derivative work

Awesome librarian (and friend) Jenna Freedman has been on the LCSH (“Library of Congress Subject Headings”) for a while for its many failures to recognize current topics and language. She just posted about the new and revised headings, including a new heading for Fair use (copyright). 150 Fair use (Copyright) [May Subd Geog] [sp 85046891] [...]

So at the end of this long post about Expelled and copyright infringement, I appended some rewritten lyrics to the tune of “Spirit in the Sky” : When I copy and they tell me “desist”, Gonna go to the place that’s the best When I get caught in a lie, Goin’ up to Designers in [...]

update 4/16: Both a commenter here and also P.Z. Myers have reported that Expelled filmmakers Premise filed on Monday a DJ (“declaratory judgment”) motion on XVIVO‘s copyright claims against them — i.e., asked a judge to look at the evidence & say that they are not infringing. Premise v. XVIVO, N.D. Tex., 4/14/2008. Here are [...]

4/11: I had previously (3/27) drafted a brief commentary on Expelled‘s use of copyrighted material. Then, I unposted it while I checked on something, to try to make it more complete. I hadn’t gotten back to it, when the other shoe dropped: One of the copyright holders’ whose material was used in Expelled wrote a [...]

Josh Timonen wrote a detailed synopsis of the movie “Expelled”, the creationist film that tries to argue that creationist views are “unfairly” excluded from the academy. What piqued my interest about this particular post (there have been hundreds by now about how bad the movie is, the deceptiveness of the filmmakers, P.Z. Myers’ being prevented [...]

Machinist at Salon has the scoop. Yaay Nine Inch Nails! It’s been a while since I’ve broken out my NIN collection but this inspires me to dip back in. It’s not just a web download, either; there’s a torrent at PirateBay. Wow, this sort of means that NIN is to BitTorrent was Mr. Rogers was [...]

* Judge White withdrew his order requiring the shutdown of wikileaks.org. See also 3/1 bits blog. (NYT 3/1) * The music industry has yet to pay artists any of the money it has received in settlements and lawsuits; the artists are pissed. NY Post 2/27) * The owners of the game scrabble are pissed off [...]

The Ninth Circuit has weighed in on Perfect 10 v. Google (captioned Perfect 10 v. Amazon.com on the 9th Circuit case download website). The opinion is by Ikuta, who (IMO) got it right on the Fair Housing Council decision yesterday. It’s a long opinion, and I’m still working through it. But here’s a summary of [...]

Last week a copyright imbroglio broke out at a science blog which had written a post critiquing mainstream coverage of a science article; the blog had posted a figure from the paper to demonstrate bad science writing in the mainstream media. Wiley sent a C&D; the blogger agreed to take the material down (actually took [...]

Copyright paranoia is, truly, everywhere. Reading a NYT article about websites that track the Iraq war dead, I noticed this: The Iraq Page (iraq.pigstye.net) is the obsession of Tom Willett, a software developer from Bloomington, Ind. The site includes a single news account for each United States service member killed in combat, with a fluttering [...]

A perfect example of how copyright paranoia can be used as an excuse to stifle the very uses which copyright law ought to foster: KSFO asks liberal critic to stop using audio clips

A great decision from the 2d Circuit in another case about Jeff Koons. Collage artists haven’t had a lot of caselaw to work with before Blanch v. Koons, and it’s reassuring to get a positive spin on transformative artistic uses. More analysis coming.

Judge Alex Kozinski, renowned for his copyright and trademark jurisprudence, will be delivering a lecture on “Fair Use Revisited” Thursday, Sept. 21, 2006, at Washington College of Law, American University, Room 603. Judge Kozinski is always entertaining as well as enlightening, so this is an event not to be missed. More information at

The first stage of our new fair use project is online — the Fair Use Network website, at http://fairusenetwork.org/ . At present, we’re focusing on consumer resources, and version 1.0 includes resources for recipients of copyright cease-and-desist letters or DMCA § 512 takedown notices. Similar resources for trademark will be coming online later. Version 2.0 [...]

(1) Today’s NYT article on “tough questions” for gubernatorial candidates on abortion: all the gubernatorial candidates quoted are men. [NYT 6/5] (2) Mercury Rising discusses what happened to Wen Ho Lee after the racist government debacle a few years back. [sideshow 6/4] (3) I don’t believe I’ve plugged Ann Bartow’s “Fair Use and the Fairer [...]

5/3 update: variant version of this post (an older version of the post but marked-up with hyperlinks) + other blog commentary from Joy Garnett @ newsgrist … liveblogging the meeting and this session @ iptablog – The Comedies of Fair Use meeting wrapped up a few hours ago. Among the best presentations were the art [...]

I just got around to reading the weekend’s Washington Post Google Print editorials, pro (Mary Sue Coleman, UMich Pres) & con (Nick Taylor, Authors’ Guild). Short editorials, and I suppose the format limits their ability to go beyond rhetoric (“access to vast libraries of content” … “this is a socialist plot!”) into any actual legal [...]

More on Google and Siva’s response (and my responses to Siva): Recap: In response to publisher anxieties & thinly-veiled threats of litigation, Google is implementing an opt-out provision in its scan-copyrighted-library-books program, and delaying scans of copyrighted books until November. [google blog] This has been widely reported as Google backing down. See, e.g., “Chilled by [...]

Compare sizes of starships & other objects from various sf universes at Jeff Russell’s STARSHIP DIMENSIONS. Only complaint: Firefly and the other vessels from the series are not yet there. My spouse asks if this isn’t copyright infringement, since all the designs for fictional ships are individually copyrighted. Fair use, I assure her.

two great tastes that taste great together: (critiquing) intelligent design, and derivative works. Ernie Miller rewrote Pastor Niemöller’s classic work for the modern era of attacks on science: First they came after biology and I did not speak out because I was not a biologist Then they came after geology and I did not speak [...]