Joe Merante's Blog

Earlier today, Carl Malamud tweeted a link to a fascinating paper about the evolution and reasons for Gandhi's prescient views and use of copyright law during his life. The combination of historical narrative, interdisciplinary research and discussion, and copyright was enough to take over the start of my Sunday afternoon. Read the abstract and download the full paper by Professor Shyamkrishna Balganesh here . The paper traces Gandhi's views during his most prolific writing periods, and anchors its analysis with examples showing three key phases: personal rejection [of copyright], reluctant engagement and strategic deployment. The first phase largely coincides with Gandhi's rejection of utilitarian philosophy primarily out of concern that minority voices would be drowned out or ignored, along with other reasons. The second is illustrated by the example of granting US and UK rights to a publisher for an autobiographical work, which Gandhi perceived as an appropriate compr...

This post on Techdirt caught my attention this morning for a few reasons. The article outlines the contours of recent debates about "intellectual disobedience," a term used in this video by Nina Paley to combine 'intellectual property' and 'civil disobedience' into an unapologetic stance on copyright infringement for the sake of one's art. While today's copyright laws are certainly in need of more user-friendly reforms (for author and non-author users), I'm not quite ready to go down the abolitionist path that "intellectual disobedience" leads to. The occasional intellectually disobedient use of a work might not be covered by parody, satire, fair use or other (affirmative) defense but such edge cases are a necessary means for courts to (attempt to) clarify a law Congress isn't ready to reform. Taken to its extreme, "intellectually disobedient" use of others' work would be a free-for-all, devoid of even the possibility ...

Would more creators apply permissive licenses to their works if the attribution requirement included some sort of notification that the work was being used (maybe call it CC BY-NO?).  Professional courtesy, really.  While there are simple ways to find your work online, such as via search engine, Google Alert, monitored downloads via registration or otherwise, etc., the onus is still on the original author and assumes the author would be aware of such tools.  Yet reluctance to freely releasing creative work to the wilds of the Internet might abate if some sort of "reuse responsibility" beyond attribution were in effect-- perhaps so the original author can publicize the use, get in touch with the user or become inspired by the remixing.  Fuzzy objectives, to be sure, although in the link below, it is noted that software creators might have technical reasons for staying aware of downstream uses.  Still, a notification requirement begs the question of whether the or...

I’m a lifelong musician and supporter of the arts, online and off.  Music led me to study copyright, which led me to study technology.  The three don’t always play nicely together as anyone who hasn’t had their head completely in the sand for the past fifteen years would acknowledge.  Recently, I attended an alumni event hosted by my undergraduate alma mater, Berklee College of Music.  I spent most of my night discussing copyright law with a fellow alum who works at a rights organization.  I mentioned my legal interests and inevitably we wound up discussing the role of Creative Commons (CC) in the current online ecosystem.  Once he said something along the lines of “Creative Commons is just an arm of Google, and has all the tech companies do their dirty work,” I knew this would be an interesting night.  The rights organizations have an essential role to play, I simply disagree with their litigation choices in a few recent matters and think there are...