R.I.P. Scrabulous. Long live Wordscraper!

Today @ PC World:

The death of Scrabulous on Facebook may have been a sad event for many, but at least it was a short-lived one. Scrabulous is back, but under a new name and with some minor tweaks to avoid any copyright issues. And thus Wordscraper was born.

Appropriation

Experience tells us that our creative practices are largely derivative, generally collective, and increasingly corporate and collaborative. Yet we nevertheless tend to think of genuine authorship as solitary and originary. This individualistic construction of authorship is a relatively recent invention, the result of a radical reconceptualization of the creative process that culminated less than two centuries ago in the heroic self-presentation of Romantic Poets. In the view of poets from Herder and Goethe to Wordsworth and Coleridge genuine authorship is originary in the sense that it results not in a variation, an imitation, or an adaptation, and certainly not in a mere reproduction, but in a new, unique -- in a word, "original" -- work which, accordingly, may be said to be the property of its creator and to merit the law's protection as such.

Thus, copyright owners find it incredibly useful to interpret current copyright doctrine to mean that the default is that any use of an existing work infringes unless specifically excepted. The Copyright Act promotes public access to knowledge because it provides an economic incentive for authors to publish books and disseminate ideas to the public. Harper & Row, 471 U.S. at 558, 105 S. Ct. at 2229 ("By establishing a marketable right to the use of one's expression, copyright supplies the economic incentive to create and disseminate ideas."). The Supreme Court has recognized that "[t]he monopoly created by copyright thus rewards the individual author in order to benefit the public." Id. at 546, 105 S. Ct. at 2223 (quoting Sony Corp. of America v. Univ. City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 477, 104 S. Ct. 774, 807 (1984) (Blackmun, J.,dissenting)). Without the limited monopoly, authors would have little economic incentive to create and publish their work. Therefore, by providing this incentive, the copyright law promotes the public access to new ideas and concepts.

Some legal institutions find much to recommend this interpretation. To begin with, there is ease of enforcement. Get a license or do not sample. These institutions do not see this requirement of a license as stifling creativity in any significant way. It must be remembered that if an artist wants to incorporate a "riff" from another work in his or her recording, he is free to duplicate the sound of that "riff" in the studio. Second, the market will control the license price and keep it within bounds. The sound recording copyright holder cannot exact a license fee greater than what it would cost the person seeking the license to just duplicate the sample in the course of making the new recording. Third, sampling is never accidental. It is not like the case of a composer who has a melody in his head, perhaps not even realizing that the reason he hears this melody is that it is the work of another which he had heard before. When you sample a sound recording you know you are taking another's work product.

This attitude has led to some remarkable lawsuits. Mike Batt is a British classical composer who put together a group called "The Planets" in 2001. Their first album was called Classical Graffiti. In it Batt included a track with one full minute of silence. He said it was a tongue-in-cheek dig at a John Cage piece called 4 minutes 33 seconds which was similarly a track of total silence, albeit somewhat longer. Batt, credited himself as well as Cage with writing the piece. There would be precious few other ways to identify who the dig was directed at. Unfortunately, Batt soon found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit from the estate of John Cage, who had died several years previous. In the trustees' view "We do feel that the concept of a silent piece - particularly as it was credited by Mr Batt as being co-written by 'Cage' - is a valuable artistic concept in which there is a copyright."

As the term suggests, appropriation art borrows common images from advertising, the mass media and elsewhere, places them in new contexts and, thereby, aims to change the way we think about these images. Some appropriation art, such as Duchamp's use of found objects, doesn't implicate copyright at all. But when the borrowed image is copyrighted, appropriation art risks infringing the rights of the copyright owner.

But might conceptual appropriations provides new insights into the original? If so, we might think twice before legally condemning it. Still, it must be noted that the art community is itself divided on appropriation art, with some artists whose works have been appropriated viewing the appropriators as destroying art.

Nevertheless, the claim that the concept of authorship in literature is intimately related to that which operates in law is principally an historical claim that copyright law, romantic authorship and the overpowering significance of the author were ‘born together’. That is, the link established in law between an author and a work, and the romantic conceptualization of the work as the organic emanation from an individual author, emerged simultaneously at the end of the eighteenth century. The consequence of this, it is claimed, is that the literary critique of authorship threatens the intellectual foundations of copyright law. If the legal walls establishing ownership of the text were built on the same intellectual foundations as romantic authorship, and those premises turn out to be sand rather than rock, copyright will sooner or later come tumbling down.

Moreover, while parts of the arts and legal communities might believe that any unauthorized appropriation runs up against the biblical adomonition, Thou shalt not steal," without borrowing, stealing, cribbing, remixing, mashing-up, collaging and compiling -- without influences great and small in other words -- there is no " creating.” No hip hop, sure, but also no blues, no Disney, no Shakespeare. No Lolita or “I have a dream.” We’d be reduced to staring at campfires and barking at one another.

I realized this forcefully when one day I went looking for the John Donne passage quoted above. I know the lines, I confess, not from a college course but from the movie version of 84, Charing Cross Road with Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. I checked out 84, Charing Cross Road from the library in the hope of finding the Donne passage, but it wasn't in the book. It's alluded to in the play that was adapted from the book, but it isn't reprinted. So I rented the movie again, and there was the passage, read in voice-over by Anthony Hopkins but without attribution. Unfortunately, the line was also abridged so that, when I finally turned to the Web, I found myself searching for the line “all mankind is of one volume” instead of “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume.”

My Internet search was initially no more successful than my library search. I had thought that summoning books from the vasty deep was a matter of a few keystrokes, but when I visited the website of the Yale library, I found that most of its books don't yet exist as computer text. As a last-ditch effort I searched the seemingly more obscure phrase “every chapter must be so translated.” The passage I wanted finally came to me, as it turns out, not as part of a scholarly library collection but simply because someone who loves Donne had posted it on his homepage. The lines I sought were from Meditation 17 in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which happens to be the most famous thing Donne ever wrote, containing as it does the line “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” My search had led me from a movie to a book to a play to a website and back to a book. Then again, those words may be as famous as they are only because Hemingway lifted them for his book title.

In fact, from an artistic point of view, it is ponderously delusional to try to paint all these new forms of fragmentary sampling as economically motivated "theft", "piracy", or "bootlegging". We reserve these terms for the unauthorized taking of whole works and reselling them for one's own profit. Artists who routinely appropriate, on the other hand, are not attempting to profit from the marketability of their subjects at all. They are using elements, fragments, or pieces of someone else's created artifact in the creation of a new one for artistic reasons. These elements may remain identifiable, or they may be transformed to varying degrees as they are incorporated into the new creation, where there may be many other fragments all in a new context, forming a new "whole". This becomes a new "original", neither reminiscent of nor competitive with any of the many "originals" it may draw from. This is also a brief description of collage techniques which have developed throughout this century, and which are universally celebrated as artistically valid, socially aware, and conceptually stimulating to all, it seems, except perhaps those who are "borrowed" from.

No one much cared about the centuries old tradition of appropriation in classical music as long as it could only be heard when it was played live in front of your ears. But now all music exists as a mass produced, saleable object, electronically frozen for all time, and seen by its owners to be in continuous, simultaneous economic competition with all other music. The previously interesting idea that someone's music might freely include some appropriated music of another has now been made into a criminal activity. This example is typical of how copyright laws now actually serve to inhibit or prevent the creative process, itself, from proceeding in certain interesting ways, both traditional and new.

This has become a pressing problem for creativity now because the creative technique of appropriation has jumped from the mediums in which it first appeared (principally in the visual fine arts of painting, printmaking, and sculpture) to popular, electronic mass distributed mediums such as photography, recorded music, and multimedia. The appearance of appropriation techniques in these more recent mass mediums have occasioned a huge increase in owner litigations of such appropriation based works because the commercial entrepenours who now own and operate mass culture are apparently intent on oblitering all distinctions between the needs of art and the needs of commerce. These owners of mass produced cultural material claim that similarly mass produced works of appropriation are a new and devastating threat to their total control over the exclusive profits which their properties might produce in the same mass marketplace. They claim that, art or not, an unauthorized appropriation of any kind can not be allowed to directly compete in the appropriated material's avenue of commerce, as if they were equal in content, and equal in intent. The degree to which the unique nature and needs of art practice do not play any part in this thinking is more than slightly insane.

Consider the starkly stupid proposition that collage has now become illegal in music unless the artist can afford to pay for each and every fragment he or she might want to use, as well as gain permission from each and every owner. Consider how this puts a stop to all independent, non-corporate forms of collage in music, and how those corporately funded collage works which can afford the tolls had better be flattering to the owner in their usage. . . .

Please consider the ungenerous and uncreative logic we are overlaying our culture with. Artists will always be interested in sampling from existing cultural icons and artifacts precisely because of how they express and symbolize something potently recognizable about the culture from which both they and this new work spring. The owners of such artifacts and icons are seldom happy to see their properties in unauthorized contexts which may be antithetical to the way they are spinning them. Their kneejerk use of copyright restrictions to crush this kind of work now amounts to corporate censorship of unwanted independent work.

In fact, compliance with copyright law results in the guarantee of copyright to the author only for a limited time, but the author never owns the work itself. This has an important impact on modern interpretation of copyright, as it emphasizes the distinction between ownership of the work, which an author does not possess, and ownership of the copyright, which an author enjoys for a limited time. In a society oriented toward property ownership, it is not surprising to find many that erroneously equate the work with the copyright in the work and conclude that if one owns the copyright, they must also own the work. However, the fallacy of that understanding is exposed by the simple fact that the work continues to exist after the term of copyright associated with the work has expired. "The copyright is not a natural right inherent in authorship. If it were, the impact on market values would be irrelevant; any unauthorized taking would be obnoxious." Pierre Leval, Towards a Fair Use Standard, 105 Harv. L. Rev. 1105, 1124 (1990).

We are not, however, a society oriented only toward property ownership. Free expression, based primarily in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, is also foundational to our society. It is exposure to ideas, and not to their particular expression, that is vital if self-governing people are to make informed decisions. There is, however, an inherent tension here. While the First Amendment disallows laws that abridge the freedom of speech, the Copyright Clause calls specifically for such a law. The First Amendment gets government off speakers' backs, while the Copyright Act enables speakers to make money from speaking and thus encourages them to enter the public marketplace of ideas.

In order to strike the balance between the copyright owner’s property interest in his creation against society’s interest in being able to use that creation, there is a swing toward the view enunciated by Judge Pierre Leval in his article “Toward a Fair Use Standard," 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1111 (1990). In that article, Leval wrote that in order to constitute a non-infringing fair use, an unauthorized use of copyrighted material

must be productive and must employ the quoted matter in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original. A quotation of copyrighted material that merely repackages or republishes the original is unlikely to pass the test; in Justice Story's words, it would merely "supersede the objects" of the original. If, on the other hand, the secondary use adds value to the original -- if the quoted matter is used as raw material, transformed in the creation of new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings -- this is the very type of activity that the fair use doctrine intends to protect for the enrichment of society. Transformative uses may include criticizing the quoted work, exposing the character of the original author, proving a fact, or summarizing an idea argued in the original in order to defend or rebut it. They also may include parody, symbolism, aesthetic declarations, and innumerable other uses.

Thus, In perhaps the most influential case current case on the legitimacy of artistic appropriation, the court made clear that “[t]he test for whether [the appropriating art] is ‘transformative,’" and therefore non-infringing, “is whether it ‘merely supersedes the objects of the original creation, or instead adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message.’"

What does all this mean? Good question. Changing material conditions will almost always require the law on which they are based to change. And if anything is clear, it is that we are in a period in which the material conditions concerning the reproduction and dissemination of art are in flux. But one thing is clear: these questions will be asked and likely answered in the not-too-distant future. Hang on.

Postscritpt: This post steals its method from Jonathan Lethem's essay, "The Ecstacy of Influence, A Plagiarism. As Open Source explains, “[n]early every word of [Lethem's] essay about cultural borrowing and reworking was stolen — er, appropriated — from some other source and then cobbled together with a big dose of Lethem magic to form a cohesive whole.” So too does this post cobble together, albeit with very little of my magic, other sources in an effort to make a cohesive, if open-ended, whole. The pieces (which include, among many other sources, Lethem’s essay, Open Source’s discussion of it, and my own What is Fair Use? blog) are all indicated by the hyper-links beginning each appropriation.

Announcing a new endeavor

The new endeavor referred to in the title of this post will be a blog named Ruling Imagination, which I will begin writing on August 4, 2008 and in which I will address broadly speaking, both the law as it affects creative endeavors and creativity within law itself. While Ruling Imagination will, quite plainly, overlap in subject-matter with What is Fair Use?, I will continue to maintain this site; this site, however, will be confined, as it has since its beginning, primarily to questions of copyright and fair use and will continue to be aimed at an audience seeking a fairly high level of legal sophistication and technicality in its discussions. Ruling Imagination, on the other hand, will address a far wider range of subjects and will seek to engage a broader audience, in particular an audience within the creative community.

Carolyn Jack, one of the founders of Geniocity, has this to say:

I’m proud to announce that Peter Friedman, associate professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, will join our roster of bloggers starting Monday, Aug. 2.

Peter, who specializes in legal analysis and writing at Case Western Reserve University and is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Detroit Mercy Law School and at the University of Windsor, also teaches at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. He will write for Geniocity.com about the creative cutting edge of the legal profession.

For those of you who think the law and creativity are separated by continents, if not galaxies, let me point out that technology, government policy, social trends and other forces constantly require the law to adapt in unforeseen ways. Look what Internet access has done to copyright law: How will artists get paid for their work if everyone can find music, pictures, writing and video for free on the Internet? Consider the questions that surveillance technology - security cameras, satellites, GPS-equipped cell phones and cars - raises about our constitutional right to privacy. And which locker room - men’s or women’s? - should an as-yet-surgically-unchanged transsexual be required to use?

A furiously changing world demands some pretty inventive thinking about the rules we live by. Peter will explore that thinking and unveil the latest, fascinating twists reshaping our legal landscape and our lives.

So look to Geniocity for briefs of a different cut.

Even Cleveland describes Geniocity as follows:

Carolyn Jack, the former arts writer for the PD has joined forces with artist and critic Dan Tranberg to create Geniocity.com, an online home for creativity. Inspired by a 7-part newspaper story she wrote on creativity, Jack has honed in on an underappreciated fact: creativity in all its variations is embedded in all walks of life. Their new site, Geniocity.com, is part objective news portal, relating the latest advances in science, research, commentary and inventions, and part marketplace for creative work. Their Geniocity Shop will represent global artists, including Clevelanders Robert Thurmer of CSU, and Tracey Lind of Trinity Cathedral. They officially open for surfing on Thu 6/12, so get creative, and contact them to submit your work and reach an international audience.'

Scrabble v. Scrabulous

There is, on the one hand, having a legal right to one's intellectual property. On the other, there is the question: does it make business sense to assert that right to shut down an infringer?

Looking to cut down its main competition and most high-profile copycat in the growing market for social gaming, Hasbro has sued the two Indian brothers behind the popular Web game Scrabulous, which has more than half a million regular users on the social network Facebook.

Hasbro, the Rhode Island company that owns the trademark to the 60-year-old board game, Scrabble, on which Scrabulous is closely based, has also asked Facebook to remove the game under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying that it infringes the company’s intellectual property. Facebook has not yet responded to or commented on the request.

A copy of the complaint is here (pdf).

As Josh Quitner writes, "[A]s a tech writer and life-long student of what passes for Internet economics, I’m baffled. Is Hasbro just a stupid Potato Head? Or is this a brilliant game of Stratego?" And Mike Masnick observes:

The Scrabulous/Hasbro situation is a perfect example of Matt Mason's thesis that "piracy" is almost never about "theft." It's almost always a market indicator that the market is unhappy with what's being offered. It's the market showing companies what they want.

Redlasso's clipping service is shut down

Hulu partners NBC and Fox have sued Redlasso, alleging that Redlasso's service that provided clips of copyrighted network programs to blogs violates the plaintiffs' copyrights in those programs. As a result, Redlasso "announced today that it has no alternative but to suspend blogger access to its video search and clipping Beta site for the immediate future." Redlasso argues that its search and clipping service is not infringing because it makes possible commenting and criticism by bloggers, uses that are fair uses. As Redlasso's press release puts it (pdf):, "The now-suspended Beta site provides bloggers with online broadcast content tools that enables them to exercise their first amendment rights to comment on newsworthy events, by searching blogger-selected TV and radio segments and creating limited duration clips for usage in blog posts."

Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, argues that Redlasso's position that "it's enabling third-party users to engage in fair use" is not likely to prevail because "[f]air use doesn't provide coverage for the intermediary." Goldman bases his reasoning on UMG Recordings, Inc. v. MP3.com, Inc., 92 F. Supp. 349 (S.D.N.Y. (2000), in which the court ruled that MP3.com was not engaged in fair use in providing online access to recordings its users already owned CDs of. The court reasoned that "although defendant recites that My.MP3.com provides a transformative 'space shift' by which subscribers can enjoy the sound recordings contained on their CDs without lugging around the physical discs themselves, this is simply another way of saying that the unauthorized copies are being retransmitted in another medium -- an insufficient basis for any legitimate claim of transformation."

The services provided by MP3.com, however, were not entirely analogous to those provided by Redlasso. MP3.com's users were merely using the online recordings for precisely the same purpose as the CDs they already owned: entertainment. Redlasso, on the other hand, provides clips of copyrighted shows for bloggers who, as mentioned above, comment on and criticize those clips. As an intermediary for these legitimate, non-infringing uses, Redlasso may be more like the defendant, an internet search engine, in Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., 336 F.3d 811 (9th Cir. 2001). Arriba, the defendant, provided online thumbnails of the plaintiff's photographs that were linked to web pages containing those images (much like Google's image search does). The court held that Arriba's use was non-infringing and distinguished MP3.com:

Although Arriba made exact replications of Kelly's images, the thumbnails were much smaller, lower-resolution images that served an entirely different function than Kelly's original images. Kelly's images are artistic works intended to inform and to engage the viewer in an aesthetic experience. His images are used to portray scenes from the American West in an aesthetic manner. Arriba's use of Kelly's images in the thumbnails is unrelated to any aesthetic purpose. Arriba's search engine functions as a tool to help index and improve access to images on the internet and their related web sites. . . .

Kelly [the plaintiff-photographer] asserts that because Arriba reproduced his exact images and added nothing to them, Arriba's use cannot be transformative. Courts have been reluctant to find fair use when an original work is merely retransmitted in a different medium. [citing MP3.com and Infinity Broad. Corp. v. Kirkwood, 150 F.3d 104, 108 (2d Cir. 1998)]. Those cases are inapposite, however, because the resulting use of the copyrighted work in those cases was the same as the original use. For instance, reproducing music CDs in computer MP3 format does not change the fact that both formats are used for entertainment purposes. Likewise, reproducing news footage into a different format does not change the ultimate purpose of informing the public about current affairs.

Arriba Soft, 336 F.3d at 819-820. As with Arriba, Redlasso's clips of network broadcasts are intended for a different purpose than the original broadcast. The blogs that use the clips are not doing so merely to re-broadcast the clips but, rather, to comment on them, a use that is at the core of fair use. Redlasso too is not clipping the entirety of the original programs but, instead, selected segments of them.

Then again, these segments can be used illegitimately for the same purpose as the original clips; without comment or criticism, mere posting of the clips would serve the same purpose to a viewer as wouldt viewing that segment on TV. In that sense, Redlasso is not like Arriba or Google Image Search, which only reproduce low-resolution thumbnails of copyrighted images.

All that is certain to me is that the matter is not as clear as indicated by the quotes from Professor Goldman.

When is a takedown notice based on a misrepresentation, and when does taking material down constitute a breach of YouTube's duties?

In 2007, YouTube informed Stephanie Lenz of Pennsylvania that it had removed a video she had posted after YouTube had received a takedown notice from Universal Music Publishing Group ("UMPG"). The video, 29 seconds long, showed Lenz's 13 month old son dancing to Prince's Let's Go Crazy. Ms. Lenz sent a counter-notification to YouTube requesting that YouTube re-post the video, but YouTube did not do so until, six weeks later, UMPG dropped its copyright claim.

Now, with the assistance of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Lenz is suing UMPG. Her complaint (pdf) seeks (1) a declaration that the use of Let's Go Crazy in the video constitutes fair use, (2) an injunction against any lawsuit or threat against Lenz in connection with her video, and (3) damages under the DMCA because UMPG "knowingly materially misrepresent[ed]" that the video infringed UMPG's copyright in Let's Go Crazy.

Lenz's first cause is based on the provision of the DMCA. 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) providing that anyone who "materially misrepresents" that "material or activity is infringing" is liable to the alleged infringer (in this case, Lenz) for any damage arising from the misrepresentation.

Copyright overclaiming is a problem, and UMPG plainly concluded in the end that it had been wrong in its initial position that Lenz's video infringed the copyright in Let's Go Crazy. But was that error so obvious at the time UMPG sent its takedown notice that it was a "material misrepresentation"? It is a trite at this point to observe that whether a given unauthorized use of copyrighted material is a non-infringing fair use is a difficult, case-by-case question; nevertheless, some cases are less difficult than others

In this case there does not seem to be any reasonable basis for UMPG to have believed Lenz's video infringed the copyright in Let's Go Crazy. Len'z video used only 29 seconds of the song, was for non-profit purposes, and would not serve as a substitute for any primary or derivative use of Prince's song. In short, the decision UMPG made 6 weeks after sending its takedown notice is one it should have reached before sending the notice. Lenz's case may not be as strong as that asserted in OPG v. Diebold, but it is one that should worry UMPG.

Lenz's lawsuit might worry Viacom even more. Viacom sent Google/YouTube over 100,000 takedown notices based merely on the fact the videos targeted by those notices contained "unauthorized" clips of material in which Viacom owns the copyright. By definition, any non-infringing fair use will be "unauthorized." Lenz's use of Let's Go Crazy was unauthorized. It was not infringing. It seems likely that among Viacom's 100,000 plus takedown notices are many that Viacom either knew or should have known were unwarranted. How could Viacom possibly have made over 100,000 legitimate fair use decisions about 100,000 different videos?

In addition, Lenz's lawsuit asserts a second, very creative, cause of action alleging that UMPG's unwarranted takedown notice tortiously interfered with Lenz's contract with YouTube. Roughly speaking, UMPG tortiously interfered with Lenz's contract with YouTube if (1) UMPG knew in sending its takedown notice it would cause YouTube to breach a contract with Lenz and (2) UMPG acted "improperly" in sending the notices. What constitutes "improper" conduct is often difficult to determine; nevertheless, it seems obvious that UMPG's takedown notice was "improper" if Lenz prevails on her first cause of action -- for her to do so, the court must find that the claim of infringement asserted in its takedown notice was a "material misrepresentations" that violated § 512(f). The outer boundaries separating "proper" from "improper" conduct may be vague; "material misrepresentations," however, are obviously well on the "improper" side of those boundaries.

The remaining and more difficult question on this second cause of action is whether YouTube breached its contract with Lenz when it did not restore her video until 6 weeks after she sent her counter-notice. YouTube's Terms of Use provide that in the event YouTube, in response to a takedown notice, removes a video, the person who submitted the video can file a counter-notice asserting her argument that the video does not infringe the rights of the person who sent the original takedown notice. Section 8B of the Terms of Use further provides that when YouTube receives such a counter-notice

YouTube may send a copy of the counter-notice to the original complaining party informing that person that it may replace the removed content or cease disabling it in 10 business days. Unless the copyright owner files an action seeking a court order against the content provider, member or user, the removed content may be replaced, or access to it restored, in 10 to 14 business days or more after receipt of the counter-notice, at YouTube's sole discretion. (emphasis added)

In short, even if UMPG's takedown notice was unwarranted, YouTube's failure to restore the video for six weeks after receipt of Lenz's counter-notice does not seem to be a breach of any express contractual duty owed by YouTube to Lenz -- the contract provides that YouTube has the unilateral right to restore or not restore the contested material. Moreover, the DMCA provides, in 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(1) , that "a service provider shall not be liable to any person for any claim based on the service provider’s good faith disabling of access to, or removal of, material or activity claimed to be infringing or based on facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent, regardless of whether the material or activity is ultimately determined to be infringing." (emphasis added)

Nevertheless, Lenz could possibly prevail in arguing that the legitimacy of her video was so obvious that YouTube's failure to immediately restore it after she served her counter-notice was a breach of its implied duty to act in "good faith." As § 512(g)(1), quoted above, indicates, YouTube's immunity from liability for disabling Lenz's video requires that in doing so it acted in "good faith." Moreover, though the duty rarely seems to have practical weight, every contract implicitly requites the parties to act in good faith. Finally, YouTube emphasizes that it will consider seriously the merits raised by counter-notices -- its Community Guidelines, which are incorporated by reference into its Terms of Service, provide that "[i]f we remove your video after reviewing it, you can assume that we removed it purposefully, and you should take our warning notification seriously."

If YouTube had indeed taken UMPG and Lenz's respective positions seriously, it is difficult to believe it needed to wait until UMPG backed off from its infringement claim to conclude that Lenz's video was non-infringing. Thus, Lenz's argument on her tortious interference with contract claim would be that YouTube breached its obligations to her to evaluate UMPG's infringement claim "seriously." It is a very interesting and creative claim, and one that truly puts YouTube's policies in these disputes to the test.

Addendum: Sherwin Sly adds some cogent analysis to the dispute between Lenz and UMPG.

Code of Best Practices for using copyrighted materials in online video

American University's Center for Social Media "a code of best practices" that helps creators, online providers, copyright holders, and others interested in the making of online video interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use."

The authors make clear that "this code of best practices does not tell you the limits of fair use rights. . . . It’s not a guide to using material people give permission to use, such as works using Creative Commons licenses. Anyone can use those works the way the owners say that you can. . . . It’s not a guide to material that is already free to use without considering copyright. For instance, all federal government works are in the public domain, as are many older works. In most cases, trademarks are not an issue. For more information on “free use,” consult the document “Yes, You Can!” and copyright.cornell.edu."

Then what is it? Essentially, it's a guide to what professionals actually are doing:

This is a guide to current acceptable practices, drawing on the actual activities of creators, as discussed among other places in the study Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video and backed by the judgment of a national panel of experts. It also draws, by way of analogy, upon the professional judgment and experience of documentary filmmakers, whose own code of best practices has been recognized throughout the film and television businesses.

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised at the views of authorship and creation that inform this code of best practices. Fans of Girl Talk and the class that originated this blog will be particularly interested in the code's claim that it is fair use to "to recombine elements to make a new work that depends for its meaning on (often unlikely) relationships between these elements.

Good Copy, Bad Copy (embedded with permission)

A documentary from Denmark on Girl Talk, Bridgeport Music, sampling, and copyright:

Who's the author?

From Scoodleyweb:

I don’t think I have any words for this. Star Trek the Animated Series mashed up with William Shatner singing Pulp’s common people, as Kirk/Spock slash fiction. So many memes tied up in a nice bow. Exquisite. Simply Exquisite.

And if you wonder where the title of the post, "In that case, I'll have a Rum and Coke," comes from, you should look here and

ask yourself, who wrote "Rum and Coca-Cola?" Morey Amsterdam, U.S. copyright holder, who slightly changed some lyrics to a song he heard in Trinidad? Lord Invader, who put new lyrics to a song written by Lionel Belasco in the early 1900s? Lionel Belasco, who adapted his music from a folk song from the 1800s?

And how far back does the thread stretch from there? Who originally wrote the music that would evolve into "Rum and Coca-Cola"?

Course packs in the internet age.

Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Sage Publications sued the Georgia State University in federal court in April, arguing that course readings that professors and librarians disseminated online infringed publishers' copyrights." The complaint is here (pdf).

I am sympathetic to the view of the that the posting of copyrighted materials without permission for educational purposes would be beneficial for students. As the editors of the UCLA Daily Bruin write: "With increased tuition fees, living expenses and constantly looming debt, the last thing students want to dish out more money for is a heavy and overly expensive textbook that they will open once over the course of the quarter to read one paragraph."

But there is serious legal doubt to the legitimacy of the position of Georgia State in the lawsuit. In Princeton University Press v. Document Services, Inc., 99 F.3d 1381 (6th Cir. 1996) , cert. denied, 520 U.S. 1156 (1997), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that photocopied "course packs" containing excerpts from copyrighted materials that sound very similar to those being posted on line by your university did NOT constitute fair use. Though there are many ways in which the internet changes the calculus one must apply to questions of fair use, I don't see any particular way Georgia State's actions differ from those of the University of Michigan professors actions in making available to their students photocopied coursepacks consisting of collections of excerpts from copyrighted texts.

Of course, the federal courts in Georgia are not bound to follow the Sixth Circuit's decision in Princeton University Press, but that decision has not proven to be a particularly controversial one with respect to its doctrine. As Stephana Colbert and Oren Griffin explain in "The Impact of Fair Use on Higher Education: a Necessary Exception?", 62 Albany L. Rev. 437, 454-55 (1998): "the Congress that passed the Copyright Act in 1976 would pretty clearly have thought it unfair for a commercial copyshop to appropriate as much as 30 percent of a copyrighted work without paying the license fee demanded by the copyright holder . . . ."

Neverthless, the issue is "[o]ne of the most contentious issues between libraries and publishers in the digital age . . . ." As Colbert and Griffin point out:

T]he changes in technology and teaching practices that have occurred over the last two decades might conceivably make Congress more sympathetic to the defendants' position today. If the law on this point is to be changed, however, we think the change should be made by Congress and not by the courts.

Thus, while suggesting that [Michigan Document Services had] has legislative support for its conduct, the court left open the possibility that a different result might be forthcoming should Congress revisit the copyright statute. Certainly, technology has had a dramatic impact on virtually every segment of American society, and to think that the application of American copyright law has been unaffected by the advances in technology since 1976 is naive.

See also Melamud, Pursuing Fair Use, Libraries, and Electronic Reserves, 92 Law Libr. J. 157 (2000)(pdf).

What can you do? Well, you don't have to send a takedown notice or sue.

From Techdirt, a question -- who will be the first to sue Girl Talk? I don't think it will be LL Cool J -- and mention of a small industry of "sample trolls":

[W]ith over 300 samples used on the album, there's almost certainly going to be a few who get upset [by the Girl Talk album]. . . . [T]he woman in charge of the copyright for the band the Guess Who is planning to go after Girl Talk, noting that: "We'll chase it down. What more can you do?" Well, actually, there's plenty more that you can do -- such as recognizing that no one who hears the music on Girl Talk is going to see that as a replacement to the Guess Who's album -- and, if anything, it might entice new fans to the original.

But, eventually a legal battle is going to pop up -- and while Gillis and his label are banking on "fair use" claims to protect them, the history of court cases on this particular question have shown the courts (wrongly) seem to count nearly any require a license. This has created a small industry of "sample trolls" getting the rights to various songs (often via very questionable means) and then suing anyone who samples just a few notes from it. It seems quite likely that sooner or later someone is going to go after Gillis for this.

Is Coldplay original?

This whole question of originality can make one's head spin. It may not help Coldplay's situation that Chris Martin has been quoted in the past as saying "We're definitely good, but I don't think you can say we're that original," he notes. "I regard us as being incredibly good plagiarists."



Addendum, from Techdirt:

[T]he guy from Creaky Boards later not only retracted his accusation, but suggested that perhaps both bands were actually "inspired" by the "Fairy Theme" in the Legends of Zelda. In a world of strict copyright, of course, that might make both songs "illegal," though I doubt anyone would think that would be the optimal outcome.

. . . The thing is, part of the point we keep trying to make around here is that, for the most part, that's true of just about everyone. It's the overly aggressive use of copyright law that prevents that sort of "goodness" from showing up. Oh, and it's also worth mentioning, that this little story has definitely increased the profile of The Creaky Boards -- proving one of the points we recently made about plagiarism. Even if the plagiarist is "bigger" than you, the original creator can use that to their advantage as well.

Kid Rock doesn't steal, but is there anything original about him?

Speaking of Kid Rock, of course, brings to mind his own appropriation of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama, Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London, and Bog Seger's Night Moves, which can't help but bring back a fond nostalgia for the much maligned decade of my teens (the '70s). I have no doubt, of course, that Kid Rock paid big bucks to the copyright holders of the songs he appropriated (though, perhaps, not to Seger, from whose Night Moves there isn't quite copying), but I'm sure he's made far, far more than he paid.

And could there possibly be a more fitting instance of The Manual's principles in action?

Kid Rock says he was kidding about saying it's okay to download his songs for free.

Kid Rock, "who has resisted selling his music on iTunes and other online stores, tells The Associated Press he was just kidding." (Hope AP doesn't send me a takedown notice!)

Copyright Ignorance from MTV.com

In connection with yesterday's post about Girl Talk's new album, I can't help but mention today's post on MTV.com by James Montgomery. Montgomery writes of listening to the album while flying on a plane along with L.L. Cool J and wondering:

Song seven on the [Girl Talk] record is called "Like This," and it features, in addition to a whole lot of other things, two very audible samples of LL's "Mama Said Knock You Out," two samples that Girl Talk did not obtain LL's permission to use, which means that they appear in the song illegally, which means that LL is not getting paid for their usage, which would probably make LL very upset if he had any idea that this was happening. (emphasis added.)

Then Montgomery writes that Girl Talk's Greg Willis uses "the concept of 'fair use' to shield himself from any pesky copyright suits."

I can't believe someone from MTV.com is writing on these issues from such a state of ignorance. It's far from certain that what Girl Talk is doing is "illegal," and "fair use" is no "technicality" to shield one from copyright infringement lawsuits. It's one's constitutional right.

And, incidentally, D.J. Danger Mouse has not, as Montgomery implies, "left the [musical collage] genre behind.

Addendum: First, according to Will in the comments, Mr. Montgomery should have known better than to think LL Cool J would've been upset by Girl Talk's appropriation because "LL recently recorded a 'mixtape' called 'Return of the G.O.A.T.' featuring a number of freestyles over uncleared sampled beats."

Second, and more important in trying to determine whether Girl Talk's appropriations constitute fair use, Mr. Montgomery's own evaluation of Girl Talk's music basically makes the case that the use is "transformative" and therefore does constitute fair use. He writes: "[Girl Talk's] new album is so great, the kind of thing that could not have existed 10 years ago, an audio time capsule of the era in which we live. The kind of thing that can inspire post-millennial dilemmas at 37,000 feet."

Then again, inasmuch as Mr. Montgomery is a shill for MTV, and MTV is part of a corporate conglomerate with every interest in hiding the realities of fair use from the public, it should be no surprise that he writes with such ignorance about fair use. Here are some posts to try to begin to bring him up to speed.