Contest-Winning Poster To Promote Copyright Protection... Copied From Another Artist

from the define-irony dept

Reader A alerts us to this amusing story out of Taiwan, where it turns out that a student who won a contest put on by the country's Intellectual Property Office, involving creating a poster to promote strong copyright protection, has been stripped of his prize after it was discovered that the poster was copied from a Dutch artist. The student has been ordered to return the approximately $1,600 he was awarded. What's not clear is if the student was really just pranking the Intellectual Property Office or what. Separately, there's this conundrum: if the Intellectual Property Office felt that a copied poster was the most successful in promoting respect of copyright, by taking away the prize are they actually harming their own case?

Filed Under: copying, copyright, taiwan

Marketplace's Misleading Report On Fashion Copyright

from the not-the-reporting-we'd-expect dept

We've been covering the extremely misguided idea for fashion copyright for a while now. If you're just catching up, the fashion industry can't copyright its designs in the US, and the industry has thrived because of that lack of copyright. It helps do a few different things: specifically encouraging more and more innovation and new designs, while also segmenting the market and spreading trends faster. And yet, a few designers (including those caught copying others) have been pushing for a special government monopoly to limit competition and slow down innovation. There's simply no justification for it -- and many in the press have been pointing that out. Yet, the word on the street is that after years of failed attempts, this fashion copyright bill has a pretty good chance of passing, despite the fact no one involved can point to a single reason why it's needed. What's really stunning is that whenever the press seems to talk to supporters of this bill, I've yet to see or hear any of them, ask them about all this research on how copyright would harm the industry, or ask them even to explain why such a copyright is needed in such a thriving industry.

American Public Radio's Marketplace show recently ran an interview with professor Susan Scafidi, who's been one of the major backers of fashion copyright. While I'm not a regular listener to Marketplace, Jay Rosen recently wrote a piece explaining why he thinks it's one of the worst programs on the radio. I don't know enough to agree or disagree, but I'll say that this interview doesn't do it any favors, and is hugely problematic in how incredibly misleading it is. The interviewer, Kai Ryssdal, regularly confuses a few topics and doesn't challenge some whopper assertions from Scafidi. It's pretty sad.

It starts out with Ryssdal talking about counterfeit goods, and then asking Scafidi:

Can you copyright a design? I mean, you can't copyright a book title, can you?

Already, we're starting out on the wrong foot. Counterfeit designs and design copyrights are really two different topics. Counterfeit goods that pretend to be designer products violate trademark laws, in that they're falsely pretending to be a work by someone else. The fashion copyright question has nothing to do with the counterfeit market. It's about other designers and some "fast fashion" houses that create similar (but cheaper) designs targeting the lower end of the market. Counterfeiting is really a trademark issue -- and is already against the law, but has nothing to do with copyright. Conflating the two is really bad, and confuses the issue totally, falsely giving the impression that fashion copyright is about protecting designers from counterfeit goods sold in alleyways.

Scafadi's response mentions trademark, but does so in a way that implies that using trademark in such cases is a "creative" use of the law: She does nothing to point out the vast difference between counterfeit goods and fast fashion copiers:

Kai, no, you cannot copyright a fashion design in the United States at this point. However, I have been very involved working on legislation that would permit copyrighting of fashion designs, or rather a very, very short-term form of copyrighting -- a three-year copyright. A good fashion lawyer needs to know the basics of the intellectual property system, but also get creative and borrow from areas of intellectual property law that might apply. We're talking about the trademarks that protect labels and logos, for example. So it's about getting creative with the lot out there and learning to apply it to the special needs of the fashion industry.

An interviewer who actually understood the issues would challenge the vagueness of the statement, and the easy conflation of counterfeits and fast fashion copiers -- which the copyright law is targeted at. Instead, Ryssdal goes right back to implying that counterfeits were the problem, leading Scafadi to then make totally unsubstantiated claims about "harm" from counterfeiting:

Trying to shut down counterfeits and knock-offs is a little bit like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. I think that the consumer doesn't always understand the potential harm from carrying that fake Louis Vuitton purse. And the harm is particularly intense when it comes not to the big companies, but to the little ones, the ones whose names you might not even know but whose designs are stolen, sometimes even before they can get those designs to market.

Again, someone familiar with the topic would dig in and question this, especially since study after study after study has suggested this isn't true at all. Who needs facts? The studies all seem to show the same thing. The "harm" to brand name producers is not found. Most people buying counterfeits know they're counterfeits -- so it's not as if they're being deceived (what trademark law is supposed to prevent). Furthermore, the studies have found that counterfeit purchases are aspirational, rather than substitutes. That is, the people who buy the counterfeits really want to buy the real version, but know they can't afford them... yet. However, a very large percentage eventually do buy the legitimate version. If anything, the counterfeits act as market segmentation and promotion for the brand name designers. Scafadi ignores all of this research, and Ryssdal simply takes her assertion as true.

Ryssdal then finishes off the interview, by asking Scafadi to explain the "movement" she's trying to create, where she makes some ridiculous, and frankly insulting, claims about the fashion industry, and how it needs to be "protected" because it's a part of our "culture" now whereas it wasn't in the past:

The idea of design being part of our culture is also part of what's making it more possible to respect and protect design. Once upon a time, fashion was that frivolous thing that girls did, that women did, maybe some gay men did, but surely not the upstanding members of the bench and bar who were attired in their pinstripes or their black robes. Now, as fashion becomes more and more part of American culture, it becomes something that we respect, and therefore something that we protect, as a key element of our economy and as a creative medium that we find enchanting and engaging. So fashion law is catching up with how the culture is starting to perceive fashion.

My grandfather worked in the garment industry in NYC for many years, and I don't think it was ever considered a "frivolous thing that girls did, that women did" etc. It's been a pretty serious business for quite some time in New York. And you don't protect something with copyright because it's "something we respect." Copyright is designed to serve one purpose and one purpose only: to create the incentives to spur innovation ("to promote the progress"). This is basic stuff that both Scafadi and Ryssdal should know and should admit. Considering that the fashion industry is highly competitive and highly innovative, there isn't any actual evidence that such a copyright is needed. And Ryssdal never asks any such question about it, and instead helps Scafadi make the case by pretending the whole copyright issue has something to do with counterfeits. It's a disappointing and misleading piece of journalism, which Scafadi abused to push her "movement" by misleading listeners.

Filed Under: copying, copyright, counterfeiting, fashion, journalism, kai ryssdal, susan scafidi

How Social Mores Can Deal With 'Unfair' Copying, Even In Absence Of Copyright

from the being-neighborly dept

One of the complaints that we hear often from various publishers is the idea that, without copyright, other sites could simply copy all content. In fact, this is the big complaint we keep hearing from newspapers these days -- the idea that they do all this expensive "reporting," and then along comes some "blog" that just copies the work, adds a bit of commentary and gets all the traffic. I tend to point out that this is a silly position to take. The thing is, I say that even though I've experienced being on the "other" side of this discussion, and not with a smaller site, but a larger one. For quite some time a publication (that will remain nameless) that is larger and more well known than us had a habit of "rewriting" stories that were found on Techdirt, as well as a few other moderately popular blogs, without any credit. It became quite obvious that this was happening -- especially on stories that I would sit on for a couple weeks for various reasons, only to post them and see a very similar story pop up six hours later on this other site. The timing was uncanny. I finally asked a writer at the site about one such story, and was told that the editor had sent him my story, but said that since he did additional reporting on it, they felt no need to credit me -- and even claimed that this was the same stance that "real reporters" took, such as the AP and Reuters. Of course, that's not quite true, and the AP just changed its credit policies, so that it will clearly credit any publication that publishes a story before they do.

Now, I can already hear critics of Techdirt furiously writing their "you hypocrite..." comments, but let me finish before declaring that. At no point did I think this was wrong, and it most certainly was not illegal. But I did think that it was not very nice and not very neighborly. One of the nice things about many blogs is that they're quite generous with "hat tips" and giving credit to other sites where they find things. Those links may not have much overall impact, but it's just a social nicety. At one point, I tried to make this point to an editor at that other publication -- again, trying to point out in as friendly a manner as possible, that it was the nice or neighborly thing to do to simply give a little "found via" or "so and so alerted us to..." link. My point wasn't that they had to do this, or that not doing it was "harming" me in any way. In fact, it was unrelated to us directly. I pointed out that from a perception standpoint, I was actually worried this would hurt that other publication's reputation. I pointed out that I wasn't the only one noticing this, and that some other sites were as well -- and that the potential "cost" of having people criticize them for "not being nice" over such a practice -- even if it was perfectly legal -- could be quite high as compared to the "cost" of providing a simple hat tip.

Eventually, two things happened. A few stories were written on other sites about this publication, falsely accusing it of "stealing" stories from other sites. I didn't think those stories were accurate or fair, because no stories were "stolen," but it did create a reputation issue for the publication, and in response that publication quickly became much better about giving "credit" to where it found the stories, even when it did significant reporting on its own. In my eyes, the reputation of this site increased quite a bit, not because it was obeying any law, or doing what it "had" to do -- but because it started doing the nice and neighborly thing to do.

I was thinking about this again, after reading Cory Doctorow's recent column for Locus Magazine, where he discusses someone who got upset with him for reposting public domain advertisements that others had scanned and uploaded to a community that discusses such things. The main complaint was that people felt (incorrectly) that Cory had reposted such things "without credit." After pointing out that there was, in fact, credit, everything was fine. Cory spends most of the article discussing why "permission" isn't needed -- but I actually think that this story, and my experience above, highlight a separate point that is really important:

Even in cases where there is no intellectual property right, social mores, social expectations and desire to keep one's own reputation, can actually solve such issues.

Believers in strong copyright act as if this is impossible or that it never happens. But that's not the case. In both my example above, and in the situation Cory faced, there were no intellectual property rights at stake. There was no legal obligation to credit whatsoever. But there was tremendous social pressure to do so. There's actually been some serious economic research on this topic, and Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for exactly this type of research -- showing that social mores within certain communities can often act as a better regulator of "public goods," than any government mandated privileges or property rights.

Does this mean that copying without credit is stopped entirely? Of course not. But it does show that it is not, as some people claim, a "costless," situation. There can be a tremendous cost to reputation in doing so. It's why people have an inherent negative reaction when they hear stories about comedians "copying" each others' jokes, or any other situation where someone tries to take credit for something that someone else did before them. And, in the end, these things tend to work themselves out, without relying on an overly broad form of government protectionism.

Filed Under: copying, culture, social mores

Why Big Companies Almost Never Notice Disruptive Innovation

from the follow-the-money dept

Paul Graham has written one of his typically worth-reading essays about why Yahoo! went from the darling of the internet world in the mid- to late-90's to whatever it is today (an also-ran's also-ran). I don't have much to say on the main point of the essay, so if you're interested in that, go read it. However, what did catch my eye, was one little aside about trying to get Yahoo to buy Google soon after Google came on the scene:

I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search. He told me that it wasn't worth worrying about. Search was only 6% of our traffic, and we were growing at 10% a month. It wasn't worth doing better.

I didn't say "But search traffic is worth more than other traffic!" I said "Oh, ok." Because I didn't realize either how much search traffic was worth. I'm not sure even Larry and Sergey did then. If they had, Google presumably wouldn't have expended any effort on enterprise search.

Whenever we talk about innovation and things like patents, one common refrain is that no innovation would occur without patents because big companies would immediately copy the technology and destroy any up-and-comer. We've pointed out plenty of times that this simply isn't true. For a truly disruptive innovation, big companies often won't even notice you until you're way ahead of them -- at which point copying is fruitless. Hell, for nearly the past decade now, Yahoo's tried every which way to "copy" Google, and it got them nowhere in terms of actual market share (actually, it got them so little that they recently gave up and outsourced it all to Microsoft).

The problem is encapsulated in the little exchange between Graham and Filo above (and, I've actually heard nearly an identical anecdote from some folks at AOL who looked at buying Google in '98/'99 as well). If a company is big enough to be the "feared" competitor that people always worry about, it's because they're making a lot of money from something. When a disruptive innovation comes along, they usually don't care because they're blinded by the cash cow that they already have. In fact, the really disruptive innovations are scary to these big companies, because it they usually look like they'll undermine the cash cow. Elsewhere in the post, Graham notes that before Yahoo! bought his company in '98, he showed Jerry Yang a new offering he was working on that would optimize revenue on shopping search -- but he notes that Yang didn't care:

Jerry didn't seem to care. I was confused. I was showing him technology that extracted the maximum value from search traffic, and he didn't care? I couldn't tell whether I was explaining it badly, or he was just very poker faced.

I didn't realize the answer till later, after I went to work at Yahoo. It was neither of my guesses. The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If they merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less.

Real innovations threatens cash cows, and one of the most difficult things for any company to do is undermine their own cash cows. So stop worrying about some big, successful company copying your idea. If it's really innovative, they probably won't even notice it... until it's too late.

Filed Under: copying, disruption, innovation, patents
Companies: google, yahoo

US Copyright Group Caught Red Handed Copying Competitor's Website

from the photo-hunt dept

Why is it that the biggest "defenders" of copyright are always the ones caught infringing on others' copyrights? As a whole bunch of you have been submitting, US Copyright Group -- the publicity seeking effort from DC law firm Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver that is suing tens of thousands of people for alleged copyright infringement in an effort to get them to pay up via "pre-settlement" letters -- appears to have a bit of a problem with understanding copyright itself. TorrentFreak is showing how USCG appears to have blatantly copied the full HTML for its "settlements" website from a competing operation called Copyright Enforcement Group. USCG had set up a site at CopyrightSettlement.info that had code that was so obviously copied from CEG that it included CEG's copyright statement, images and phone number for some of the time. Since then, much of the code has been "scrubbed," but plenty of CEG's code was still there. Here's the image TorrentFreak put together noting the... uh... obvious similarities (you can click for a larger view): And it's not a case of the two operations being related or sharing information. TorrentFreak contacted CEG about this, and was told:

"Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are not associated with the US Copyright Group and they are not authorized to use Copyright Enforcement Group materials."

Someone else was told that Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver will be receiving a cease & desist shortly. I wonder what sort of "pre-settlement" option will come with that letter.

Filed Under: copying, images, websites
Companies: copyright enforcement group, dunlap grubb & weaver, us copyright group

Death At A Funeral Leads To Lawsuit In A Courtroom

from the who-do-you-believe dept

It's pretty common for people who think that "ideas" can be owned to get upset when someone else makes a movie or a book that has a similar idea to one they had. These often lead to lawsuits that quickly go nowhere. It's actually quite rare to find a lawsuit over the idea of a book or movie that has legs, and it usually has to involve some detailed evidence. For example the famous Buchwald v. Paramount case involved a situation where Paramount had specifically optioned a very similar story (to what became Coming to America) from Buchwald, involving the same actor (Eddie Murphy) and director (John Landis) who eventually made the movie. That case showed direct involvement of many of the parties. Most of these cases are more along the lines of "hey, I had that idea and I sent it to movie studio X, so they must have seen it and copied it." Those don't get very far.

However, THREsq has the details on a lawsuit from a woman who does a half decent job of suggesting her lawsuit might be slightly more like Buchwald's than others -- though there are some really wacky aspects to this lawsuit, and I doubt that she'll win. This case involves Pamella Lawrence, who apparently wrote a book about an embarrassing thing (where her clothes were stripped off) that happened to her at a funeral in Jamaica which was caught on film. Her book had the catchy name "Caught on Video ... The Most Embarassing Moment de Funeral, July 11, 1994, Jamaican Volume 1." Two movies, with the much catchier name "Death at a Funeral" have come out in the last few years (one in the UK, and another remake in the US -- neither of which did all that well). Lawrence claims both were based on her book and video. At times, her lawsuit seems to go off the deep end. As THREsq describes:

The woman, Pamella Lawrence, is representing herself in court and has filed a lawsuit stuffed with outrageous claims, including racism, a plot to eradicate the female population of urban cities and allegations of inside jokes within the movie that were specifically intended to humiliate her.

Yes, apparently, because the first thing you want to do when infringing on someone's copyright is write into the script jokes intended to humiliate the person. Most of those claims seem like absolutely ridiculous stretches. However, as THREsq notes, this shouldn't automatically be relegated into the "nutty pro se" lawsuit bin:

Yes, many of the claims stretch reason, but Lawrence has also gone to extreme lengths to craft a 54-page complaint that almost looks and feels as if it was drawn up by a $500-an-hour attorney. She cites applicable laws and case citations (although none are required in complaints), copyright registrations, numerous exhibits and perhaps most impressively a frame work intended to bypass the legal pitfalls that typically trip up those asserting idea theft in Hollywood.

It still seems like a longshot, but she does describe meeting with studio execs, and even getting involved in a legal dispute previously that ended in a settlement. That all makes for much more interesting reading than the typical such lawsuit, but it still seems pretty thin on actual evidence of anything in the complaint. But, there's also so much pure ridiculousness in the lawsuit that whatever credibility is built up in the other parts may get lost in the deep paranoia. Again, from THREsq's summary:

Lawrence claims the defendants intended to destroy the "female competition" from the "inner city" in relevant markets by distributing the film, that Hollywood has a consistent pattern of discriminating against women as evidenced by the fact it took 82 years for a woman to win best director at the Oscars, and that this case is an example of why there are so few minorities at Sony Pictures

Yeah, that's not quite how you go about making yourself a credible plaintiff. On top of that, the "similarities" seem incredibly weak as well. Just because there are some generic similarities in characters or parts of a story, it doesn't mean that infringement or breach of any contract occurred. Still, if you want some entertaining reading in the form of a lawsuit filing, here you go:

Filed Under: copying, death at a funeral, movies

For Staunch Copyright Defenders, Big Singers From Big Labels Seem To Copy From Others A Lot...

from the just-saying... dept

Reader Dan points us to a long, but fascinating article by someone tracing a number of stories involving famous Western pop stars copying famous songs that originated in Cameroon, without any credit (or, of course, money) -- including the song by Shakira that is currently the World Cup theme song -- which some folks did some online detective work to track down its origins:

Ze Bella who had retired from the Presidential Guards in 2002 was enjoying a quiet retirement in his village when he got a call from an acquaintance in France informing him that Shakira had just released a version of Zangalewa. This information was soon confirmed by Emile Kojidy another Golden Sounds alum now living in the United States. They were both right.

A few days earlier, the Internet had been inundated with buzz about the new song by Columbian pop star Shakira titled "Zaminamina" which was rumoured to be the official anthem for the FIFA 2010 World Cup. To many listeners, the song was eerily familiar and many bloggers and journalist sought to find out the origins of the song....

To Cameroonians and many African, the origins of the song was no mystery as they instantly recognized it as a remix of "Zangalewa". Thus began a frenzied online campaign to alert the world that this was not a Shakira original but a remix.

After the evidence became overwhelming, and people started complaining, Shakira's label (Sony) was forced to come to the table and settle (some believe that FIFA pushed them to make sure that the song was "cleared" before they would use it as the World Cup official song). Now, I, like many don't think there's anything wrong with musicians building on the works of others. It's how music has pretty much always been created. However, it does seem very hypocritical for all these big labels and big musicians to be whining about copyright infringement, when it appears that they try to get away with it themselves when they can.

Filed Under: cameroon, copying, music, shakira, world cup
Companies: fifa, sony

AP Sues Others For Copying Its Reporting, But Has No Problem Copying Bloggers Without Citation

from the can't-admit-the-bloggers-beat-you dept

You may have seen the story we recently had about a woman suing Google after she got hit by a car while following Google Maps' walking directions. In that post, we linked back to Danny Sullivan's post about this story at Search Engine Land (where he noted that Gary Price had tipped him off to the news). In our post, we recommended people read Danny's full writeup, highlighted some of the points he made and added a bit of our own analysis. Of course, it's a hot story, and so lots of other publications wrote up their own versions of it as well, and Danny is now pointing out that the vast majority of mainstream publications did not credit him at all with breaking the story -- some of whom even used the images that Sullivan created in their own stories without credit.

Of course, the one I find most interesting is the Associated Press. The story published by the AP basically repeats a lot of what Danny put in his report, but fails to mention that Danny had the story first, and did a lot of the journalistic legwork in understanding what the story was about. Now, I've gone over this issue before in the past: and I don't see any legal reason why others should be required to cite their sources, but do believe it's the neighborly thing to do, and tends to lead to goodwill back in your direction as well.

But, when we're talking about the AP, this is an organization that has sent DMCA notices and threatened a blogger with legal action for linking to AP stories along with a headline and a short (35 word) excerpt. This is the organization that has claimed it was planning to sue others for creating similar stories and specifically sued All Headline News for supposedly rewriting its stories. This is also the same AP that thinks it gets to define fair use, and that means that any use of 5 words or more is not fair use. This is the same AP that claims that creating an entirely new artistic work based on an AP photograph is, in no way, fair use.

Yet, this AP has no problem making use of Danny's original reporting, without even so much as giving him credit?

Filed Under: bloggers, copying, hot news, journalists
Companies: associated press

Time To Live In Reality: People Are Going To Copy; So Build A Better Business Model

from the indeed dept

Rose M. Welch points us to an interview with Cory Doctorow, where he discusses his decision to give away all of his books as free downloads (which, as you hopefully know, has been quite successful for him). As Rose notes, one of his quotes aptly sums up the basic position we've taken here at Techdirt for years:

As a practical matter, we live in the 21st century and anything anybody wants to copy they will be able to copy. If you are building a business model that says that people can only copy things with your permission, your business is going to fail because whether or not you like it, people will be able to copy your product without your permission. The question is: what are you going to do about that? Are you going call them thieves or are you going to find a way to make money from them?

This is what's been so frustrating about this debate for so long. The focus, by many in certain industries (especially the music and movie industry), has relied so much on the "calling them thieves" part, rather than figuring out better ways to make money. Sure, if there were a way to stop unauthorized copying, that would make lives easier for those companies. But that's a pipe dream. It's not possible. And while it may take more work, once they stop complaining about it, and start realizing that there are ways to leverage that copying as free or cheap creation, promotion and distribution, suddenly it becomes an opportunity, rather than a threat.

Filed Under: business models, copying, copyright