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February 20, 2009

The Commons

Posted by Elaisha Stokes at 01:28 PM ET | Comments (0)

For your Friday viewing pleasure, a meditation on the nature of knowledge and ownership. Enjoy.

More entries on: Copyright/left

September 10, 2008

Elect a Tory, kiss net neutrality goodbye

Posted by mason at 01:11 PM ET | Comments (0)

In a statement published on international peer-to-peer news site p2pnet.net, the NDP's Charlie Angus has brought the net neutrality issue into the federal election campaign. He begins by outlining what he calls the ruling Conservatives' ignorance toward digital innovation and the recent axing of the New Media Fund. The Harper government falls into line with the pro-free-market U.S. administration when it comes to copyright legislation, he continues, before extolling the virtues of his party as the only one defending Internet freedoms in the House of Commons.

"There are key urban ridings across Canada where the issue of copyright and Net Neutrality could spell the difference in winning or losing the riding," Angus writes. "This provides a unique opportunity to the arts, education and innovation community to get active and organized. The Conservative party needs to know that the digital community will push back against their corporate agenda."

Full text of the statement here.

More entries on: Copyright/left | Cultural industries | Election 2008 | Harper Index | Interweb

May 17, 2007

the self-correcting internet touches down in Iceland

Posted by john_d at 02:40 PM ET | Comments (0)

(photo courtesy Rebekka)

This one's got everything I love -- a copyright fight, great photography, Iceland, some folks behaving badly and genuine contrition. Maybe there is something to this internet thing after all.

Most everyone has by now heard of the talented Rebekka Gudleifsdottir, a Flickr photography star of the highest order. Rebekka's stunning Icelandic landscapes and moody, broody self-portraits have attracted threes of millions of views on the photo-sharing site. Perhaps inevitably, her Flickr success has also attracted some crappy behaviour.

Long story as short as possible: Rebekka became aware that a company in England was selling copies of her images without her permission. She posted a note about this flagrant copyright violation on Flickr. The posting attracted hundreds of comments and started one of those famous internet tornadoes, with the discussion spreading out into photography and copyright fora the world over.

The plot twist: The infringing company started to receive some nasty messages from outraged Rebekka supporters and, presumably, complained to Flickr. Flickr removed Rebekka's post and all the comments from their site, apparently worried that their site was being used for harrassment.

The return: Rebekka posted her disappointment about the Flickr removal, and mused about the value of staying on the site. Flickr took a good long look in the mirror, asked itself why it was punishing one of its superstars, and apologized.

Here are some quotes from Stewart Butterfield, a Flickr co-founder (good Canadian boys always apologize):

"... I have a pretty good idea that we screwed up -- and for that I take full responsibility (actually, several team members are fighting to take responsibility).

There are several policies which will be changing as a direct result of this incident and the goal is that nothing like this ever happens again. Any errors from now on should be on the side of caution.

It's important to be clear why the photo was deleted: it had nothing to do with a desire to silence Rebekka from calling attention to the outfit which had reportedly sold copies of her photos without knowledge or permission and without compensating her...

So, to Rebekka: Our apologies. I'm sure you did not intend to bring on the firestorm to the extent it developed, you were not in the wrong and it was our fault to suggest that you were."

UPDATE: Coverage in the BBC

More entries on: Copyright/left

April 11, 2007

corporate copyright complications complete complexity coefficient

Posted by john_d at 02:37 PM ET | Comments (8)

(image courtesy Urban Counterfeiters blog)

Okay, let's see if I can follow the thread here:

Boing Boing, famous for championing the copyleft reaction to corporate cultural lockdowns such as the well-documented Disney protectionism over the Mickey Mouse image (draw Mickey without pants; enjoy expensive philosophical discussions with Disney lawyers), has recently taken up the cause of independent artists who have their images used "without permission or payment" by corporations.

Boing Boing links to Urban Counterfeiters, a blog seemingly dedicated to outing the retail company Urban Outfitters for unlicensed commercial use of artists' work. The t-shirt logo shown above has apparently been remade by Urban Outfitters and is being sold without the permission of the original artist, Michael Leon.

Checking out the Michael Leon link provided by Boing Boing, we see the following image of some of his t-shirt designs.

(image courtesy commonwealthstacks.com)

Note the Mountain Dew (TM) logo "homage" in the bottom right corner. The Urban Counterfeiters blog also shows a t-shirt design utilizing the famous John Deere deer logo (with the deer producing a musical note fart) on a t-shirt intended to criticize the tractor company for tractors "polluting nature with their toxic farts." UC criticizes a company called Esprit Sport for using the same concept (moose farts this time).

So, am I getting this right? It's not cool for a retail corporation to use an image or concept created by someone else for commercial gain, especially if the image or concept uses an image or concept created and owned by a corporation AND is being used by an individual artist for commercial gain?

If only Walt Disney were around to create a simple line drawing of this based on someone else's simple line drawing. It would probably look like a goofy Arabian genie escaping from a bottle.

More entries on: Copyright/left

September 13, 2006

Download for our troops! (?)

Posted by john_d at 12:28 PM ET | Comments (12)

image courtesy wikipedia

There's a fantastic event coming up in Toronto at the end of the month. CopyCamp, billed as an unconference for artists about the Internet and the challenge to copyright, looks to bring together working artists and creators from both sides of the current copyright/copyleft debate for open discussions and maybe a bit of a "where are we now?" moment before the Canadian government embarks on the next round of copyright law reform. I'll be there for part of the conference, asking my usual "and how will the artist be paid?" sort of question, and I anticipate hearing a lot of interesting answers.

Browsing the CopyCamp site, I came across this fascinating post by sci-fi star and Boing Boing editor, Cory Doctorow, in which he relates how American troops stationed on a ship in the Mediterranean have been downloading his books and passing them around below decks. Doctorow provides all of his writing as Creative Commons licensed free downloads on his website, advertises them heavily on Boing Boing, and actually sells a startling number of dead-tree books as a result of this loss leader and viral marketing approach to book selling.

Doctorow insists he sells more books with the free downloading option available to his fans than he would without it, and I believe him, but the jury is still out on whether that success would transfer to other areas of bookselling outside sci-fi (whose natural market dwells on the Internet--somemight even say they are the Internet). Nevertheless, Doctorow's entrepreneurial model should be intriguing to anyone working in writing and publishing today. I talked my own progressive publisher, Nightwood Editions, into free downloads of portions of my novel, The Uninvited Guest (sample the book for free here). To me, there is no question the benefit of viral Internet marketing on book sales is huge. Discussion on a full-text download of my book continues.

I love the image of American sailors passing loose pages of Doctorow's stories back and forth, sharing the single copy downloads one of their fellows was smart enough to gather into binders. It reminds me of the banned samizdat texts passed around through networks of friends in the old Soviet bloc (ahem, sort of like what happens in The Uninvited Guest). It fairly reeks of freedom of expression and thought; and I'll admit to being pleasantly surprised the American military does not engage in active download censorship. Especially gratifying because Doctorow writes some pretty subversive fictions.

But something in the economics of this story is not working for me, and I'd like to unpack it a bit and get some other views. As the sailor relates in a letter to Doctorow, "On a ship underway, there's no room to keep books -- unless they're the ancient, creaking John Grisham paperbacks in the ship's library - and no time to get some anyway if you're scrambling around for the couple days of warning you have..."

Okay, if there's no room on board for a single copy book of Doctorow's writing, how is there room for a binder filled with loose sheets of paper, which would be larger than a book? Granted, with the binder approach, more sailors can read Doctorow's book at the same time by passing loose sheets back and forth, but the same effect could be had by buying a single copy, ripping out the pages and passing them around, as was done often with samizdat texts, many of which were necessarily destroyed in the very act of being read.

As well, if the ship has a library, and the military obviously does not mind its troops reading Doctorow (since they are able to download him using military computers), why don't the troops simply insist their employers stock Doctorow in the shipboard library, instead of the Grisham they seem to despise?

Whose paper is being used to print the downloads? One would presume it is the American military's paper. Whose binders? And who has paid for the computer and the (presumably very expensive) high-speed Internet infrastructure that allows Doctorow's loss leader texts to make it into sailors' hands. This is all American military spending, is it not? Environmentalists might ask whether or not the sailors are printing their downloads double-sided. The arrangement is fraught with difficult questions not normally addressed in the copyright debate.

As an unrepentant social democrat, liberal and lover of peace, I think I would far prefer the American military buy a large stock of Doctorow's books and provide them free of charge to their troops (one per ship or camp if space is an issue -- liberal lending and borrowing allowed). That way an admittedly miniscule portion of the US military budget would go to something that does not blow up yet has the power to change hearts and minds. Doctorow and his publisher would then also be paid, money would flow through the cultural economy and free downloading could continue unabated on the home front.

More entries on: Copyright/left

September 03, 2006

Designer duds: now with fewer duds

Posted by calvin at 11:05 AM ET | Comments (0)

CBC News reports that the fashion industry is not just setting the latest fashion trends but also the latest sensation in anti-counterfeit technology. Your latest Louis Vuitton luxury over-night bag may now come embedded with authenticating synthetic DNA interwoven into it's fine Italian silk inner lining. The technology makes any Canal Street forgery lacking the DNA undisputably identifiable from the coveted boutique sold original. While this spells a boon for the fashion industry which has struggled to defend its intellectual property for decades, it will undoubtedly exert distressing financial pressure on chavs.

More entries on: Copyright/left

June 07, 2006

Captain Copyright! -- where is the love?

Posted by john_d at 04:06 PM ET | Comments (0)

Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency has recently launched a superhero -- Captain Copyright -- as a tool for teaching basic concepts of copyright to a generation that maybe is not getting a lot of "fun" information on the concept.

The character is silly, dumb, over-the-top and even, dare I say, derivative (in the critical sense). And I love him. I have a Captain Copyright sticker on my laptop... and I had vowed to never put a sticker on my beautiful little computer, but this guy is too great. He is way cooler than Elmer the Safety Elephant. I hope someday he too gets his own flag.

The website offers games, comics, and sometimes bizarre lesson plans for teachers. This stuff is straight out of the duck and cover days of instruction on how to survive a nucular attack.

What's the reaction to Captain Copyright out there in the broader discussion of copyright? Are folks laughing? Oh bother:

"These materials, targeting kids as young as six years old, misrepresents many issues and proposes classroom activities that are offensive." -- Michael Geist

"They also neglect to mention that Canadians pay a tax on blank media that is meant to compensate artists for downloads."-- Slashdot News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.

"Also, ironic that most of the elements of his costume are borrowed from elsewhere: Shazam's arm protector thingees, the Sentry's belt, and the Spectre's color scheme." -- Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

"Captain Copyright is the propaganda cartoon character created by Canada's Access Copyright agency to "educate kids about copyright, in the most biased, one-sided and intellectually dishonest way imaginable."" -- same as above

I think it is just fine to disagree with Captain Copyright's message, and I am in no way defending what has been pointed out about the good captain's criticism-shielding linking policy (which seems a rather unfortunate decision and appears to have been removed), but the tone of this pile-on strikes me as a sad missed opportunity to bring this ongoing argument out of the land of super-charged emotionalism where it seems to really, really want to live for some reason.

Better, much better, are the inevitable parodies of CC. Check it out:

Hey Kids. It's Captain Copyright

More entries on: Copyright/left

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