Legal Committee

  • OTW Staff in the News

    By Claudia Rebaza on Saturday, 25 August 2012 - 7:28pm
    Message type:
    Media Mentions
    Tags:
    Open Doors Committee, Development & Membership Committee, Legal Committee, OTW Sections, OTW Sightings, Technology

    These past two months have seen a spike in interviews with OTW staff by various media outlets. Here's a rundown on some of the places online where you can read their discussions about fandom, fanworks, and the OTW.

    • Geek Girl Con did an interview with Anna Zola Miller, who serves on the Open Doors Committee. Anna talks about her increased perception of fandom history, the challenges the project has faced, her favorite archived item, and what she's feeling fannish about.
    • Board member Francesca Coppa wrote Fandom: Open Culture Vs. Closed Platforms at OrgZine which also brings up the work of Open Doors and looked at the importance of fans' ability to keep their work from disappearing from online sites. "The social networks of Web 2.0 are mostly for-profit, commercial enterprises; the web is no longer the loose network of university and government servers it was twenty years ago. Fans used to roll their own code and make their own webpages; now others own the ground beneath their feet. And the priorities of these businesses may or may not be the priorities of fans."
    • Rebecca Tushnet discussed the legality of fanworks with Lauren Davis at io9 which formed the basis of a lengthy piece on this issue, required reading for anyone wanting to debate the topic, and sporting a nifty piece of fan art to boot.
    • Development & Membership staffer Aja Romano is delivering some excellent discussions of fandoms and fannish activities over at The Daily Dot. A notable recent piece provided recs to online sites for people wanting to find the next Fifty Shades of Grey, a badly needed guide if some of the rec lists appearing in the media over this summer are anything to go by.
    • Francesca Coppa and Tisha Turk of the OTW's Vidding Committee were the guests on talk show Hearsay Culture on KZSU-FM, Stanford, 90.1 FM, a show which focuses on the intersection of technology and society. They discussed their personal histories in vidding, what transformative works and vids are, the work of the OTW, and what our legal team's effort to secure a DMCA exemption for remixing is all about. Asked what they want the typical non-vidder to do, they exhort listeners to both know their rights and exercise them. (No transcript available).
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  • Reason magazine interview with Rebecca Tushnet

    By Claudia Rebaza on Thursday, 26 July 2012 - 6:36pm
    Message type:
    Media Mentions
    Tags:
    Intellectual Property, Legal Committee, OTW Sightings

    OTW Legal Committee chair Rebecca Tushnet was recently interviewed by Reason magazine and a 7 1/2 minute video of it was posted on their site as well as on their YouTube channel.

    Tushnet discusses the origins of copyright law in the United States and explains the fair use principle, including what factors are looked at when judging whether or not something is infringing. She then points out how fanworks can co-exist with the material produced by content owners as they provide a broader spectrum of storytelling, which many content creators are realizing amplify the reach of their own work.

    Interviewer Nick Gillespie then asks Tushnet about the OTW and its work, and they finish by discussing where the good ideas on copyright law are expected to come from. Tushnet says that it is unlikely to come from the U.S. due to its legislative gridlock, but instead Canadian law offers a more hopeful outlook. While some of its more restrictive copyright law elements were forced on it by the U.S., Canada provides "much more robust protection for personal uses" especially for education and research. (No transcript available)

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  • OTW Represents Vidders And Other Remix Artists at DMCA Anticircumvention Hearings

    By .fcoppa on Saturday, 9 May 2009 - 11:09pm
    Message type:
    Announcement
    Tags:
    DMCA, Intellectual Property, Legal Committee, Remix, Fan Videos

    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.

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