Tag: terry hart

HART: Copyright and the Historical Record

In a new post on Copyhype, Terry Hart responds to the general assumption that the Founders would be “appalled” by the state of copyright today.  Personally, I think the Founders would be appalled by the application of the 2nd Amendment today and impressed as hell by the role professional authors and creators play in their Republic–but that’s me.  Hart writes …

“…there’s always a danger with using history. Someone who’s trying to make a point may try to find evidence in the historical record to support that point, so there’s a danger of abuse. And perhaps there’s no period more prone to this type of myth and mischief then the Founding period, the period beginning after the end of the Revolutionary War, through the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, and through the first Congress.”

Read full article at Copyhype here.

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.

Terry Hart Rebuts Rebuttal of IIPA Report on Copyright

As usual, Terry Hart at Copyhype comes bearing wisdom and footnotes in his follow-up post on the IIPA Report indicating that copyright industries contribute substantially to GDP.  From his post:

The reaction from copyright skeptics about the report’s conclusions that copyright contributes significantly to the US economy was, essentially: “Does not.”

The spin seems to be that, yes, industries that create and disseminate copyrighted works may make substantial contributions to the US economy, but that does not necessarily mean that the success is a result of copyright itself. Jonathan Band, writing at the CCIA’s Project DisCo, says, “The report itself does not in any way attribute the success of these industries to copyright protection.”

Hart calls this argument “odd” because it is.  To me, Band’s criticism is like saying the right of free speech has nothing to do with the profusion of citizen journalism, satire, or political debate in America, but what do I know?  Read Terry’s blog, and read it often.  When it comes to the real nuts and bolts of copyright, Terry is a wise, sober voice — with footnotes!  I’m just a curmudgeon with a well-worn thesaurus.

Read Terry’s post at Copyhype here.