and desist from undertaking any infringing activity in violation of this section

The bill goes on to state that the Attorney General could order the domain registrar to “suspend operation” and “lock” offending domestic domains, and that ISPs shall “take reasonable steps that will prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name’s Internet protocol address” for foreign domains.

I find this an incredibly dangerous proposal for free speech and online communication.

Why is it so important that the public be able to put werewolves on T-shirts?

This Washington Post editorial attempts to answer this very question, regarding lawsuits over the use of copyrighted images in Twilight fan material. Following an apt quote from Tolkien, the author suggests:

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.

Paying the costs to learn

In “A Failure to Communicate,” Publisher’s Weekly takes a look at the Georgia State eReserve lawsuit. While there’s not really any “new news” to report, the article does a good job of portraying how difficult it can be to play by the book–or rather, the book that publishers are arguing for.

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.

If the Glee kids can do it, why can’t I

An interesting post at Balkinization poses some questions I’ve been wondering myself:

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)!