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False Copyright Claims
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Jul 14, 2007 01:33 PM
from the one-sided-rights dept.
from the one-sided-rights dept.
FreetoCopy writes "Teenagers downloading music may not be the worst copyright offenders. See this item (available for download in PDF file with free registration) about the growing problem of copyfraud — in which publishers, archives, and distributors make false claims of copyright to shut down free expression. From the paper: 'Copyfraud is everywhere. False copyright notices appear on modern reprints of Shakespeare's plays, Beethoven's piano scores, greeting card versions of Monet's Water Lilies, and even the US Constitution. Archives claim blanket copyright in everything in their collections. Vendors of microfilmed versions of historical newspapers assert copyright ownership. These false copyright claims, which are often accompanied by threatened litigation for reproducing a work without the owner's permission, result in users seeking licenses and paying fees to reproduce works that are free for everyone to use...'"
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Hey! (Score:5, Funny)
No, you cannot have Fair Use. Not Yours. (Score:4, Funny)
Sue You
Take it down now
Take it down now
That summary is copright
Take it down now
I'll sue you if you don't
Take it down now
I'm sending the lawyers round!
Your overuse of my IP clearly falls outside the realm of Fair Use, so "take it down now!"
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Dark and lonely on a summer's night.
Kill my landlord.
Kill my landlord.
Watchdog barking. Do he bite?
Kill my landlord.
Kill my landlord.
Slip in his window. Break his neck.
Then his house I start to wreck.
Got no reason. What the heck?
Kill my landlord.
Kill my landlord.
C-I-L-L
my land
lord!
I demand you relinquish all rights back to me, or I will slip in your window, break your neck, then your house I'll start to wreck; I'll have a reason
Re:No, you cannot have Fair Use. Not Yours. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:No, you cannot have Fair Use. Not Yours. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:No, you cannot have Fair Use. Not Yours. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Scanning insufficient to establish copyright (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
There should be consequence (Score:5, Insightful)
However, when you create a "derivative work" based on public domain content, it's probably eligible for copyright protection in and of itself. The problem comes from where you draw the line. Perhaps in the interest of preserving the public domain, there should be law stating that any use of public domain material within derivative works should also fall within the public domain. Imagine how viral that could be...
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You don't need for the derivatives to be public domain, copyleft would be enough, no?
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2007/04/some-thoughts- on-copyright-offensive.html [blogspot.com]
You may be interested in some of these ideas... Refinements welcome...
all the best,
drew
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Reading this reminded me of a website [eliaskhnaser.com] I came across recently that sells training videos for Vmware's products.
Re:There should be consequence (Score:5, Informative)
That's already the law. You can read it at 17 USC 103(b). But it only covers that portion of the derivative work. So if you, say, make a movie where there is a scene involving you reading one of Shakespeare's sonnets, then the sonnet is still in the public domain. Anyone can watch that movie and copy down the sonnet, rather than having to consult some other source to get it. However, they can't copy anything from the movie that is copyrighted, such as the video or audio of you reciting the sonnet, or the remainder of the movie; only the sonnet itself. This applies to derivatives of anything, by the way; whatever portions of the work are derived from elsewhere keep their original copyright status and do not acquire the status of the newer work. E.g. Disney's 'Fantasia 2000' is mostly going to have a copyright date of 1999, but since part of it ('The Sorcerer's Apprentice') is from the original 1940 movie, that portion is still treated as a 1940 work, and will enter the public domain before the newer parts of the movie.
It's not viral though. The use of public domain materials in a derivative work doesn't make the entire work derivative.
Parent
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From my understanding, when you make a derivative work, that derivative is your copyright. But, you do not own the copyright to the original just because you used it.
There are a lot of examples to work with. A large portion of Disney classics are prime examples - one of my favorites being 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. The story itself is in the public domain - the copyright has expired. But Disney's take on it is not. So while you can base your own work on the original 20K Leagues, you can not base it on any unique aspect of Disney's work. A further example is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which is based on numerous SciFi and Horror classics - 20K Leagues being
I fell for copyfraud on the US Constitution (Score:4, Funny)
I thought.. (Score:2)
In other words, people are free to copy the original, but not your [whatever] of the original.
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The article, at least the sumery makes a few assumtion forgeting the entire aspect of the copyright.
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In the case of... (Score:2)
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Public Domain Can Be Re- Copyrighted (Score:5, Informative)
Although he's right that merely digitizing or copying a public domain work does not result in a new copyright, creating a collection of public domain works does. The individual works remain in the public domain, but you can't copy the "collection" as a whole (eg. scan and upload the book as a whole to the internet) because the creativity of selecting and assembling the work is a new copyright. This, for example, would apply to Dover books of public domain clip art.
Also, public domain music can be re-copyrighted to an extent--unfortunately--because individual arrangements can be copyrighted. You are free to use the original tune, but you can't copy a new arrangement because that arrangement is a new copyright.
Public domain is not GPL. Just because a work is public domain doesn't mean that derivative works will be public domain.
Now, that being said, the article is, otherwise, a good one. I'm tired of museums and "educational" institutions claiming copyright on the public domain works in their collection and copyright on the reproductions of those works. In those cases, no new creativity has occurred and there is no new copyright.
Re:Public Domain Can Be Re- Copyrighted (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it may, but it doesn't necessarily. A compilation is only copyrightable if the selection and arrangement is itself sufficiently creative. And the compilation copyright only pertains to the copyrightable portions of the selection and arrangement; not the materials which compromise the compilation.
Parent
As far as I'm concerned (Score:3, Insightful)
What we need is DRM! (Score:4, Insightful)
But we need an effective way for marking content with important details such as copyright owner, copyright date, contact details, and perhaps even licensing details in terms of what the licensor explicitly allows to be done with the content, even if there is no artificial technology restriction imposed on what is disallowed.
For example, if I find a piece of music on the Internet and I want to use it in something that I'm creating, how do I know if I can? Who do I contact? What if I don't even know what the song actually is? Sure enough, even knowing that the copyright holder doesn't want me to do such a thing might not stop me from doing it, but at least I know I'm acting against their wishes.
If we could have some form of DRM that was actually more like "digital rights marking", and survived transcoding/editing, that would probably be very interesting. To the extent that it wasn't used to restrict our actions, but merely make us aware of what we were doing (in terms of our actions being acceptable or otherwise), maybe that's something we as a society could agree to adopt.
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Practically, I agree it's very hard. To even get the ball rolling we need some kind of a standard that says "you encode the information this way, it should contain the following data, here are some guidelines to help you ensure that all of the contact info you enter today will still be useful in ten years time, the mark data itself should be digitally signed in this manner, your public key should be published here for ease of verification, etc.". Then we need next genera
You mean... (Score:4, Funny)
punishment is simple... (Score:2)
music scores (Score:4, Informative)
And even if we do have the complete, original, score, it may have been for old instruments. A lute is not the same as a guitar, for example, and when Vivaldi wrote for lute, he knew how it would be tuned, and what fingerings were possible. To make it work on a guitar can be quite a creative challenge.
Even if we still use the same instruments as the composer wrote the piece for, we might want a score for different instruments. You can't just sit down at your piano, or guitar, or with your full orchestra, with the score to, say, Bach's cantata #147 ("Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring") as originally written as a choral work, and start playing. It just won't work. You basically have to rewrite the music for those different settings.
Slander/Libel (Score:2)
From TFA:
The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials.
While this may be true, isn't there a way to fire back with a slander/libel charge? (ha! Let's see the pendants call me on this one :) In other words, you're claiming that I'm violating copyright on one of your works, but that claim is invalid because you don't actually own the copyright.
One possible problem (and a lawyer would have to confirm if this is a problem) is that copyright vio
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I hate myself for doing this, but it's spelled "pedant".
Not all false copyrights (Score:3, Insightful)
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That's interesting. But they're generally not protected in the US. I can imagine cases where they would qualify, but usually typesetting and layout are simply not sufficiently creative to be copyrightable.
How to pay (Score:3, Funny)
--
Mass production solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
As an ebook publisher making pocket change (Score:3, Interesting)
For instance, I have made a little pocket change reprinting a rare 1863 cookbook. By no means am I getting rich off of it, but I do put a copyright on the ebooks I sell just to have some legal options. I don't care if someone prints it out and OCRs it, there isn't a thing in the world I could do about that. But I had to spend a couple of days OCRing the material, cleaning it up, and formatting it. Anyone else wanting to sell it, or give it away, should have to do the same, not swipe my work.
How exactly should someone be able to just start reselling my ebook and why is that wrong of me to put a copyright notice on it?
Transporter_ii
Re:As an ebook publisher making pocket change (Score:5, Informative)
The Supreme Court and the Constitution disagree with you. The authoritative case on your 'sweat of the brow' argument is Feist v. Rural. Here's the good bits, rearranged and edited a bit for clarity:
Parent
At least they should be required to say WHY (Score:3, Interesting)
All of these, without exception, bear the notice "Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission."
In the case of articles published before 1923 (and don't you think it's interesting that the Globe cuts off at exactly 1923?) I completely fail to see how these can be anything other than a faithful reproduction of a work published in the United States before 1923.
Darn it, at the very least, if someone is going to claim copyright in something, they should be required to give an explicit statement of the legal basis for their claim. Maybe there's some way this material is copyrighted, but in the case of material that every university library guideline says is in the public domain, the burden of proof... or at least, the burden of saying why this is an exception to the general rule... should fall on the person making the assertion.
Sometimes not fraud, but sheer ignorance... (Score:4, Interesting)
I sell out of print books on eBay. There is a certain historic African-American sorority that published a quite hard to find history of the organization -- tends to bring triple-digit prices when you can find a copy. I've been fortunate enough to twice have found a copy (once at an estate sale, once in a Goodwill), and both times when it was listed on eBay, I was INUNDATED with hostile messages from members of that sorority. Apparently, they believe that the fact that the book is copyrighted means that only THEY can sell copies, and only to fellow members -- as far as they are concerned, I don't have the right to read it or even posess it, let alone sell it! Both times, they lodged complaints with eBay who politely explained to them the right of resale and the fact that pretty much every used book sold, whether on eBay or in your local book nook, is copyrighted. But that didn't stop them from continuing to harass me and threaten me with legal action (take yer best shot, I told 'em). Really makes one wonder what sort of deep, dark secrets are in that book that they don't want any "outsiders" to get their hands on a copy!
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Really makes one wonder what sort of deep, dark secrets are in that book that they don't want any "outsiders" to get their hands on a copy!
I'd like to hear more details.
"The women of Delta Sigma Theta, a repected African-American women's organization, share more than 250 delicious recipes, compiled from members of the sorority, along with suggested menus and entertaining tips for specific occasions, ranging from bridal and baby showers to book club meetings, a backyard barbecue, and Christmas dinner."
Re:All over the place. (Score:4, Informative)
JibJab was sued by The Richmond Organization, which owns Ludlow Music, and was asserting its copyright claim.
As much as I hate to cite Wikipedia:
Richmond Organization threaten[ed] legal action. At this point, it was noticed that the copyright to the original 1945 publication had expired in 1973 and was not renewed as then required by copyright law. The Richmond Organization settled with Jibjab shortly thereafter. It still, however, claims copyright on other versions of the song, such as those appearing in the 1956 and later publications. Legally, such claims only apply to original elements of the song that were not in the public domain version.
So, no, it wasn't the "Bush Camp" that tried to get the song pulled. And those who can remember the parody without the tinted glasses of partisanship remember that it poked fun at both Republicans and Democrats equally well. But somehow you don't see Republicans claiming the "Kerry Camp" tried to get it silenced. I wonder why that is...
Parent
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Let's put this one to the test. /wastler/ [cnn.com]
Here a news article link the the JibJab affair: http://money.cnn.com/2004/07/26/commentary/wastler
Here is some more information on The Richmond Organization: http://www.mpa.org/directories/music_publishers/sh ow/370 [mpa.org]
The JibJab piece used a Woodie Guthrie song to poke fun at both Bush and Kerry, in a fairly even-handed way, as I recall.
Maybe yo
Re:All over the place. (Score:4, Insightful)
Broken thinking makes good comedy - but not so good politics.
Parent
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I think you're thinking of the Scientologists.
</sarcasm>
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The DMCA is a good law with poisonous rider provisions (stuff about circumvention devices for example), and of course like any law with good intentions, is being gamed and rigged by those who are less than honorable. The situation under the DMCA is better than the previous regime, where an ISP could find itself liable for someone simply having uploaded something that's a blatant violation. Unfortunately, the "easy out" that it gives
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Re:All over the place. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wake me up the first time someone is convicted of perjury for making a false DMCA claim. Its not real until the prosecutors, well, prosecute it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think part of the problem is that the organization issuing the takedowns might actually think they own them, because they own things that use them. Thus a "public hanging" would be out of place.
If I scan and post a picture of the Mona Lisa out of an art history book, am I making an illegal reproduction of part of that book? The IP rights get cloudy when you consider: If I down
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- Ok in the interest of following the call for "public hangings" in the GGP: If I make prints from my own source, but Getty Digital Archives believes that it is theirs and they make eBay close my online vending page: Does Getty deserve a "public hanging"? I believe you called for the full weight of Purjury charges to be applied in the case of false DMCA takedowns.
It's a twisty, ambiguous, and nuanced area of law,
-In general
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