Skip navigation.
Home
Synchronicity Arkive
Home » Discussion Forums » Public Forums » Synchronicity Discussion

Copyright

Submitted by Karl Tune on Tue, 2005-08-02 20:07. Synchronicity Discussion

Ownership of ideas and work is important. Copyright protects the creator from theft and plagerism.

Yet there seems to be great debate about how far copyright laws extend and what they cover.

» previous forum topic | next forum topic

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
looney runes's picture

excercise your copy rights

Submitted by looney runes on Sun, 2008-02-03 16:58.

Here is a link to a post on the ECC website called "FBI Warning - Exercise Your Copy Rights". I can't wait to include this at the beginning of my next synch project.

*Excerpt* When copying DVDs with DVDShrink, one great thing you can do is save disk space by substituting a still image for a video segment. It's great to take out that irritating FBI scare tactic that clogs up the first minute+ of your DVD, not to mention also removing the user-unfriendly restriction on skipping the track. But sadly DVDShrink can't change the length of that portion -- if you substitute it with a black screen, you still have to look at a minute+ of a black screen. So, I made this improved (and educational) version.

Text (for you search engines... and the blind):

FBI WARNING

Copyright owners, and not the FBI, include these
warnings of severe civil and criminal penalties to
scare you. In real life, you've probably already
committed dozens if not hundreds of copyright
violations. Has the FBI busted you yet? No.
In fact, you can legally reproduce copyrighted
materials, without permission, in cases of Fair Use.
And you're allowed to make one backup copy of
this entire DVD if you purchased it. Legally.
Did they tell you any of that? Of course not.

EXERCISE YOUR COPY RIGHTS




bonus features

» login or register to post comments
arkiver's picture

Learn about Copyright...

Submitted by arkiver on Mon, 2005-08-08 19:01.

Check this out:
http://www.digitalconsumer.org/overview.html

peace,
--mj
arkiver

The Magic Theatre
for madmen only
Price of admittance your mind
Not for everybody.

» login or register to post comments

Copywrite and plagerism

Submitted by Marco on Wed, 2005-08-03 14:45.

Hi Karl:

Have to admit, plagerism has been out for almost a 100 years, in film and music. Very few have attempted lawsuits pertaining to plagerism as you can find blatent coincidences in every film and CD out there.

I remember the lady, about 12 years back, who sued Steven Spielberg, stating that he stole her story to make the film "Amistad". As soon as it was revealed that he in fact took the story from a book made years earlier than hers (proving that SHE was the plagerist), she immediately dropped the suit (but was in turn countersued by the other author, kind of ironic)

Examples in music: Almost every music out there now takes soundbytes from other musicians to lay down their new tracks.

Several musicians have countered with lawsuits during the past 20 years: Huey Lewis (I Wanna New Drug) vs Ray Parker, Jr. (Ghostbusters); Public Enemy (Fear of a Black Planet) vs. Madonna (Justify My Love). In the former, the complaintent was awarded, in the latter, I last heard that there was a settlement out of court.

To synchers, "Mama's gonna make all your nightmares come true", "I need a dirty woman, I need a dirty girl" and "Are there any queers in the theatre tonight" - Pink Floyd; "Mama just killed a man", "God save the queen", "Death on two legs", and "I'm just a poor boy and nobody loves me" - Queen; "Let's go crazy, let's get nuts", "Called my old lady for a friendly word", "Maybe your just like my mother, she's never satisfied", "I'm not a woman, I'm not a man, I'm something that you'll never understand" and "Baby, baby, baby, what's it gonna be, is it him (HER) or is it me?" - Prince. They are all speaking of the same thing = Norman Bates and his Mother.

So, plagerism is nothing more than another's version of the same story (and helps in finding the synchs).

The only form of non-plagerism is a proclaimed remake (film or music), in this instance the maker admits to having a complete lack of creativity and is simply redoing it.

How many rappers and hip hop artists are using remakes in their CDs. Most of the time, you only have to grab two CDs (each containing an exact particular song) and note that the rest of the songs' lyrical content on the newer CD have plageristic attributes from the prior CD.

Copyright infringement is bad, no doubt about it. But only if you plagerize copyrighted material to make money and only if the material was actually copyrighted.

Whether the copyright infringement is due to a bootleg CD/DVD or Napster-type of unit (depriving the makers' of deserved funds); a musician using lyric's or musical arrangements of another's "copyrighted" material (copyrighted material is defined as 'actually' submitting your material to the copyright office and 'actually' paying for the rights to the subject matter - not 'simply' annotating on the CD/DVD that it's "Copyright 2005 - a musical group"); allowing another person to enter a theatre without paying, loaning a CD/DVD to another person instead of telling them to get their own (again, depriving the makers' of deserved funds).

I, myself, am all for Digital Rights Management, and subscribe to various movie download pay sites to watch movies (and check for synchs at my leisure). In a short period of time, the movie (which might I add is lower grade than DVD) expires. If I liked the movie alot, I have no problem going to the store to purchase and add to my collection. If I didn't like the movie, I simply hit 'delete' and move onto the next one (I already paid to see the movie at a reduced rate so the makers' already made out).

Most makers do not sue for copyright infringement as they in turn plagerized an earlier entity and would cause a 'domino effect'.

Synchers do not deal in plagerism but they do ride the line when it comes to copywrite infringment.

The people who copy a DVD and insert a new soundtrack to make the synch are in violation of the maker's of the movie and selected musical tracks, BUT ONLY if they give out (or, especially) sell their product to other synchers.

If a syncher does it out of love for the craft, for THEIR OWN PERSONAL enjoyment, and not for monetary gain; then nothing can be said.

I checked with a few lawyer's in NYC (friends, in fact) and they stated that like submitting an invention to a patent office - a work of art, whether a visual (i.e., Painting, Video, Movie, or Photograph), an idea (i.e., Short Story, or Book), or a piece of sound material (i.e., musical arrangement, lyrics, soundbytes, etc.) must be registered in it's particular central office in order for it to have any standing in the legal system.

Additionally, if YOU do register something as YOURS and it's found out that someone else beat you to it, than this registration CAN be used against YOU in a court of law.

As I have never heard of any movies not actually being copyrighted, there are a few Musical Acts that only annotate a copyright verbage on the product without actually registering it (nothing more than a scare tactic). When you copyright it, you also state the use and quantity of the finished product in many cases, and it tends to get costly (especially if it's international (without a major studio to pay for it); if the product does poor in the music shops; and if gets no airplay on the radio to spur sales).

For these various reasons, my book cannot be registered copyrighted to me, it's blatantly using images from other makers' movies and lyrical excerpts from other makers' songs. The only item that is copyrighted for five years (with the option to extend if I want) is the name "The DeConno Report", this way it cannot be used in any content without my permission.

Due to the nature of my book, I cannot copyright the contents nor can I make any money from it; therefore, it's like I said earlier "for the love of the craft".

And "for the love of the craft" is the reason that there isn't musician's suing musician's for "stealing" material; they are all working towards a common goal - using material to create synchs.

Marco

» login or register to post comments
arkiver's picture

plagiarism?

Submitted by arkiver on Thu, 2005-08-04 18:22.

I think part of the problem comes about with the difficulty of defining creativity. It seems to me that creativity is only poorly understood and since it is a fairly fundamental idea when it comes down to intellectual property, in a lot of ways the idea of IP (Intellectual Property) is built on a foundation of sand... with the tide coming in.

Every act of perception involves creativity. Who is the buddha who makes the grass green? You are. There's no guarantee that the "green" you see is quite the same as the green I see. What's more, the human perception system seems set up specifically to exclude things... it functions as a kind of filter from the constant bombardment of input on our sensory systems. What's more, the whole system of media/commerce in which our creativity is exchanged, art movies music etc., is itself an intellectual construct, following rules we have agreed on. And it also relies heavily on everything that has gone before to create meaning and coherence where otherwise there might be none.

So what is this rule called copyright exactly? If you review the Consitution, copyright is essentially a bargain, a balancing act, between the needs of society for access to the individual act of creativity, the needs of the creator for access to "the past" (ie. what's gone before), and the needs of the creator for compensation, ie. the means to "make a living." The original term of copyright was 7 years. It is now the life of the author plus 70 years. What's happened is that gradually the one aspect of that bargain, the needs of the creator for compensation have pushed the other aspects into a much lower priority.

Furthermore, since a corporation is a "legal" person and can own intellectual property, a lot of those copyrights are now concentrated in the hands of what is essentially a legal fiction, whose sole purpose is to extort $$ from society.

In a situation like that, is it still "stealing" to try to reclaim some of that original bargain? Don't get me wrong, I very much see the value in artist compensation... I just have an issue with corporations, who really contribute very little to the creative process, using copyright law to accumulate and then essentially tax access to what is really the rightful intellectual, cultural, and artistic inheritance of human society.

And what's more, most of the violations that go on occur in situations of scarcity, generally artificial scarcity. Take movie "piracy." New movie comes out in a theatre, generally first in the US, and then gradually the rest of the world. If you don't care to go to the theatre, well, tough, you have to wait. The movie itself is done, completed as an intellectual product. The thing being controlled now is ACCESS to it. Why shouldn't I be able to watch it at home, if I'm willing to pay for it? Well, that would throw off the corporation's "window"?

Plus, there are plenty of other pieces of intellectual property law under assault in this battle over copyright. Take the doctrine of 1st sale. If I buy your book, under law, that means I can turn around and sell my copy to someone else. You have no say in that, and copyright law, as it stands now, says that's OK. I can't keep a copy if I choose to sell it, but other than that, you don't get control of it. DRM removes that option. What's more, DRM controls how you can use what you paid for. Now, if you buy a cd, you can make a mix tape, rip to .mp3, etc. The original IP owner cannot tell you what you can or cannot do with that. You could light it on fire, if that's what you really wanted to. But DRM changes that. Want to take your iTunes track into Windows Media format instead? Or convert it to .mp3? etc. Nope, not if the DRM doesn't allow it.

The other thing that gets me in this debate... take remixing. Is there any difference at all, from a neurological standpoint, from the actual art of learning to play guitar with your own 2 hands, and taking samples of guitar notes and constructing a song? There haven't been many studies on it that I know of yet, but I honestly don't think there is any difference, other than the physical pieces themselves. If that's true, then why do we say the one is more deserving of protection than the other? And if the songs that are created are not the same, even slightly, then why does the one "owe" the other anything, really? Take Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby... that was the first case I read about where someone was sued for sampling. OK, I can definitely see the use of the sample, but seriously, anyone who thinks that Ice Ice Baby and Queen's Under Pressure are the same song, or that any thinking individual could mistake those, is nuts, plain and simple.

In the end, the act of having to compensate those creators, especially to compensate a legal entity that exists solely to extort $$, results in a diminished cultural creativity, and in the end that hurts everyone. If more people realized that, then maybe we wouldn't be headed to this cultural lock-in. I buy a lot of DVDs, but it pisses me off when they try and get you to pay twice or more for things... and no, I don't feel bad copying those discs. As for plagiarism, there's a world of difference between just putting your name on something and the act of reinterpreting, remixing, enhancing, etc. that seems to go with the net culture, and I'd think that of anyone, someone who synchs would be able to see that.

peace,
--mj
arkiver

The Magic Theatre
for madmen only
Price of admittance your mind
Not for everybody.

» login or register to post comments
Key's picture

Well Put

Submitted by Key on Wed, 2005-08-10 13:57.

I agree 100% with what your saying here. It seems like people just don't see the importance of the needs of society (at leaste in reference to art). I think alot of this comes from the way people define artists. Especially in america it seems that almost every artform is percieved to be a means to make money. That is in order for you to even be considered a musician you have to have been payed for playing music before (same with every other artform). I also strongly agree with the difficulty to define creativity. IMO the strict definition of creativity is a falicy (like unbiased journalism). Because if you were to hold people up to this strict definition the only people to ever create anything would be mothers having kids. Even that exaxmple could get holes shot in it's logic. Anyway I'd like to rant some more but I gotta go. Just wanted to say that what you wrote was well thought out and I agree.

» login or register to post comments
arkiver's picture

several story posts lately...

Submitted by arkiver on Tue, 2005-08-02 20:56.

I've posted a couple story links lately to the copyright issue... I especially like the most recent one that tries to lay out for folks who may not know why this is important.

Also, I read this/last month's book of the month, DarkNet, a little bit ago and it is one of the best books I've read in a long time on that issue. I still luv Larry Lessig's stuff and his blog is awesome, but DarkNet nails it in a way that Lessig doesn't... Larry's always a little more abstract and "high principle." Plus the DarkNet website has some background detail on my PVR, the Replay (with it's incredibly awesome, undeniably kewl commercial skip feature, which, in case you hadn't guessed, I totally love). So, worth checking out if you've got time/inclination.

I especially liked the example of the camcorder that cuts out when you're recording your baby's first steps because he walked in front of the TV and there was a copyrighted show on.... chillingly possible and all too probable while most people have no idea it's coming even. I told a friend of mine about it, who just had a baby... not happy about the idea at all. Eye-wink

peace,
--mj
arkiver

The Magic Theatre
for madmen only
Price of admittance your mind
Not for everybody.

» login or register to post comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.