Savage Popcorn

Lloyd Kaufman, Chairman of the IFTA, delivers a speech on media consolidation and the dangers it poses to independent art.

Ironically, I found this YouTube video by way of Kaufman’s MySpace blog.

Cory Doctorow has an article in Locus Magazine (via) discussing why he thinks the current copyright model is broken:

When you hear a song you love, you play it for the people in your tribe. When you read a book you love, you shove it into the hands of your friends to encourage them to read it too. When you see a great show, you get your friends to watch it too — or you seek out the people who’ve already watched it and strike up a conversation with them.

So the natural inclination of anyone who is struck by a piece of creative work is to share it. And since “sharing” on the Internet is the same as “copying,” this puts you square in copyright’s crosshairs. Everyone copies. Dan Glickman, the ex-Congressman who now heads up the Motion Picture Association of America (as pure a copyright maximalist as you could hope to meet) admitted to copying Kirby Dick’s documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated (a scorching critique of the MPAA’s rating system) but excused it because the copy was “in [his] vault.” To pretend that you do not copy is to adopt the twisted hypocrisy of the Victorians who swore that they never, ever masturbated. Everyone knows that they themselves are lying, and a large number of us know that everyone else is lying too.

Go read the rest

The French Senate has voted in favour of disconnecting internet users who persist in illegally downloading music or films, setting the stage for a fight between France and Brussels as the European Parliament approved by a large majority an amendment outlawing exactly this sort of measure in September.

Under France’s proposed three-strikes or “graduated response” law, Internet users accused of stealing content online for the first time would receive a cautioning email. A second time results in a warning letter delivered by post, and a third claim requires the user’s Internet service provider (ISP) to cut access for a year.

In passing the bill, the senators rejected an amendment proposed by senator Bruno Retailleau of the right-wing MPF party replacing internet cut-off with a fine. Retailleau accused the bill of being too severe and discriminatory as internet access is often bundled with television and fixed-line telephone services making it impossible to just cut off the internet.

I’ve posted on this before, but it bears repeating that people will share files and, rather than trying to identify who is sending what to whom, it would be a lot simpler – and a lot fairer – if the media industry recognised this fact and sought to build their business models around it.

It’s also been noted in the past that ISPs have expressed concerns and – in some cases – taken action to try and control the rising bandwidth demands imposed by the sort of rich media websites that are currently proliferating.

One way of addressing both of these issues would be for ISPs to offer two – or more – tiers of internet access; a cheap, limited bandwidth option and a more expensive, very high or unlimited bandwidth option. The ISPs would then need to negotiate with collection agencies, such as the Performing Rights Society, so that a percentage of the revenue is handed over to the national collection agency to be distributed to copyright holders in much the same way that they handle licensing fees from TV and radio.

The advantage of this approach is that it requires no policing. If you stay within your bandwidth quote, no additional cost will accrue. If, however, you want to download a bunch of films, you can do so safe in the knowledge that part of what you paid to your ISP will end up in the pockets of the legal owners of those films.

Set in the 2056, Repo! The Genetic Opera tells the story of an epidemic of organ failures that devastates the planet, killing tens of millions. Out of the tragedy, a savior emerges: GeneCo, a biotech company that offers organ transplants… for a price.

It’s a film that seemed destined to become a cult hit, with curiosity and fan interest running high pretty much from day one. Unfortunately, the film fell victim to a change of management at Lionsgate and – as is often the case – the new guy tries to make himself look good by under-marketing the previous incumbents projects.

In the case of Lionsgate, this has let to a pitiful opening for Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train and JT Petty’s The Burrowers is receiving practically no marketing at all. Similarly, Repo! Has received a whole lot of nothing in terms of marketing but – in this case – director Darren Lynn Bousman is not prepared to see his film sink without trace and has been doggedly mounting his own campaign which has so far seen him release the soundtrack and pound the festival circuit for all it’s worth.

And now Twitch has managed to score a full musical number that captures the unique aesthetic of this odd little film. Watch it, watch the trailer, demand the DVD.

Walmart, Microsoft and Yahoo have all put their customers in this position. And if you buy media encumbered with this broken solution you will - sooner or later - find yourself with a library you can’t access.

Author JK Rowling has won her legal battle in a New York court to prevent the publication of Steven Vander Ark’s Harry Potter Lexicon which, she claimed, would cause her irreparable harm as a writer.

The TechnoLlama’s take on this is worth reading:

I believe it is a prime example of the growing conflict between traditional copyright owners and fans generating their own content based on existing material. My opinion has been that while content owners are usually happy to allow fans to tinker with the source material, they will sue if the fan crosses the commercial line.

I mentioned this case back in May, agreeing with Orson Scott Card’s view that, while the Lexicon may not be scholarly, it certainly falls within the realm of scholarly comment – so much so that the Lexicon website was reputedly used by Warner Bros when making the Harry Potter films. And it certainly isn’t going to do any “irreparable” harm to Rowling as a writer.

The court agreed that the Lexicon conveyed “new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings” but found that it copied “distinctive original language from the Harry Potter works in excess of its otherwise legitimate purpose of creating a reference guide.”

In other words, too much copying and pasting and not enough use of quotes left the Lexicon open to a charge of plagiarism.

The TechnoLlama notes that originality thresholds are higher in the US than the UK and questions whether a different decision would have been reached on this side of the Atlantic.

For now, though, the Harry Potter Lexicon is dead and it will be interesting to see what impact this ruling has on the mess that is copyright law going forward, especially in the case of derivative works.

Why won’t the backers behind Ken Russell’s masterpiece The Devils let us see the film in its complete form?

The UK government has brokered a deal between ISPs and the music industry in which ISPs will send angry letters to people who download music illegally. The letters won’t include any threats and, if people choose to ignore them nothing will happen. So it all looks like a pretty pointless exercise.

The deal also obliges ISPs to develop their own legal online music services although why they think anyone will use them – especially when you consider that several such services already exist – is unclear, to say the least.

It should go without saying that if someone creates content professionally they should be able to draw an income from their work. It’s also clear that the current music industry model of distributing music on physical objects is looking increasingly broken.

It’s also worth noting that ISPs have expressed concerns about rising bandwidth demands caused by – among other things – filesharing.

It strikes me, therefore, that there is an opportunity here to kill two birds with one stone by recognising that filesharing will continue and building a business model around this fact.

Such a scheme would involve ISPs offering two packages: a cheap, limited bandwidth one which would be sufficient for general use and a more expensive, very high or unlimited bandwidth package. The ISPs would then need to negotiate with the Performing Rights Society (PRS) so that a percentage of the revenue is handed over to the PRS to be distributed to musicians in the same way that they handle licensing fees from TV and radio.

Such a scheme would need no policing – either you stay within your bandwidth quota or you pay more – and would ensure that musicians are paid for their work without anyone having to be threatened with anything.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a treaty being negotiated by Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, and the United States. Despite the name, the treaty’s main concern is not just the protection of brand names against generic knock-offs, but also the protection of intellectual property.

The problem is that this treaty is being negotiated in secret, so no-one knows what is going to be in it. That said, the few available indications are so ominous that the Free Software Foundation has launched a campaign (via) to raise public awareness of the possibilities.

Although the proposed treaty’s title might suggest that the agreement deals only with counterfeit physical goods (such as medicines), what little information has been made available publicly by negotiating governments about the content of the treaty makes it clear that it will have a far broader scope, and in particular, will deal with new tools targeting “Internet distribution and information technology”.

What we know so far is that the proposed agreement would empower security officials at airports and other international borders to conduct random searches of laptops, MP3 players, and cellular phones for illegally downloaded or ripped music and films. Travellers with infringing content would be subject to a fine and may have their devices confiscated or destroyed.

A document leaked to Wikileaks also includes a provision to force Internet service providers to provide information about suspected copyright infringers without a warrant, making it easier for the record industry to sue music file sharers and for officials to shut down non-commercial BitTorrent websites.

As it stands, the proposals look very much like a shopping list from groups such as the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, both of which have been lobbying governments in the United States and other countries for similar measures for years. And the agreement is completely out of control even before the negotiations are concluded as it would create its own governing body. So existing international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization and the United Nations would have no oversight.

Not content with going fishing for potential copyright violations on YouTube, Viacom are also claiming copyright for videos they don’t own (via).

Juxtaposer is an original animation made by Joanna Davidovich for her senior project. She copyrighted the film in 2006 and says that she “only entered into distribution agreements that were nonexclusive.”

And now she’s received a notification from YouTube that Viacom has made a copyright ownership claim to the film. She is, of course, disputing the claim and has documentation to support her case but – while the dispute is in progress - Viacom gets access to her video statistics.

Digging around a bit, it looks like the claim is a result of over-reliance on automated copyright claiming - either on the part of Viacom itself or a result of YouTube’s Video Identification Tool casting its net too widely. But Viacom does have form with these sorts of claims.

“With Viacom sending more than 160,000 DMCA takedown notices, it may not even be aware which videos it told YouTube to remove,” said the EFF. “If that’s right, then Viacom will inevitably end up censoring some perfectly legitimate videos—surely, the MoveOn/Brave New Films video is not the only example of a fair use that got caught in Viacom’s driftnet.”

Obviously, copyright owners do have every right to protect their intellectual property. However, the approach being taken by groups such as Viacom and YouTube is to assume that everyone is stealing everything; and when they start automating on this basis, these sorts of false positives become inevitable.

Being on the receiving end of a baseless accusation isn’t pleasant and this sort of behaviour is going to deter creators from sharing their content.

Ultimately, the burden of proof has to be on the copyright owner, not the accused, and accusing everyone and hoping for the best is neither a viable nor a reasonable approach to protecting intellectual property.