Comments
mhhf1ve
11/12/2017 2:32:54 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Piracy is Killing
I remember that lawsuit. IIRC, they settled and didn't use the song. But that situation was not necessarily about profit motives or free speech as much as the wishes of one of the deceased Bestie Boys. Although I'm not sure how they got their song in a Star Trek movie?
Ariella
11/12/2017 11:47:23 AM
User Rank Author
Re: Piracy is Killing
< This shouldn't be a legal battle but a common sense PR move. >
@mhhf1ve that reminds me of the incident with Godiblox usiing the Beastie Boys songs. See http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/beastie-boys-settle-lawsuit-over-girls-toy-commercial-20140318
GoldieBlox specializes in engineering and construction toys for girls, and in the ad for the "Princess Machine," three young girls built a Rube Goldberg machine and sang the Beastie Boys track with altered lyrics to reflect the company's mission ("Girls to build a spaceship / Girls to code the new app / Girls to grow up knowing / That they can engineer that").
Garnering millions of views, the Beastie Boys responded to the company claiming copyright infringement, causing GoldieBlox to file an official lawsuit that argued the ad was a parody and therefore protected under fair use. The suit focused specifically on the sexist nature of the original song's lyrics ("Girls to do the dishes / Girls to clean up my room / Girls to do the laundry / Girls and in the bathroom"), saying the company was trying to "make fun of the Beastie Boys song" and "break down gender stereotypes and to encourage young girls to engage in activities that challenge their intellect, particularly in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math."
mhhf1ve
11/12/2017 11:35:50 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Piracy is Killing
Ariella, there's actually a company that collects the celebrity rights of dead celebrities. I'll have to look it up because I forget its name, but it owns Elvis rights and several famous baseball players. It's an industry. But it probably shouldn't be. Copyrights will get trickier when completely artificial actors can be created-- and it's already happening in Japan where fake singers are being added to pop bands.
mhhf1ve
11/12/2017 11:30:41 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Piracy and the printing press
Ariella,
Copyright laws varying significantly from country to country. One of the most significant differences in my opinion is the "sweat of the brow" rule that some countries allow and some don't. For example, in the US, you can't copyright a phone book that you compiled simply because you've done the work (aka "sweat of the brow") to collect names matched with numbers. But in some countries, you can copyright such a compilation even though there's no creativeness behind a phone book.
mhhf1ve
11/12/2017 11:22:28 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Piracy is Killing
Excellent examples. There are plenty of cases where IP law has been twisted to suppress expression for a variety of reasons -- including political dissent. Nearly every year, some political candidate uses a song as a campaign theme without getting any kind of permission from the singer if songwriter.... one might think a politician should know better than to use a song written or sung by an artist who doesn't share the same political views. This shouldn't be a legal battle but a common sense PR move.
mhhf1ve
11/12/2017 11:15:25 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Piracy is Killing
Sensible tests may be difficult to come by, but I like your suggestion of a SLAPP back like law for IP to prevent (expired) copyright holders from intimidating lawful use of works. And perhaps there should be more stringent ownership rules so that the case of the Happy Birthday song can't happen again.
JohnBarnes
11/11/2017 10:42:42 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Piracy is Killing
faryl,
I think the sensible test is mostly public utility (I guess I'm with mhhf1ve here). IP should remain property only long enough to incentivize creators to create it, and I'd add that further there should be some restrictions on denial of licenses (aka patent trolling) and the equivalent of SLAPPback suits when IP is being used for extortion or repeated non-winning cases (notoriously, Arthur Conan Doyle's family sued over and over and over again, losing every time it went to court, for decades after Sherlock Holmes was public domain; but they kept suing because they could afford to and it intimidated everyone else).
JohnBarnes
11/11/2017 10:38:06 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Piracy is Killing
faryl, mhhf1ve, rest'o'ya,
As long as we're wading into the philosophic waters we might as well go deep enough to drown ... many communication theorists and media critics have pointed out that if a work has a political and social content, then IP rules intended to protect commercial interest can easily be bent to preventing dissent or criticism. The Carl Barks Donald Duck comics are straight-up lectures in monetarist and supply-side economics (Milton Friedman used to praise them pretty highly), but they're also vastly entertaining stories (many are still in print though originally published fifty years ago). As Ariel Dorfman pointed out in How To Read Donald Duck, which I think might be the single best combination of a serious important book with a really silly title ever, the result is that one side of the argument gets all the appeal -- a much-loved familiar character having family-friendly fun adventures -- and the other side specifically can't answer in the same form. Consider also the tangled history of Gone with the Wind versus The Wind Done Gone.
Now, entirely aside from IP guaranteeing that one side will have all the popular appeal and the other will be easily portrayed as cranky spoilsports, consider that in both cases IP lawsuits were used quite deliberately to try to shut down the other side. Disney's pro-imperialism, or Margaret Mitchell's defense of treasonous slaveholders, not only got the bigger and nicer soapbox -- the IP laws could easily be bent to make any criticism effectively a crime.
IP purely for profit turns instantly to IP for political repression; for a third example, see the Disney v. Air Pirates case.
Ariella
11/11/2017 6:16:00 PM
User Rank Author
Re: Piracy and the printing press
<That's a somewhat strange thing for the Smithsonian to publish? I wonder what other authors would think nowadays. The Grimm fairy tales have been plundered by Disney. Aesop's fables have been re-vamped in countless ways. I wonder what would happen if an author today purposely put a work into the Public Domain? There are so few examples of content that isn't controlled by copyright. >
@mhhf1ve ah, now you're getting into art that is considered in the public domain. Does anyone own the rights to Grimm's fairy tales? No, though a particular edition with a specific translation could be still under copyright if it was set up or renewed within the allotted time frame for the particular country in question. Life +70 years seems to be the most popular, but here are some variations according to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths
However, some very common things like the song "Happy Birthday" were subject to a major dispute over copyright that was only settled relatively recently to the tune of $14 million. See https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/10/business/media/details-of-happy-birthday-copyright-settlement-revealed.html
Ariella
11/11/2017 6:06:03 PM
User Rank Author
Re: Piracy is Killing
@mhhf1ve Celbrity images are considered part of the estate. This came up a few years ago when Audrey Hepburn was CGIed into a commercial as discussed here: https://reelrundown.com/celebrities/Audrey-Hepburn-Resurrected-For-A-New-TV-Commercial-Is-This-A-Good-Thing
The soon-to-be-released Star Wars movie will feature the late Carrie Fisher, though that was filmed directly by her. But the movie before that, which did featured a CGI version of her younger self also had other actors now deceased CGIed into it. I"d imagine they had to get permission from the estate.
|
|
Italy's 5G auction could exceed a government target of raising €2.5 billion ($2.9 billion) after attracting interest from companies outside the mobile market.
The emerging-markets operator is focusing on the humdrum business of connectivity and keeping quiet about some of its ill-fated 'digitalization' efforts.
Three UK has picked Huawei over existing radio access network suppliers Nokia and Samsung to build its 5G network.
Vendor says that it's its biggest 5G deal to date.
Verizon skates where the puck is going by waiting for standards-based 5G devices to launch its mobile service in 2019.
Orange has been one of the leading proponents of SDN and NFV. In this Telco Transformation radio show, Orange's John Isch provides some perspective on his company's NFV/SDN journey.
10/16/2017
Huawei Network Transformation Seminar
The adoption of virtualization technology and cloud architectures by telecom network operators is now well underway but there is still a long way to go before the transition to an era of Network Functions Cloudification (NFC) is complete.
The Small Cell Forum's CEO Sue Monahan says that small cells will be crucial for indoor 5G coverage, but challenges around business models, siting ...
People, strategy, a strong technology roadmap and new business processes are the key underpinnings of Telstra's digital transformation, COO Robyn ...
Eric Bozich, vice president of products and marketing at CenturyLink, talks about the challenges and opportunities of integrating Level 3 into ...
Epsilon's Mark Daley, director of digital strategy and business development, talks about digital transformation from a wholesale service provider ...
Bill Walker, CenturyLink's director of network architecture, shares his insights on why training isn't enough for IT employees and traditional ...
All Videos
|
On-the-Air Thursdays Digital Audio
Special Huawei Video
Tweet This