I’ve spent the last few weeks getting my head around the whole notion of cyberspace; particularly with regard to the who/where/what of copyright protection. As a one-time journo who experienced having consumer media heavyweights ride roughshod over my own rights to copy (sign the whole lot away on the back of your cheque, lady. Otherwise there ain’t no payment and yer dog gets it…) I’ve been amazed by the free-for-all on the copyright front. Which is why the whole Viacom/Google opera has been so instructive.
Backstory: Google pays $1.65billion for YouTube, which effectively means that YouTube is now the kid on the block with the big-walleted daddy. So if you were ever going to sue YouTube for copyright infringement, the time is surely now.
Up sails Viacom Media’s legal boarding party with an invitation to attend court for ‘massive intentional infringement of copyright’ plus $1billion for damages.
Google-dad is pushing back, in the hope that the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 will save its bacon. Specifically section 512 which protects service providers from liability for acts of copyright infringement committed by 3rd parties. (Although this patently didn’t save Napster’s hide.)
All goes quiet for a couple of weeks. Then ‘whacko!’ out come the cyberspace army I’ve been hearing about since I started this whole technology module. They’re the Internet Community…the Invisible Ones…the Out There’s. Only now they’re very visible, very here and very *****d off with Viacom
The electronic activists have got themselves very much together and have launched a legal suit against Viacom Media. This after Viacom supposedly issued a video takedown request to Google – with which the service provider immediately complied – only for all parties to ‘discover’ later that the video in question was on YouTube perfectly legitimately.
The argument now is that the video use was ‘protected under the fair use provisions’ of the same copyright law…which means Viacom’s complaint amounted to a ‘misrepresentation’, which leaves it open to damages. Viacom is insisting that it never issued the request for this particular takedown. Although it did ask for 100,000 other videos to be filtered by Google, who declined to co-operate. Makes you wonder how this one got through…Sod’s Law, I guess.
But since courtrooms still seem to operate in a peculiarly old-fashioned way – requiring tangible proof, evidence and stuff like that - I imagine the hunt is now on at Google for the revelatory – and condemnatory – email. A paper trail, in other words…now this, I do understand!
Got me thinking about the whole copyright thing tho…and the realisation that anything published after 1923 is effectively copyright protected. (So much for the odd screen-grab!) Can’t take the credit for knowing this…found it on a very interesting website. The Tartan is the online version of the student magazine for the Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I like it! Very clean, stylish looking site, easy to navigate, loads of interesting info and good writers. We need something like this at Stirling!!
Class Act
Obviously I have a never-before-accessed-but-nonetheless-very-strong masochistic tendency. Nothing else can explain why I roll up to the technology class each week to undergo the ritual tecchie-mauling by my fellow students.
We’ve done the digital camera thing and now it’s the memory-stick thing. My hubby presented me with mine a few weeks ago (and yes, Derek – he had just upgraded his. But I think the term ‘cast-off is a little cruel.)
Anyway…it’s about 2.5 “(dead giveaway!) long, it’s a rather refined gold colour and it’s called VFUEL. Is there anything in this description that would make you fall about laughing? Whatever…this got passed around from person to person causing huge mirth. And then of course, everyone had to get theirs out (some things never change) and there was lots and lots of showing off. All of which was quite wasted on me.
If only my presentation the previous week had created so much focus, interest and active response…although to be fair, it was on social media press releases. And I’d bored myself silly with that, long before presentation day….
Right now, it’s Easter week. Or so I’m told. Up here in my little roof loft, I’m in a death struggle with an essay on ‘Technology’s Impact on PR’. Terminal, if my own experience is anything to go by….
2 comments:
Ownership of the Internet is, for me, a scary premise, and that's what this is obviously about.
The recent purchases of what are vehemently social media cyber hang-outs (not just normal websites or a message board somehwere) like My Space and YouTube feels, well, wrong to me.
The big difference between traditional mediums like TV, Radio, newspapers and internet when I was a kid was that the internet was mine. It was there, waiting inside my monitor, for me and, if I was so inclined, by me.
I'm sure many others feel the same way, the same personal connection, the same individualistic experience, the same feeling of freedom.
I have continually been told the Internet is still new, raw, yet to make its biggest splash and profoundly unregulated, but recent takeovers resemble more than a few tip-toes the other way.
The internet community you mentioned are a boisterous lot, but how long can they hold out? Won't whatever power they have slowly diminish? The more internet content is controlled and commodified, acess widened and techno-fear barriers broken, that community will be a minority, soon squashed and promptly forgotten.
Boo I say!
John
Heya Trudy,
The thing that I have found the hardest to come to grasps with in terms of the PR Technology class (besides the 9am lectures) was the fact that we were told to use it to research academic pieces of writing. For so many this means copy and paste!!!
Im guessing miicrosoft clearly were not thinking to far into the future about Copyright when they came up with that wonderful tool as part of Windows.
For so many students being told to use the internet (not for access to journals) for research is like giving them a fairy wand. I have continualy had it drummed into me to academicaly reference everything that I write in uni work therefore the internet was never an option so copyright did not really enter my mind but now that i think about it i suppose plagerism would be a simial thing.
Well thanks to Turnitin there will most definitely not be any copyright infringement when it comes to hand ins.
Debz
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