Julianna Yau’s blog

Copyright

• Japan considers iPod tax (John Degen responds)
• Susan Scafidi shares a case where knockoff clothing directly impacted the value and saleability of the original
• Cory Doctorow on free-based business models
• Russell McOrmond gives a good summary of the content creator vs access provider debate

Orphan Works

• The Art Law Blog reports that the Orphan Works bill in the US has been passed
• Orphan Works blog posts on opinions and points to a summary of the debate between photo advocates

Art

• Making Art and Essential Part of Life
• Another government culture site bites the dust

Related posts

• The Question of Ownership (0)
• Playing catch-up (0)
• Finding adoptive parents for “orphaned” works (2)
• “Copyright obsession”? (0)
• Yoav Mazeh: Fixation in Copyright - part two: the discussion (0)

A while ago, others wrote about the conundrum of the concept of “intellectual property” (Cory Doctorow and Mike Masnick; Russell McOrmond has also been concerned about the use of the phrase as jargon for some time). Many of the lectures presented by the Centre for Innovation Law & Policy have also touched on the link between creativity and ownership of that creativity.

I’ve been mulling over these thoughts, and am trying to make some sense of why and whether physical output is fundamentally different from intellectual output. It is difficult to penetrate this because it suffers from similar philosophical challenges as the link between the mind and body.

Issues of copyright are seeming to develop more shades of grey in the differentiation between the ownership of a thing and the copying of an idea. Copyright law generally prevents ideas from receiving protection, but whether it’s a question of basketball, wanting to be someone’s boyfriend, toilet paper or other silliness, people are pushing the limits of what can be protected by copyright and what can be owned.

The problem is perhaps how easily ideas can now be stolen from creative persons to be made into the fortunes of the business-savvy. One of the recent examples of this is OLPC’s XO laptop, which is threatening to be another Atari 400 or Commodore 64. Although it would be difficult to successfully argue that the concept of an inexpensive and small portable computing device was “stolen” or “belonged” to the pioneers at OLPC, their literal inability to deliver the XO is suspected to be a factor in the departure of some of the major minds behind the project.

Of course, an idea on its own is almost completely useless. Whether it is political, philosophical, artistic, technological, musical or otherwise, an idea which never gets past the conceptual stage is little more than exercise for your brain. But how do we find a balance between rewarding the birth of new ideas and allowing people to stand on the shoulder of giants?

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• XO laptop shipping in Canada begins (?) (2)
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On Tuesday, Cory Doctorow had an article published in the Guardian Unlimited arguing that [a]n exhibition of pop art at London’s National Portrait Gallery unwittingly celebrates a golden age before copyright was king. The article was brought to my attention through the Art Law Blog, and reading it posed many questions.

Firstly, Doctorow points out what could be seen as copyright hypocrisy on the part of the Pop Art Portraits project, or London’s National Portrait Gallery in general. Essentially, he argues that the portraits are employing creative reuse of existing work, presumably in violation of the copyrights of the primary works holders, but the National Portrait Gallery prohibits photography to protect the copyrights of the works on display.

I say presumably because although their programme does not say a word about copyright, this does not necessarily mean that the artists have used the work without compensation to the original artists, or that they necessarily need to (depending on various fair use issues). To my knowledge, it is not a general practise to include information regarding who has been paid copyright residuals in the programme for a show.

That being said, I would hope that copyright has been paid where appropriate, but doubt it. Mostly because I know the administrative web that needs to be untangled to clear all the copyrights for using anything in a magazine is complex and time-consuming. And I doubt Disney would allow the use of any of their characters for a price affordable by an artist or a publicly funded gallery.

Secondly, there is the whole issue of how much copyright enforcement is too much. That I’m not prepared to tackle right at this time, but it seems that excessive copyright enforcement is a combination of legitimate copyright concerns, a disregard for fair use and a dash of desire for censorship/control. The concept of copyright in itself is not a negative thing, but we certainly need to revisit the terms of copyright and the methods and extent of enforcement happening recently.

Related posts

• Yoav Mazeh: Fixation in Copyright - part two: the discussion (0)
• Yoav Mazeh: Fixation in Copyright - part three: my thoughts (0)
• Yoav Mazeh: Fixation in Copyright - part one: the presentation (0)
• Why SOME creative people are putting their work free on the Net (1)
• What about visual artists? (9)