Warner Music Forces Lessig Presentation Offline

An anonymous reader writes "Larry Lessig, known (hopefully) to everyone around here as a defender of all things having to do with consumer rights and fair use rights when it comes to copyright, is now on the receiving end of a DMCA takedown notice from Warner Music, who apparently claimed that one of Lessig's famous presentations violated on their copyright. Lessig has said that he's absolutely planning on fighting this, and has asked someone to send Warner Music a copy of US copyright law that deals with 'fair use.'" Reader daemonburrito notes that the (rehosted) "video remains available at the time of this submission."

Comments

Lessig is a moderate

[QuantumG]

Lessig is not against copyright. He's a fundamental advocate of copyright, "especially in the digital era", he just thinks it is "out of sync" and "needs an update".

Whereas people like me are advocates of just scrapping the whole damn thing because the potential benefits of doing so are way more interesting than the deprecated business models that it will finally put to bed.. and because I believe it is fundamentally the right thing to do, from a "you don't tell me what I can and can't do and I'll do the same" sense of what right means.

Re:Lessig is a moderate

[swillden]

"by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

Read the writings of the authors of that text, and you'll understand that they didn't consider authors to have any sort of inherent rights. The difference is actually visible right in that line, in the choice of the word "securing", rather than "guaranteeing". That word implies that the government is granting or providing the rights in question, whereas the other things we think of as rights were thought by the framers to be God-given, or natural, and which government should preserve or guarantee, never, ever, grant.

The grant of temporary exclusivity exists only to serve the interests of the public, not the authors. Its purpose is to ensure that works are created and published to enrich the public domain. If it enriches the creators, that's fine, and good, but it's a side effect.

Re:Lessig is a moderate

[Bigjeff5]

An alternative to copyright would be some sort of exclusive right to sell.

The work could be put in the public domain, but only the author would have the right to package and sell that work.

That would give incentive, as the only persons permitted to profit off the work would be the original author, but I don't know that the incentive would be as high as the original copyright term of 14 years exclusive right to copy.

Beyond that, I don't see how you could encourage the production of creative works.

Automatic claiming?

[no_opinion]

There's a really good chance this resulted from automatic claiming tools that make use of things like acoustic fingerprints. YouTube or a filtering partner will have a catalog of Warner tracks that new uploads are checked against. Warner may not even have known about this until it blew up. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.

Re:Pick Your Battles Wisely

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nothing more than a safe harbor. To really find out whether something is fair use, you have to evaluate all four factors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Only one of the elements is how much was taken.

I'm not going to do a full analysis. Indeed, even if I did, a court's analysis would probably look much different.

The truth is that most people cannot afford to pay the lawyers to go to court and make the fair use argument to find out whether something is fair use or not.

So most people stick with the safe harbors.

In this case, Warner Brothers picked on the wrong guy. Lessig has both the resources and the inclination to go into court and make a fair use argument.

I would love to see that case. Unfortunately Warner Brothers is going to cave very quickly and there will never be a court case.

The RIAA / MPAA will make sure that when they go to court, they have a defendant who will not garner public sympathy.

look harder...dig deeper...find FACTS...

[Archfeld]

FYI... The 'ma na ma na' song IS NOT MUPPETS, or JIM HENSON, but was written in 1968 for an Italian Porn movie and has been in several movies since then. The muppets used it LOOOOONG after its creation, while that does not ensure that Warner doesn't own it now.

http://www.geocities.com/pieroumiliani/

You don't need copyright to fight plagiarism

[Mr2001]

Copyright doesn't exist to protect corporate interests. It exists to protect authors... it's the same thing that keeps you from writing a book (or whatever), changing a few things, and publishing it under their name.

No, you don't need copyright for that. All you need is anti-fraud laws, because plagiarism is a form of fraud. Abolishing copyright wouldn't suddenly make it legal to lie to your customers.

Any open source license out there---GPL, BSD, Apache, MPL, CC, etc---are built on copyright.

Many of us believe that the most useful part of those licenses is the way they use copyright against itself, giving users (and other developers) back the rights that copyright law took away in the first place. Without copyright, there wouldn't be much need for those licenses; if someone didn't give you source code, you could freely reverse engineer it and distribute it yourself.

But, if you want to tell me that my works must also be unrestricted public domain works: well, you're doing exactly what you claim to be against.

Not really. If I tell you your works must be public domain, that doesn't actually force you to do anything, or restrict your freedom in any way. Copyright, on the other hand, does restrict the speech of everyone who doesn't have permission from the author to make copies.

Re:Pick Your Battles Wisely

[cdrudge]

Thanks for linking to the original video. I hadn't seen or heard that in a while. Kind of ironic how you lecture Larry about what fair use guidelines are (notwithstanding whether you are or are not correct), but you have directly referenced the work in it's entirety that would have even less going towards it regarding fair use. While I understand that you probably didn't post the video, don't you find what you did a little bit hypocritical at some level?

Could Warner promote Lessig's ideas any better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or prove them right more efficiently?

First of all consider Lessig's point: Copyright Law needs to face today's realities. Now Warner is suing Lessig for some few seconds of the video, that are meant to illustrate this stupidity. Could they prove the stupidity any better?

Also the fact that the industry is acting like the late Soviet Union trying to stop events, as their world was collapsing around them. Extreme, isn't it? Until you see them trying to shut him up with this lawsuit.

Second the speech itself was an obscure event, one of Lessig's many activities. Could it be promoted any better by trying to suppress it? Because of this the speech gained worldwide attention. I mean their best option is probably to withdraw the lawsuit, and pretend the talk does not exist. Except it is already too late. For the suppression of the talk and for the fate of their "business" practices.

-1 Redundant

[Bob9113]

Reader daemonburrito notes that the (rehosted) "video remains available at the time of this submission."

What I'm about to say is, I'm sure, redundant. I'm saying it anyway:

Warner,

I am pulling a copy right now. It's going in my mystical hidden repository of stuff fools think they can stop me from seeing.

Here's how this rule works: You try to suppress it, I will get it, and I will keep it forever. That is possible because we are better at this than you are. We will always be better at this than you are. The best among us will never work for you, so you will always epic fail. You cannot stop us. Every time you try to kick us, you are going to get a couple broken toes, and we will just get more ornery.

You know, I don't violate copyright because I haven't made up my mind about it yet. I gotta tell you though, it gets more tempting every time you pull some shit like this.

And if you think you can stop me (let alone the next generation of tech naturals) from watching whatever we want, whenever we want, on whatever platform we want, well, you are really stupid. The more you fight, the more practice we get, and the harder we laugh when we pee on your leg.

Try being nice to your customers some time. It might not do you much good, but it won't do you as much harm as what you're doing now.

Re:Whooooh! They picked the WRONG guy for this one

[bersl2]

That case was not about the fair use provisions already on the books; it was about the limits of the enumerated power of Congress to establish copyright, which is not a question here. In all probability, he will hand Warner's ass back to them, as this sort of matter is probably well-explored, whereas the scope of Congress' power was not.

What if Lessig did want the notice

[Vapula]

His presentation may be willingfully at the fringe between Fair Use and Copyright violation.
He may want to have this case brought to court and use the opportunity to show his whole presentation to the court in order to educate the judges.

Parent gave prove of interesting geocities pages!

[freaker_TuC]

Geocities is dying, such valuable information would be lost forever if not archived at all...

This site is the example of what the Internet really is... or was?