Slashdot Mirror
Yoko Ono/EMI Suit Exposes Fair Use Flaw
Ian Lamont writes "Yoko Ono and EMI Records have backed down from their suit against the makers of a documentary film who used a 15-second fragment of a John Lennon song — but only after a Stanford Law School group got involved. Even though the use of the clip was clearly Fair Use, the case exposed a huge problem with the doctrine: It's becoming too expensive for people to actually take advantage of what is supposed to be a guaranteed right. Ironically, the song in question was Imagine."
Can't the film makers just countersue to get the losses incurred by this lawsuit? If not, then there's a serious problem with the judicial system.
Fair use is a legal defense to be used in court, therefor everyone who wants to avoid defending their case in a court avoids including copyrighted stuff in their works even if it's clearly fair use.
Terrible state of affairs.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Could it be any other song?
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
When John Lennon wrote "Imagine no possessions" he was worth $150 million.
why does anyone need the exclusive rights to something for more than 10 years? if you can't make your money on it in 10 years, it's time to stop flogging a dead horse, and if it's still popular it's long since passed into pop culture and should enter the public domain in recognition of all the support it's had...
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Tsk, tsk it's an insectivorous submarine!
That's *exactly* how BitTorrent works. But the doctrine of fair use also implies the purpose for which the parts are used. You can quote parts of a work, for instance, to make a criticism, but not to create a full copy of the original work.
I hate to admit it, but she's right. Everybody knows that such types of fair-use are what make record sales plummet. Why buy John Lennon's record when you've got a 15-second fragment of one of his song in a documentary that you can just reply as many times as you like?
That's right, you don't, which is why so many baby seal-killing pirates are now resorting to listening to documentary soundtracks just to avoid buying discs just so they can avoid giving $2 of royalties to starving artists like John Lennon. God I hate these bastards.
You just got troll'd!
If it wern't for Yoko's history, I'd wonder if this was more about stopping that terrible film from being associated with Lennon than any real copyright concern.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I think the following provision should be in the law: if a jury decides a lawsuit is frivolous, then the lawyers that started it should pay everything they got plus punitive damages to the part that got sued, where "punitive" means "enough to hurt". No lawyer should be allowed to get *any* profit from a frivolous lawsuit. And lawyers should know enough about the law to realize that they are embarking on a frivolous lawsuit, whose purpose is just to intimidate or send a political message.
Copyright is enforced by the public. It is entirely up to us how long we choose to enforce copyright terms. I, for one, am all for zero length copyright terms.. but some people think slightly longer terms are acceptable. Only Disney and similar megacorps think the life + 90 year crap is acceptable (until they need another 30 years added on).
How we know is more important than what we know.
Would it really be unfeasible or inadvisable, in cases as clear-cut as this, to turn up to court yourself, sans lawyer, and say "This clearly falls under fair use. Can I go home now?"
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
Way to bury the needle on the irony meter, Yoko.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Unlike European copyright law, which is premised on creators' rights, US copyright law is premised on public benefit -- encouraging creation of new works as a first and primary goal, accomplished by means of a temporary, government-provided monopoly by which creators can make a return on their work.
Perpetual copyright leads to economic inefficiencies (in which the cost to the public as a whole vastly outweighs tho benefit to the author and inheritors (if you need me to cite an peer-reviewed analysis to this effect, let me know and I'll dig up a few), to older works being lost because nobody has the rights to reproduce them (or enough economic incentive to do that at the price the present rightholder wishes to charge), and to new works which could leverage the public domain (the "creative commons") not being created.
If you want to argue that 10 years is a bad idea, that's an eminently reasonable position to take. Arguing that copyright should be perpetual, on the other hand, goes against everything US copyright law is based on, and favors a position which would be very much to the detriment of the public, including those who create new works.
Glad to see you have your head on straight and are receiving signals from the mothership. How in the world do you justify such a statement? Do you know her personally? Has she expressed her willingness to let other, more left leaning, documentary producers use her dead husbands songs?
Would Yoko Ono have sued about this if Michael Moore borrowed that same 15 second clip?
I think not.
And (presuming for a moment that this wasn't a matter of so clearly falling into fair use that suing should never have been contemplated) that's her right. Copyright is as much about keeping control of how your work is used for the duration copyright, as it is about extracting tolls for use. It's perfectly reasonable to use it as tool to ensure your work isn't used in ways you disapprove of (indeed, this is exactly what the GPL uses coopyright to do -- ensure that the software isn't used in ways the original author disapproves of: as closed source software).
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Nope.
Fair use is deliberately vaguely defined. Since this is a clear desire to do nothing except deprive the right holder of their exclusive rights, and not intended for criticism or other aspects of fair use, then it's illegal.
Your motivation has much more to do with whether it's fair use than the length.
in 1893 a school teacher made up a ditty (and most likely copied the tune and lyrical idea from other songs from that time period.)
Good morning to you,
Good morning to you,
Good morning, dear children,
Good morning to all.
She died in 1916.
twenty years after "Good morning to you" was first sung a song with the same melody became popular.
Happy Birthday To You
Happy Birthday To You
Happy Birthday Dear _____
Happy Birthday To You
The sister of the deceased sued and took the copyright because the songs were obviously so similar.
My parents sang that song at my first birthday party (Illegaly I may add as it was probably in a public place like a resteraunt) and the copyright will not expire until after I am dead.
The "artist" never saw a dime.
The "artist" only created something vaguely similar.
A pack of lazy useless family members and lawyers have been living off the income for the last hundred years contributing nothing to society while doing so and being nothing but a pain.
That is the copyright system as it stands.
Work for an hour and you can gain the right to charge other people for making certain sounds in public or making certain marks on paper for the rest of your life, then your kids inherite that right and then sell it to some random company and the best thing is that it will never expire since the terms keep getting longer and longer and longer.
copyright is broken.
It should last no longer than is needed to get your book published and on the shelves or your song recorded and into peoples ipods.
Actually, in a wonderfully apt counterexample, Yoko Ono refused to let Michael Shermer use an excerpt in one of his books a few years before. (The chapter in question was on changing attitudes to religion, for maximum appropriateness.) Difference is, of course, that Shermer actually asked and deferred to her for the sake of a quiet life. She's famously protective of the Lennon estate.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
You can not be my Yoko Ono.
And I quote:
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
QED
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
'Fair Use' is what's left of the right to copy after most of it has been suspended to create a privilege to benefit publishers (in the belief this ultimately benefits the public).
You have a right to copy anything you create, purchase, or discover. The state has suspended this right apart from those few exceptions it terms 'fair use', but those exceptions only come into effect as defences after you have been prosecuted for copyright infringement, not before. There can be no 'fair use' without infringement.
It would be better to demand the complete restoration of the right to copy, and to abolish copyright, than to quibble about whether certain exceptions should be acknowledged prior to the commencement of any litigation.
(I should also point out, of course, that Shermer's backing down is an example of the too-expensive-to-defend situation again. For those with too little money, fair use de facto doesn't exist.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
That if a copyright holder repeatedly uses legal harassment to prevent obviously legal uses of its copyright, perhaps it should lose that copyright. All you would need is one or two lost copyrights and you would see media company behavior dramatically change.
The copyright to Happy Birthday is not owned by the original author ..not by the new words author ..but by Warner Music Group
due to expire in 2030 (US) 2016 (Europe) currently estimated to be worth US$5 million
and is a good example of copyright that is largely ignored by the general public ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
There is no such thing as a use which is "clearly fair use."
Fair Use is not a right, it's a guiding principle used in courts (it's what is called an "equitable doctrine" and acts as an "affirmative defense" -- "equity" refers to rules which are not law but are designed to overcome unfairness in some applications of the law, and an "affirmative defense" is where you admit to breaking the law but claim that it shouldn't matter because of some extenuating circumstance). Courts weigh several different highly "fuzzy" factors in determining whether Fair Use should apply.
Some people might think this distinction is pedantic, but it's important for the following reason: people in the open-source/media-rights community need to understand that current law is not as much in their column as they'd like. This means two things:
1) You should not assume, just because some use seems fair, that you would win in a copyright infringement case based on Fair Use.
2) If you want to make Fair Use into a well-defined right, you'll need to write to your representatives in Congress.
People who submit summaries on Slashdot which mischaracterize Fair Use do injury to the political goals of the readership.
This was absolutely positively NOT a fair use issue. There are many legal reasons why they had no right to use that clip in the movie that went beyond the protections allowed by fair use. Yet again slashdot users don't even attempt to understand the issue.
The article asks, "Is Fair Use decided by who has the most money?"
The answer, of course, is yes.
Money decides nearly everything.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Obviously I'll defer to the opinion of a Stanford law professor, but it seems on the face of it not to be a clearly frivolous lawsuit.
Ben Stein, Mark Mathis, and the rest of the lying scumbags (see Expelled Exposed for proof) who produced this piece of dreck were using the song for a commercial purpose and were not criticizing, commenting, or reporting on it, and their disingenuous pseudo-documentary certainly doesn't qualify as teaching.
Say what you like about Yoko Ono, but wanting to avoid association with this misfire in the culture war is understandable.
You're looking at this through the European perspective -- as if the creator's monopoly on their work is a natural right.
Look at it again, as if the natural order of things in for information to be usable without restriction, and copyright is an artificial monopoly created for the sole purpose of benefiting the greater good of the public as a whole.
To be sure, things which are copyrighted may have value to the eventual rightsholder 90 years later -- but if you calculate present value at the time of creation (if you've never taken an accounting class, this determines the amount which would need to be invested, at current interest rates, to yield the same eventual income as the extended monopoly period would grant; this sum effectively represents the amount of economic motivation granted to an author to create their work), the amount of value which the creator receives at the time of creation based on this extended grant of exclusive rights is absolutely minimal. On the other hand, the costs levied on the rest of the economy -- even excluding the unknowns of derivative works which aren't created, public-benefit performances which don't occur, and enhanced breadth of society's culture as a whole based on expanded exposure to knowledge -- are considerable indeed.
See this amicus brief to the Supreme Court challenge of the DMCA, An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law (Landes and Posner), Forever Minus A Day? Some Theory And Empirics of Optimal Copyright (Rufus Pollock), and (for lighter reading) this analysis in the Financial Times.
I agree that shorter terms with an option to renew are desirable, but also hold that the length of renewal should be limited either explicitly or via economic incentives (ie. attaching significant cost for renewal after a reasonable period).
due to expire in 2030 (US) 2016 (Europe) currently estimated to be worth US$5 million
This assumes it doesn't get extended again before 2030.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I have no problem paying to see performances and sponsoring artists is an old tradition which worked quite well during the renaissance with no copyright around
Will you pay to hear me read my novel? The next show is tomorrow at 4:30am Eastern in my basement. Bring your own coffee.
Well, no, of course you won't. You'll expect me to publish it online and make it available for free. Or you will wait until someone else buys it, rips it, and publishes it online for free.
Message: Artists whose work translates digitally are screwed. Best, really, to become a sculptor. True, few enough people will actually pay to see a gallery showing, but if they want to "own" the art they will have to pay the artist for the privilege.
The submitter and the so called legal expert claims this was a clear case of fair use.
Considering the clip makes up part of a commercial DVD and really has no relevance to the subject matter of that DVD, I don't see any fair use claim.
I don't support the current copyright laws, but whatever the lifespan of a copyright, the regulations should be obeyed. This case did not meet fair use guidelines, in fact it was an example of the rules acting as they should.
Considering both sides dropped their respective claims anyway, and the clip was removed from the dvd, I don't see what the fuss is about. If I want to make a dvd of video I've shot, and add a published artists music as a soundtrack, then I should be able to. The moment I attempt to profit financially from that DVD I should get permission from the rights holder and pay a fee if required.
Life is feeling pretty easy when you are rich. You can afford to have crazy theories about a utopian society.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So should I make my software bug ridden so I can sell support?