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Legal Drama
Does Gawker's Publication of McSteamy Sex Tape Constitute Fair Use?
It probably seemed like a fun idea at the time. Last year, Eric Dane, known as "McSteamy" from the show "Grey's Anatomy," his wife Rebecca Gayheart, and former beauty queen Kari Ann Peniche decided to make a home movie. Yes, that type of home movie. The threesome recorded themselves nakedly fumbling around in bed, slurring words, and splashing in a...
more »MovieShift
Animated Film Takes Donations, DVD Sales to Pay Music Costs
When New York-based animator Nina Paley decided to distribute her independent animation project "Sita Sings the Blues" online for free, she recalled the fate of 1920s jazz vocalist Annette Hanshaw. Once hugely popular, Hanshaw had almost completely disappeared from public knowledge when Paley decided to include her songs in the score for her film. "How could this happen to an...
more »Legal Drama
A Brief History of AP's Battles with News Aggregators
The news is information, and information wants to be free, as the saying goes. But for news organizations, the news is a product that is collected, recorded and sold for profit. And those profits are now under extreme economic pressure, threatening some news organizations with extinction. Both online and traditional news outlets are regrouping, retrenching and reconsidering their business models...
more »Legal Drama
How Animal Rights Activists Beat the Rodeos in Videotaping Events
As cell phone cameras and palm-sized videocams have become cheap and ubiquitous, there is little if anything that is immune from being documented and displayed on the web, as numerous celebrities and sports stars have learned to their regret. In the realm of hard news, the result is that citizen journalists are able to bypass big media news organizations and...
more »Legal Drama
Should Copyright Law Change in the Digital Age?
This is the final part of my three-part email roundtable discussion looking at the new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use of Online Video created at the behest of the Center for Social Media at American University. In the first part, the respondents in this email roundtable talked about what the Code means, how they might put it...
more »Legal Drama
AP Badly Mistaken on Drudge Retort
Last week, the Associated Press decided that the Drudge Retort was in violation of copyright laws because it excerpted parts of AP stories and linked to them. The AP legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter to Drudge Retort's owner, the technology book author Rogers Cadenhead.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
5 Places to Watch Movies Online Legally -- and Free
The spread of broadband Internet access has made online video a much better experience, allowing movie fans to catch a flick on the Net without having to rent a DVD. Depending on the kind of system and monitor you have, watching films on a computer can become almost as enjoyable as watching them on your television. For instance, with...
more »Digging Deeper
Anti-Piracy Dragnet Could Hurt 'Fair Use' of Copyrighted Video
All the lawsuits and rhetoric around people uploading copyrighted material on video-sharing sites such as YouTube make it seem like a black-and-white situation: either you're shooting your own original video or stealing it from someone else. But what's lost in that simple either-or interpretation is the more gray area in copyright law known as fair use, which protects people...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Is the Future of Television Online? Not Yet
Late last month the BBC announced that it would be offering up a large part of its television content free of charge on its website. And back in May, ABC announced it would stream some of its primetime shows in HD online for free. As networks begin to put more of their content online -- either on their websites...
more »Your Take
Should online video of presidential debates be free for public use and remix?
Just who owns the video of presidential debates? Up until this point, the TV networks that broadcast the events held the copyright to that footage and could post it online, monetize it in whatever way they wanted, and restrict usage by other folks. But Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, a proponent of Creative Commons "copyleft" systems, started an online petition...
more »Legal Drama
Digg Users Show Strength in Numbers in DVD Dust-Up
The community-generated news site, Digg, has been an experimental hothouse for online communities. Last summer, there was the move by Netscape to offer to pay top Diggers to do their news-article bookmarking at Netscape, with Digg CEO Jay Adelson saying he'd never pay Digg community members. Now comes the user revolt after Digg decided to remove posts that mentioned...
more »Your Take Roundup
Loosen Copyright Restrictions for the Internet Age
Slowly but surely, the entertainment industry is realizing that it can't use copyright law as a blunt force in the digital age. Take the case of music giant EMI. Not long ago, EMI was fighting music-sharing service Napster and threatening DJ Danger Mouse over the mash-up, The Grey Album. But today the music company announced a plan with Apple...
more »Your Take
How would you rewrite copyright law for the digital age?
The music industry is still suing college students over file-sharing. Viacom is suing Google and YouTube for $1 billion for copyright violations. NBC and News Corp. are teaming up with their own video-sharing concept, dubbed NewCo (or "ClownCo" by Google), to help protect their copyrighted material. The increasing length of copyrights in the U.S., and the quick obsolescence of the...
more »Legal Drama
Viacom, YouTube Legal Tiff Irrelevant in End
Judging by the sturm und drang roiling the blogosphere and media circles, you'd think that Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against Google's YouTube is the epic confrontation of old media vs. new, of suits vs. hipsters, of DRM vs. free love, of greed vs. good. It may well be all those things, but it will not change the basic fact...
more »TVShift
The heavyweights of the media world are lining up in opposition to YouTube, and supporting Viacom's recent removal of all its clips from the video-sharing service. That removal followed a back-and-forth last fall when Viacom initially asked for clips to be removed, and then went into negotiations with YouTube. Those negotiations turned chilly, and now comes the freeze-out for video clips from MTV and Comedy Central shows such as "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show."
more »Online Video
Fake Anchor Colbert Gives Best Take on YouTube Takedowns
The last week has been a surreal one for fans of fake news. TV shows such as Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" have had huge boosts in their popularity thanks to online communities, who share video clips and summaries from each show. But the corporate parent to Comedy Central, Viacom, was a bit blind to that fact when it asked video-sharing site YouTube to pull down video clips from those shows that had been posted by fans.
more »Online Video
Stephen Colbert: Don't Love and Leave YouTube
We in the Colbert Nation are sickened by the recent news that heavy-handed trial lawyers at Viacom, representing Comedy Central, have asked YouTube to force its users to remove video clips from "The Colbert Report," "The Daily Show," and "South Park." While those lawyers have legal standing to do this, it goes against the spirit of Internet sharing and viral promotion -- two phenomena that have helped make your show so popular in the first place. It just doesn't sound like you, Stephen, baby.
more »Digging Deeper
Creative Commons + Flickr = 22 Million Sharable Photos
When I was writing a blog post about Mark Cuban and his ShareSleuth site, I wanted to illustrate it with a good photo of Cuban but didn't like the photo he sent me. So I turned to an invaluable source of photography for a non-commercial blog like MediaShift -- the Flickr Creative Commons pool. On that site, you can search through 22 million photos for shots that are being legally shared by photographers, under flexible copyrights licensed through Creative Commons (CC).
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