tagged w/ public domain
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It's like an unspoken, almost sacred concept in copyright law. It's the public domain, where cultural creations exist unfettered, without a legal owner (though often, a credited author). These works are free for re-use, reinterpretation, and sale, and a protected place where orchestra conductors, curators, and preservationists frequently roam.
But the US Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in Golan v. Holder, that Congress can remove works from the public domain and re-copyright them in order to bring the pieces into compliance with international copyright schemes. Yeah, because that doesn't run completely against the spirit of copyright law or anything.
For one reason or another, the American copyright protections of many famous, foreign works—including H.G. Wells' Things to Come, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Prokofiev's Classical Symphony and Peter and the Wolf, Shostakovich's Symphony 14, Cello Concerto and everything by Igor Stravinsky—moved into the public domain despite still being copyrighted overseas. To "correct" this issue, Congress passed legislation in 1994 that would move the works in question back to protected status and comply with the Berne Convention, an international copyright treaty.
This week, the Supreme Court ruled on a case brought by a coalition of educators, performers, and film archivists who rely on public domain works such as these for their livelihoods. If these pieces are place back under copyright, this group (like everybody else) simply can't use them. However in a 6-2 ruling—Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito dissenting—the Court ruled that bringing these works into agreement with the international treaty did not violate the First Amendment rights of those people using the works as they are now (no, those folks will just have to pay licensing fees to perform), nor does it set a precedent for Congress to eventually push for perpetual copyright protections.
In his dissent, Justice Breyer stated that the congressional legislation,
"bestows monetary rewards only on owners of old works in the American public domain. At the same time, the statute inhibits the dissemination of those works, foreign works published abroad after 1923, of which there are many millions, including films, works of art, innumerable photographs, and, of course, books - books that (in the absence of the statute) would assume their rightful places in computer-accessible databases, spreading knowledge throughout the world."...
Continued at:
http://gizmodo.com/5877740/supreme-court-gives-the-go-ahead-for-re+copyrighting-public-domain-worksIt's like an unspoken, almost sacred concept in copyright law. It's the... more
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Dagum
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added this
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22 days ago
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The Open philosophy as applied to movies & animations deals with three related concepts:
* open, collaborative projects maintained by a community;
* open source software;
* the copyleft / public domain side of the digital rights spectrum.
In regards to the first issue, a good starting point could be just watching a video called “RIP: A remix Manifesto“.
(continue...)The Open philosophy as applied to movies & animations deals with three related... more
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If there's one intended victim of the decaying copyrighted music game it is classical music.
A great amount of classic music should be totally free, because its copyright expired a long time ago, but very few recordings of this kind of music are in the public domain.
The founders of Musopen want to achieve the goal of recording and eventually also obtaining recordings with no copyrights,
in order to build a musical commons that would be easily shared, listened to and re-used. This effort is governed by a certain quality control, in order to make it worth placing in the public domain.
It's a new type of "donation" that triggers access to a vast music sector. All the music uploaded is also randomly streamed through a "radio" channel.
Furthermore there's a collection of many sheets of music that would facilitate the free recording call, and finally there's also a project about writing a collective Music Theory Textbook.If there's one intended victim of the decaying copyrighted music game it is... more
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A project by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been created to help teachers provide accurate informations about the laws concerning digital rights & the concepts of copyright and piracy.
There are lots of free resources for both student and educators, available in PDF documents, external links, or “Frequently Asked Questions” pages; you can access all of them on the TeachingCopyright website, which is structured as a curriculum…
(continue...)A project by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been created to help teachers... more
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It has been recently announced by the Creative Commons Foundation that a new tool called CC Zero (or simply, CC0) is now ready to use; something very close to a “No Rights Reserved” concept.
The CC0 project actually started out around December 2007, but it has reached the format of a full 1.0 version only in the last days.
CC0 is defined not so much as a license, as it is a waiver. If you use it for a work you have created, you waive all copyrights related to the work.
(continue...)It has been recently announced by the Creative Commons Foundation that a new tool... more
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