Info Wants To Be Free

Why Copyright Filtering Should Not Be Part Of The Natl Broadband Plan

2009-09-26T10:36:00.003-04:00

http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/2568

FCC Chair On Preserving A Free & Open Internet

2009-09-21T23:55:00.001-04:00

Required Reading:

http://www.openinternet.gov/read-speech.html

Answers On Why We Need Net Neutrality

2009-09-05T09:09:00.004-04:00

La Quadrature du Net (Squaring The Net) is an organization involved in public-policy debates at the French and European Union levels in order to protect the fundamental rights of the citizen in the digital environment.

They provided a clear ad concise defense of why net neutrality is so important. Check out their answers to a survey here.

The Internet’s open architecture aims at guaranteeing the free movement of information through our communications infrastructures. It is only by maintaining this principle of openness that the rights and freedoms of citizens in the digital environment - both as producers and users of informational goods - will develop and flourish.
Network neutrality is the essential guarantee for competition, innovation, and fundamental freedoms on the Internet.

EFF's Teaching Copyright

2009-05-29T07:33:00.001-04:00

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

Citizen Media Law Project

2009-03-06T06:36:00.000-05:00

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

2009-03-04T07:16:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-13T02:13:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-07T07:37:00.004-05:00

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

2009-01-25T10:11:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-21T10:09:00.001-05:00

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

Net Neutrality Update

2008-12-15T11:15:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-08T08:08:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-06T06:50:00.002-05:00

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.

Moving The Conversation Forward: From Piracy To IP

2008-12-05T11:38:00.000-05:00

Screen International has a good article on the lessons the film business can learn from the music industry. Essentially it comes down to:

The emphasis on piracy needs to mature into a bigger debate about intellectual property - and soon.

They point out:

A workable framework is one that finds a balance, although attaining that, of course, is fraught with risk. Make the controls too tight and you lose innovators and customers. And pirates thrive on protectionism.

The Google Book Supplement

2008-12-05T06:45:00.003-05:00

Scott Macauley over at the Filmmaker Magazine Blog hipped us to this podcast.

Link to it here.

Host Jonathan Kirsch, an attorney specializing in intellectual property and publishing law, moderates a panel discussion on a landmark literary-legal settlement. It allows Google to scan and make available online many out-of-print but still-copyrighted books. The settlement portends a viable digital future for authors, publishers and libraries. Is there any downside?

Today's Copyright Term & Reform Musings

2008-11-18T07:12:00.004-05:00

Copyright term is one of the most sacred areas for the film industry at large. "The longer the better" says the voice from on high, and everyone seems to blindly accept this creed. I wonder how true this is, particularly for independent and Truly Free filmmakers. I certainly don't feel this is so for culture in general. We are definitely being denied participating in a growing wave of remix & mashup work that is particularly interesting and relevant to the world today.

A handful of recent and diverse articles has me pondering. I very much liked the historical context that was given in Daniel Smith's article in the NY Times Sunday magazine "What Is Art For" on Lewis Hyde. Among other things, Hynes uses the example of Ben Franklin, who sought no patent on his stove design as he felt they were derived from already common information. But it was the discussion of art as being a "gift economy" that particularly resonated well for me. It speaks of

aboriginal societies in which the person of consequence — the man or woman who is deemed worthy of adulation, respect and emulation — is not the one who accumulates the most goods but the one who disperses them. Gift economies, as Mauss defines them, are marked by circulation and connectivity: goods have value only insofar as they are treated as gifts, and gifts can remain gifts only if they are continually given away. This results in a kind of engine of community cohesion, in which objects create social, psychological, emotional and spiritual bonds as they pass from hand to hand.

Hydes contextualizes creative work well:

Unlike a commodity, whose value begins to decline the moment it changes hands, an artwork gains in value from the act of being circulated—published, shown, written about, passed from generation to generation — from being, at its core, an offering.

This morning BoingBoing's post on Pam Samuelson's Free Culture 2008 lecture then spelled out another reason why we need Copyright Reform. She cites an article by John Tehranian (download it there) where he demonstrates that in a normal day (without any P2P activity) he potentially violated copyright law 83 times and was liable for $12.5M in fines. That is in a single day!

Recognizing how Intellectual Property Protection is central to what we do as filmmakers, how do we reconcile these other cultural needs and necessary reforms?

On The Soapbox For Net Neutrality

2008-11-02T19:59:00.003-05:00

I spoke at The New York Film Academy on Oct 21 to a room of thousands. Well, not quite, but I did speak, and I got to speak out about the issue that is most crucial to all "independent" filmmakers these days. This is part two of three. Part One is mostly focused on what Truly Free Filmmakers need to do in this day and age. Three is how to keep your passion for filmmaking alive in this cruel, cruel, cruel world. Check them all out.

Lessig's New Copyright Rules

2008-10-22T06:04:00.004-04:00

Unfortunately Lawrence Lessig doesn't make the rules, but we are lucky we have him to fight for us. Last week he published five recommended changes to the copyright law designed to help those who create to continue to create. When the law starts to do the opposite of what it was intended you have to wonder.

Deregulate amateur remix: We need to restore a copyright law that leaves "amateur creativity" free from regulation. Before the 20th century, this culture flourished. The 21st century could see its return. Digital technologies have democratized the ability to create and re-create the culture around us. Where the creativity is an amateur remix, the law should leave it alone. It should deregulate amateur remix.

What happens when others profit from this creativity? Then a line has been crossed, and the remixed artists plainly ought to be paid -- at least where payment is feasible. If a parent has remixed photos of his kid with a song by Gilberto Gil (as I have, many times), then when YouTube makes the amateur remix publicly available, some compensation to Mr. Gil is appropriate -- just as, for example, when a community playhouse lets neighbors put on a performance consisting of a series of songs sung by neighbors, the public performance of those songs triggers a copyright obligation (usually covered by a blanket license issued to the community playhouse). There are plenty of models within the copyright law for assuring that payment. We need to be as creative as our kids in finding a model that works.

Deregulate "the copy": Copyright law is triggered every time there is a copy. In the digital age, where every use of a creative work produces a "copy," that makes as much sense as regulating breathing. The law should also give up its obsession with "the copy," and focus instead on uses -- like public distributions of copyrighted work -- that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.

Simplify: If copyright regulation were limited to large film studios and record companies, its complexity and inefficiency would be unfortunate, though not terribly significant. But when copyright law purports to regulate everyone with a computer, there is a special obligation to make sure this regulation is clear. It is not clear now. Tax-code complexity regulating income is bad enough; tax-code complexity regulating speech is a First Amendment nightmare.

Restore efficiency: Copyright is the most inefficient property system known to man. Now that technology makes it trivial, we should return to the system of our framers requiring at least that domestic copyright owners maintain their copyright after an automatic, 14-year initial term. It should be clear who owns what, and if it isn't, the owners should bear the burden of making it clear.

Decriminalize Gen-X: The war on peer-to-peer file-sharing is a failure. After a decade of fighting, the law has neither slowed file sharing, nor compensated artists. We should sue not kids, but for peace, and build upon a host of proposals that would assure that artists get paid for their work, without trying to stop "sharing."

This was in the Wall St. Journal. It's gotten a lot of play in the blog world already, but I've been a bit swamped lately. Lessig's got a new book coming out, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive In The Hybrid Economy. Let me know if you've read it and what thoughts you have.

Toxie Knows The Internet Must Be Free For All

2008-10-02T07:08:00.001-04:00

Troma's own Lloyd Kaufman, the man who brought us not just THE TOXIC AVENGER, but also POULTRYGEIST and many, many more, is also head of IFTA, the Independent FIlm and Television Alliance, the organization that runs the AFM (American Film Market).

As a true independent filmmaker, he recognizes what is stake, and is not afraid to speak up, albeit with his own particular brand of wit.

MPAA Spokeslawyers Insist They Not Be Identified

2008-10-01T07:28:00.004-04:00

BoingBoing reveals how in suing RealNetworks, the MPAA has tried to keep their efforts hush, hush -- and journalists complied! The report was first published on the Wired blog which outlines the whole case.

If you hadn't heard, RealNetworks released RealDVD, which allows consumers to copy the DVDs they own using their computers. The Studios are demanding that a judge block the sale on grounds that copying is akin to theft. RealNetworks says that they are stifling technological developments.

"We are disappointed that the movie industry is following in the footsteps of the music industry and trying to shut down advances in technology, rather than embracing changes that provide consumers with more value and flexibility for their purchases," RealNetworks said.

This is such a tricky situation. I think with all the hysteria to prevent the film business from falling into the crapper like the music industry, the efforts are coming close to making it inevitable. It's not a war against the consumer and advancement that the Studios seem to think is the case.

Wired boils this case (and another one) down at the end of the article:

The lawsuits beg the question of whether it is legal to copy an encrypted DVD for personal use. The courts have not squarely decided the issue as applied to CDs or DVDs, although the music and movie industry oppose copying.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which the MPAA claims RealDVD and Kaleidescape are breaking, says descrambling or circumventing encryption is a violation carrying a penalty of up to $2,500 per DVD.
RealDVD and Kaleidescape allow users to copy DVDs in their original encrypted form. Those companies, and other similar services, say their wares prevent the movies from being uploaded to torrent trackers.
Lawyers for the MPAA, in a teleconference with reporters, said Kaleidesape and RealDVD are circumventing "technology designed to prevent copying."

Making Net Neutrality The Key Indie Film Issue

2008-09-29T22:19:00.003-04:00

If it wasn't clear already, I think Net Neutrality is the key issue for all filmmakers.

On Saturday morning I gave the Key Note talk for Film Independent's annual Filmmaker Forum. I posted the speech (A Thousand Phoenix Rising) on Let's Make Better Films. Please read it.

It's gotten a lot of play on other blogs: Anne Thompson, Indiewire, Filmmaker Magazine, Shooting People, Ted Leonsis, Tribecca's Resources, Pulp2.0, Behind The Scenes, etc.

All this is pretty swell, but it truly illustrates the need for maintaining Net Neutrality. The internet is the home of free speech and participation. There is no such thing as free choice if you don't know what the choice is. To make decisions, we all must be able to access all info immediately and equally. It's not like old media would have covered something like my talk.

Things That Could Bring Progress

2008-09-29T21:21:00.002-04:00

BBC News has a story on the spread of Mobile Broadband via a new alliance of PC manufactures, chip makers, and phone firms. The basic plan is to build wireless chips that will work with third and fourth gen wireless, promote via a distinct brand, and get the laptops on the shelves in 91 countries by Christmas.

All I know is that the US has dropped from 3rd to something like 26th (I have to look it up) in the last three years, and what we call Broadband is about 40x weaker than what they have in South Korea.

I believe that when people can get stuff fast and it looks real good, they will also want everything possible. The dream of getting it where ever you are, when ever you want it is here. Technology is delivering. Fulfilling the promise is now dependent on maintaing Net Neutrality.

Obama On Net Neutrality

2008-09-26T06:08:00.000-04:00

Only one candidate is committed to a free and open internet.

Even More Than Net Neutrality: Common Carriage On All Infrastructure

2008-09-24T10:08:00.003-04:00

Last Monday I was on a panel on Net Neutrality at Independent Film Week in NYC that was moderated by David Rosen. David knows of what he speaks. He recently penned an article in Filmmaker Mag that is available right here.

Rosen chronicles the Telecoms and Cable Controllers attempt, with endorsement from the MPAA mind you, to create a separate -- but far from equal -- internet for exclusively video content that seeks to be fully immune from the demands of common carriage. He takes our battle a step forward:

“Net neutrality is a distraction,” argues Bruce Kushnick, of Teletruth, a broadband customer advocacy group. “As long as the telco and cable companies control the infrastructure and are allowed to vertically integrate all products (i.e., offer local and long distance, connection to the Internet, broadband and even wireless), they can control any activity or any competition over the networks, including all video. The only next step is to have common carriage returned: While the underlying infrastructure may be controlled by the incumbent, all applications and services should be allowed by all parties.”

Maintaining equal for all is the biggest battle the independent film community currently faces. Without Net Neutrality there is no assurance that information will be "distributed on a first-come, first-served basis no matter from which applications provider they come from or to which destination they are intended" (Rosen) -- you know? Equality. Remember that?

Dancing Baby Expands Fair Use

2008-08-23T10:49:00.001-04:00

Mark Hefflinger at Digital Media Wire reports:

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that copyright holders must consider the potential "fair use" of their works before sending copyright takedown notices to online video sites. "In order for a copyright owner to proceed under the DMCA with 'a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law,' the owner must evaluate whether the material makes fair use of the copyright," U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel wrote, in his ruling.

This is a great mandate and clearer definition. As you listen to "Let's Go Crazy" on the clip, it is clearly in the background and not added later. It's documenting a moment. This is that baby and his dance that we can all thank for it: