Disqus - Latest Comments for John Bickerton

Re: Why Fair Use Suffers on YouTube

John Bickerton — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:42:55 -0000

I don't know Jonathan, I think your Fair Use guidelines are somewhat misleading. The size of the clip and acknowledging the source don't really secure your usage as Fair Use.

Quoted from the Copyright Actâ¦
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The distinction between âfair useâ? and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.
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William Patry is senior copyright council for Google. This is what he has to say about Fair Use. I've edited it (you can read the whole post at http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2007/05/barton...) He's a very good writer and it's a good blog.
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Patry says....
I have been studying fair use seriously for over 25 years. I have read every English and U.S. fair use/fair dealing decision I could find, many of them many times over; I have read a voluminous amount of commentary on the subject; read and re-read the legislative history of Section 107 and spoke to those involved in that process; testified before Congress on the subject, and as a Congressional staffer, I was heavily involved in the 1992 amendments on fair use and wrote the House Judiciary Committee report on the subject; as a Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights I went to Brussels to discuss with European Union officials how fair use works and how it might work with software reverse engineering; as a law professor I spent years teaching the subject; .... [snip]

Yet, despite all this concentrated attention, I doubt I understand fair use much better than when I was a law student... ...there are reasons anyone might feel uneasy about coming to grips with the subject: it is ad hoc, fact-oriented, allegedly completely equitable in nature, and dependent on a shadowy weighing of vague factors, to say nothing of the luck of the draw in the decisionmaker.

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I would caution about depending too heavily on "fair use" as an argument for using content which is not your own - at least not without legal council.

Re: My Experience with the Music Industry

John Bickerton — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:21:30 -0000

Jonathan,

It's funny to read your post because Tower Records, which went bankrupt, was precisely that beautiful type of record store where you could browse hour after hour. They stocked everything even the most obscure records. But they are gone because piracy and file-sharing destroyed them. You can't blame everything on the labels. People who download music illegally have to accept responsibility for their actions. And one of those is that retail record stores are fast growing extinct. You can't find an obscure CD at retail now because it costs too much (too few units are sold) to make it economical. The bittorrents and illegal downloaders have forced retail record shops to be limited to just the mega-star offerings.

Re: My Experience with the Music Industry

John Bickerton — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:24:02 -0000

Jonathan, just a quick follow-up to your follow-up...

Record distributors and labels didn't make special deals with Big Box stores at the expense of Tower Records. Tower was a major player - it was its own big box if you will. Yes, big box stores priced CDs as loss leaders but Tower's prices were always good and competitive. Big Box didn't kill Tower. You can argue that Amazon contributed to Tower's demise - that I think is accurate but the primary reason Tower is no more is that the CD itself has a value close to zero in today's market and the reason that is is because file sharing and torrents have reduced it to that.

It's a shame because a whole generation of kids will now grow up without having any major music acts of their own. This is the cultural fallout of file sharing. The music business is going to be about small regional acts with a small radius of attraction. This generation will not have its own Bruce Springsteen in other words. It's not cost effective to blow an act up to a national level. The only place doing that is American Idol - that's the only place an act can gain national notoriety. Problem is the music on American Idol has no edge and really no musical interest. It's more like 15 minutes of national notoriety that's totally driven by non-musical factors.

(The movie industry had a banner year in 2007 but they are scared sh*tless by file sharing. They know they are next. It's already starting to effect their bottom line).

Re: 2007/05/25/youtube-car-crash/

John Bickerton — Thu, 31 May 2007 10:20:31 -0000

The reason NJTA wants it removed doesn't have to do with money. It has to do with the fact that a death occurred and the video was not meant to be viewed for people's "entertainment". There's not much difference watching this video than watching a snuff film.

Is the video of the state putting to death a felon by electrocution in the public domain?

Come on people, if that was your father in that crash, would you like the fact that hundreds/thousands of strangers were mindlessly watching the footage? Maybe we should rename YouTube - "VoyeurTube".

Whether this lawsuit will fly is another question, especially since YouTube removed the video when asked. I think it points towards the fact that YouTube is being asked, through all of these suits, to take more responsibility for the content that gets uploaded.