Copyright Law and Music

Professor Lawrence Lessig, copyright activist and one of the founders of Creative Commons, was interviewed a few weeks back on the excellent radio public radio program Sound Opinions. You can listen to him discuss copyright law and its effects when applies to the music industry in episode #134 HERE or download an MP3 podcast HERE. Show notes are HERE.

Good Copy Bad Copy

Good Copy Bad Copy is an excellent new documentary from Denmark that reviews the current state of copyright law and its relationship to creative culture, using a range of international interviews. Watch the entire hour long film below (also worth checking out is the work in progress Copyright Criminals)...



Thanks Kit!

10 Miles Per Hour

Trailer for the documentary 10 MPH about riding a Segway scooter across America. The filmmakers are letting folks download the entire 92 minute film for free...

Pennies and Dimes

This is a video I created for the band Gaskets for their recently released Loose Change album/DVD, it's created entirely with public domain footage from the Prelinger Archive. and made under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. Here's Teddy Blanks, one half of the duo, with the story behind the song/video:

“Pennies and Dimes” is a song that was written when I was close to graduating college and entering what people call the ‘real world’. It deals with my own anxieties about the prospect of making a living as well as some of the frustrations I had with corporate consumer culture, informed by many of the ideas discussed in the “Design Rebels” class I took with Noah. It seemed fitting that Noah direct the video. He expertly cut together a hilarious selection of economic cartoons and food packaging assembly-line footage into an ironically optimistic visual accompaniment to an overtly cynical song.

Day of Silence

I tried tuning into one of my favorite internet radio stations this morning only to be reminded that it is one of thousands that are protesting an upcoming drastic royalty rate change with a Day of Silence. The change, which will go into effect July 15 (and be retroactive to January 1, 2006), could cause many small, independent broadcasters to shut down. A list of participating internet stations (including some of the largest like Yahoo! Launch, Rhapsody, and Pandora.com) can be found along with more details in RAIN (Radio And Internet Newsletter). To let your elected officials know your feelings about the rate change go here.

File Under Irony: Fakes Are Never In Fashion

Harper's Bazaar has decided to tackle the issue of counterfeit goods with a new campaign: Fakes Are Never In Fashion. And how do they plan to let folks know that it's not OK for people to make money off of something they didn't pay for or create themselves? They're having a T-shirt design competition! That's right, they've asked people to create art for them without getting paid. And the "winners"? Well according to the site they get...nothing! OK I guess they get the honor of seeing their work used by a corporation (after assigning all copyrights to them) for limited-edition T-shirts, limited-edition boxed sets, featured in upcoming issues of Harper's Bazaar, posted online, and downloadable into desktop wallpaper.

In the spirit of the competition I've decided to create my own design (shown right), but rather than submit it to them I've gone ahead and made a Cafe Press store to sell them myself HERE. Any profits will be donated to Creative Commons.

Thanks Mica!

A Fair(y) Use Tale

Disney characters explain Copyright Law and Fair Use in this entertaining Fair(y) Use Tale created by Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University. It's also available for download via the Fair Use Project at The Center For Internet and Society at Stanford University.


via Mica

CNN agrees to make debate footage accessible.

CNN has agreed to make footage from the upcoming presidential debates available to the public without restrictions (read: copyrights). CNN's notice about this appears here.

Copyrighted Homework

Virginia students have sued an anti-plagiarism software company for copyright infringement. From a recent Christian Science Monitor article:

The saga began last year when McLean High School in Virginia adopted a widely used antiplagiarism service called Turnitin. Under the system, students electronically submit essays to be stored and compared against millions of others in a massive database. Teachers can see if students are lifting work – a valuable tool given that research has found that 40 percent of undergraduate students admit to copying and pasting passages from websites.

But the setup rankled some students, who argued they shouldn't have to surrender their personal writing and persuasive essays – along with their names and e-mail addresses – to a computer bank in California.

"The suit is not about plagiarism; it's about the school forcing the students to turn their work over to a for-profit company," says Kevin Wade Sr., the father of a plaintiff.

Read the entire story here.