EFF's Teaching Copyright

EFF's TEACHING COPYRIGHT was created to help teachers teach copyright in a fair and balanced way.  Check it out.

Citizen Media Law Project

As their site explains:

CMLP's legal guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training and focuses on the wide range of legal issues citizen and online media are likely to face, including risks associated with publication, such as defamation and privacy torts; copyright; trademark; access to government information; newsgathering; and general legal issues involved in setting up a business and finding a web host. You can access the guide here. 

Knowing your legal rights and responsibilities is important for anyone who publishes online. The CMLP's legal guide addresses the legal issues you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work. The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues.

Fair Share: Claim Your Work

Fair Share is " a free service that enables you to claim your work, watch how it spreads and learn how it is used across the Web."  Their website states:

If it's text and published via RSS, you can claim it: Blog posts, poems, recipes, songs, essays, car reviews, game cheats, celebrity scoops, love letters, you name it.

You plug in your RSS feed (full text feeds are strongly preferred), select a Creative Commons license and give us your email address.

We'll confirm your email address and give you a FairShare feed to add to your RSS feed reader.

Sit back and relax for a few hours while we crank up our engines.

By the time you've finished your nap, the different pages on which your work has been reused will start popping into your FairShare feed.

For each page containing your work, we'll show you how the reuse compares to your license conditions and point you to a handy page where you can see more details.

What does "registered through FairShare" mean?
This is the number of articles or blog posts that have been claimed by our users. FairShare allows you to claim your original work as your own and constantly searches over 35 billion blog and web pages to find where your work has been reused above a certain minimum threshold.

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse

I just got tipped to this via MentalEclectic's tweet:

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is 

a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics.

Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you.

Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we've noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to "chill" legitimate activity.

The website offers background material and explanations of the law for people whose websites deal with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation.

In addition, we want your help. We are gathering a searchable database of Cease and Desist notices sent to Internet users like you. We invite you to input Cease and Desist letters that you've received into our database, to document the chill. We will respond by linking the legalese in the letters to FAQs that explain the allegations in plain English.

$2 Billion For Broadband Expansion

The NYTimes reported today the Stimulus Plan expected to pass the Senate has $2B allocated to broadband expansion in underserved areas.  Currently 25% of the country still does not have broadband, but even still their were Senators who were not supporting this aspect of the bill.

As FastCompany pointed out, broadband expansion has a great ripple effect on the economy: 

more broadband access would create a so-called "network effect" stimulus: Consumers can spend more by buying online, businesses can save money by digitizing their dealings, and the overall speed and cost of communications can be improved. The Internet could bring a whole new host of entertainment, service, utility and products to underserved citizens, both saving them money and encouraging new spending.

I doubt the film industry had anyone actually lobbying for this passage, but it should benefit all of us.  Some short sighted folks will see this as giving greater access to pirates in the boondocks eager to grab for free what they weren't paying for to begin with.  As the media stokes such hysteria, they are missing the real issue: the lack of a functioning consumer-driven model.

Hopefully this will bring greater focus to all in the entertainment industry to come up with a new model. I firmly believe everyone will be willing to pay for access to high quality content as long as it is available where you want it, when you want it, and how you want it.

A Great Way To Contribute To Copyright Reform

Wired reports:

Nina Paley, director of the award-wining animated feature Sita Sings the Blues, is selling a night with her to the highest bidder in an effort to get her film out of what she calls "copyright jail."

Read all about it here.

Copyright Law Needs A Makeover

Miller -McCune sums it all up with a little help from DJ Spooky.

Net Neutrality Update

There is a lot of buzz around about Google's supposed abandonment of  their pro-Net Neutrality position due to what is being called a misleading and poorly reported article in today's WSJ.

Save The Internet does a great round up of the issue and current state of affairs (as usual).  Read it now.

Google Book Settlement Discussion

Scott Macauley is on this issue more diligently than I can be.  Check out his post on the Filmmaker Blog.  He quotes from Peter Osnos on Today's Zaman :

But the major point is that Google has now conceded, with a very large payment, that “information is not free.” This leads to an obvious, critical question: Why aren’t newspapers and magazines demanding payment for use of their stories on Google and other search engines? Why are they not getting a significant slice of the advertising revenues generated by use of their stories via Google?

Data Portability: The Free Market Should Swing Both Ways

I hear a lot of anxiety from other newcomers to social networks.  Most of the folks in the film biz I know seem to initially join a network like MyFace for the promotional possibilities and professional networking.  Some get seduced by the actual social functions.  The anxiety often comes from what will be seen and shared and by whom.  Is it good or bad to friend all those who reach out to you even when you don't know them?  Will anyone tag you in photos from the past that you would prefer to remain forgotten?  That sort of thing.

But there are things that we should be concerned about, things we should ask for, push for, fight for.  Businesses talk about their investment in the technology, but little is said about the user/consumer's investment.  You create connections.  You tag information.  You provide data, but none of it is yours.  Your life in MyFace is life in a prison cell.  If you leave the network, you leave behind all of your work you created there.  You think you have a 1000 friends but how do you take them to another planet with you when you want to travel.

If 2008 was many things (the year of change, the year of hope, the year unregulated capitalism and greed revealed its true demonic ways), 2009 may well be the year that freedom starts to go both ways, that people push for equal rights for what they create, that we move from impulse to choice.   One can hope at least.

Bill Thompson has a good post on the BBC site "The net and the real cost of free" precisely about data portability.  This issue is central to all media makers.  We need to own and or at least have unlimited access to the data we generate: our friends, our tags, who watches, what they watch, when they watch, where they watch.  Read Bill's piece and started thinking about what really is yours.