Flickr has adopted a less severe way of handling copyright infringement claims after a small firestorm of controversy erupted about a photograph of President Barack Obama modified to look like The Dark Knight's rendition of the Joker comic-book villain.
Previously, certain copyright infringement complaints were met with the removal of an image, and if the complaint was overruled, the Flickr member who posted the image was allowed to repost it. After the Joker Obama case, Flickr decided to merely replace the image in question with a message, a move that means the discussion below the image is preserved and that eases republication if the removal is overturned.
The Obama Joker image still is widespread on Flickr.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)The move illustrates the complexities that have arisen in the digital era where photos can be transferred and modified with ease. Copyright law is a much older concept than the Internet, though it's been renovated a bit relatively recently with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Under the DMCA, a party holding copyright to a photo or other work can request that a Web site remove content posted by a third party that infringes that copyright; the Web site can avoid liability in the matter if it takes down the work in question when it receives the notice of infringement. The DMCA also includes a provision to let the third party that published the content challenge the claim.
The Joker Obama image was swept up in this DMCA process in August. The resulting discussion led the Yahoo photo-sharing site to change its policy Tuesday:
"Upon receipt of a complete NOI (notice of infringement), the U.S. Copyright Team will replace the image with a new static image that bears the following copy: 'This image has been removed due to a claim of copyright infringement,'" said Heather Champ, Flickr's director of community, in a comment.
The change was the suggestion of a Flickr user, The Searcher, and Flickr said it liked the idea.
The Obama Joker image was posted on the Flickr site of Firas Alkhateeb, who told the Los Angeles Times he created the Obama Joker image using Photoshop and a Time Magazine cover photograph. The Obama Joker image spread farther after somebody else created a poster with the image and the word "socialism."
Flickr, though, removed the image after it received a DMCA notice of infringement, Champ said in a forum posting.
Among those to criticize the move were Thomas Hawk, an outspoken critic of what he sees as Flickr censorship and the chief executive of Flickr rival Zooomr. He argued in a blog post that the image qualified as a parody under the fair-use provision of copyright law that permits some uses of copyright material.
"Whatever you may or may not think about this image and its appropriateness, the image would absolutely and unequivocally be considered parody and parody has always been one of the most effective defenses against any copyright complaint," Hawk wrote.
Added TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, "In the past Flickr has deleted accounts of users who are critical of President Obama, but as far as I know nothing like this was done to users who were critical of Bush. It's clear that the Flickr team wanted to take this image down."
However, image copying and modification permissions can vary according to context. While creating a parody from an image might be permitted under fair use, copying that parody might not be.
And there's evidence some original rights holders aren't involved. Photo District News reported that Time and DC Comics both said they hadn't send Yahoo the DMCA notice, and that the office of the original Obama photographer, Platon, wasn't even aware of the controversy.
Hawk also quoted the DMCA notice Flickr sent Alkhateeb letter that identified the infringement complainant to be Edward Przydzia.
Yahoo hasn't detailed its rationale for removing the image, saying its privacy policy forbids it from discussing particulars of the situation. However, it did indicate politics were not involved.
"There appears to be a whole lot of makey uppey going in the news and blogosphere about this event," Champ said in a forum post. "We very much value freedom of speech and creativity...I'm not sure how complying with the law has led to the idea that we (the Flickr team) have a particular political agenda."
There's no more room for smut and naughty bits on build-your-own social network service Ning, according to a post on the company blog. Ning has announced that it will shut down its "Red Light District" of adult content, and on January 1 will formally ban it.
"We are exploring ways for adult networks that will no longer be available on Ning to export their content in addition to their members," the post by CEO Gina Bianchini read. The reasoning, she explained, is that it's costly and problematic--something you just can't deal with in a recession.
Advertisers don't like it, Bianchini said. "Our ad partners aren't big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue," she explained. "We don't want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that's where this is heading."
And if legal adult-content networks are allowed, the illegal ones invariably weasel their way in, Bianchini said, and that means more work for a small team. The number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices is also higher for adult networks: "Compared to our other social networks on the Ning Platform, the additional work created by adult networks alleged to have violated the copyrights of others is enough for us to discontinue adult networks in favor of investing time and energy in growing the Ning Platform from here," Bianchini wrote.
Ning isn't the only site to be cracking the whip on porn. YouTube, owned by Google, said on Tuesday that it's "tightening the standard for what is considered 'sexually suggestive.'"
Bianchini co-founded Ning with Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, and famously raised a $60 million round of funding in anticipation of a "nuclear winter." Guess that was a good move.
If you've been thinking about starting a Twitter account under the pretense of being someone else you might want to think twice if it has anything to do with someone else's intellectual property.
In the past few weeks users, who have been trying their best to emulate characters from AMC's television series Mad Men have apparently had their accounts wiped clear and de-authorized by the microblogging start-up at the request of AMC's lawyers.
That's not the only instance, though.
More troubling is the story of Rich Johnston, a columnist for ComicBookResources.com. Johnston had gotten his hands on an advanced copy of a script for an upcoming graphic novel from publisher Marvel where Twitter was being used by one of the characters. Seeing the username unclaimed Johnston registered it, and began posting messages, essentially creating his own storyline.
Shortly thereafter, his comic-inspired Twitter account was wiped clear. In a response as to why it was no longer there, Johnston said he received a note from a Twitter representative telling him "I'd rather resolve this issue without getting Marvel's legal department involved because we are a very small start-up and lack a legal department."
For his troubles Johnston was given a Twitter T-shirt.
Going forward, the possible lack of a legal team at Twitter may be a more subtle problem than some of the service's growing pains that have affected a larger contingent of users. Say you've created an account using a brand name or posing as a public figure. Without proper protection for users, not only as part of the terms of service but also with people at Twitter willing to lay down the law, you're out of luck if a company decides to draft a takedown notice.
It's also not the first time Twitter's terms of service have gone under the microscope. Back in May, Ariel Waldman, Pownce.com's community manager, had trouble getting Twitter to take action on ongoing harassment. Waldman had jumped through nearly all the hoops usually needed for a company to take action, however, Twitter failed to even issue a warning to the harassing user despite a deluge of message history Waldman had presented.
While Johnston's early crack at the Twitter username might have been ill-willed, you can't fault the guy for thinking ahead--unlike Marvel. In the case of the Mad Men takedown, the real loser is AMC. If anything, the fake accounts were a source of fan enthusiasm that marketers would dream of achieving with cash-infused viral campaigns.
Note: Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on the Marvel matter.
YouTomb shows videos removed from YouTube because of copyright complaints.
(Credit: YouTomb)Ever wonder how many YouTube videos vanish from alleged copyright violations? A Massachusetts Institute of Technology research project called YouTomb can show you some.
The site, an effort by the MIT Free Culture group, scans the most popular YouTube videos for the metadata Google inserts after a video has been taken down. YouTomb shows a list of recently removed videos (which you can't actually view), who requested their removal, when they were taken down, and how long they were up beforehand.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act shields Web sites from legal action based on content published there by site users if the Web site operator removes the content upon receipt of a "takedown" request by the copyright holder.
The MIT Free Culture group said it became more interested in the YouTube takedown issue after Google launched a tool that scans to see if uploaded videos match fingerprints of copyright content.
"While many YouTube videos that contain non-original material are blatantly violating copyright (e.g., exact rips of TV shows), many others have a more complex legal status because of the fair use provision of copyright law," the group said. "The sampling and remixing of non-original material have often led to great cultural accomplishments, so protecting this fragile aspect of copyright law is very important to us."
(Via Google Operating System blog.)
Muxtape allows any user to upload songs in order to create a sharable, online digital 'mix tape.' The question is, is it legal?
(Credit: Muxtape)If you're an aficionado of Twitter or the short-form blogging platform, Tumblr, over the last couple of weeks, you've no doubt become aware of the make-your-own-mix tape service, Muxtape.
A seemingly home-spun operation with no obvious profit motive, Muxtape allows anyone to upload a series of songs to its servers to create, and then distribute online, a digital "mix tape" along the lines of the ones you made for your unrequited paramours back in college.
And even as Muxtape has caught fire in the Twittersphere, another service, Mixwit, has come along, also giving users the ability to create a custom digital mix tape, but this time without uploading your own songs. Instead, you choose available songs from two existing music search services, SeeqPod and Skreemr, albeit on a much more polished site that seems primed for seeking to bring in revenue.
As my colleagues Rafe Needleman and Josh Lowensohn have noted, Muxtape appears to be a legal time bomb, merely awaiting the wrath of the Recording Industry Association of America, while Mixwit seems to exist on firmer legal footing.
But are those impressions accurate? I decided to check in with some legal scholars to find out.
... Read more
Tech/culture connector Scott Beale turned me on to Muxtape, a super-simple site that streams a list of MP3s via the browser. Playlists you create get their own simple URLs and the interface for controlling the stream is plain and intuitive: Click a track to play it. Click again to pause.
You have to upload MP3s to the site to create your playlists, though, and while the interface for doing so is simple, it's rather a drag. There's no bulk uploader. You have to select each file from your disk and upload it individually.
The player looks great in a browser and would look great on an iPhone too.
Unfortunately, the site is Napster-esque in its disregard of digital rights. You can upload any MP3 file to the service and distribute the playlist URL far and wide. I strongly doubt the site's legal notice on the upload page is enough to shield the service and its users from the law: "By uploading a song you agree that you have permission to let Muxtape use it."
That's a shame, because it really is a nice service. To use Muxtape is to replicate very well the old experience of making a cassette mix tape (if you're old enough to remember that). The differences will kill the site, though: your Muxtape site can be instantly played by millions of people, and the audio is a perfect digital copy of what you upload.
Facebook Secrets is no more.
The blog, which had been set up specifically to share the leaked source code that Facebook's front page accidentally displayed to a number of users over the weekend, has been taken down by host Blogger's parent company Google.
The company cited violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, evoking the similar takedown notices that plagued Digg when its users 'dugg' HD DVD crack code earlier this year.
Since the Facebook source code inevitably made its way into plenty of hands while it was public, the action probably won't do much--it's more of a symbolic gesture.
In Facebook's initial response statement to the source code leak, the company stressed that the PHP code was copyrighted and asked that people not circulate it. It's not yet clear whether Facebook was behind the DMCA takedown; we will update this post when we have heard back from them.
But none of this has stopped the still-anonymous Facebook Secrets blogger, who has launched a separate blog, titled Facebook Secrets Again, for the purpose of sharing the DMCA takedown e-mails from the Blogger team.
At the D5 conference, YouTube founders (and now Google employees) Chad Hurley and Steve Chen were just interviewed by Walt Mossberg. In a wide-ranging interview, Hurley and Chen discussed today's EMI deal, copyright issues, and advertising. Some highlights:
The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg interviews YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley at the D5 Conference.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
The EMI deal
Regarding the deal with EMI, Hurley said it will open up opportunities for YouTube users, although in a somewhat backward fashion: "It's about creating new marketing opportunities," he said. Music rights holders will be able to "identify when their music is being used, and earn revenues against that." Presumably the revenues will be from advertising, since this will "give users a free and legal way to use" this media.In practice, it will work with YouTube's audio swap tool, which Hurley said is being expanded and improved.
Copyrights
Walt tried to nail the founders on their apparent laissez-faire attitude regarding copyrighted material. Hurley said, "In early 2006, we were the first to release content management tools, a way for people to identify their content with metadata." Also, he says, "We've done a good job of educating people on copyright law."
Walt: "Wait. Wait. Wait."
Hurley relents a bit: "We see this as a search algorithm [issue]. We're running trial with audio and visual fingerprinting." In the Fall, he said, "everyone will have access to these advanced tools."
... Read more-- Skype founders name new video start-up Joost. The once-named "Venice Project" now has a real name. The service, which has been in private beta since this summer, aims to bring free, high-quality Internet programming through a Web-based interface. (News.com)
-- Putting a squeeze on Net video. Internet media technology company On2 has some exciting new codecs that could mean streaming high-definition video on services such as YouTube and Google Video in the near future. (News.com)
-- DMCA complaint with YouTube dropped. A controversial DMCA complaint about a video on YouTube has been dropped after the man who made the complaint realized the video in question was simply just offensive instead of a copyright violation. He originally pulled the DMCA card when complaining got him nowhere. (News.com)
-- User-generated Web sites in clicks-to-cash dilemma. The future might have a lot of Web video, but according to market research analyst Screen Digest, all of that won't amount to much money for content providers. We checked out a proposed solution for this a couple weeks ago with Podaddies. (News.com)
-- For sale: One-way trip on a private jet--no waiting. Got $9,500 for a quick trip wherever you want? Sure, that could get you a couple of round-trip, first-class tickets on most jetliners, but what if you want to take your own plane? OneSky is here to help you out with a private jet Web service akin to Expedia. (News.com)
- prev
- 1
- next
