Virgin og Creative Commons sagsøgt i Texas

Det måtte ske før eller siden. Virgin Mobile Australia - et datterselskab til Richard Bransons medieimperium - fandt for et par måneder siden på en - i mine øjne - lige lovligt smart kampagne. Idéen var at bruge folks cc-licensierede billeder fra fotodelingstjenesten Flickr til at illustre kampagnens budskaber ("Are you with us or what?"). I sig selv var sådan set slemt nok, men kampagnen har en hånlig og ubehagelig tone over sig, og det er tydeligvis ikke noget individeren på billederne ville have ønsket at medvirke i.

Virgin var klar over vilkårene idet Virgin kun brugte cc-attribution licensierede fotos. Attribution (eller navngivelse på dansk) kræver at brugeren krediterer ophavsmanden på behørig vis. Det vil sige at billederne gerne må bruges kommercielt - og det gjorde Virgin da også, selvom krediteringen også var utilstrækkelig.

Men Virgin glemte at der også er andre love der beskytter folk på fotografier end fotografens ophavsret. Man er f.eks. nødt til at sikre sig at de mennesker, der optræder på billederne, er indforstået med at deltage i en reklamekampagne. Det gør man gennem en såkaldt model release. Og det havde Virgin ikke gjort. Nu har en af fotograferne sagsøgt Creative Commons og Virgin fordi han føler sig ført bag lyset. Her følger en tydelig forklaring på problemet fra Creative Commons hjemmeside.

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Mike Linksvayer, September 27th, 2007

Many people have asked us for information about the lawsuit prepared to be filed in Texas against Virgin Mobile and Creative Commons. The plaintiffs of the lawsuit are the parents of a student whose image in a CC-licensed photograph was used by Virgin Mobile in an advertising campaign and the photographer who took the original picture of the student and posted it on Flickr. We have prepared the FAQ below, which should answer many of your questions. We also recommend that you read Creative Commons CEO Lawrence Lessig’s blog post about the situation.

Has Creative Commons been sued?

Yes, Creative Commons has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed in a Texas state district court.

So what has Creative Commons been sued for?

The complaint alleges that a photographer, Justin Wong, took a picture of a student, Alison Chang, and posted it on to Flickr. The photographer posted the photo under a Creative Commons Attribution license. He selected that license from within Flickr, via one of the site’s “Set a license” pages, which gives all users the option to license their photos under any of CC’s six copyright licenses. Virgin Mobile in Australia then used the photographer’s picture in an advertisement (that is, commercially). Although the photographer licensed the photo to the public for commercial use under one of CC’s commercial licenses, Virgin’s commercial use of the picture apparently surprised him. So now he is suing CC, claiming that we failed “to adequately educate and warn him … of the meaning of commercial use and the ramifications and effects of entering into a license allowing such use.”

Of course, users do not have to license their photos when they use Flickr; CC licensing is a special option within Flickr for only those users who are specifically looking to grant certain copyright rights to the general public. The set of CC license options available within Flickr includes three “noncommercial” licenses, which are clearly marked as such (full page screenshot). The “Set a license” pages within Flickr also link to the Creative Commons site which explains, in detail, how the different licenses work.

Is Creative Commons liable?

No.

Do you have any authority for that answer beyond your own (some might say self-serving) views?

Well, listen to the lawyer who brought this case in his interview with CNN. At approximately the 2:16 mark of the interview, he’s asked how there could be a lawsuit here given that the photographer’s license authorized commercial use. “The commercial use has really been blown out of proportion. It’s really irrelevant to our case,” he says. “What’s important here is that Alison has a separate and independent right of privacy.”

That’s a pretty sensible answer by this lawyer. The lawsuit is also against Virgin Mobile (specifically, Virgin Mobile USA, LLC and Virgin Mobile PTY Ltd.). The complaint alleges that Virgin Mobile used a photograph of a student commercially without getting permission from the student or her parents. That claim does not involve copyright law, it involves the rights of publicity. As we say in our Creative Commons licensing FAQ, Creative Commons licenses say nothing about rights of publicity.

In his CNN interview, the photographer’s lawyer did not talk about the claim against Creative Commons.

So then are you happy?

Totally unhappy. The photographer in this case alleges that he misunderstood our license. Anytime that happens, we’re not happy. Our aim is to make this copyright stuff simpler.

So what are you going to do?

We are always looking for ways to improve Creative Commons licenses, and we will continue to make changes to the licenses when we think we’ve found an improvement that can be made.

Does this lawsuit mean that the Virgins of the world can use my CC-licensed work any way they want to?

We don’t think so. First, if like the majority of CC users you chose the “noncommercial restriction” when licensing your work, no Virgin should want to have anything to do with your work without asking you for permission first. Second, now that this lawsuit has received so much attention, if you’ve released a photo of a person under a CC license (or under no license at all), you could reasonably expect that no Virgin would consider using that photo commercially without making sure the person pictured in the photo is OK with that.

But there you go again with the word “commercially.” I thought you (or at least the lawyer suing you) said “commercial use … is really irrelevant to our case.”

That’s true in the sense that this lawsuit is not about whether the commercial use of this photograph was a violation of copyright law. But the right of privacy or publicity alleged to have been violated by Virgin Mobile depends upon the manner in which the company used the photograph. By using it as they did, commercially, they triggered the question as to whether they have violated Ms. Chang’s rights of privacy or publicity.

So did the photographer violate Ms. Chang’s rights?

We certainly don’t think so. We don’t believe any court should find that Justin Wong had violated Ms. Chang’s rights simply by posting this photo of her in Flickr, however it was licensed. Cool (as in using Flickr, and even better, using Flickr with CC licenses) can’t be a crime.

Mediadefender update: Pirate Bay sagsøger svenske plade/filmselskaber + "chopped and screwed" remix konkurrence

Det er ikke alene morsomt men også yderst interessant - på baggrund af lækkede emails fra de professionelle "hackere" Mediadefender (se min tidligere post om dem) har Pirate Bay lagt sag an mod ALLE større plade og filmdistributører for sabotage / denial of service attacks, hacking (af den onde slags!) og spamming.

Fra Pirate Bays blog:

"Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we've been suspectinghttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers.

While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level".

En anden blogger er begyndt at remixe (i første omgang Britney Spears og Larry Lessig - download her) udfra specifikationer fundet i en af Mediadefenders lækkede mails om hvordan man bedst smadrer en sang så det lyder som en dårlig optagelse - og har startet remixkonkurrence:

"there’s still the occasional pearl to be found among the half-digested roughage. Yes, contained within 700 megabytes of MediaDefender’s anxious lists of IP addresses used to spoof 12-year-olds secretively downloading Akon tracks while mom is in the other room, are the TOP SEKRUT PLANZ for creating “chopped and screwed” remixes of popular mp3s for use as decoy bait.

“Hi Randy, after some internal discussion, here’s our preliminary list.

1) Intermittent glitching (”mech, intermit”) done in a way that’s more random sounding vs periodic.
2) Bit-resample, such that there is audible artifacting (sounds like a bad mp3 encode).
3) shifting channels (sounds like a speaker cut out). Again, the goal should be to sound somewhat random.
4) Laugh-track, at a respectable volume level.
5) Saw-tooth volume, so long as the volume goes to (or close to) zero, so that the track can’t be fixed by an inverse saw increase.
6) Beep, at a high volume

In the future, you might do experiments with static noise overlays (sounds like faulty recording equipment), voice over (public domain audio), and overlapping songs.

You probably don’t want to apply any effect for the first 30-60 seconds, so the user thinks they got a good track. We should take some care to ensure that when there is intermittent effects they happen in the same places so that it’s not possible to take the good portions of one version and splice them with the good portions of another version to get a complete (and perfect) third version.”

link

via Boing Boing

"Hensigten er ikke at fungere som en ekstern harddisk"

Jeg skulle idag overføre en 3gb fil (et såkaldt diskimage) til to mindre filmfestivaler, der vil vise vores film. Af indlysende grunde troede jeg at jeg kunne bruge mit dertil indrettede webhotel hos One.com, hvor jeg betaler 45kr / måned for 4gb plads. Jeg skal ærligt indrømme at jeg ikke har nærlæst betingelserne, men regnede med at en ftp og et webhotel var et sted man kunne lægge filer som andre så kunne hente - selvfølgelig indenfor rimelighedens grænser. Efter flere forsøg hvor jeg fik tilbagemeldingen "socket error" kontaktede jeg One.com. Herunder følger en lettere forkortet chat med One.coms supportmedarbejder. Jeg kan stadig ikke forstå "Martins" argumenter og overvejer nu at skifte udbyder - kender nogle et sted med god plads, god support og stabile servere?

Martin: Hej. Velkommen til One.com chatsupport. Hvad kan jeg hjælpe med?
Dig: hej, jeg skal overføre en 3gb fil til min ftp
Dig: hver gang den når 2gb får jeg en socket errror
Dig: hvorfor det
Martin: Hvilket domæne er der tale om?
Dig: XXX
Martin: Det tyder på at vores server blokerer for den store mængde data du vil sende. Vent venligst et øjeblik
(...)
Martin: Det ændrer ikke på at vores server automatisk lukker af efter en så stor konstant datastrøm. Det er grunden til at du får en data socket error
Dig: jeg betaler for en 4gb ftp så den må vel også kunne klare en 3gb fil
(..)
Dig: det er jo, undskyld mig, lidt fjollet
Martin: Det er bestemt ikke fjollet. Det er for at vi undgår gener fra folk som evt. misbruger deres webhoteller i mod vores forretningsbetingelser - som f.eks. punktet der nævner at webhotellet ikke må bruges som en online harddisk

Dig: jeg har en 4gb webhotel til 45 kr pr måned, med fri traffik. jeg misbruger ikke jeres webhotel (og iøvrigt - hvad er en ftp hvis man ikke må bruge den til at overføre filer??)
Martin: Læs venligst vores forretningsbetingelser med hensyn til brug af dit webhotel
Martin: https://www.one.com/da/forretningsbetingelser
Martin: Pkt. 1.1
Dig: jeg har kigget på jeres forretningsbetingelser og kan ikke se jeg overskrider nogle af dem -
Martin: Det er ikke tilladt at have større mængder filarkiver liggende til fri downloading eller visning uden forudgående aftale
Martin: med One.com. Hensigten er ikke at fungere som en ekstern harddisk for lagring af data filer som zip, MP3, jpg, etc.,
Martin: men som fremvisnings- /salgsplads for virksomheder og private.
Martin: Hvilket er netop det du gør, ved at lægge en (meget stor) fil op til download
Dig: jeg skal bruge min ftp til at overføre en fil til to andre
Dig: det er ikke ulovligt indhold, og det er ikke en adresse som andre ville kunne se
Martin: Du ligger én 3 Gb fil til download fra dit webhotel, hvilket bestemt er tale om brug som fil arkiv
Dig: ftp = file transfer protocol. hvis jeg ikke må bruge min ftp til file transfer - kan jeg ikke se formålet
Martin: Ja, det betyder at du har mulighed for at overføre filer til og fra dit webhotel. Der er tale om den store mængde trafik du skaber og brugen af dit webhotel som en lagringsplads for direkte download af fil(er)
Dig: (..) hvis du havde 500 downloads af en stor fil fra min server indenfor kort tidsrum - så ville du have en pointe, men der er to mennesker der skal downloade den, til et helt legitimt formål. man skal kende URL´en for at få adgang til filen
Martin: Det ændrer ikke på forholdene
(..)
Martin: Du har selv læst og accepteret vores forretningsbetingelser og det er disse som dit abonnement er indbefattet under.
Dig: ja og jeg mener som sagt at I fejlfortolker jeres egne betingelser

Jeg har ændret navnet på supportmedarbejderen og forkortet teksten lettere.

Hvis virkeligheden var ligesom Youtube-kommentarer

Mediadefender

Jeg har lige læst en interessant artikel om californiske firma Mediadefender, som lever af at blokere og korrumpere ophavsretsbeskyttet indhold på P2P netværk. Et filmstudie, for eksempel, køber en "beskyttelsespakke" til en bestemt udgivelse, som så kører i de første par måneder hvor filmen eller pladen høster størstedelen af sin indtjening. Idéen er simpel - i stedet for at forsøge at fjerne indholdet eller lukke samtlige netværk ned - sender Mediadefenders mega-badass-servere en mængde henvendelser ud til de "gode" fildelte filer, så de bliver sværere at komme til. Samtidig med at falske filer spredes (så brugeren, der leder efter f.eks. en bestemt film, bliver træt og giver op) gennem en 9 gigabit internetforbindelse (!).
"the goal is to make files hard to find for a short period of time so that studios, music labels, and artists can make money from selling the legitimate product. (..) MediaDefender counts every major music label and most studios among its clients, with the notable exception of Disney", skriver Ars Technica.

Mediadefenders teknikker:

Decoying. This, in a nutshell, is the serving of fake files that are generally empty or contain a trailer. The goal is to make legitimate content a needle in a haystack, so MediaDefender works hard to ensure that its copies of files show up in the top ten spots when certain keywords are searched for. Everything about the file is tailored to look like the work of pirates, from the file size (movies are often compressed enough to fit on a CD) to the naming conventions to the pirate scene tag. With massive bandwidth and plenty of servers, the company has little trouble in getting these decoy files to appear at the top of search results, but decoying has a down side: the bandwidth. Because MediaDefender actually serves these large but bogus files, it incurs a significant bandwidth bill by using this technique.

Spoofing. Spoofing sends searchers down dead ends. MediaDefender coders have written their own software that interacts with the various P2P protocols and sends bogus returns to search requests, usually directing people to nonexistent locations. Because most people only look at the top five search results, MediaDefender tries to frustrate their first attempts to download a file in hopes that they will just give up.

Interdiction. While the first two techniques try to prevent searchers from locating files, interdiction prevents distributors from serving them. The tool is generally used when media is leaked or newly released; the goal is to slow its spread in those crucial first days. MediaDefender servers attempt to create constant connections to the files in question, saturating the provider's upstream bandwidth and preventing anyone else from grabbing the data.

Swarming. Though he acknowledges the BitTorrent networks can be hard to disrupt, Lee points out that MediaDefender can use "swarming" to make life more difficult for users trying to download copyrighted content. BitTorrent works by using a hash file to reassemble a file from many pieces, each of which may have been downloaded from a different user. MediaDefender simply serves up its chunks of these files, but instead of providing the proper data, its chunks contain static or nothing at all. BitTorrent will discard such junk data, but a flood of it can slow a user's download to a crawl.

Jeg kan ikke lade være med at beundre MediaDefenders hacker-agtige tilgang lidt - det virker forfriskende i modsætning til de velkendte retsager og top-down strategier fra industriens side - og udfordrer også fildelernes intelligens og dovenskab. Men ikke overraskende er der brudt krig ud. Forleden lækkedes et halvt års interne emails fra MediaDefender og det er nok ikke det sidste vi hører til den sag. Indtil der kommer en billig, DRM-fri, måde at downloade film og TV-serier på lovligt, vil det blive ved. Det kommer til at tage LANG tid i Danmark.

IT Politisk forening demonstrerer mod terrorpakken

Jeg var idag forbi Kulturtorvet hvor IT politisk forening havde lavet en - ret kreativ - happening der skulle markere deres utilfredshed mod de nye regler om tilbageholdeldelse af data. Hør mere i Harddisken på P1 på torsdag.

Flere billeder her

Adblock Politiken.dk

Jeg kan godt forstå at populære sites som politiken.dk (som jeg tjekker flere gange dagligt) er nødt til at tjene penge på reklamer. Men det er simpelthen blevet for meget. Dråben var Thomas Vinterberg der pludrede løs om sin nye film i et gigantisk banner der næsten ikke kan undgå at startes (det sker ved mouseover) da det ligger lige under adresselinien, og derfor er det første man rammer når man flytter musen væk. Da jeg aldrig har mødt et eneste banner, set en eneste reklame, eller oplevet noget reklamemæssigt på politiken dk som syntes at være rettet specifikt mod mig (altså, ingen indbygget intelligens eller filtrering udfra mine læsevaner eller søgeord - har jeg bestemt mig for at jeg ikke har brug for reklamerne.

Så jeg har installeret Firefox-add-on' et Adblock, som har den fordel at du selv styrer hvad der filtreres. Ligesom gmails spamfilter virker (indtil videre) filtrene intelligente. Modsat altså Politikens annoncer. Her er efter-billedet, efter ca. 30 sekunders opsætning. Det er en meget mindre stressende oplevelse, selvom filteret har været så smart at det også fjerner billederne..

"It's just a piece of painted wood and a projector"



Pablo Valbuena explains how this amazing, mezmerizing sculture works and how it's made. Shot at Ars Electronica 2007

Konstantin Guericke on privacy and online identity control

Konstantin Guericke (US), co-founder of LinkedIn, CEO of jaxtr, on contrilling your online identity, privacy and a few LinkedIn insider tips.

Click here to see the video

Free Beer swiss style

link

Erik Moechel interview

Den østrigske journalist Erich Moechel har længe arbejdet med problemstillingerne omkring tilbageholdelse af data i forbindelse med mobil- og internet overvågning. Henrik Føhns fra Harddisken interviewer.

Link

Til Ars Electronica i Linz

Østrigske Linz er grå, våd og fuld af sortklædte digitale typer (inklusive mig). AE starter rigtigt i dag (under overskriften "Goodbye Privacy" men onsdag åbnede en del af de mange kunstinstallationer. Morsomt nok foregik det blandt andet på en kunstig strand med Second Life terminaler og storskærm indtil selvsamme strand i SL hvor et par ligeså triste avatarer med dukkede hoveder og (away) efter deres navn stod under parasoller.

Jeg optager lidt video undervejs og tager billeder som vil være både på min flickr profil og på Harddiskens fotoblog

Good Copy Bad Copy on Blip.tv

We have been hesitant in chosing an online video platform for Good Copy Bad Copy. We wanted to be able to offer a good viewing experience while giving people the option to get a (preferably pay-per-download) better quality option. Since Google has decided to discontinue the video sales on Google Video, we decided to "give it away" on Blip.tv while - hopefully - making a few bucks on ads. Soon there will be a DVD for those who want the full experience, extra material etc. I will update when we have figures and news

If you're having problems viewing this, here's the link.

Steve Kurtz i byen på mandag - kunst og medicin mødes

Kunst keder mig for tiden. Men et af de få områder hvor der sker noget er biokunsten - det mærkelige grænseland mellem biotech, kunst og formidling. Og her er Steve Kurtz, som jeg tidligere har skrevet og lavet en dokumentar om - et af de absolut mest interessante navne - ikke mindst på grund af sagen mod ham.

På mandag kl. 10 kan du høre Kurtz i forbindelse med arrangementet Art and Biomedicine på KU. Her er programmet.

Mens den nye film om Kurtz' sag nok for en del mere opmærksomhed glæder jeg mig især til at se det projekt, som hele balladen udsprang fra - Kurtz og Critical Arts Ensembles film Marching Plague, som også bliver vist.