Lesson 27: Copyright, DRM, Remix & File-sharing I

Radiohead generation believes music is free, Telegraph (2007)

Inside the Mind of a 9 Year Old File-Sharer | TorrentFreak (2007)

Napster launches DRM-free MP3 music store, BBC (2008) >> Napster UK  (! see Marc Andreessen's take on this)

Potter fan faces Rowling in court, BBC News (2008); FT.com: Christopher Caldwell - Humility and Harry Potter

BBC NEWS | Magazine | When can papers you're carrying be photoed? (2008): a privacy issue? a copyright issue?

2)  Flickr as a case study. Your class teacher will discuss the following with you:

Flickr Community Guidelines

http://www.flickr.com/help/general/#147:

I'd like to use a photo I found on Flickr. How do I do that?

We don't act as matchmakers, so contact the photographer yourself. Only members of Flickr can send messages to one another, so if you haven't created an account, that's your first step.

As a member of Flickr, you can move your mouse over someone's buddy icon and click the little arrow to open the "person menu." Then select "Send FlickrMail" and compose your message. When you contact a photographer, it's best to include as much info as possible about the photo, yourself, and how you want to use the photo.

http://www.flickr.com/help/photos/#87:

How can I copyright my photos?

In most parts of the world, including the U.S., Canada, EU countries, and Japan, you are automatically granted copyrights to your photos.

However, the nonprofit Creative Commons offers six default licenses as an alternative to full copyright so you can choose the one that best suits your needs.

Remember that you can only copyright images that you own. This means you can't copyright images that you've taken from somewhere else! Additionally, just because an image does not have a Creative Commons license attached to it, doesn't mean that it is public domain.

You can select a default license for your photos here.

To add a license for a specific picture, click the "Change" link next to your current photo license (usually set to "All rights reserved") near the bottom of your photo page. On the Privacy and Permissions settings page, click the "Add a license to your photo" link on the right side of the page, near the bottom. On the next page, select one of the Creative Commons licenses.

How can I stop people from downloading my photos?

You can set a global preference that controls who can download all the versions of your photos. Just select a setting — from "Only Me" to "Anyone." This setting applies to all your photos and is combined with your privacy settings.

Say you publish a photo of ice cream. If you're sharing that photo with only friends, they are the only people who can see it. Even if you set it so "Anyone" can download the photo, your friends are still the only people who can see it and thus download it.

If you applied a Creative Commons license to your photos, they can be downloaded by anyone. If you don't want others to download your photos, remove the Creative Commons license here.

http://flickr.com/account/prefs/license/ : set a default license.

http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ : Creative Commons.

If there's time, you may also look at Jeremy Keith's post, Lock up your data, which examines how, despite all Flickr's efforts, people can still get upset when their public photos are (entirely legitimately) displayed somewhere on the web other than where their owners anticipated they'd be displayed (ie, "on" Flickr). The explanation is, in part, technical:

Flickr provides a range of ways of accessing your photos; the website, RSS, KML, LOL… and of course, the API. It’s a wonderful API, certainly the best one that I’ve played with. I had a blast putting together the Flickr portion of Adactio Elsewhere. Using the API, I was able to put together my own interface onto my photos and the latest photos from my contacts. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about that—there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of third-party sites that use the Flickr API to do the same thing. However, a lot of those sites use Flash or non-degrading Ajax. But I use Hijax. That means that, even though I’ve built an Ajax interface, the fundamental interaction is RESTful with good ol’ fashioned URLs. As a result—and this is just one of the benefits of Hijax—the Googlebot can spider all possible states of my application.

An API, or Application Programming Interface, is something you should know about: Facebook has one — and you are making use of this whenever you allow an application to make use of profile, friend, photo and event data. Flickr describe the function of their API thus: it "means that anyone can write their own program to present public Flickr data (like photos, video, tags, profiles or groups) in new and different ways". Wikipedia has an entry about APIs.

This really reminds me of David Weinberger's comments at Picnic about unowned order: in the digital world, there's no incremental cost to putting things in more than one (virtual) location, and it's possible for the organisation of data to be separate from the data itself; we can all own different perspectives onto the same data which the owner of the data isn't privy to.  And yeah, Mr Keith is spot-on that this is a cultural, not technical issue. I suspect that even having spent the last 18 years online I'm too old to really "get this" in my bones, and that the current wave of teenagers and young adults are the first people who might internalise this. /me thinks about record companies selling MP3s as though they were physical product...

How to find images on the web (NB use of creative commons; attention drawn to importance of obtaining copyright permission).

USA.  teachingcopyright.org: The Many Faces of Copyright (USA); United States Copyright Office FAQ; RIAA: Brief History on Copyright Laws.  The RIAA and other trade groups have taken legal action against individuals as well as organisations: Trade group efforts against file sharing — eg, Santangelo v. RIAA (Wikipedia). The RIAA explains copyright law here and the MPAA does the same here.

UK.  ORG: Government to ban illegal filesharers from the internet?; BBC NEWS | Anti file-sharing laws considered.  ORG: Copyright Education in schools.  The BPI: Illegal Filesharing; filesharing information pack  (pdf; last updated 2006).

Guides.  Education 2.0: The College Student's Guide to File Sharing, Wired (2007); The getting good with BitTorrent roundup, Lifehacker (2007); EFF: How To Not Get Sued for File Sharing (2006), File Sharing; Childnet's Young People, Music and The Internet (pdf).  The starting position of each piece is surely self-evident: the last is conservative and states the legal position in the UK; the first item says 'respect the law' but assumes a degree of familiarity with downloading and P2P practice with which most of our pupils will presumably readily identify; the Lifehacker item is  factual; the EFF material seeks to educate from a liberal position.