klapt.net

Due to a heavy influx of comment spam site management took the decision to close commenting to any non-registered users. Apologies for any inconveniences this might cause.

In an otherwise rather lengthy (but interesting and relevant) blog-entry (on statements of ASCAP about CC licensing) Lawrence Lessig makes a good and important point:

“ASCAP historically has played a crucially important role in helping artists get paid for their work. Today, the nonexclusive ASCAP agreement is a model for collecting rights societies internationally. In my view, we will and should always have collecting rights societies to help authors and artists deal with the burden of collecting royalties where they want royalties to be collected. The only question is how public policy can help make sure these societies are competitive and efficient. The US has done a good job in that respect. Other countries, not so good. But nothing in CC’s mission has anything to do with displacing the proper functioning of efficient and well run collecting rights organizations.”

Very well put.

Even the Register reports on the new Swiss copyright regulation.

The wording of the regulation is ambiguous, argues petition author Florian Bösch. Switzerland’s new copyright law has been described as “brutal” by BoingBoing.net and is hotly debated on Slashdot.

The Swiss copyright collecting authority, SUISA, dismisses the claims as groundless and misguided.

Dutch actors and musicians request that the introduction of a copying fee on mp3 players and DVD-recorders takes effect immediately. The Dutch government wants to postpone that extra fee until 2009. Copyright organisation Norma claims through its lawyer that the government’s decision is illegal.

Apart from Norma, the Dutch system consists of over 20 organisations that deal with fees for copyrights and neighbouring rights. Earlier this year, this system has been accused of being inefficient and of wasting money by the association of SMEs in the Netherlands.

Striking screen writers turn to web outlets that, while paying less, give them total control over their content and share a substantial proportion of revenue, up to 50 %, much larger than conventional Hollywood companies; read “Striking Writers Gravitate to Web” by Gary Gentile, AP Business Writer, for Wired News.

MacUpdate reports that a number of libraries, joined in the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), decided to actually pay for having their bookes scanned by the Open Content Alliance (OCA), rather than having Google or Microsoft scan them for free.

The reason is, that the OCA keeps the content “search-engine neutral” as BLC Executive Director Barbara Preece said: “Google and Microsoft are interested in search, and the OCA is more interested in content and helping libraries handle their content the way they want to.”

The exercise costs close to $3 million, $845,000 covered by the BLC and another $2 million through a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

An interesting discussion on librarything (click to see it) on the question if writers would rather prefer being paid or being read. It turns out that it’s all about “I love it when people read my work” and “I don’t want someone else making money from my writing while I don’t”, acknowledging that it is nice to get paid (even if it only “puts me roughly at the same wage level as a banana picker in Guatemala”) and that “publishers have a wider range of readers than most individuals”.

What do you think?

The WIPO has published a new booklet in their “Learn from the past, create for the future” series — a school study and exercise book on The Arts and Copyright.

Details of WIPO’s announcement are here.

The booklets should be ordered from the WIPO electronic bookshop at www.wipo.int/ebookshop.

Today we recieved a commenton this campaing website by some guy called directoryguru which I’d hesitate to hide from our readers (as I do on a regular basis with all the penis enlargement, naked girls and investment opportunities):

Hi there! I was surfing the internet Wednesday afternoon during my break, and found your blog by searching MSN for trees. This is a topic I have great interest in, and follow it closely. I liked your insight on , and it made for good reading. Keep up the good work…

(Emphasis by me)

“Fair Use” is a concept of US copyright legislation. In essence it is ‘any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work’¹.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association reveals in a study² about $4.5 trillion of the revenue generated in the US, or 18 percent, and about 17.3 million jobs rely on the fair use exceptions. This revenue is generated by industries such as³:

• manufacturers of consumer devices that allow individual copying of copyrighted programming;
• educational institutions;
• software developers; and
• internet search and web hosting providers.

The figure looks gigantic, and the temptation is high to argue for a small share of revenue for the creators of all that content used under fair use exceptions. However, the exceptions of fair use make quite many economic activities only possible, e.g. software development, which in many cases requires the making of temporary copies of existing programs to facilitate the programming of interoperability, making temporary copies of TV programmes to watch them at a later point in time, or even browsing the web, which requires temporary cache copies of websites on the rendom access memory of the computer — activities that would be extremely hard to monitor in order to collect resonable compensation for the use of copyrighted content, let alone the difficulties of establishing corresponding licensing agreements. Thus, establishing the fair use exemptions in 1976 was a vital ingredient for many industries to grow.

More importantly, it is worthwhile noticing, that it is not only copyright protection that stimulates innovation, creativity and eventually business. Obviously, the “fair use” exemption in the U.S. even outnumbers the potential of the ‘copyright industry’.⁴ I should add, however, that relying on a fair use exemption requires copyright protection to be established in the first place — and this not in a narrow sophistic sense but in order to make the creation of content viable at all.

1. http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-a.html [↩]
2. available online at http://www.ccianet.org/artmanager/publish/news/First-Ever_Economic_Study_Calculates_Dollar_Value_of.shtml [↩]
3. p. 6, 18-39 and appendix II of the report [↩]
4. according to the IIPA-report (http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/20070130-report.pdf), ‘In 2005, the estimated value added for the total copyright industries rose to $1,388.13 billion ($1.38 trillion) or 11.12% of U.S. GDP.’ [↩]

Creative Commons Netherlands and Buma/Stemra, the collecting society for music authors (composers, textwriters) and music publishers in the Netherlands start a groundbreaking pilot project: music authors will be able to combine the more flexible licensing models of Creative Commons licences with membership of Buma/Stemra. Details will be presented on 23 August 2007 at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam and will be made available at http://www.creativecommons.nl/bumapilot/index.html.

At least two services are out there that offer books and novels to read on Apple’s iPhone. Readdle.com offers the upload of 8 different formats, doc, txt and pdf among them, and a library of “iPhone-optimized classical books by O.Henry, Charles Dickens, Shakespear, Conan Doyle and others”. textoniphone.com “can only be viewed using the iPhone. More than 20,000 books and novels viewable on your iPhone for free.” It also offers document upload for registered users.