tagged w/ Online Copyright
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A "social media" company based out of Denver, CO is pressuring a teacher to give up his Twitter account with the same name. The account name is room214, and the company is Room 214. They have allegedly sent him a direct message via the Twitter site which mentioned legal action against him in order to acquire the name. Colin, the teacher, does not use his account for commercial purposes. His account has no relation the company, room214, nor the type of online marketing that they partake in. He started updating on Twitter in April 2007. The name stems from the number of his former classroom.
According to the room214 company's website, they started as a company in 2004, but their current Twitter username, room_214, started updating on Twitter on December 20th, 2008. Their most current post says they are "working things out" with user room214. It appears that there is no trademark on the name by this company, although this has not been confirmed by room214.
On December 28th, the company room214's co-founder explained that an employee independently sent the communication mentioning legal action and this move was not endorsed by the company. He also said that issue has been resolved and both parties will keep their existing usernames.
Nevertheless, what do you think about this? In this case, there was no actual legal action - does a company have the right to take a noncommercial, non-related username from an individual regardless of the date of creation? If not, should they? Do users on internet communities have the right to protect their online identities?A "social media" company based out of Denver, CO is pressuring a teacher to... more
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Google was yesterday ordered to hand over the personal details of anyone who has ever watched a YouTube video.
The ruling - which has massive privacy implications for millions of internet users - was made as part of the search engine's legal battle with content provider Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.
Under the ruling, Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion (£820 million) in 2006, must hand over to Viacom its viewing log - which includes users' log-in information and their IP address, the code that identifies their computer.
Although the case is being contested in the U.S., legal experts warned last night that the ruling would almost certainly apply to YouTube users worldwide, including those in the UK. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an internet freedom campaign group, described the judgment as a ' setback' to online privacy rights.
[snip]
In one case, the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth had been viewed 1.5 billion times.
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More at link.Google was yesterday ordered to hand over the personal details of anyone who has ever... more
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Is your seat belt on? Prepare to ruminate...it's gonna be a bumpy ride.
"In February, last year Comedy Central's parent company Viacom served YouTube and Google with a lawsuit seeking more than a billion dollars in damages. The crime? Copyright infringement. The company says that YouTube contained over 160,000 unathorized clips from programmes Viacom owns, including "South Park" and "The Colbert Report." In cases like this, the copyright issue seems clear, but there are other circumstances where the dividing lines are blurry. Video mashups that use multiple sources, lipsynching videos, and even clips where amateurs re-stage famous sketches, could all be on shaky legal ground.
"If you're using someone else's video, music or images, or even someone else's script without permission, then you could be infringing copyright," says Gavin McGinty.
"It doesn't particularly matter if the clip is short: "Copyright infringement is copying a substantial part of a work, either in a qualitative or quantitative sense," he says. "For example, you could put a five-second clip from "The Daily Show" in a video mashup. If that five seconds was the funniest part, that could be seen as substantial."
"The rule of thumb is, if you're likely to be able to spot the origin of the source material, then it's likely to be a substantial part. A valid defense may be 'fair dealing', which is similar but by no means identical tothe American concept of 'fair use'.
"Fair dealing enables you to use small parts of works for personal, noncommercial purposes. The classic examples are research and private study. That wouldn't normally cover posting video online, though. The American version, 'fair use', is so much wider than the UK version."
"In this case, it may depend on where a lawsuit is raised. "You have the issue that the content is accessible in any country in the world. Big media companies have clearance departments to make sure that everything shown in a work is cleared everywhere it's shown."
as gleaned from a recent "Future, Media with Passion" Future Publishing Ltd article
by Gavin McGinty
Technology and Commercial Lawyer at Pinsent Masons
www.pinsentmasons.com
imho this is currently a bigger issue than "climate change" with as many or more future ramifications for culture, creativity and the free expression of ideas.
other valuable resources:
http://freeculture.org/
http://www.lessig.org/
among others I'm sure =D Is your seat belt on? Prepare to ruminate...it's gonna be a bumpy ride.... more
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echoz
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4 years ago
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An incredible documentary about the current state of copyright and culture.
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bstein
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4 years ago
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Stanford professor Larry Lessig is one of the foremost authorities on copyright issues. His inspiring TED 2007 speech is about copyright and how it is stifling the creativity of the youth.Stanford professor Larry Lessig is one of the foremost authorities on copyright... more
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bstein
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added this
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4 years ago
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Publishers See a Way to Track Their Content Across the Net
Copyrighted work like a news article or a picture can hop between Web sites as easily as a cut-and-paste command. But more than ever, as that material finds new audiences, the original sources might not get the direct financial benefit in fact, they might have little idea where their work has spread.
A young company called Attributor says it has an answer, and a number of big publishers of copyrighted material say Attributor just might be right.
The company has developed software that identifies an electronic fingerprint for a particular piece of material an article, a picture, a video. Then it hunts down any place across the Web where a significant chunk of that work has been copied, with or without permission.
(the text above was copied and pasted directly from the NY Times article)Publishers See a Way to Track Their Content Across the Net
Copyrighted work like a... more
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bstein
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added this
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4 years ago
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The recent $222,000 bill handed out by the RIAA to an online music sharer has made legal ramifications from file sharing a reality. So are the big-time file sharers now in hiding as a result? This is hardly the case, as this story suggests.The recent $222,000 bill handed out by the RIAA to an online music sharer has made... more
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khsing
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added this
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4 years ago
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Let's see how quickly they reverse this implementation. Now that's some blatant copyright infringement.Let's see how quickly they reverse this implementation. Now that's some... more
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