Category: Copyright

Copyright Cases to Watch

As technology makes copying easier and better, areas which once were set aside as copyright free zones are finding their way back to the courts.

Databases: In the past, collections of facts or data have been left largely unprotected. Except for arrangement, which is protected, data has been free because of the desire to avoid granting a monopoly right in facts. Baseball statistics certainly fall under this area, but have the added element of the players’ work and personality (which are claimed to be tied in to the stats). Usually this type of protection falls under privacy, but it’s hard to see how public baseball games could apply here. It almost seems as though it is the use of this collection of the data what the leauges see as the problem. The use of one statistic couldn’t be protected, but perhaps when grouped together… (the work, or “sweat of the brow” in gathering statistics hasn’t been protected in the past).
Time shifting: Recording a television or show to view later has been protected since the Sony Betamax case. While the courts rejected the idea of “space shifting” in the mp3.com case, an XM Radio recorder is now coming under fire. The difference here is that digital material is easier to copy and creates nearly perfect copies.

These decisions could have a great impact on the scope of what users can do, and what creators can protect.

Who controls public videos?

I’m struck by the contrast in two stories appearing in today’s news

NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting network, is coming under pressure to start putting video content online (albeit for a fee). While in my country, C-Span, the non-profit network “created by cable, offered as a public service,” asked that videos of Colbert’s White House Correspondents Diner speech be removed from YouTube.com (and later agreed to have the material hosted on Google Video).

I’ll admit, the comparison doesn’t totally gel. NHK requires viewers to pay a subscription fee, and would likely do the same for videos on the Net. C-Span is funded through cable subscription fees. Yet both networks seem to have some element of both publicness and privateness to what they do; both are involved in the creation of cultural (and democratic) artifacts.

Without getting in to what is the “right” thing for either to do, what is interesting to me is the drive people feel to share this sort of material. If the amount of Japanese language videos on YouTube is any indication, there is truly interest in sharing this content across cultures. As with many of the other things I blog about, it comes down to a question of control. Is there any sort of public ownership right in content produced by government (directly, by subsidy, or otherwise)?

Copying and learning

The story about the young novelist caught accidentally plagiarizing from one of her favorite authors calls to mind a thought I’ve had recently about the role of copying in learning.

It seems to me that imitation is a crucial part of the learning process. Examples: Babies learn to talk by mimicking their parents’ vocal sounds. Garage bands learn and perform covers to figure out what it takes to write a good song. Someone making their first film may borrow cinematographic elements from favorite directors. College kids quote extensively when writing papers until they get a better grasp on the material.

In each case, copying is playing a crucial role in the learning process. I’m not aware of any existing theories of learning by imitation, but would be greatly surprised if something similar was not already out there (perhaps in psychology or education).

What is alarming about this case is that the institutional processes of publication did not catch this earlier. While authors create, it is a publisher’s job as editor to know the field and separate the good from the bad. This case appears to only involve plagiarism, thus not really a legal, but it illustrates some of the core theoretical issues in copyright nonetheless.

You Tube caps video length

I got a surprise when trying to upload my first video to YouTube last night (which was reported today): YouTube has set a maximum video length of 10 minutes. Their statement says that they found most videos over this amount of time were obviously infringing copyright, and offered a “premium content program” for content owners to upload videos longer than the limit.

When you think about it, this was a smart length of time to choose for a lot of reasons:

  • Most TV shows run about 23 minutes without commercials, had they made the maximum 15 minutes a half hour sitcom would have been easy to split.
  • Splitting longer material (especially movies) will be nearly unworkable.
  • It might also be easier for someone to make a fair-use argument for uploading such a short segment of copyrighted material. Ars pointed out that YouTube has many funny clips from movies like Napoleon Dynamite (and says “a good portion of which are not examples of fair use”)…yet perhaps a short clip with a comment/criticism in the text may pass. We’ll see if YouTube would go along with a challenge.

There is no word yet on whether material longer than 10 minutes is going to be deleted.  If so, it will be sad to see a lot of difficult to find material (international or out of print) go away.