Fair Use Lab 1.0

NPR Talk of the Nation:

On this week’s opinion page, Jacob Weinberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, focuses on the new Kindle device. In a recent opinion piece on Slate.com, he asked: “Why should a civilization that reads electronically be any less literate than one that harvests trees to do so?”

O.K., I’m sorry. Let me try again. “Laura, knock down that accessibility barrier, please.” Nick Negroponte said someone like you would come along someday to help me get stuff done. I’ve been waiting for your cool efficiency and ass-kick assertiveness for years. I’ve been working without support  staff for  so long  that I forgot my manners. I’ll do better next time. Don’t go passive-aggressive on me, Laura. I’ll send you a sonnet by Petrarch on Virtual Assistants Day.

Who’s Laura? The new VA from Microsoft. Eric Horvitz extolled her virtues this morning on NPR. Since Laura is still in development, let me place my custom order in advance. Booking airline reservations would be nice, but I don’t need to be nagged about blowing off deadlines. I want a virtual assistant who understands my accessibility needs and can hack text and code like an administrative professional killing snakes. Except that’s just a metaphor, in case you don’t do nuanced tonality yet. Really, I like snakes. You’ll have to do a lot of reading to me, so I’d love a voice  that purrs like Catherine Deneuve selling the proverbial bath oil.  And you can skip the ice-cube persona. I want the passion of Delacroix’s Liberty leading the people over the barricades!

Photographer Lan Bui wrote a great post about why he gives photos away on a Ritz cracker – a.k.a. a Creative Commons license. Lan, thanks for your generous creative ethic and great photography!

Why do I give my photos away for free? | Lan Bui:

In short, because I like to. Nothing more simple… ’sharing makes me feel good’. It is selfish, I know, but it is something I can selfishly do that helps others out.

Almost all of my photos can be shared, used, edited, remixed, reused, redistributed for almost any purpose without notifying me at all. Have at it!!!

Now lets get a little more into what I’m actually talking about. First FREE is not really free. What I am doing is offering everyone use of my photos without monetary compensation. So I can say FREE because there will be no monetary exchange.

Lets get even deeper. Anyone can use my photos as long as they attribute the work to me. So…. it isn’t really free; I ask for something back, a link or text credit. Many times I take care of the attribution myself by watermarking my photos, so in lot’s of cases we can still say I give away my photos for free.

Now, one layer deeper. Not only am I asking that if you use my photos you credit me… but you also must share the work you create under a similar license so others can collaborate, share and spread our combined work. So that is another restriction, but a liberating restriction forcing you to share.

Now I come to a very difficult part about offering my work for free to anyone that wants it. I am torn in my decision in this because there are great benefits either way. Do I allow commercial use of my work? Read more

If my spring deadlines didn’t include preparing a talk for MiT6 and a seminar for NIH, I’d love to take this course. The project I’d propose would involve building an open source tool kit that blind students could use to make their own accessible texts.

Education/EduCourse/Announcement - MozillaWiki:

Mozilla (in collaboration with ccLearn and the Peer 2 Peer University) launches a practical online seminar on open education. This six week course is targeted at educators who will gain basic skills in open licensing, open technology, and open pedagogy; work on prototypes of innovative open education projects; and get input from some of the world leading innovators along the way.

The course will kick-off with a web-seminar on Thursday 2 April 2009 and run for 6 weeks.

Weekly web seminars introduce new topics ranging from content licensing to the latest open technologies and peer assessment practices. Participants will share project ideas with a community of peers, work on individual projects, and get feedback from experienced mentors. We will also take a close look at some of the most innovative examples of open education projects, and speak to the people who designed them, including:

* The Open Source Software courses at Seneca College;

* David Wiley’s Introduction to Open Education;

* The open blog infrastructure at Mary Washington University; etc.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky:

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them. Read more

On the Media 031309:

Jonathan Zittrain is co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and author of The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It. In this extended interview he explains various problems threatening today’s Internet and which solutions might not rob the net of its generative qualities.

[Updated 032009] NPR has withdrawn the image linked here in the original post. The caption for it read: A poster of President Barack Obama, right, by artist Shepard Fairey is shown for comparison with this April 27, 2006, file photo of Obama by Associated Press photographer Mannie Garcia. Fairey has acknowledged the poster is based on the AP photograph. [Source: Mannie Garcia/ Shepard Fairey/AP/NPR]

Law Professor Weighs In On ‘Hope’ Squabble NPR 022609:

Law professor Greg Lastowka talks with Fresh Air about the intellectual-property issues involved in what might be called the audacity-of-”Hope” case.

That’s the dispute between the Associated Press and street artist Shepard Fairey, who have been wrangling in the courts over Fairey’s use of an AP photo as the foundation for his “Hope” poster — an image that became synonymous with the presidential campaign of then-Sen. Barack Obama.

The original photo was taken by AP photographer Mannie Garcia, and Fairey has admitted that his poster is based on Garcia’s photograph. Fairey’s lawyers argue that the poster is protected under what’s called “Fair Use” — a legal construct that allows for certain exceptions to copyright protections.

Lastowka teaches at Rutgers School of Law, Camden and is currently a visiting professor at Columbia Law School. He specializes in intellectual property and Internet law. His work been published in The Washington Post, USA Today, Wired and The Economist.

NPR Fresh Air 022609: Shepard Fairey | Mannie Garcia | Greg Lastowka

Shepard Fairey’s portrait of Obama was installed at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington on Jan. 17, 2009. [Photo by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images/NPR]

Shepard Fairey: Inspiration Or Infringement? : NPR 022609:

The Associated Press has threatened to sue the artist who created the iconic “Hope” poster of Barack Obama for copyright infringement, but Shepard Fairey says his work is protected under the principle of “Fair Use,” which exempts artists and others from some copyright restrictions, under certain circumstances.

Fairey based his poster on an April 2006 photo of Obama taken by AP photographer Mannie Garcia. Last month, the AP contacted Fairey threatening him with a lawsuit for using the image without permission, seeking payment for using it, and asking to share in the profits from it.

Pre-empting the suit, the Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project filed a lawsuit on behalf of Fairey stating that his work is protected under Fair Use.

Fairey is the founder of Studio Number One, a Los Angeles-based design company; he’s created album covers for several bands, including the Black Eyed Peas and the Smashing Pumpkins.

He joins Fresh Air to talk about the image, the dispute, and why he thinks his poster qualifies as a protected work under Fair Use provisions.

Spreading The Hope: Street Artist Shepard Fairey - NPR 012009:

Shepard Fairey’s illustration of Barack Obama was one of the most iconic images of the campaign — Obama’s face and the word “hope” rendered in red, white, and blue.

Fairey says he made the image to spur voters’ belief in Obama as a leader. The image was never officially adopted by the campaign, however, because of legal issues related to the original photograph he used.

The iconic poster differed from Fairey’s previous work. The image was unusual, Fairey says, because his political art is usually negative.

“I felt that Barack Obama was an unusual candidate, a special candidate, and that it was worth putting my efforts into making something positive,” he told NPR in a Jan. 2009 interview.

Now Fairey is spreading the message of hope again, this time as the official designer of the Obama inauguration poster.

Fairey spawned the “Obey” street art movement which in turn was the inspiration for a line of clothing, and he has designed album covers for several well-known bands, including The Black Eyed Peas and the Smashing Pumpkins. He’s the founder of Studio Number One, a Los Angeles-based design company.

NPR Fresh Air 022609: Shepard Fairey | Mannie Garcia | Greg Lastowka

Shepard Fairey says he used this photo by Mannie Garcia, taken April 27, 2006 at the National Press Club, for the Obama ‘Hope’ poster. Fairey cropping out actor George Clooney and changing the tilt of Obama’s head. [Photo by Mannie Garcia/AP/NPR]

Mannie Garcia: The Photo That Sparked ‘Hope’NPR 922609:

In April 2006, Associated Press photographer Mannie Garcia took a batch of photos of then-Sen. Barack Obama at a National Press Club discussion about the crisis in Darfur. One of those photographs later became the basis for Shepard Fairey’s iconic “Hope” poster, an image that came to be intimately associated with Obama’s campaign.

Recently, the AP threatened to sue Fairey over the photo, charging that Fairey’s use of Garcia’s original infringed the AP’s copyright; Fairey’s lawyers themselves filed a preemptive lawsuit, arguing that the work he created based on that image is protected under the so-called “Fair Use” provisions of copyright law.

Garcia has photographed news events for Bloomberg, Reuters, The New York Times, and Newsweek. He’s worked in countries around the world, including the U.S., Somalia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Philippines. He joins Fresh Air to talk about the dispute.

NPR Fresh Air 022609: Shepard Fairey | Mannie Garcia | Greg Lastowka

Librarian Opposes Google’s Library Fees NPR 022109:

Google wants to give you access to its huge database of scanned, out-of-print books, but the company is going to charge for it. Robert Darnton, head librarian at Harvard University, says the deal violates a basic American principle — that knowledge should be free and accessible to all.

Robert Darnton’s essy in New York Review of Books:
Google & the Future of Books