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Copywrong?! Could your online video be breaking "the law"?
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 -
Artists of all kinds - you can kiss your copyright rights goodbye
Unless this new law can be prevented, you will lose your copyright rights to all your artwork, photographs, paintings, music, lyrics, films, videos, 3D animations, and anything else you have created, while corporations can steal your work and profit from it. This is extremely bad news for all those whose livelihood depends on their creations. Even your photographs which you have uploaded to your own albums online (such as Flickr, Picasa, etc.) will be affected. This is theft, pure and simple - theft which will be made legal very soon unless people react en masse and force their legislators not to pass this new Orphan Works legislation that is before Congress. Unless this new law can be prevented, you will lose your copyright rights to all your artwork, photographs, paintings, music, lyrics, ... more
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Invention Nation - Cool Fuels
http://tinyurl.com/23k45y
I watched this last night and I love it. This guys goes around USA finding inventors and their solutions for our energy crisis. Thumbs up!
You can jump to the videos right here!
http://science.discovery.com/video/invention-nation.htm... http://tinyurl.com/23k45y ... more -
Make Your Wii a Media Center!
This is cool. You can make your Wii a PC media center by using Orb.
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