Copyright law in the U.S. was created in 1790, edited in 1831, updated in 1909 for “motion pictures,” and extended to unpublished works in 1976. Which means, according to the current Register of Copyright Maria Pallante, who leads the U.S. Copyright Office, that it is high time for an update.

“We always love it when law is brought up to speed with technology,” Josh Mendelsohn of Silicon Valley’s political advocacy organization Engine.is. “Hopefully we’ll get some some good legislation out of it.”

The review is welcomed by those looking for more freedom and less corporate control over the very stuff of our culture: digital content.

“This is great news for groups like my own, the EFF, and Public Knowledge,” Sina Khanifar, who led the White House cellphone unlocking petition drive and sees this as an opportunity to address the DMCA at the same time. “We’ll be pushing strongly for comprehensive Section 1201 reform via a grassroots campaign at FixtheDMCA.org. The DMCA’s unintended consequences on our rights to modify and repair the electronics we buy, and to remix and make fair use of copyright content could easily be fixed as part of a larger Copyright reform act.”

Whether that actually happens is subject to long months of debate and discussion. But Rep. Goodlatte said in a press release that “there is little doubt” the current copyright system is challenged by new technology, and that a wide review of copyright laws — and related enforcement mechanisms — is needed.

That’s precisely what Pallante, who had testified before the House Judiciary Committee last month, said in a recent lecture on the state of copyright law. She also addressed the need for reviewing the DMCA and its application. Corporations have used the DMCA to take down links, because the DMCA says that content-sharing and social services are responsible for the content their users post.

“The next great copyright act must … serve the public interest,” she wrote. “It must confirm and rationalize … the ability of authors and their licensees to control and exploit their creative works, whether content is distributed on the street or streamed from the cloud.”

The public interest part sounds hopeful to those who want greater freedom for users when it comes to digital content and digital devices — not so much the control and exploitation bits. But those two sides, of course, will form the basis of the battleground.

“We know the movie and music industries have been spending lots of resources on this,” Engine’s Mendelsohn told me, referencing two combatants likely to be on the control side at the coming hearings. “But we in the tech community have spent a lot of time on this as well, and now we are part of the process.”

“There is much work to be done,” Rep. Goodlatte said.

Indeed.

photo credit: opensourceway via photopin cc

News agencies seem to understand the concept of copyright fairly well, especially when it’s their copyrights that are being violated. That’s especially true for French papers — which have threatened legal action against Google for posting a title, blurb, and link to their stories.

You’d think that taking photos off another website and not just using them but actually posting them to Getty Images and reselling them would be a pretty obvious no-no.

You’d be wrong.

Photographer Daniel Morel took riveting photos of the devastation caused by the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. So riveting that the Agence France-Presse took them off Twitter and actually uploaded them to Getty Images, according to Reuters. Then the Washington Post — a Getty client — used the photos on its website.

Both the AFP and WaPo are named in the lawsuit, but it’s hard to argue that the Post did anything wrong. Most news agencies — VentureBeat included — use image-publishing sites and assume that the digital rights are taken care of. (I mostly use Flickr creative commons photography.)

District Judge Alison Nathan ruled in a summary judgement that both news agencies have infringed Morel’s rights, but the case has not yet gone to trial. He also clarified that while Twitter does allow the retweeting of images — which is in a sense re-broadcasting — the network’s terms of service do not allow for the downloading and reselling of images.

And yes, that’s the well-duh part.

photo credit: jakedobkin via photopin cc

The Church of Kopimism (Get it? “Copy”-mism?) was recognized by the state just before Christmas.

Laugh if you like, but the “free-as-in-freedom” and copyleft crowds have long had a quasi-religious fervor about their activities. Regard, if you will, public figures such as Cory Doctorow or Richard Stallman; are they not prophets and priests in a manner of speaking? Do they not proselytize and preach?

The Church of Kopimism just makes it all formal.

The church’s site, which is temporarily down as of this writing due to a glut of traffic from Slashdot, says that in its religion, “Information is holy, and copying is a sacrament. Information holds a value, in itself and in what it contains, and the value multiplies through copying.”

The movement started in 2010 with Isak Gerson, a 19-year-old philosophy student. The church’s application made the rounds within the Swedish government three times before the organization was successfully recognized as an honest-to-goodness religion.

“Being recognized by the state of Sweden is a large step for all of kopimi,” said Gerson on the church’s site. “Hopefully, this is one step towards the day when we can live out our faith without fear of persecution.”

If file-sharing is your jam, you can still call yourself a member of the church. The organization states it doesn’t have any formal initiation process or membership requirements; “you just have to feel a calling to worship what is the holiest of the holiest, information and copy,” reads the church’s website.

The Church of Kopimism’s services are called kopyactings. In these going-on, celebrants share files and remix to their hearts’ content.

Now if only BitTorrent clients could be recognized as a holy sacrament, we’d all have a bit less to worry about.

Many thanks to our own, dear Heather Kelly for Photoshopping the Swedish Pope up there, and apologies for any blasphemy or heresy we may be committing in the name of immature humor.

via torrentfreak