Chris Hadfield's Outer Space Version Of Space Oddity Is Back... But It Still Never Should Have Gone Away

from the copyright-law-is-ridiculous dept

A year and a half ago, we wrote about the copyright questions related to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recording an astounding cover version of the David Bowie classic "Space Oddity" while actually in space on the International Space Station. We noted the specific copyright issues were mostly unimportant, since Bowie had signed off on the project. Then, back in May of this year, we were taken by surprise when we found out that the video was coming down because the agreement with Bowie was only for a one-year license (Bowie, by the way, in 2002 predicted that copyright would "no longer exist" by 2012).

Today, Hadfield announced that Bowie has once again agreed to allow the video to return to its official YouTube spot (unofficial copies were all over the place). Hadfield actually discusses some of the copyright issues, and notes that getting the rights to put it back took quite a bit of time.

Thus it was with some regret that we took the Space Oddity video off YouTube last May. David Bowie and his publisher had been very gracious. They had allowed his work, his intellectual property, to be made freely available to everyone for a year, and had in fact worked with us and the Canadian Space Agency to make it happen. There was no rancour, and we removed it from YouTube to honour that agreement.

This sequence wasn’t anyone’s fault. The day we took the video down we started to work again to get permission to get it re-posted. But the legal process is careful and exacting, and thus takes time. Despite countless on-line expressions of frustration and desire, it wasn’t anyone’s ill-will or jealousy that kept this version of Oddity off YouTube. It was merely the natural consequence of due process.

This time around, Bowie and his publishers have agreed to a two-year license, meaning we may be going through this ridiculous process again in 2016:

And now, we are so happy to be able to announce that my on-orbit cover of Space Oddity is back up on YouTube. This time we have a new 2-year agreement, and it is there, for free, for everyone. We’re proud to have helped bring Bowie’s genius from 1969 into space itself in 2013, and now ever-forward. Special thanks to Onward Music Ltd, to the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, to musicians Emm Gryner and Joe Corcoran, to videographer Andrew Tidby, to my son Evan, and mostly to Mr. David Bowie himself.

Once again, this process seems silly and unnecessary. If everyone is so happy about this -- and it's reinvigorated the song and attracted plenty of new interest in it -- why not grant a perpetual license? What possible harm is done in granting a perpetual license so that this process doesn't have to be replicated every few years -- other than to the billable hours of the various lawyers who have to negotiate such a silly thing? Copyright defenders often point to the need for copyright to enable agreements like this, but it seems to be enabling a ridiculously inefficient process, rather than making things easier.

In the meantime, here you go... for at least two more years:

Filed Under: chris hadfield, copyright, culture, david bowie, space oddity

Commander Hadfield's Amazing Cover Of David Bowie's Space Oddity Disappears Today, Thanks To Copyright

from the copyright:-making-culture-disappear-since-1709 dept

A year ago, we wrote a whole post looking at the copyright questions raised by Canadian astronaut, Commander Chris Hadfield, doing a cover version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," along with an astounding music video in space, as he prepared to return to earth. Hadfield, for months, had been a great ambassador for the space program, using a variety of social media to communicate with folks back on the planet about what his day was like. The "Space Oddity" video just cemented his place as a key figure helping to generate interest in the space program through regular public communications with everyone in a very accessible way.

In our post, we noted that while the copyright issues were complicated, thankfully, it didn't really matter "because after a bunch of back and forth negotiations, they got all the permissions they needed directly from David Bowie." Except, as we find out today, that's not fully true. Because Commander Hadfield posted on Twitter this morning that today is the last day for the video online, because they only had a license to use it for one year. As I write, the video is still online, so watch it soon. It's got over 22 million views, and it's about to go away... because of copyright and the idea that everything needs to be licensed. This is really depressing, but it shows, once again, a situation that is destroying important cultural works, rather than helping to make them available. One would hope that David Bowie (and/or whoever else holds the copyrights in question) would recognize just how insanely bad this looks and would "grant" a perpetual free license to keep this video online. Bowie, himself, has had a rather progressive view of copyright for many years. Back in 2002, for example, Bowie declared that "I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing," and further noting that this is "terribly exciting."

Well, it's 12 years later, and copyright still exists, and the copyright on a Bowie song is about to destroy some culture. It would be nice if he was able to do something about it to stop that from happening.

And... now that there's no more license, the copyright questions come back into play... and the answer is that it's still "complicated." The copyright depends on where the video was filmed. Since the International Space Station has different sections in which technically different countries' laws apply. It is believed most or all of the video was filmed in the NASA section, meaning US laws apply. And while the US has compulsory licenses for cover songs, there may be some issues in that Hadfield modified the lyrics slightly (taking out the bit where Major Tom dies...). But, the bigger issue, unfortunately, is that sync licenses -- which allow you to "sync" music to video -- are not compulsory, and need to be licensed.

It is possible that someone could make a fair use argument here -- it's for non-commercial use, it's arguably transformative, it likely helps rather than harms the market for the original work -- but I'm not sure that would convince a judge.

Either way, I hope everyone can agree that it's just sad that this video is disappearing.

Filed Under: censorship, chris hadfield, copyright, culture, david bowie, licensing, space, sync licenses

DailyDirt: Commercial Astronauts

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Canadian "rockstar" astronaut Chris Hadfield, who just returned from the International Space Station, says he's retiring. (Yep, he's the guy who performed David Bowie's "Space Oddity" in zero-g while orbiting the Earth.) While he may be retiring from the Canadian Space Agency, he may not be done with spaceflight just yet, as he sees commercial spaceflight as a real possibility. In the past decade, several private commercial spaceflight ventures have been seriously developing and testing their own spacecraft, and eventually "commercial astronauts" will be needed to help run commercial space missions and space tourism flights. Here's some of the latest news in commercial spaceflight.

• Astronauts for Hire (A4H), a non-profit organization, has selected its fourth group of commercial astronaut candidates. The six new recruits, who are professionals in various fields of science, engineering, medicine, and aviation, will be trained to become research and operations specialists for future commercial spaceflight missions. [url]
• The X Prize Foundation is currently offering a total of $30 million in prize money to the first two teams to land a robot on the moon by the end of 2015. Aiming to spur commercial spaceflight innovation, the non-profit foundation also previously awarded the Ansari X Prize in 2004 to Scaled Composites for its SpaceShipOne, which Virgin Galactic has now developed into the suborbital commercial spacecraft SpaceShipTwo.[url]
• There are at least ten private spaceships in development right now. Here are the ten most promising ones: Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, XCOR's Lynx Space Plane (check out Dutch startup SXC which might give Virgin Galactic a run for its money), Armadillo Aerospace's Vertical Lander, Bigelow Aerospace's Private Space Labs, Stratolaunch's Air-Launched Rocket, the Liberty Rocket and Capsule, Blue Origin's Secret Spaceship, the Dream Chaser Space Plane, Boeing's CST-100 Capsule, and SpaceX's Manned Space Dragon.[url]
• Virgin Galactic is preparing to test its SpaceShipTwo and hopefully launch its first commercial spaceflight in 2014. At least 600 customers worldwide have already reserved tickets, which cost upwards of $200,000. Apparently, tickets recently went up to $250,000 and will remain at that price until the first 1,000 passengers have travelled into space.[url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: a4h, astronauts, chris hadfield, iss, manned space exploration, x prize
Companies: armadillo aerospace, bigelow aerospace, boeing, nasa, spacex, stratolaunch, virgin galactic, xcor

If You Thought Copyright Was A Mess On Earth, What Does It Look Like In Space?

from the copyright-trolls.....-in.....-spaaaaaaaaaaaaace dept

Assuming you haven't been under a rock, there's a decent chance that you've seen astronaut Chris Hadfield's rendition of David Bowie's Space Oddity (with the lyrics conveniently changed to skip the whole dying in space part). The video was released just before Hadfield returned to earth, and completely fit with Hadfield's time on the International Space Station, where he became the world's first serious social media expert from space -- tweeting, Tumbling and YouTubing up a storm. But... filming a cover song and releasing it via YouTube from space had some people wondering: can you untangle the copyright issues here? Thankfully, Glenn Fleishman dug in over at the Economist (which, lamely, still refuses to name their writers, but now provides the "initials" of bloggers, so you can parse out who's who), and explained what a fine mess it is.

The punchline here is that it doesn't really matter, because after a bunch of back and forth negotiations, they got all the permissions they needed directly from David Bowie. But, assuming others start going up into space (yay, private space tourism), this issue is going to be raised sooner or later. Glenn points out that it's kind of messy, because different countries have very different compulsory licensing laws for cover songs, and there are no compulsories for sync licenses, which are needed to put the song to a video. There was also the issue of the International Space Station having different sections "owned" by different countries, and the official agreement says that it matters where creation happens -- so if the video had been done in all different parts of the space station, it potentially could have been a mess (though, it looks like it was all filmed in parts owned by NASA).

While there's no issue with this specific case, Glenn alerts us to a paper from a few years ago that lays out how copyright in space is about to get complicated:

The copyright issue may seem trivial, but the emergence of privately funded rocket launches, space tourism and space exploration hold the potential for more substantive disputes. If an astronaut were to travel to the Moon, an asteroid or Mars on a privately funded spacecraft, the situation would become knottier still, because the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967 applies to countries, not companies or private individuals. J.A.L. Sterling, a London-based expert on international copyright law, anticipated all this in a 2008 paper, "Space Copyright Law: the new dimension", in which he lists dozens more potentially problematic scenarios that could arise, some seemingly risible at first. He asks what would have happened if, on a moon landing broadcast live by NASA across the world, two astronauts were overcome by emotion and burst into song—one covered by copyright. NASA might still be engaged in litigation 40 years later. More prosaically and immediately plausibly, Sterling considers space travellers who put copyrighted material from Earth on a server reachable from space, or engage in rights-violating "public performances" for crewmates. If the first person to walk on Mars decides to launch into "A Whole New World", the rights will need to have been cleared with Disney first.

Yeah, remember Rob Reid's funny sci-fi novel about copyright in space? Perhaps, like many sci-fi books, it will eventually turn out to be an accurate prediction of the future.

Filed Under: astronauts, chris hadfield, copyright, david bowie, internation, jurisdiction, space