5 Resources on Copyright Activism (The DMCA STILL Needs to Die)

I’m cranky today about copyright and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  As folks probably know, I post regularly at Wired.com’s excellent GeekDad blog.  Over the past year, I’ve posted a lot about Star Wars: The Clone Wars, mostly because it’s my 6-yr-old’s favorite show.  Helping me in that task is LucasFilm, which a few months back added me to their PR list, and so I get clips and stills from each episode, which I’m allowed (like many other folks) to post to Flickr and YouTube.

Over the weekend, apparently an overzealous lawyer from The Cartoon Network noticed that one of the clips had gotten over 4,000 views, and sent YouTube a takedown notice.  (Even though I had gotten the clip from LucasFilm, and even though I included their copyright statement.  A classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing.)  YouTube’s default policy on these matters–more or less mandated by the DMCA–is to side with the lawyer and against the uploader.  This specific conflict, between publicity reps sending out material for sites to post, and followed immediately by lawyers issuing takedown notices, is a particular problem in the music industry, as this TechDirt post from yesterday explains.

This little episode isn’t particularly academic in nature, although academics in film, television, and media studies have had fair-use problems.  Computer scientists run afoul of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions.  Librarians are now expected to master intricate judgments about copyright and fair use.  And your students probably know someone who’s gotten a takedown notice.

The consequences of my  incident aren’t particularly dire, either–unless, of course, The Cartoon Network keeps making this mistake, in which case I wouldn’t be able to write about their show.  Which seems stupid, since if there’s ever a demographic sweet spot for a show, it’s GeekDad & Star Wars.  But it’s probably not a great loss to world culture or anything.

All of which is a long, and unusually crabby preamble to 5 links about copyright that everyone in higher ed should know:

• The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, founded by Wendy Seltzer at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (which turned 20 yesterday!) defends the rights of internet users, and can point your activism in the right direction.  Of particular interest here: “Unintended Consequences: Ten Years Under the DMCA” and the “Takedown Hall of Shame.”
• Educause has 112 separate resources devoted to the DMCA’s impact on higher ed.
• Public Knowledge’s resource page on the DMCA includes an excellent series of videos on the way overly restrictive copyright laws are chilling innovation.
• Students for Free Culture promotes innovation-based approaches to intellectual property and copyright.

For inspiration, see this xkcd comic, Austin Kleon’s “25 Quotes to Help You Steal Like an Artist,” or this excellent video on “The Evolution of Remix Culture,” by Julian Sanchez:

Image by Flickr user Ioan Sameli / Creative Commons licensed