Free Republic

Shepard Fairey’s claim that he had the right to use a news photo to create his famous Barack Obama “HOPE” poster became a widely watched court case about fair use that now appears to have nearly collapsed. By Friday night, his attorneys — led by Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University — said they intend to withdraw from the case and said the artist had misled them by fabricating information and destroying other material. Fairey himself admitted that he didn’t use The Associated Press photo of Obama seated next to actor George Clooney he...

There was a time, not so long ago, when the term "Internet Freedom" actually meant what it implied: a cyberspace free from over-zealous legislators and bureaucrats.... Those days are now gone; the presumption of online liberty is giving way to a presumption of regulation. A massive assault on real Internet freedom has been gathering steam for years and has finally come to a head. Ironically, victory for those who carry the banner of "Internet Freedom" would mean nothing less than the death of that freedom.... Here is the reality: Because of the steps being taken in Washington right now, real...

The MPAA apparently said that the “enemies of copyright have really done a good job at creating the false premise that the interest of copyright holders and the interest of society as a whole are antagonistic” during the World Copyright Summit. The worry is that their pro-copyright advocacy perspective is fading away in the public conscious. In an interesting report from IP-Watch where there were a few choice words levelled against those that disagreed with the view-points of the copyright industry. Apparently, Fritz Attaway suggested that it's false to assume that the rights of the industry and the interest of...

Broadcasters are vowing to fight legislation requiring radio stations to pay royalties to performers, even as the recording industry and artist coalitions say the effort is gathering steam. The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday passed a modified version of a performance royalty bill that gives some exemptions to small broadcast stations. Broadcast radio stations now pay song royalties to songwriters and ...

So the Copyright Office is currently in the middle reviewing proposed exceptions to the DMCA, and one of the proposals on the table would allow teachers and students to rip DVDs and edit them for use in the classroom. Open and shut, right? Not if you're the MPAA and gearing up to litigate the legality of ripping -- it's trying to convince the rulemaking committee that videotaping a flatscreen is an acceptable alternative. Seriously. It's hard to say if we've ever seen an organization make a more tone-deaf, flailing argument than this. Take a good look, kids. This is what...

Is Internet access a fundamental human right? Or is it a privilege, carrying with it a responsibility for good behavior? ...The United States Congress held hearings last week on the growing problem of piracy, which the American entertainment industry says accounts for the loss of $20 billion a year in sales. Several lawmakers vowed to increase scrutiny of international markets where piracy is widespread. But if events in Paris last week are any indication, legislative solutions will not be easy. French lawmakers rejected an antipiracy plan championed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, where the Internet connections of people who ignored repeated...

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes"The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held...

AP suing Shepard Fairey over altered image. See article.

"Yes we can,'' the Obama campaign proclaimed. "No you can't,'' says the Obama White House of the varied attempts to cash in on the brand Obama built. Or maybe they can, or can't. The lawyers are looking into it, Bloomberg News reports" ### President-elect Barack Obama has created his own brand - represented both by the iconic images of the candidate who campaigned for "change'' and by the "Yes we can'' and "Change We Can Believe in" slogans generated by that campaign. Now the Obama White House, mindful of the "worldwide fascination'' about his election, First Amendment free-speech rights and...

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama won applause from legal adversaries of the recording industry. Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, the doyen of the "free culture" movement, endorsed the Illinois senator, as did Google CEO Eric Schmidt and even the Pirate Party. That was then. As president-elect, one of Obama's first tech-related decisions has been to select the Recording Industry Association of America's favorite lawyer to be the third in command at the Justice Department. And Obama's pick as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position, is the lawyer who oversaw the defense of the Copyright Term Extension Act--the...

The Bambu rolling-paper company is smoking mad at a Barack Obama-loving artist for using its iconic packaging on T-shirts that show the president-elect smoking a joint. Seamus McGovern and his "Love Fatigues" Web business were hit with a trademark-infringement suit for putting Obama's name and face on the beige and white cover of "the world's finest rolling papers." The Manhattan federal court case claims the $22 "Obambu" shirts expose Bambu to "criticism and scorn" because they show Obama smoking weed, and could "confuse the consuming public" into believing they came from the company.

You may recall the lawsuit earlier this year, where radio talk show host Michael Savage tried to sue one of his critics for copyright infringement. The group in question had a pretty clear fair use claim, as they were using Savage's radio broadcasts for commentary and to respond to Savage's attacks on the group. And, in fact, a judge wasted little time explaining fair use to Savage, and tossing out the lawsuit. However, it appears that Savage hasn't yet learned his lesson on fair use, as he's apparently been sending more takedown notices to folks who use his recordings and...

Syndicated talk host Michael Savage is being sued by a filmmaker over his demand that YouTube remove a video by the filmmaker criticizing Savage using excerpts from his show. Brave New Films alleges in the suit filed on Friday (10-10) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that use of the excerpts containing anti-Muslim rhetoric falls under "fair use." Robert Greenwald, a documentary filmmaker, uploaded to YouTube a short video titled "Michael Savage Hates Muslims," criticizing comments Savage made on a broadcast in October, 2007. The video contains about a minute of audio excerpts in which...

John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono and EMI Records, the world's fourth largest music company, dropped copyright infringement lawsuits against the makers of a documentary that used the portion of the song "Imagine" without permission. The news was made public on Tuesday by a Stanford Law School's Fair Use Projects release. The dismissal follows unsuccessful attempts by Yoko Ono in federal court and EMI Records in state court to enjoin Premise Media Corp's documentary, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," because it uses a 15-second clip of the song. "We think it was clear from the beginning that our clients had every right...

A judge's ruling today is a major victory for free speech and fair use on the Internet, and will help protect everyone who creates content for the Web. In Lenz v. Universal (aka the "dancing baby" case), Judge Jeremy Fogel held that content owners must consider fair use before sending takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"). Universal Music Corporation ("Universal") had sent a takedown notice targeting a 29-second home movie of a toddler dancing in a kitchen to a Prince song, "Let's Go Crazy," which is heard playing in the background. Because her use of the song...

A federal judge has dismissed radio host Michael Savage's copyright infringement lawsuit against the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations, which had posted excerpts of one of his programs online. Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco ruled that the clips, totaling four minutes out of the two-hour Savage Nation program that ran on Oct. 29, 2007, constituted a fair use. "Defendants used plaintiff's material in order to criticize and comment on plaintiff's statements and views," Illston wrote in the 21-page ruling. Savage filed suit for copyright infringement and racketeering last December. Among other allegations, Savage asserted that the CAIR took his statements...

Several newspapers and The Associated Press have settled a copyright infringement lawsuit against the operator of a collection of Web sites, the news organizations announced Friday. The Police News Publishing Co., Breck Porter and six affiliated Web sites had been accused of accessing the news content of the organizations without their authorization and posting it on the Web sites, where advertising appears. The content was then archived; the archiving, publication, distribution and display of the content all violated the news organizations' copyright, according to the suit. Porter, of Galveston, was the editor of the various Web sites. In addition to...

DBKP.com was alerted yesterday to both a good news-bad news situation by Doug Ross, of DougRoss@Journal. The good news was the TimesOnline had used several of our quotes from our interview this week with David Perel, Editor-in-Chief of the National Enquirer, in a story it ran July 26 2008 on John Edwards’ run-in with the Enquirer’s reporters at the Beverly Hilton while visiting his mistress and their love child. The bad news was that the Times reporter, Sarah Baxter, in her story, Sleaze scuppers Democrat golden boy never credited DBKP as her source for the quotes, which were taken word-for-word...

Excerpt - As the economic pressure on newspapers intensifies, the Associated Press, a 162-year-old newsgathering cooperative for the industry, is beginning to fracture. Long a newspaper-centric organization, the AP has shifted its focus in recent years. With readers and advertisers migrating away from news on printed paper and toward cable TV and the Web, the AP is devoting more of its resources to producing content for other news outlets. These include the very Web portals that pose the greatest competition for newspapers, such as Yahoo and Google, which are now among the AP's biggest customers. For some editors, the AP's...

Google deal uncovers truth that AP is now a competitor to newspapers, and papers are suckers for being members of it 9/2/07Posted by Steve Boriss in Uncategorized. trackback As reported by Jeff Jarvis and many others, Google News has just reached the incredibly obvious conclusion that its readers would rather not wade through dozens of nearly identical versions of the same original AP story that are published by its member papers. So, striking a deal with AP and three foreign wire services, Google News will now feature the originating wire service’s story, reducing the prominence and interest in similar members’ stories,...

I don't blame the Associated Press for refusing to participate in a conversation about its attempts to overthrow government authority and rewrite copyright law its own liking. The AP is like a husband who foolishly told his wife that the new jeans do make her butt look big. The best way to limit damage at that point is to simply shut up and hope the subject eventually goes away. But this issue isn't going away. The AP is doing nothing less than attempting to unilaterally rewrite copyright law, and also undermine citizens' freedom to criticize the news media. It's just...

No money changed hands but Rogers Cadenhead, who owns the Retort, evidently agreed to tweak the offending posts to bring them into compliance with the AP’s guidelines. And what might those guidelines be? He’s not saying. Yet. I spent around two hours yesterday talking to AP attorneys about their specific objections to the user blog entries in dispute, going line by line through the text to pinpoint exactly where they have intellectual property concerns in the short excerpts that were posted. I won’t reveal the details of this discussion until AP releases the guidelines for bloggers that it promised on...

Speak to any teacher these days and the biggest gripe about the internet age will probably be plagiarism. Where I teach in Rome, the university has a strict "no copying" policy. If a student is caught lifting text from a website and claiming it as his own, that’s grounds for failure. End of story. And, if the crime is particularly grievous, it could lead to expulsion. The one-strike-and-you’re-out policy isn’t perfect, but it seems to strike enough fear into enough students to get them to think twice about stealing somebody else’s work on Shakespeare or Cicero or Einstein. If only...

Bloggers, like me, are voicing their views and commentary on the news (and falsehoods, etc) of the day as is our right under the constitution.  When a corporation tries to tell me I cannot comment, criticize (and more often correct) their lousy product I lose all interest in being reasonable.  There are lines you do not cross because they cannot be uncrossed. The-news-source-that-shall-not-be-named, which went after bloggers for excerpting and linking their biased and error prone ‘news’ articles, crossed that line - in full hypocrisy it seems: 1. The AP is essentially arguing that anyone who excerpts 33 to 79...

A scrappy Web site that's built a reputation for taking on Goliath-sized corporate and government corruption is now fighting a holy war over copyright infringement.Wikileaks — a watchdog Web site that leaks corporate and government documents — hasn't officially launched, yet it has already uncovered human rights violations in China, claimed to have swayed Kenya's elections and exposed the inner workings of Guantanamo Bay. So many were surprised when it recently turned its sights on two lawyer-heavy religious groups: the Mormons and the Scientologists. Founded in December 2006, Wikileaks boasts of an archive of 1.2 million released documents, sent in...

In other words, the AP monster has turned on its creators and is now taking their money while putting them out of business. Last September it was announced that the AP signed a contract with Google News giving its original wire stories prominence, while reducing traffic and presumably online ad revenues at AP members’ own sites. And now the AP is turning on its creators once again, this time launching a program to make its stories available on iPhones, preempting its members’ necessary efforts to restore their ability to generate and deliver their own, valuable original content. But still,...

Google defeated in Belgian copyright case; everyone but Google loses By Ken Fisher | Published: February 13, 2007 - 11:48AM CT The group of disgruntled newspapers in Belgium that sued Google for copyright infringement has emerged victorious after a decision was granted in their favor today in court. The judgment echoes a previous ruling from the Court of First Instance in Brussels that found Google in violation of copyright law when the company published extracts of articles from Belgian newspaper publishers. Copiepresse, the Belgium copyright group representing the nearly 20 papers scandalized by Google News, now gets its wish: Google...

The Associated Press is at it again. Not content with attempting to bring about the end of Snapped Shot, my little wire-photo-critiquing hobby, they’re now going after the dastardly news commentators over at the Drudge Retort for alleged copyright violations. Will they ever learn how this Internet thing works? Back in March, I was delighted to receive a love letter from the AP’s legal department, which kindly informed me that they didn’t particularly care for me. You can read all about those travails in the piece I wrote for Pajamas Media back then. (Pun intended.)[snip] [snip]This harkens back to memories...

So, the AP has now riposted to The Brouhaha with a re-post of its pricing for quoting its words (see here for the price tabs): There are 3 rates - For Profits, Educationals, and Registered not for profits. The Educationals and Not for Profits have the same pricing. I will now perform my own value-added analysis, which last time I looked qualifies as Fair Usage. If you graph the rates, it looks like this: AP Pricing Graph showing arbitrage points As you can see, there are a few interesting points of inflection: - The pricings are the same, no matter...

This is our Boston tea Party. The Associated Press wants to levy a $12.50 and up license fee (aka extortion fee) on any blogger who quotes more than 4 words from one of their propaganda pieces. This is an outrageous attempt to control the blogosphere and free speech itself. To hell with their license fee and to hell with the AP. Any AP article that gets posted to FR will be jettisoned into the harbor posthaste. Please do not post any AP material to FR excerpted or not.

Our list of sites that must be excerpted due to copyright concerns continues to grow, but now the Associated Press is upping the ante. Not only are they not allowing full text postings, they're threatening to sue bloggers who allow the posting of AP titles and brief excerpts or even if their posters post brief quotes from AP articles within a discussion thread. AP is now developing their own rules for fair use and will decide when, how and what they will allow the public to quote from their articles. And their rules are much more restrictive than is commonly...

As we wait with bated breath for the Associated Press to come down from the mountain with its own rules for "fair use for bloggers," Patrick Nielsen Hayden gives us a sense of what the AP considers fair use (found via Boing Boing). Apparently, for quite some time, the AP has had up a page that lists out prices for quoting AP text. I will quote the list prices, and hope I don't get a DMCA takedown: 5-25 words: $ 12.50 26-50 words: $ 17.50 51-100 words: $ 25.00 101-250 words: $ 50.00 251 words and up: $ 100.00 Oh,...

Face it, blogs exist so we don't have to read the news for comprehension The Associated Press took a grandiose Facebook-style faceplant last week when it attempted to impose strict guidelines on the blogosphere. Now, just like Facebook’s initial unapologetic enthusiasm for its privacy-violating Beacon program followed by Facebook’s effusive apology for its privacy-violating Beacon program, the AP is bowing to the will of the angry Internet masses and backing off. Sort of. As part of the big mea culpa, the AP's Jim Kennedy pledged to meet this week with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association (which is,...

In the name of "defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt" the Associated Press is now selling "quotation licenses" that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that "fair use" -- the right to copy without permission -- means "Contact the owner of...

NEW YORK - The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers' group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online. Jim Kennedy, the AP's director of strategic planning, said Monday that he planned to meet Thursday with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, as part of an effort to create standards for online use of AP stories by bloggers that would protect AP content without discouraging bloggers from legitimately quoting from it. The meeting comes after AP sent a legal...

The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright. The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For...

We received a copyright infringement notice today from Forbes.com. They requested that we either remove a thread that contained a full text posting of one of their articles or reduce it to a brief one paragraph excerpt with a link back to their source article. We have complied with their request and have added Forbes.com to the excerpt and link only list. My understanding of fair use is that we can quote small amounts of copyrighted works for critiquing and discussion purposes as long as we're not adversely impacting the publisher's market for his works. Our excerpt and link list...

In the aftermath of the $222,000 jury verdict that the Recording Industry Association of America recently won against a Minnesota woman who shared 24 songs on Kazaa, the U.S. Congress is preparing to amend copyright law. Politicians want to increase penalties for copyright infringement. It's no joke. Top Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday introduced a sweeping 69-page bill that ratchets up civil penalties for copyright infringement, boosts criminal enforcement, and even creates a new federal agency charged with bringing about a national and international copyright crackdown. "By providing additional resources for enforcement of intellectual...

A car repair firm has been taken to court accused of infringing musical copyright because its employees listen to radios at work. The action against the Kwik-Fit Group has been brought by the Performing Rights Society which collects royalties for songwriters and performers. At a procedural hearing at the Court of Session in Edinburgh a judge refused to dismiss the £200,000 damages claim. Kwik-Fit wanted the case brought against it thrown out. Lord Emslie ruled that the action can go ahead with evidence being heard. The PRS claimed that Kwik-Fit mechanics routinely use personal radios while working at service centres...

--- snip --- Kidding. Or daydreaming. But this is important. The Computer & Communications Industry Association has filed a Complaint [PDF] -- "Matter of Misrepresentation of Consumer Fair Use and Related Rights" -- charging content owners including Universal, NBC Universal, the National Football League, Major League Baseball, Dreamworks Studios, and others, with misrepresenting copyright law in their "copyright warnings". It's about time somebody noticed US Copyright Law includes fair use. Everyone in the entertainment industry that waxes poetic about the most holiness of copyright law seems to forget that the law includes a section limiting exclusive rights, the fair use...

The new documentary "War Made Easy" isn't just a searing critique of how administrations over the past 40 years have manipulated the media to build support for war. The 72-minute film is a media provocation itself - a challenge to federal copyright laws. Based on a 2005 book by Bay Area media critic Norman Solomon and narrated by actor Sean Penn, roughly 90 percent of "War Made Easy" consists of archival news footage from major television networks that would cost a ton of money to license - if the filmmakers had paid for all of it; they bought only about...

Music copyrights will remain fixed at 50 years after the British government decided against extending their term to as much as 95 years. In May, the Parliamentary Select Committee on Culture, Media, and Sport had recommended that the term be lengthened to bring it more in line with copyright terms in the rest of the world (95 years in the US). Related StoriesBeatles music to start entering UK public domain in 2012? Gowers: I took the "politically prudent" course on copyright in IP report Compulsory music licenses to get Congressional overhaul courtesy of "Mr. Hollywood" Court declines to postpone Internet...

Back in April, a court found that Kaleidescape's high end DVD jukebox was perfectly legal, despite complaints from the entertainment industry. The DVD jukebox clearly was not for pirating materials. It would rip DVDs and store them on a hard drive, but it included all kinds of copy protection and cost $27,000. This wasn't for kids ripping DVDs in their bedrooms. When that lawsuit came out, the group in charge of the DVD spec, DVD-CCA whined that the lawsuit would delay the rollout of the latest DVD specs -- though it wasn't clear why. Now we know. PC Magazine has...

The Sony Betamax Supreme Court decision was one of the most important "fair use" decisions of the last 25 years, but it's been a constant source of frustration for Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights in the US since 1994. As head of the Copyright Office, Peters is in charge of the triennial DMCA anticircumvention review process. And every three years, her office sees the Sony case used as the basis for the most popular requested exemption: DVD ripping. Each time the Copyright Office deals with the issue, consumer groups contend that fair use rights to use the material on...

The copyright holder of George Orwell's classic novel 1984 may sue over the video that used Apple's 23-year-old Macintosh advertisement to jab at Senator Hillary Clinton, a lawyer for Rosenblum Productions said Wednesday. "We're not filing [a lawsuit] at this point; we're monitoring the situation," said William Coulson, who represents Rosenblum Productions. "But we certainly reserve the right to do so in the future." Coulson did not specify whom Rosenblum might sue -- the video's creator, YouTube or both. The 74-second video, a mashup that substitutes the droning Big Brother of the original Apple television ad with images and words...

A new bill in the U.S. Congress aimed at protecting the fair use rights for consumers of copyright material would "legalize hacking," the Recording Industry Association of America said. The Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship (FAIR USE) Act, introduced Tuesday by U.S. Representatives Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, and John Doolittle, a California Republican, would allow customers to circumvent digital copy restrictions in six limited areas when copyright owners' business models are not threatened, Boucher said in a press release. So-called fair use doctrine allows customers of copyright works to make limited numbers of copies, particularly for reviews, news...

Today, Reps. Rich Boucher (D-Va.) and John Dolittle (R-Calif.) introduced what they call the "Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship" (or FAIR USE) Act they say will make it easier for digital media consumers to use the content they buy....

You are not going to believe this article. Since its an AP story I can only point you to it but wow L.A. Scouts loyal, helpful, and they don't steal movies.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Sanitizing movies on DVD or VHS tape violates federal copyright laws, and several companies that scrub films must turn over their inventory to Hollywood studios, an appeals judge ruled. Editing movies to delete objectionable language, sex and violence is an "illegitimate business" that hurts Hollywood studios and directors who own the movie rights, said U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch in a decision released Thursday in Denver. "Their (studios and directors) objective ... is to stop the infringement because of its irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies," the judge wrote....

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - A federal judge in Colorado has handed the entertainment industry a big win in its protracted legal battle against a handful of small companies that offer sanitized versions of theatrical releases on DVD. The case encompasses two of Hollywood's biggest headaches these days: the culture wars and the disruptive influence of digital technologies. Senior U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch came down squarely on the side of the Directors Guild of America and the major studios in his ruling that the companies must immediately cease all production, sale and rentals of edited videos.