For the London Free Press – February 9, 2009

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Techdirt comments on a New York Times article that talks about the hardship caused to the industry by the downloading of movies and TV shows.  Techdirt’s position (and i tend to be more on the Techdirt side on this one) is that the arguments and stats used by the industry just don’t add up.  For example, Techdirt says:  But, the NY Times reports, without a hint of skepticism, about the fact that The Dark Knight was so widely available online, representing a huge failure for the industry. You know which important part the reporters left out? That it was also the highest earning movie of the year. In other words, piracy is not the problem. People are plenty willing to pay to go to the movie theater if you give them a good reason to do so.

And concludes by saying:   It’s really sad that the entertainment industry keeps trusting execs who view such opportunities as threats, and that the media takes their word for it.

The bottom line in my view is that in general we spend too much time trying to stop new things from happening, and not enough time figuring out how to use new things to our advantage. 

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows:

There has been a disturbing trend towards authorities in various countries stopping, questioning, and even arresting people who are simply taking photographs of public places. Somehow taking a photo equates in some people’s minds to gathering information for terrorist purposes. Often the police or security guards in question insist that the photographer is breaking the law – which is usually not the case at all.

A recent example is where a photographer was detained and arrested for taking photos of an Amtrak train. His reason? He was taking photos to enter an Amtrak photo contest that called for people to take and enter photos of Amtrak trains.

The absurdity of this is captured by a Colbert Report video.

For those interested in this topic in general, take a look at the Photo Attorney blog, and in particular, the series of posts entitled Photography Not Allowed

Techdirt has a post that refers to a Wall Street journal article entitled Color This Area of the Law Gray  that talks about artists being inspired by the works of others.  It explores the concept of how different something has to be to be from an existing work to be non-infringing.  In other words, when is something transformative vs stealing.

That line is not always easy to define at law.  The WSJ article talks both about what the law says, and what the policy ought to be.

It starts by saying:

Beauty, it is often said, is in the eye of the beholder, and so might be copyright infringement. Artist Richard Prince never denied that he made use of some photographic images he found in a 2000 book by Patrick Cariou called “Yes Rasta,” documenting the community of Rastafarians the French photographer encountered in the mountains of Jamaica, for collage paintings that were exhibited last fall at New York’s Gagosian Gallery and reproduced in a book published by Rizzoli. The question is whether Mr. Prince’s use of these images was “transformative” — borrowing in the process of creating something entirely new — or just stealing. A lawsuit filed by Mr. Cariou in New York District Court in late December against the appropriationist Mr. Prince — as such artists are known — likely will be one more front in the battle over what constitutes copyright infringement in these days of “sampling” and point-and-click downloading.

Techdirt’s position is:

The history of creativity has always included the concept of taking the ideas of others (those who influenced you) and building on them. That’s the history of storytelling. It’s the history of joke telling. It’s the history of writing. It’s the history of music. It’s the way art is created. And that’s a good thing. Art never springs entirely from 100% original thought. It’s an amalgamation of what else is out there — put together in a new way. What’s even more ridiculous is that, in almost every one of these cases, it’s difficult to see how the “original” complaining artist is even remotely “harmed” by the follow-on artists. If anything, it’s likely that the later art would only draw more attention to the original artist. It’s just that we’ve built up this ridiculous culture of “ownership” of ideas, where people think that someone else doing something creative by building upon my work is somehow “stealing.”

For the London Free Press – February 2, 2009

Read this on Canoe

Almost everyone has heard about people who register website domain names, such as “mcdonalds.com,” with no legitimate claim to them.

The same thing may now be happening with usernames on social networking services such as Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

The motivation for domain squatters is the profit to be made when someone else wants to use the domain in the future.

In some cases, the motivation might be to tarnish the trademark at issue. There have been cases of domain-name blackmail in which domain squatters have threatened to post pornography or other offensive content on a company’s domain name unless the company pays them not to.

Dispute-resolution mechanisms have been put in place to handle ownership disputes over domain names.

Today, with the expanding number and popularity of online social networking services, there may be a similar race to acquire usernames. A username identifies the users of social networking sites, and in that sense is similar to a domain name.

The motivations of username squatters are similar to domain squatters. Username squatting has the potential to create confusion for consumers and can be detrimental to a business’s image.

If a business has not started to use the social networking tool, it may not even be aware this is happening. If a business decides to start using the tool, it may be disappointed to learn that its logical username has already been taken.

In his article, A call for the creation of the Uniform Username Dispute Resolution Policy, Erik J. Heels coins the term “Twittersquatting,” to describe the problem of somebody else registering a company’s trade-mark or name as a username on Twitter (See erikjheels.com).

Heels proposes a standardized policy to make dispute resolution more efficient, regardless of what legal jurisdiction they happen to be located in, as an alternative to more costly legal proceedings.

Usernamecheck.com is a website where you can enter usernames and find out which have been taken on various social networking services. Heels used Usernamecheck.com to discover that “of the top 100 global brands, 93 per cent have had their Twitter usernames taken by somebody else.”

To eliminate username squatting, businesses and organizations should keep on top of popular and emerging social networking services and obtain usernames for as many as they can.

Unlike registering domain names, it does not cost anything other than the time to do it. One doesn’t actually have to use the service right away, or at all, but at least it gets them the username for future use, and lessens the chances that someone else will obtain it for some other purpose.

Of course, there are always solutions for those who have their usernames pirated by squatters. But those solutions may involve litigation or a pricey buyout — solutions that will cost considerably more than the few minutes it would have taken to register the username itself in the first place.

Few in the early ’90s anticipated the value of securing domain names. We cannot always predict what online social networking service will be the next big thing. But it’s always cheaper and more effective to be proactive when it comes to protecting your name, brand or trade-mark.

To eliminate username squatting, businesses and organizations should keep on top of popular and emerging social networking services and obtain usernames for as many as they can.