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Newest YouTube User To Fight a Takedown: Lawrence Lessig
onehitwonder writes "Lawrence Lessig has teamed with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to sue Liberation Music, which recently demanded that YouTube take down a lecture Lessig had posted that features clips from the song 'Lisztomania' by the French band Phoenix (on Liberation Music's label). Liberation claimed copyright infringement as the reason it demanded the takedown, but in his countersuit, Lessig is claiming Liberation's 'overly aggressive takedown violates the DMCA and that it should be made to pay damages,' according to Ars Technica."
They did the work "for hire" and don't own the rights, the labels do.
Fair Use is pretty well defined, in a nutshell you can use 30 consecutive seconds of audio before it becomes an infringement, or the entire track in the case of a narrative or analysis of the track. Clips? This is where it gets interesting; if I use multiple fades and play a track through, am I infringing? I would say not, others might disagree.
On the other hand, I've used a track with no fades, from the first bar to the last, as a theme for a Youtube video. UMG put in a DMCA complaint, my response was that as far as I was concerned, the only person who had any right to complain if he felt the need was Scott Stapp, the individual who wrote the song. I contacted Scott Stapp through his agent, he wrote back himself and pretty much said "I've seen the video, I like it, you go for it."
Big label publishers can go fuck themselves. I'll engage with the artist, not the museum.
Oh, little tip for anyone wanting to use an instrumental background: The KLF back catalogue is all Public Domain, has been since 1993. Some great stuff in there, and you can use any DMCA notices that come as a result to lay harassment charges against the labels.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Exactly it. No matter how much effort you put into music, most labels retain copyright over the works. Smaller indie labels don't tend to do this, but the big players all do it.
Then again, most of these synthetic bands/artists don't write their own music or lyrics, they're just glorified cover bands. Not to say Phoenix is like this, I quite like their music, but I'm not sure how I feel about their label now.
from the fine article:
So, he had video clips of people dancing to underscore the point of the presentation. People dancing in random parts of the world is the original content, and material (hell, the point) to his presentation. The non-profit/no-loss part is COMPLETELY relevant, as it is two of the four tests used in determining if something is fair use:
--United States Copyright Office
finally, you could just watch the presentation and judge for yourself.
I actually have seen a lecture of his from when he released Free Culture back in 06 I believe? I was in high school and went to see him give a speech at a museum. He used a lot of music for his presentation, but every bit of it was a clip to demonstrate a point and served a solid purpose to his discussion.
There are a number of musicians who still get screwed over by the major record labels, even if they haven't made their millions. Sometimes all they do is simply play songs perhaps for a wedding or bar mitzvah and then jam in a local park for fun most of the time.... and they still are required to pay fees to ASCAP or other similar "industry groups" even if they are performing original music they wrote themselves.
Life sucks sometimes, and it is hard to be a musician in America or even most of Europe right now and avoid getting entangled with the music industry at some level.
Untrue in France at least (since the original band is French). In France, the original artist of a piece of art *cannot* sell 100% of the rights on the work of art. They retain a minimum of 50%.
That said, the problem doesn't really change as the label owns 50% of the copyrights and hold the band by the balls anyways.
Write boring code, not shiny code!