copyright

The Clash of Culture, Copyright, and Business

By Bryan - Posted on 16 January 2010

Copyright Criminals, which airs its documentaries on PBS, has an upcoming show on the rise of sampling in hip-hop music. While, the documentary focuses on copyright laws covering music it's not too difficult to apply lessons learned for other content including text found on web sites.

You may notice that I currently don't specify a copyright or Creative Commons license on my site. Where do I stand on the issue? I pretty much follow US Copyright laws which basically says using excerpts from an article is proper but it's illegal, outside of personal use, to copy a full article without permission. In the end though, it's not the law that I rely on but each persons own moral compass. That seems to work for me. It's only in rare cases that I've found people stealing entire articles without permission nor giving credit where credit is due.

Copyright Criminals - Trailer from IndiePix on Vimeo.

Story found via Creative Commons

Content Is Becoming a Commodity

By Bryan - Posted on 14 April 2008

Sarah Parez: Over the weekend, it seemed that everyone in the tech blogosphere contributed to the discussion around fractured blog comments; Robert Scoble even went so far as to say that the "era of blogger's control" is over. What all these discussions hinged on was whether or not a web service called Shyftr had the right to appropriate bloggers' RSS feeds and build their brand around our content (a practice they've now modified due to this outcry).

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Lorelle on Wordpress: Content Theft

By Bryan - Posted on 04 February 2008

"I and many WordPress “representatives”, along with the developers and staff of WordPress and Automattic, are getting more and more complaints and requests for help dealing with content theft issues. We all need to clear this up and spread the word about how this works in relationship to WordPress."

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Opinion: Google News, Bloggers, and the Belgian courts

By Bryan - Posted on 14 February 2007

From time to time we like to see the giants fall. However, I think in this particular case if the giant falls so does the little guy. If the Belgian court's recent ruling against Google becomes the "standard" that all sites will be judged, the ruling would likely have a negative effect for most bloggers and the readers who visit those blogs. As reported by CNET:

A Belgian court on Tuesday ordered the search giant to refrain from showing excerpts of articles from French- and German-language Belgian newspapers on Google News and Google's Web search site for Belgium, reaffirming an earlier ruling by the same court against the company. However, in a nod to Google, the court reduced the daily fine Google faces if it fails to heed the order, from $1.3 million to $32,500.

Please don't take this as legal advice, but I think this ruling is just plain silly. The fact is most bloggers and many news sites take excerpts from other articles and place it in their own article (with proper references, of course). In fact, I have to wonder since I put the above citation from CNET into this post am I now breaking Belgian law? If you're a visitor of sites such as Linux Today, NewsForge, Slashdot, Digg, and the infamous CMS Report...well according to this Belgian court you may be visiting a site that is breaking Belgian copyright law.

Lorelle on WP: Digital Fingerprints Help Track Blog Content Theft

By Bryan - Posted on 05 October 2006

"In an attempt to help bloggers track down content theft and copyright violations, MaxPower.ca has created the Digital Fingerprint Detecting Content Theft WordPress Plugin for full version WordPress blogs. The plugin injects a “digital fingerprint” manually into your posts which is seen only in your feeds, not in the post itself."

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Professional PHP: The Legality of Republishing RSS Feeds

By Bryan - Posted on 20 July 2006

"Tobias Schlitt "freaked out" today about PHP Freak's republishing of his blog feed. He publicly withdraws his implicit permission for PHP Freaks to republish content from his feeds. This is an interesting area of law. Eric Goldman has an rundown of the issues. In my mind, there's no question that a blogger grants an implied..."

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