Category: Intellectual Property

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.

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.

End Piracy? As if…

Think back to January 18, 2012, the day Internet companies led a blackout (it was more gray really) of  their websites in protest against the dreaded SOPA & PIPA bills.  On that day, Google backed a petition with a slogan that sounded so reasonable.  It said, End Piracy, Not Liberty.  It was classically effective because they could count on anyone who wasn’t paying close attention to the issue — and that would be nearly everybody — to think the message makes sense, that of course, companies like Google want to end piracy as long as the methods don’t threaten liberty.  Who wouldn’t agree with that?

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Of course, Google had no intention of doing a damn thing about piracy, and they knew that millions of people who clicked on that petition two years ago wouldn’t be paying attention to the matter by the morning of January 20th.  And since that day, which has been treated as the web industry’s Alamo and Yorktown in one, Google and friends have steadily promoted piracy, which I believe is the opposite of ending it.  So, I guess what I’m saying is that headline, which drew millions of pavlovian clicks, was unalloyed bullshit.  As mentioned a couple of posts ago, a Google search on the term “movie piracy,” takes you to what is now the top result only because Google wants it to be the top result.  I refer you to the earlier post, but this link will take you to an article written in support of  an anti-copyright, libertarian, Koch-funded organization that just happens to be wonderful for Google’s bottom line.  I don’t care if you hate copyright, this is just a tiny example of how dangerous it can be to have one company presume to “organize the world’s information.”  To serve whom exactly?