More Law Things

My favourite copyright issue of the moment is the legal case between Wikimedia and a photographer about a selfie taken by a crested black macaque monkey. Wikimedia says copyright resides with the maker, in this case the monkey, the professional photographer (who owned the camera). There’s a good legal discussion here. Ashleigh meanwhile notes that this is a big area, and (I’d add as several political candidates have just found out) what you say online stays, and if it isn’t nice it will come back to you. In tis case it is a football club sponsor – someone who once upon a time a club would bow to. Monique on having her stuff stolen online (so yes you might think it a hassle, but it protects you).

Seonaid learns that if you repeat something defamatory then thats defamation too. Yes, it is all about publication. Me saying something to you that is defamatory about Bill is not defamation, but as soon as someone else hears, reads, knows about it, and knows who we’re talking about, then the private conversation is no more. And as we all know, if you want a private conversation you don’t publish it anywhere online… Evelyn has a nice think-out-loud post about ideas, and how you can’t ‘own’ them. No you can’t, and in relation to legal stuff you can’t copyright an idea, you can legally protect how you do something (that is patent law), the things you make (copyright), but not the ideas themselves. Mia muses about the differences between copying and embedding. These are good questions as the difference between copying and embedding is important. When you embed the media is coming from where it lives, and if people let or allow embedding there is an implicit permission that you can. This is very different to making your own copy of the work and putting it somewhere else, and is one of the technical things of the Web that we no longer even notice.

Laura has a blog scenario. No, Bob isn’t in trouble. Research, criticism, opinion are all fine. Even posting something mildly offensive is ok online as you have to go and find it to see it. The issues about offensive behaviour I described are more to do with school, work, and so on, where you don’t have the opportunity to just not go and look at it.

Copyright, Notes, Confusion

Karlee gets a Flickr account (you get a terabyte free, a terabyte) and realises there are lots of images with creative commons licences that means you can use them. There’s music out there too peoples. Kiralee with a summary of the symposium, and then a link to an article about the Australian government’s current thinking about piracy.

Jamie is worried, the aim here is to mitigate this. Online is public, it is like standing in Flinders Street station at 5:30 on Friday afternoon yelling very loudly. If you say stupid stuff, people will think you’re stupid. If you say offensive stuff, people will be offended. It really isn’t any more complicated than that. Copyright, let people know where you got it from, embed from other services (YouTube, sound cloud, Flickr, and so on), and respect the rights available. You want to change the rules? Then share you stuff the way you want to be able to share others. Which would be my comment to Kenton, critical opinion is good, rants and uninformed opinion isn’t and shouldn’t happen in a university, so you really can’t get defamed for saying what you think if its well argued and evidenced.

Happy Birthday as Copyright Case

Brady asks about Happy Birthday. Great example because for a long time you did not see or hear it in TV, or film, because Warners enforced copyright over it. Yes, you had to pay Warner Music to sing Happy Birthday. However, copyright lawyers were always suspicious of this and so are trying to prove that Warner’s don’t have copyright, and are wanting to recover money to pay people who have been sued, or paid for it, in the first place. For more see wikipedia and if nothing else realise that US copyright is different to everybody else’s. (We don’t need to register or publish a copyright symbol for copyright to apply.)

More Legals

Copyright is a big topic. Changing too. James has things on SOPA and creative commons. Laura has a great summary, and Michael links to a story about piracy and discusses one reason why it happens. Many share this view by the way, the bigger issue is to try and solve the issue (it is what we call a wicked problem). But industry reacts and so wants to make the walls, the punishments, etc bigger, harder, harsher. It is a stick rather than carrot approach, and anyone who wants to change behaviour will tell you, carrots work better.

And By The Way

Another afterthought of the legal minefield, come playground. It is international. So while what I write might not defame someone in Australian law it could in Singapore. And if I turned up in Singapore, and the person I defamed was so inclined, they could launch a civil case against me. It doesn’t really matter where it was published from, for most of media law it is about where it is published to.

Symposium 04 Followup

Something that we didn’t get to today (the discussion about patents was probably too marginal, patent law isn’t something we need to worry about) was that when you’re writing critically you are allowed to quote material. This is, technically, a breach of copyright but there is a thing called fair dealing where you can quote something for the purposes of criticism. This does not mean you can also use quotes or extracts outside of criticism, fair dealing only lets us do this for the purposes of criticism.

More Legal Matters

Luke on some of the issues of copyright in film making and music. Nethaniel on Creative Commons licences, Simone on YouTube, music, creative commons, and hive species. Sarah has a dot point summary. Monique thinks about creative commons in relation to ideology and courtesy, which is a cool way to approach it. Seonaid outlines things about copyright, and creative commons. Ashleigh brings in Lessig from another class (always good to see) to discuss copyright and its unreasonable restrictions. Maddison realises that publishing a blog post means it is copyrighted (yep), publication is all it takes.