Here’s a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote.

What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office? (Maybe “I downloaded but didn’t share” will be the new “I smoked, but didn’t inhale.”)

This is why understanding the intersection of copyright, culture, and technology is not just a worthwhile pursuit — it should be a prerequisite for future policymaking.

via No Copyright Intended – Waxy.org.

Lessig recently gave a “webside chat” on the usual issues of copyright and fair use that was posted to YouTube.  The video included clips of music that is covered under copyright, but in this context appear to be fair use. The details aren’t immediately clear, but it seems that Google’s automatic copyright filters stripped the audio track from the video (though it is now available again — with a link to purchase the music featured in the video).

This is an incredibly timely coincidence with my last post about the censorship of digital speech. In this case, there wasn’t even a button to push–an automatic filter indiscriminately altered what Lessig had to say.

The democratization of web publishing, I believe, is an inherently good thing. It would be shameful if speech gets quashed because of a business extending its power over any medium it touches.

Techdirt isn’t usually a source I like to cite, but when Lessig tweets a story about himself, you know it must be legit.

Here’s an interesting story of an “infringing” parody.

The story seems familiar to online video users: fans create a parody video using pirated studio content and post it on YouTube, and the studio’s lawyers quickly have it removed for violating copyright law. But this time the studio’s marketing team relented —and even paid the fans to repost their video.

First, the story assumes that the material that went into the material is “pirated,” despite the fact that parody is a well-established fair use. Not having seen the video, I can’t comment on how infringing it might be, but the opening of the story seems to convey that any use of copyrighted material is “piracy.”

This is also another interesting case of how user created content is finding its way into the mainstream… at least in this case the creators were paid for their efforts (plus being able to use and display the materials, plus the exposure gained by this story).

Wired has a great article on how YouTube is shaping the future of video…both in moving video entertainment to a more user-created model (which the author calls “monkeyvision” but others have called “semiotic democracy” or “rip/mix culture”), and in terms of how the current media model might try to embrace this new phenomenon. I like this piece because it talks about many of the concepts I’ve been thinking of in a humorous way. The one aspect touched on only briefly is the role of copyright in this new form of creation. Tensions between the rights of both owners of original content and owners of (sometimes “mixed”) content uploaded to YouTube might not survive through deals and the safe harbor clause alone.

Judge rules for Craigslist in discriminatory housing ads case &
Craigslist ruling: Why the EFF is right to be pissed

On a largely unrelated note (except in the loss of control over law on the Internet), a Federal appellate court ruled that Craigslist need not police itself for violations of the Fair Housing Act. Discrimination in classified housing ads holds the esteemed position of being one of the few circumstances when the law leans towards telling a newspaper what it cannot print (Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations). More on this in the future.