A few legal stories that might be of interest to followers of the OTW:

From publicknowledge.org: UGC is More Than Hamsters on a Piano is an essay by Michael Weinberg at publicknowledge.org, talking about the "assumption that the UGC is essentially commercially worthless – it is all first grade ballet recitals, dogs jumping up and down, or kids falling off of skateboards. The real action (and money) is around the "real" content. Since the money will only come from the professional content, the concerns of today’s professional content owners (usually having to do with filtering or kicking people off of networks) tend to dominate the discussion." But Weinberg points out that we are not all sitting around waiting for professionals to come and entertain us, and that today's established studios may not have "the best interests of their future competitors at heart."

From boingboing.net: Meet the 42 lucky people who got to see the secret copyright treaty: Fans should be aware that a number of parties are trying to negotiate an international, anti-copyright treaty "that contains provisions that criminalize non-commercial file-sharing; require net-wide wiretapping for copyright infringement and border-searches of hard-drives and other devices; and disconnection from the Internet for people accused of violating copyright." A lot of people, including publicknowledge.org, BoingBoing, the EFF, and others--are protesting the secretive nature of these negotiations.

From Rachel Maddow: Hey, Rachel Maddow follows BoingBoing: could we love her more? Rachel interviews BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin about the Ralph Lauren photoshop disaster--but gets that the real story was the attempted DMCA intimidation of BoingBoing after the fact, when reprinting the photoshopped image to mock it was a classic case of fair use. Because Boingboing's ISP was in Canada, they didn't have to comply with the DMCA, and Rachel immediately gets what she calls "the deeper part of this story", that "ISPs just immediately cave whenever they're confronted by anything like this, and it sort of hurts the first amendment."

Lastly, our own Rebecca Tushnet caught the story that Mattel has licensed "Barbie Girl". For those not familiar with the case, 12 years ago, Barbie sued the Danish pop band Aqua, claiming trademark and copyright infringement. The claim was dismissed and the song was ruled as protected speech. Now, Mattel has licensed and rewritten the song to promote its new line of Barbie products. If you can't beat 'em...?

OTW board members Rebecca Tushnet (chair of Legal) and Francesca Coppa (chair of Communications and Vidding History) and TWC review editor Tisha Turk went down to Washington DC on May 7, 2009 to testify at the DMCA Hearings on Noncommercial Remix. Rule 1201 of Copyright Law prevents the circumvention of copyright protection systems (e.g. makes it illegal to rip DVDs or to hack your cellphone) but also requires the copyright office to hold hearings every three years to find out of this prohibition is adversely affecting anyone. In 2006, the copyright office granted an exemption to film studies professors, because the case was made that these professors need to rip DVDs to make high quality clip compilations to teach their classes. This year, there were a number of new proposed exemptions, including: educators beyond film studies professors (including K-12 teachers), documentary filmmakers, and vidders and other noncommercial remix artists.

The OTW previously submitted a reply comment in support of the EFF's proposed exemption for vidders and other remix artists. Tushnet, Coppa, and Turk went down to support this comment with live testimony. As you might have seen across the internet, the other side--MPAA, studios, the people who make encryption technology, etc--suggested that instead of ripping, professors, remixers, documentary filmmakers and others make clips by filming a flat screen with a camcorder.

For more information:

* Audio files/podcasts of the hearings are available at the U.S. Copyright Office's website and mirrored by the EFF on iDisk. (Our statements are part 2, the Q&A is part 3.)

* Rebecca Tushnet liveblogged the hearings: read the part about noncommercial remix.

* Wendy Selzer of Chillingeffects.org posted about the hearings and also livetweeted them.

* Patricia Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media at American University also blogged the hearings.

* Fred von Lohmann of the EFF has made a YouTube video summarizing the issues and focusing on the OTW and Rebecca Tushnet ("She's Awesome"). He also blogged his legal analysis.

* Rashmi Rangnath weighs in at publicknowledge.org.

March 25, 2009 - Our own Naomi Novik appears on today's broadcast of NPR's All Things Considered, in a a story called Will E-Book Anti-Piracy Technology Hurt Readers? The aired program, as well as a shorter print version, is now available at the NPR website. Naomi is speaking against the DRM [Digital Rights Management] protection on e-books that mean that they can't easily be transferred from Kindle to Laptop to iPhone. Naomi notes that: "The biggest danger to most authors, to most storytellers, is not that somebody is going to steal your work and pass it along — it is that nobody is ever going to see your work."

The Vidding History project of the OTW has now got its own home on our website. The project is committed to documenting and celebrating the 35 year history of fan vidding, and to arguing that vids are a fair use under US copyright law.

Our work toward these ends include:

* A Test Suite of Fair Use Vids, offered as part of the OTW's reply comment in support of the EFF's petition to the Copyright Office for a DMCA exemption for vidders and other makers of transformative or otherwise fair use works.

* Vidding (2008), a documentary introducing people to vidding produced by the Organization for Transformative Works in partnership with MIT and New Media Literacy, 2008.

* The Oral History Project, an ongoing attempt to document the experiences of many of the foremothers of vidding. We would like to have as many vidders as possible involved in this project; if you are interested in being interviewed, please contact us.

* Helping to educate the public about what vids are and why they are fair use by means of articles and presentations.

* ...and last but not least; our dream. A Vidding Archive of Our Own.

Go take a look at our projects! We will be expanding the Vidding History project over the course of the year, so if you are interested in being a part of it, please contact us through the Volunteers contact form.