Richard Hooper to lead Digital Copyright Exchange

The Government has today announced that Richard Hooper, formerly of Ofcom and the BBC, will head up a feasibility study to develop a Digital Copyright Exchange, one of the key recommendations in the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property. With over 20 years experience in the information and communications industry, Hooper seems a sensible choice for this project on the face of it; he is certainly no stranger to challenging projects, having led an independent review into the Postal Services Sector.

The Digital Copyright Exchange (DCE) is envisaged as a means to boost economic growth in the creative sector by lowering the costs of licensing and improving access to copyright material for businesses and consumers. However, the Review recognised that:

“A range of incentives and disincentives will be needed to encourage rights holders and others to take part [and that] governance should reflect the interests of participants, working to an agreed code of practice.” (Recommendation 3: http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf)

As a matter of opinion, a functioning digital rights marketplace should ensure the following:

1. That rights holders are fully supportive and willing to allow their content to form part of the DCE;

2. That the right technical people are involved to ensure that the technological infrastructure is fully functional and supported (too often in the past technical expertise around copyright-related schemes has been overlooked, to great detriment);

3. That licences available to purchase are regulated – one of the main problems faced by those who want to use other people’s material is the debilitating sum which is charged, often leading to the failure of many projects such as documentary films. An affordable and regulated licensing structure is key to facilitate the success of this scheme.

The Government has also indicated that it wants the DCE to be self-sustaining and free at the point of access for users.

The feasibility study will look at the licensing challenges facing different sectors and should take all these issues on board, basing its findings on evidence from a number of stakeholders. Views must be acquired from not only the creative industries themselves but also from consumers and individual creators to ensure a suitable balance of opinion. The study will run in two stages: firstly, defining the problems of copyright licensing across the sectors, and secondly to bring forward appropriate industry-led solutions with a view to how these could be implemented. Findings from the study will be reported to the Government before the summer 2012 Parliamentary Recess and will provide the groundwork for a functioning exchange.

Image 'Exchange_Place' from Flickr by _SiD_, used under CC-BY-NC-ND licence

Preview Pictures II (Google Thumbnails)

In a judgment handed down yesterday, the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) confirmed and expanded its position on Google thumbnails. In last year's 'Vorschaubilder' (preview pictures) decision (BGH I ZR 69/08, see Birgit's IPKat post here), the BGH held that Google's image search service does not infringe copyright in the pictures shown as 'thumbnails' in the search results. Since the copyright owner in that case put the pictures on the web and failed to take any steps to prevent them from appearing in Google's image search (which I understand is easy to do), she was deemed to have granted an implied licence for the pictures to be made available to the public by appearing in Google's image search results.

Now the court went a step further. The factual scenario was as follows: The copyright owner, a photographer, gave permission to someone else to make one of his photographs available on the Internet, presumably without requiring to take technical steps to prevent the photograph from appearing in Google's image search results (the written judgment is not available yet, and the press release is not entirely clear on this). Third parties then copied the photograph and made it available on their own websites. Google image search results then showed the photograph linking to the third parties' websites. The copyright owner complained and later sued Google, but to no avail.

The BGH considered that a search engine cannot distinguish pictures made available with the copyright owner's permission from those made available without the copyright owner's permission. It concluded that since the copyright owner gave someone permission to make his work available on the Internet, he is deemed to have given Google an implied licence to use the work in its image search service no matter what, even if the source of the preview picture is a website whose operator is in breach of copyright for making the work in question available.

Very kindly, though, the BGH pointed out that the copyright owner is free to sue those for copyright infringement who unlawfully made the images available on the Internet. Times were when one might have thought that would go without saying...

I agree that Google did not infringe copyright, but I confess to being confused nonetheless. If the third parties made the photograph available on their websites without permission and are thus infringing copyright, why is Google upon notification of the copyright owner not required under the principles of 'Störerhaftung' (secondary liability for contributing to someone else's breach of rights) to remove the photograph from its image search service as far as those websites are concerned? Surely it must be possible to exclude the third parties' websites from the image search while keeping the thumbnail from the website of the legitimate licensee?

Any comments by our dear readers would be very welcome.

Yes Means Yes

Please don’t ask my permission to re-use my work. YOU ALREADY HAVE PERMISSION. Please copy, share, re-use, redistribute, edit, modify, sell, etc.

Asking permission wastes your time, and mine. You might not mind wasting your time. Many people think asking for permission is a “sign of respect.” But what about my time?

Information (including all of my work) is not scarce. Attention (time) is.

Emails get lost in spam filters. They get lost amid the hundreds of other emails in my inbox. I’ve been known to take vacations and actually get away from my computer for a few days – something I should be doing more often. So what happens if you don’t get any response to your permission request? Do you not reuse the work? A work that has been explicitly made Free, in the hope that you will reuse it? Not reusing the work harms the work, and harming a work is disrespectful. Delaying reusing the work likewise harms the work, in smaller increments.

Suppose a “respectful” email asking for permission which has already been explicitly granted doesn’t get caught in a spam filter or lost in some other glitch. Suppose it actualy makes it into my inbox. Now I am obligated to respond – the requester essentially said, “I’m not going to use this work unless you respond.” As “respectful” as this sounds, it places an unfair burden on me. The work, and any use of the work, should not be held hostage pending my checking and responding to email.

It is not “respectful” to make me do more, unnecessary work.

More importantly, asking permission is bad for the work itself. If you refuse to reuse the work unless I send you an email, you are blocking an expression or distribution of the work. How many days or weeks or months are you willing to put it off pending my ability to process email? Or worse, someone thinks it’s “respectful” to require me to sign papers and mail them back. Yes, this happens. I have such paperwork sitting right here, telling me that unless I sign it and mail it back, they won’t use the work they already have explicit permission to use. How is it “respectful” to make me jump through more hoops before they redistribute or remix a work I’ve made explicitly Free?

If you want to show respect, please send me something like this instead:

Dear Nina,

I thought you might like to know I’ve reused _________________ in _________________. Check it out at (insert URL here). Thanks for making the work Free!

Love,

Someone Who Understands Yes means Yes

Ahh, lovely. Thank you!

A complaint I hear often is that nowadays, thanks to the inerwebs, not only do artists “have to give their work away for free” but they also “have to be businessmen.” HA! One goal of freeing my work is to free me of paperwork, contracts, and the role of manager – and what is having to oversee and administrate every re-use but management? In the “Intellectual Property” model, artists either have to do much more negotiating and managing and paperwork, or they have to pay someone else to do it for them. They have to be businessmen, or hire businessmen. And hiring businessmen (agents, lawyers, etc.) still requires much paperwork, negotiating, and contracts.

Some still insist that I’ve “maintained more control” over Sita Sings the Blues. The point is I have maintained no control over it, and that benefits me. The point is I don’t have to be a business(wo)man. The point is that other people, the crowd, distribute the work, and cost me nothing.

As long as they don’t ask for permission.

TSA Refuses To Provide Body Scanner Info In Lawsuit - Claiming Copyright Prevents Handing Over The Info

Last year, we mentioned that privacy advocates EPIC were suing over the TSA's decision to use the naked scanners at airports. Reader jilocasin alerts us to a bizarre update in that lawsuit. Apparently the TSA is refusing to provide specific evidence to the court first claiming that it was "sensitive security information," but also saying that it won't hand over the info because it'scopyrighted material.




Source Link: Techdirt