I stumbled across this television writer -- Aaron Barnhart -- when the whole Porter Berry is a Bill O'Reilly tool episode hit.  So I've bookmarked the guy and this popped up.  What started as a pretty bleeping hilarious link to a Bill O'Reilly You Tube video, led to an interesting writeup on copyright standards.

For those who need to catch up:

Viacom (CBS, Comedy Central) is suing YouTube/Google for $1 billion for facilitating copyright violations when videos (e.g. Daily Show, Colbert, CBS News) are uploaded to the YouTube site.

During discovery, Viacom demanded that Google turn over just about everything in its database, and the trial judge has ruled that they will have to turn over:

* all data concerning what videos users watched and uploaded;
* usernames;
* user IP addresses.

It's yet another example of the copyright laws being used to suppress free speech.  Don't buy it?  Read below the fold.

One of the most fascinating New Economy consequences to emerge from the Eliot Spitzer sex sting is the apparent multi-hundred thousand dollar score bagged by Emperor's Club VIP escort and budding recording artist Ashley Alexandra Dupre. She had a couple of tracks listed on Dragon Slayer upstart and indie music site amiestreet.com. Her notoriety combined with Amiestreet's underlying economic model combusted to the tune of instant lottery like winnings. For years Madonna had to pretend to be a vamp to make that kind of money. Here's an actual hooker scoring big on the pop charts for her vocal skills.

Let's look at the Amiestreet business model for a moment. All tracks are free at first. Then, if the demand picks up, the price starts to rise topping out at just under the psychologically important $1 (imagine if the Federal Reserve Bank under Greenspan and Bernanke operated like this, the dot-com and sub-prime bubble and burst would never had happened as the demand for credit would have raised interest rates in time to avert the bubble).

As it turns out, those skeptical of the latest Autism Speaks controversy may have actually been right.

First, some background:  Recently a blogger designed a shirt with the slogan "Autism Speaks can go away", referring to the autism charity which is not held in high esteem amongst the autistic community, and posted it to the online T-shirt store Zazzle.  The shirt was pulled from the catalog not long after, due to an alleged intellectual property complaint. I covered this all in my previous diary here on DKos.

But as it turns out, Autism Speaks did not specifically target that shirt with its trademark complaint; that was a mistake on Zazzle's part.

by Max Keiser

I have a question for Bill Moyers, but before I get to that...

America was founded by patriots who were sick and tired of, "taxation without representation." Why today do we find no patriots defending America from draconian and unconstitutional copyright taxes. Our collective imagination, our creative endeavors, our soul as a nation -- and our ability to compete in the new digital century -- is locked up on private corporate balance sheets and we find ourselves economically disadvantaged and fighting a corporate occupation as did our forefathers who fought against the British Monarchy and the British East India Company.

NOTE: See correction under the fold; turns out Autism Speaks was not responsible for the most recent takedown.

You might recall that a while back, I posted a diary criticizing some of the tactics of the autism charity Autism Speaks.

Well, let's all be thankful that they haven't (yet) forced DKos to take that post down— or, worse yet, sent a cease-and-desist notice to the hosting provider for my personal blog, at which I also posted it— because of alleged intellectual property infringement. As utterly absurd as that may sound, it is precisely what they've done to not one but two autistic bloggers an autistic parodist who have has dared to criticize that organization.

In light of the Associated Press's innovative fee schedule, I have decided to offer a fee schedule for those of you who want to steal my words.

(Fee schedule after the jump)

I like their "Come Back With A Warrant" attitude towards those seeking to get videos removed based on claims of copyright infringement. Most corporations would like to deny that a 'fair use' exception to the copyright law even exists. Google lets you know right away that here it will be vigorously defended. The 'don't tread on me' statement below is from the Google website instructions for filing a copyright complaint:

Infringement Notification - copyright in the US

To file a notice of infringement with us, you must provide a written communication (by fax or regular mail -- not by email, except by prior agreement) that sets forth the items specified below. Please note that you may be liable for damages (including costs and attorneys' fees) if you materially misrepresent that a product or activity is infringing your copyrights.

Using intellectual property laws (as Monsanto did to take control of seeds worldwide), someone is pushing a law to say that "orphaned" artists' work is okay to use by others.

I don't see a lot of artists out there asking for this bill or any big flood of poor orphaned art work which can't find it proper owner.  But there are new digital registry companies which will benefit because unless artists pay to get their work registered digitally, it is open to total use by anyone claiming they couldn't locate the artist.

http://capwiz.com/...

Representative John Conyers (D-MI) has put his progressive reputation and committee authority behind H.R. 4279, the so-called PRO-IP Act (the acronym stands for: "Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property").

The act was recently passed by Conyers' judiciary committee and will now work its way onto the legislative schedule. It is backed by all the usual industry suspects (grouped together under the name of "the Copyright Alliance") and is a potential disaster insofar as it threatens to impede fair use and balanced enforcement while increasing the criminalization of non-commercial copyright infringement. H.R. 4279 would also create a new "Copyright Czar" within the federal government, a position that appears to be loosely modeled on the "Drug Czar" positions that have done so much to perpetuate the wasteful, expensive, and ineffective "war on drugs."

Those of us who value our digital rights and civil liberties should be concerned...

This will be a short diary, because I really just want everyone to know that Democratic Representative Howard Berman (CA) has caved to the corporate bosses, and introduced legislation that will legalize corporate appropriation and theft of the creative work of individual artists, writers and musicians.

Republicans and Conservatives (especially the talking Bobblehead kind on Fox News) talk a lovely game when it comes to protection of private property, particularly copyrights for intellectual properties. The Republican Congress back in 2001 passed the odious DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and has generally allowed the RIAA and the MPAA to become the intrusive, suing beasts that they are today.

Apparently, like laws against torture and ease-dropping, Conservatives also can choose to just ignore copyright law whenever the want.

Exhibit A: "Expelled" and the film's use of John Lennon's "Imagine". Typically responsible filmmakers try to get permission to use an Artist's music in their film or documentary regardless of how much or how the music is used. If a filmmaker doesn't they get sued into oblivion, or (more likely) their film never sees the light of day because no Film Distributor wants to get sued themselves.

As a visual artist, I have always known about the decades old copyright system in place for artists; in a nutshell, as soon as you write the copyright symbol on the work, it's good enough for the courts. You were always able to register your work or submit it for copyright, and this works well for many professional photographers and illustrators.

Well, all of that could change if legislation sponsored by Rep. Howard Berman of CA gets through the House. The issue in question is how to address fair use guidelines for works where the original author can not be identified. Unfortunately, this could lead to coerced registration with private registries (costing potentially thousands of dollars) in order to protect your rights.

I've read some extreme rhetoric from both sides of the issue, but it speaks volumes that many free-lance photographers have been active in opposing the legislation. It seems to me that the current laws work well and the only use this new legislation has is to enrich registry companies and make it easier for people to use your art without permission. The major problem is that the window of opportunity for making your voice heard on the law is shrinking fast!

Check out the details after the jump:

This is big.

Over the past week I've been thinking about the Trinity videos (who hasn't?) and what impact they could have in the general election. And one thing I realized was that these were not videos from somebody's home footage, or from news organizations. These are videos recorded and produced by the church itself, and sold on DVD to the public.

In this case, it is very possible that Trinity United Church of Christ holds copyright protection on the videos. While fair use probably allows them to be used in news programs, they could not be used in political ads without permission.

If Trinity has the copyrights (or applies for them), then the Rev. Wright videos may have a lot less impact in the general election than Republicans are hoping for. Right wingers have already called the Rev. Wright videos "manna from heaven".  But the footage would be almost useless if they cannot actually be used in attack ads.

This may sound an obscure legal issue, but could have a HUGE impact on the general election.

In this world of anti-piracy messages you can't fast-forward through, logos on your CDs telling you it's a crime to steal intellectual property, and sports shows that warn you off with phrases like "express written consent" ...what happens when THAT world meets the world of user-created content?

Well, it turns out that everyone has sticky fingers. Including Fox (who stole one woman's pug this Christmas), and Virgin Mobile (who took a Dallas, Texas teenager and showed her around Australia. And the poor girl never even got to see the place).

More after the flip.

Well, it appears taht the RIAA has now officially become a terrorist organization, it is suing a man for putting tracks from his own CD's on his computer.
What I hope is a fair use excerpt:

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

That's right, if you want to play your CD on your iPod, you go to jail, or debtors prison.

For years the neo-fascist and racist blog "LGF" has been following the footsteps of right wing propaganda sites (such as MEMRI) in posting without permission images and video from middle eastern news agencies, particularly Syrian, Palestinian and Iranian. Of course, there is no one to fight a copyright infringement for the "axis of evil" so they get away with it. But now, they've started doing it to western news agencies with specific photographic reproduction clauses displayed right on the pages.

Way back in the stone age (i.e., May), I wrote about how the TV networks were trying to keep a firm grip on their "ownership" of the footage from presidential campaign debates they hosted on "their" air, and how bloggers and new media types were trying to free that up so that, you know, Americans could kind of maybe see and talk about some of it without necessarily having to be asked to buy Doritos along the way.

Since then, we've had some success in convincing both the parties, many candidates, and even a few networks (CNN, ABC, NBC) that yeah, even though they do a lot of work and make a big investment in making these debates available over the air, it really is kind of a ridiculous application of their "ownership rights" to say that what's ultimately being produced -- a free, public airing of the key views of the major contenders for the presidency -- is something that should be hoarded by media conglomerates rather than shared with the public.

But guess who's still got a death grip on "their" footage? And worse yet, guess who's using that death grip for political purposes -- allowing the Guiliani and Romney campaigns to use their stuff, but not McCain?

Yeah, you know it. FOX "News."

So, once again, a Left-Right alliance is after the sluggards at FOX to join the new century and get with the program.

Leave it to FOX to be among the last holdouts claiming private rights in the "news" (particularly debates), and then end up doing it on a selective basis, rewarding political allies and punishing enemies. Truly the George W. Bush of television networks.

But then, what are the Republican candidates gonna do? Refuse to debate on FOX? Yeah, right! And that's definitely not gonna happen when a couple of them are already getting preferential treatment.

Really, though, it's just another sign that Democrats have no business on "their" air. They were right then to walk away from FOX-hosted debates, and they're right now.