copyright

Content Is Becoming a Commodity

Submitted by Bryan on April 14, 2008 - 9:03pm

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

Submitted by Bryan on February 4, 2008 - 7:32am

"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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Creative Commons is turning 5

Submitted by Bryan on November 27, 2007 - 1:01am

"No matter where you are in the world, we invite you to celebrate CC’s five years of helping to keep culture free and celebrate the future of participatory culture."

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Lorelle on WP: Spinning Spammers Steal Our Blog Content

Submitted by Bryan on November 15, 2007 - 9:05am

"Grabbing content through your blog’s feed and inserting or replacing synonyms in the content, typically keywords the splogger needs to get the page ranking and search terms to attract attention, has been around for a long time. However, this form of conversion is dramatically different. The words don’t translate into recognizable search terms."

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CC: Creative Commons @ 5 years

Submitted by Bryan on October 2, 2007 - 8:22pm
"Five years ago this December, we launched Creative Commons...We have taken the insight of the Free Software Movement, and made it real in the space of culture, science and education. There is now a language to signal the freedoms creators support, and a set of legal and technical tools to make those freedom stick."

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Linux.com: The trouble with artwork and free software licenses

Submitted by CMS Report on September 26, 2007 - 5:46pm
"Are you a crafter of icons, sounds, backgrounds and splash screens, or even window manager themes? Selecting the right license for your artwork to coexist with free software is no trivial task. Creative Commons (CC) and Free Software Foundation (FSF) licenses each have their advantages, but they are mutually incompatible. The two groups are beginning to move toward simplifying the situation, but in the meantime there are several things you can do to make license compatibility easier.

The crux of the problem is that non-software artwork like the examples above occupies a strange niche inside free software applications and operating systems. They are not code, but they are tightly integrated into the system. Artists frequently create them as standalone works, but they are also -- by necessity -- bundled into software packages and distributions, many of which are under the FSF's General Public License (GPL)."

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Knowledge@Emory: Outsourcing Your Creative Work? Overlooking Copyright Issues Can Cause Legal Woes

Submitted by CMS Report on August 14, 2007 - 3:57pm
"Corporations today deal with an incredible number of contractual relationships. However, copyright issues and the assignment of rights are often neglected when using outside firms to create graphic design work, advertising, or to handle web development. While many top level executives understand the value of the intellectual property and copyrightable material they may create – and they work furiously to protect it – these same corporate leaders often forget to ensure that work done for their firm can then be legally used as their own."

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Creative Commons: To build upon

Submitted by Bryan on April 6, 2007 - 11:05am
"When we launched version 3.0 of the CC licenses February 23 we also switched on a number of graphical, language, and technical updates. This is the first of a very tardy series of posts about those updates."

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Opinion: Google News, Bloggers, and the Belgian courts

Submitted by Bryan on February 14, 2007 - 5:42pm
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.

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Lorelle on WP: Digital Fingerprints Help Track Blog Content Theft

Submitted by Bryan on October 5, 2006 - 5:55am

"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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