Posts Tagged ‘copyright law’

Until further notice AP articles are banned from Cahoots.

Some people just have no idea how the Internet works. I suspect it may be because they’ve never used it correctly or at length. The Associated Press has sent seven DMCA takedown notices to a blog called "The Drudge Retort" after small snippets of text and quotes were used under fair use. Remember, these weren’t entire articles, and the authors linked directly to the AP. From Cadenhead:

The Retort is a community site comparable in function to Digg, Reddit and Mixx. The 8,500 users of the site contribute blog entries of their own authorship and links to interesting news articles on the web, which appear immediately on the site. None of the six entries challenged by AP, which include two that I posted myself, contains the full text of an AP story or anything close to it. They reproduce short excerpts of the articles — ranging in length from 33 to 79 words — and five of the six have a user-created headline.

Here’s one of the six disputed blog entries:

Clinton Expects Race to End Next Week

Hillary Rodham Clinton says she expects her marathon Democratic race against Barack Obama to be resolved next week, as superdelegates decide who is the stronger candidate in the fall. "I think that after the final primaries, people are going to start making up their minds," she said. "I think that is the natural progression that one would expect."

If you follow the link, you’ll see that the blog entry reproduces 18 words from the story and a 32-word quote by Hillary Clinton under a user-written headline. The blog entry drew 108 comments in the ensuing discussion.

Do you see what I did there? I just quoted another article from THE INTERNET. I didn’t quote the entire article, just an interesting snippet. You can choose to follow the link to their article to read the whole thing, click some ads, and make them some good money for their content. On the Internet, anything that matters gets linked to.

And now, AP, you will pay dearly. You will not get any more links or clickthroughs from this site or many others, because you’ve really pissed us off. We happen to like free speech, and we happen to enjoy using copyright law to our advantage. I’d like to remind you that filing false or malicious DMCA takedown requests is illegal under Title 17 of the US Code.

The LATimes has a good oped published last week that asks just that question:

“Jon Healey correctly points out that the debate over intellectual-property theft is complex because we are often dealing with “non-real properties.” These properties cost nearly nothing to produce, and an infinite number of people can use the same property at the same time. And yet, we still want to treat them as if they were “real” property.

Significantly, some of these non-real properties have major effects on human welfare. Take, for example, the formula for “oral rehydration therapy,” a mixture of salt, sugar and water. Although it could potentially be copyrighted, it has saved more lives in the Third World than almost anything else. The world is lucky that this formula is in the public domain, not copyrighted and subject to use charges that people who need it couldn’t afford.”

The present system treats these copyrighted works as a funny kind of real property with no carrying costs, taxes or significant fees. Without carrying costs, copyrights remain in force almost forever - even though, over time, the demand for the copyrighted material can fall to almost nothing. As the demand decreases, the value may remain, but it becomes effectively unavailable to, as the Constitution puts it, “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” Witness all the copyrighted books, scientific journals, audio works and visual works that are out of print or otherwise unavailable because copyright law prevents the new, low-cost methods of distribution from being utilized.