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Sunday, June 22, 2003 |
Copy
Protection and the Reasonable Man, by Richard Menta.
Sure, Bo Diddley would love to earn a check every time another
artist employed his distinctive rhythm. Last I heard, he was living in a
trailer in Florida and making a modest living on the oldies circuit. What
made Bo Diddley great was the creation of a unique beat that has become so
pervasive it is now part of our culture, heard in movies, TV and in the
records of artists as disparate as Buddy Holly, Nirvana, and any number of
Hip Hop groups. This is what the freer flow of his ideas has given us.
. . .
Bo is measured by his gift to society, not by the cash in his wallet. The
law says that you can copyright songs, but you can't copyright licks or a
style, no matter how obvious its source. It wasn’t other artists who robbed
Bo of his mansion on the hill. They only spread his fame. It was the record
company deals in the mid-fifties that paid him $45 bucks a side with no
royalties. That is about what I paid for his 45-track greatest hits package
from MCA, which unlike Bo, DOES make money from his music.
No, these artists only took what he created and made more great music from
its inspiration. As for the record companies’ claim that digital rights
management protects the artist's rights, realize that in the eye of the law
Mr. Diddley sold off the rights to his own recordings years ago. So it’s
quite ironic that the industry still sells his music for top dollar and is
taking strong measures to restrict/control its use, but feels no obligation
to compensate him.
And you want that same record industry to rewrite the rules with regards to
how consumers listen and exchange music?
Let's imagine a world where Bo's music made money, but not enough to
satisfy some preconceived corporate standard. As a result, his records
would be discontinued and his music suppressed. Suppressed because file
trading of his no longer available catalog would still be considered theft
by the record industry, which would take all steps necessary to prevent the
recordings flow. There are plenty of artists who's works are no longer in
print, but until those recordings hit the public domain, DRM says you have
no right to listen and enjoy them if you should acquire their lost tracks
online.
1:23:03 PM 
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Digital Pirates: Risks of downloading movies don't deter people
who want free entertainment, by Hailey Heinz, Anchorage Daily News.
11:22:43 AM
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I'm doing post-by-e-mail while I'm in Toronto. If all goes well, this will
post while I'm giving a presentation, "Programming Aside, Fair Use By
Design," at the joint American Library Association-Canadian Library
Association conference.
The core of the presentation is reasons why I'm prepared to give up on
"programming fair use," but not ready to give up on the idea of "fair use
by design."
More on the subject later . . .
10:22:33 AM
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Harry Potter and the Copyright Lawyer: Use of Popular
Characters Puts 'Fan Fiction' Writers in Gray Area. By Ariana Eunjung
Cha,
Washington Post.
In the past few years, a curious literary genre known as "fan
fiction" has been flourishing. The term refers to all manner of vignettes,
short stories and novels based on the universes described in popular books,
TV shows and movies. Similarly derived works are appearing in music, where
fans are using their computers to mix songs from popular artists into new
works that they call "mashups." Movie fans are taking digital copies of
films such as the "Star Wars" epics and creating alternate endings or
deleting characters such as the much- maligned Jar Jar Binks.
The explosion of these part-original, part-borrowed works has set authors
of fan fiction against some media companies in a battle to redefine the
line between consumers' right to "fair use" and copyright holders' rights
to control their intellectual property.
"We don't grow up hearing stories around the campfire anymore about
cultural figures. Instead we get them from books, TV or movies, so the
characters that today provide us a common language are corporate
creatures," said Rebecca Tushnet, an assistant professor of law at New York
University who has written extensively on intellectual property.
Fan-fiction creators say their work represents the emergence of an art form
that takes advantage of all that the Internet was built for. They invoke
the First Amendment and say that under fair-use laws they have a right to
create what they want as long as they are not trying to profit at the
expense of the original material. But some book, music and movie houses
argue that fan fiction is more plagiarism than high art and have demanded
that operators of Web sites remove the offending material.
9:22:24 AM
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Learning
>From a Teaching Contest, By ''MAX CLIO'' (a pseudonym).
Do not misunderstand me: Most of the winners of the award are
colleagues I am proud to have. I imagine them to be excellent teachers. A
few I would even place in that rare category of extraordinary teachers,
ones who change lives forever, from what students tell me. That these
teachers are popular is an index of their quality. The challenge, however,
is to square those deserving and accomplished cases with award winners
whose merit is far from obvious. The truth is that favor among students has
many elements, with merit only one among them.
4:20:57 AM
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