In the past, Lions Gate, which owns the rights to the “Mad Men” clip, might have requested that TomR35’s version be taken down. But it has decided to leave clips like this up, and in return, YouTube runs ads with the video and splits the revenue with Lions Gate.

Remarkably, more than one-third of the two billion views of YouTube videos with ads each week are like TomR35’s “Mad Men” clip — uploaded without the copyright owner’s permission but left up by the owner’s choice. They are automatically recognized by YouTube, using a system called Content ID that scans videos and compares them to material provided by copyright owners.

» via The New York Times

So, can a cocktail be copyrighted? In short, no. The publication of a recipe can be legally protected, but the “expression of an idea,” as the lawyers in the seminar explained, cannot. It’s the reason musicians can’t be sued for covering another band’s song in a live show. But few bartenders publish their recipes. They tend to pass them on as an oral tradition.

A big part of the problem, according to Freeman and other senior bartenders and mixologists, is the “brand ambassador” model. For those unfamiliar with it, it involves big liquor companies hiring bartenders to act as spokespeople for their brands. The bartender not only acts as an advocate but is also expected to create signature cocktail recipes using the product he or she is pushing. Only, these days, the model is so prevalent that liquor brands will tap just about anybody to be a brand ambassador. Oftentimes, these young bartenders (cheap labor compared to members of the old guard) don’t have the experience required to create their own cocktail recipes. And so they Google a recipe and tweak it, or simply use something they learned from a mentor —a mentor, mind you, who might be too expensive for a liquor company to hire directly.

» via The Atlantic

On Aug. 5, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced S.3728: the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act. He’s got 10 cosponsors—including three Republicans—and a big idea: to extend copyright protections to the fashion industry, where none currently exist. That’s right: none. I—well, not I, but someone who can sew—can copy Vera Wang’s (extremely expensive) dress and sell it to you right now (for much less), and Wang can’t do a thing about it.

Allan Schwartz, founder and lead designer of the label ABS, has already promised to do exactly that. He’ll take the dress, remake it, and sell it to the masses for much cheaper. Is he stealing? Or is he popularizing? Schumer’s legislation suggests his answer: he wants to make Schwartz’s imitation illegal. Only Vera Wang should be able to profit from her designs, at least for the first three years (the length of Schumer’s proposed copyright). But what if he’s wrong? What if copying, despite what your teacher always told you, is … good?

» via Newsweek

So – patent and copyright need to be both strengthened and relaxed. 

A first suggestion would be to provide newspaper and other journalistic content special protection, so that no part of any story from any daily periodical could be reposted in an online aggregator, or used online for any use other than commentary on the article, for 24 hours; similarly, no part of any story from any weekly publication could be reposted in an online aggregator or for any use purpose other than commentary, for one week.  A stronger form of restriction, the “hot news doctrine”, would prevent rebroadcast not merely of the wording of the article itself, but of its essence; it’s not clear if the hot news doctrine is truly applicable or if the courts will allow the necessary extensions to make the doctrine applicable. 

Google, Bing, and Yahoo would find their revenues unaltered by these restrictions.  With luck, traditional media would survive as well.  Society would also benefit, since the incentives in remaining copyright protections would make it possible to earn money from creative work.

» via BusinessInsider

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has threatened Wikipedia with legal action if the online encyclopedia doesn’t remove the FBI’s seal from its site.

The seal is featured in an encyclopedia entry about the FBI.

Wikipedia isn’t backing down, however. The online encyclopedia — which is run by a nonprofit group and is edited by the public — sent a chiding letter to the FBI, explaining why, in its view, the FBI is off its legal rocker.

» via CNN

US Copyright Group — the publicity seeking effort from DC law firm Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver that is suing tens of thousands of people for alleged copyright infringement in an effort to get them to pay up via “pre-settlement” letters — appears to have a bit of a problem with understanding copyright itself. TorrentFreak is showing how USCG appears to have blatantly copied the full HTML for its “settlements” website from a competing operation called Copyright Enforcement Group. USCG had set up a site at CopyrightSettlement.info that had code that was so obviously copied from CEG that it included CEG’s copyright statement, images and phone number for some of the time. Since then, much of the code has been “scrubbed,” but plenty of CEG’s code was still there.

» via TechDirt

There is a common misconception today, especially among people who create copyrighted works, that the purpose of copyright is to protect the people who create copyrighted works. But in a terrific essay in Open Spaces Magazine, law professor Lydia Pallas Loren reminds us that the real reason that copyright was written into the US Constitution was to protect not the creators of the work, but the public as a whole.

Three hundred years earlier, copyright started out as a private monopoly—the Stationers’ Company (the guild of booksellers) got together and decided to respect each others’ rights to print certain books. In 1557, the crown granted a royal charter to the Company permitting them to destroy “unlawful” books, leading to a form of crown-sponsored censorship that lasted for 150 years.

Extremely suspicious of copyright because of the abuses that had come before, the Founding Fathers explicitly limited its scope in the Constitution. In fact, as Loren points out, copyright is the only clause in the grant of powers to Congress that has an explicitly-stated purpose: “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

» via TeleRead

If the words “sweeping new exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act” make you want whoop for joy and join a conga line, you just might be a fair use advocate — one who wants professors and students to be able to decrypt and excerpt copyrighted video content for lectures and class projects. Since Monday, a lot of advocates have been dancing.

“This is very exciting,” says Patricia Aufderheide, a communications professor and director of the Center for Social Media at American University. “We’re doing nothing but chat about this, we’re so excited.”

The thing that has made so many professors abuzz — and a-blog — is the latest round of rule changes, issued Monday by the U.S. Copyright Office, dealing with what is legal and what is not as far as decrypting and repurposing copyrighted content.

One change in particular is making waves in academe: an exemption that allows professors in all fields and “film and media studies students” to hack encrypted DVD content and clip “short portions” into documentary films and “non-commercial videos.” (The agency does not define “short portions.”)

This means that any professors can legally extract movie clips and incorporate them into lectures, as long as they are willing to decrypt them — a task made relatively easy by widely available programs known as “DVD rippers.”

The exemption also permits professors to use ripped content in non-classroom settings that are similarly protected under “fair use” — such as presentations at academic conferences.

» via Inside Higher Ed

A federal appeals court has just ruled that breaking through a digital security system to access software doesn’t trigger the “anti-circumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Any other interpretation of the DMCA, declared the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, would permit infringement liability for tapping into a work simply to “view it or to use it within the purview of ‘fair use’ permitted under the Copyright Act.”

The ruling is already being hailed as another victory for fair use, following Monday’s Library of Congress decision giving wide approval to iPhone jailbreaking and DVD CSS circumvention on similar grounds.

» via ars technica

Owners of the iPhone will be able to legally break electronic locks on their devices in order to download software applications that haven’t been approved by Apple Inc., according to new government rules announced Monday.

In addition to jailbreaking, other exemptions announced Monday would:

— allow owners of used cell phones to break access controls on their phones in order to switch wireless carriers.

— allow people to break technical protections on video games to investigate or correct security flaws.

— allow college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break copy-protection measures on DVDs so they can embed clips for educational purposes, criticism, commentary and noncommercial videos.

— allow computer owners to bypass the need for external security devices called dongles if the dongle no longer works and cannot be replaced.

» via The New York Times

The public domain is a great thing for literary appreciation. Any title older than 1923—which includes most of the great literary novels, the works of 19th-century poets, and so on—is immediately available to anyone who can download an e-book.

But what happens when a lost work turns up—and then promptly vanishes into a private collection? This is the question posed by Michael Rosen on the Guardian’s Books blog. Rosen reminds us that the four year anniversary recently passed of the discovery of a lost poem by Percy Bysse Shelley, entitled “Poetical Essay”.

The poem, self-published by Shelley in support of a friend imprisoned for libel, was known to scholars but considered lost, until a copy of the pamphlet containing it turned up in a British antiquarian bookshop. The reappearance of the poem caused a bit of a stir in the press, with at least one article by a literature professor about it, but then the owner sold it to a private collector and it disappeared entirely from view.

» via TeleRead