Author: David Newhoff

David is an author, communications professional, and copyright advocate. After more than 20 years providing creative services and consulting in corporate communications, he shifted his attention to law and policy, beginning with advocacy of copyright and the value of creative professionals to America’s economy, core principles, and culture.

Family Copyrights with William Hammerstein (Podcast)

Will Hammerstein Part I
Will Hammerstein Part II

As the debate will no doubt rage (or stomp its feet) on the subject of copyright review in the coming year, one subject that will assuredly be on the table will be the terms of copyright (i.e. how long ownership can last). There is a persistent assumption that these terms are somehow the exclusive privilege of large corporations.  As Robert Levine will point out, of course, right now “copyright terms last about ten minutes” because that’s how long it takes for work to be poached on the Internet, but it should also be understood that families and other legacy rights holders have played an important role in preserving the integrity, purpose, and continuity of works for the benefit of generations born long after the creators are gone.  One body of work that has remained relevant and popular are the musicals of Oscar Hammerstein II.

William is the grandson of Oscar II, who gave us some of the most famous musicals in the world, including Show Boat, Oklahoma, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music.  The most renowned of these were of course produced with long-time partner, composer Richard Rogers.  Today, Will Hammerstein is an environmental lawyer, who  sees a link between the stewardship of natural treasures and artistic ones.  Will is also the Executive Director of the Oscar Hammerstein’s Highland Farm, which is a project to turn the home where Oscar wrote most of his work into a museum about the man and the medium.

Will spoke to me via Skype from his home in New York City.

Theme music by Sandy Davis.

Casey Neistat & Fox Redefine the Movie Promo

Okay this is pretty cool, and a really interesting example of what can happen when old media meets new media to produce something extraordinary.  Filmmaker Casey Neistat was offered $25,000 by 20th Century Fox to make a video to promote the release of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  In considering the themes the studio proposed for the project, Neistat responded that he would like to take the money and do something for the people of the Philippines whose lives were overturned by a typhoon on November 7th.  The studio said yes, and the video  below is the result.  Assuming we can take the whole story at face value — and I certainly hope we can — it’s a wonderful example of digital age meets legacy industry to produce something that wouldn’t exist without combining the best of both worlds.  Less than a decade ago, even if a filmmaker like Neistat had the same instincts, the technology simply wasn’t there to support this kind of project.  Kudos to Neistat for his approach, and kudos to whoever it was at Fox who recognized that this video actually fulfills their creative brief.  Take a moment to view.

Hart asks why EFF still dancing in Lenz v UMG.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had my Internet service cut out from time to time, and I’m strongly considering suing my ISP for periodically violating my right to free expression.  Sound absurd?  Good.  Then, I draw your attention to Terry Hart’s recent update in the case known as Lenz v UMG.  What happened was Mrs. Lenz, a grandmother, uploaded a video of her dancing grandchild to YouTube, and an automated system detected the Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy” playing the background, which triggered a DMCA takedown notice from Universal Music Group.  It was an error — music playing incidentally in the background like that would often be fair use — but I’m happy to report the Lenz clan have suffered no psychological damage stemming from the six-week period when the video was offline.  That was six years ago, but as Hart reports, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as the saying goes, is still making a federal case out of it.

The EFF and other forces aligned against artists’ rights like to claim that malicious DMCA notices are rampant, but as Hart has pointed out before, if this were true, why pick a fight over a case as weak as Lenz?  Answer:  because this isn’t about rampant abuse of DMCA (or certainly about any harm done to Mrs. Lenz), it’s about establishing greater burdens for individual creators to protect their works online.  If it weren’t about that, who’s paying EFF’s lawyers to pursue this for all these years?  Hint:  Not the Lenzes.

“So we can ask two questions. Do we want to see noninfringing content become temporarily inaccessible at certain web sites? Of course not. But, at the same time, is a greater than 99.8% accuracy rate acceptable, especially when you’re dealing with tens of millions of notices a month?”

See Terry Hart’s full article here.