"The Lighter Side of Copyright Infringement."

Appropriating the panels Dave Berg drew for MAD and replacing the word balloons. (Via Metafilter.)

National Lampoon did it in 1971, and "'in 1991 or 1992,' Sam Henderson and some unnamed friends put together a zine titled The Lighter Side of Copyright Infringement, featuring Berg MAD art with rewritten, raunchy words in the balloons. (Henderson is proud that they found a font similar to MAD’s mechanical typography.)" And:

The editors of MAD began to practice Berg-détournement themselves when they introduced (in #487, March 2008) their “Darker Side of The Lighter Side” feature, a recycling of Berg’s images with new word balloons. Now Berg’s delicately-drawn characters deliver jokes about murder and sex offenders in the pages of the magazine itself. Late capitalism can recuperate and profit from anything, including the subversion of its own laws about property ownership, but the inspiration for “The Darker Side of The Lighter Side” goes back to the earliest comic-book issues of MAD, where Harvey Kurtzman wrote new, supposedly funny word balloons for previously published E.C. horror stories (“Murder the Husband!” / “Murder the Story!” MAD #11, May 1954) and slapped captions on pictures of babies (“Baby Quips!” MAD #13, July 1954) to save money on contributors’ wages and keep ahead of crushing deadlines.

Your pre-dawn Meade dog.

Here's that video Meade was editing in the next room when I called out that question last night about the first automobile. There are no cars in this video, only dogs, lots of dogs, filmed by Meade yesterday at the Capital Springs dog park. Meade gets down to the dog's-eye level and, in the editing — with music licensed via iMovie — opens the portal to Dog World:



You see what it's like in there?

"The Supreme Court, returning from its summer recess, on Tuesday granted review of 8 new cases..."

SCOTUSblog reports. One case is a copyright dispute over the screenplay for Raging Bull (which came out in 1980).

For a moment there, I thought I'd failed to notice that the first Monday in October had come up again. (Why were there not a bunch of Supreme Court preview stories?) But it's not Monday. It's Tuesday, and the first day in October, so the first Monday is next Monday. The court is just back, amusingly enough on the first day of the federal government shutdown, which is all very abstruse.

A new Van Gogh. Declared "100 percent genuine" now.

Back in 1908 it was declared a fake and stuck up in an attic.

Hey, if it's really a Van Gogh — from the "mature" period, no less — why wouldn't it be something you'd hang in full view even if you believed it was fake?

Let's contemplate the importance of authenticity. But don't start — as I tried — by Googling that phrase. You'll get bullshit about personal relationships, not art. I wanted bullshit about art.

Being who you really are. That seems like an old-fashioned subject. Something we talked about in the 60s, right?

This topic of personal authenticity took me back to "The Above Ground Sound" of Jake Holmes, specifically "Genuine, Imitation Life" (audio at link):

Chameleons changing colors,
While a crocodile cries.
People rubbing elbows,
But never touching eyes.
Taking off their masks,
Revealing still another guise.
Genuine, imitation life.

That was not a joke, but 100% genuine in 1967. Or... I'm reading the Jake Holmes article at Wikipedia and I'm now not sure that it wasn't a joke. Was he making fun of serious folksingers, making fun of authenticity? A picture from that article raises questions:



What's going on here? Caption: "Jim Connell, Jake Holmes and Joan Rivers when they worked as the team: 'Jim, Jake & Joan.'"

Holmes also wrote the song "Dazed and Confused" (recorded by Led Zeppelin) and many famous advertising jingles, notably "Be a Pepper" and "Be all that you can be." This is blowing my mind. Just that the same guy urged us to "Be all that you can be" (in the Army) and to "Be a Pepper." I'll bet the Army kicked you out back then if they found out you were a Pepper. That's weird. But that he also wrote "Dazed and Confused." And worked with Joan Rivers (and looked like he looked working with Joan Rivers).

Now, I'm questioning the authenticity of that Wikipedia article. But here's a 2010 NYT article about Holmes suing Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement.

Anyway, back to Van Gogh. Think that's a real Van Gogh?

What do you think of that "Van Gogh"?
	Authentic and bad — that's why it was mistaken for fake.
	Authentic and good — experts are experts and Van Gogh is Van Gogh.
	Fake and bad — why else would it have been stowed in an attic for decades?
	Fake but good — but then why did they put it in the attic?
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I found — on YouTube, not in my attic — some Jim, Jake & Joan (from a 1964 movie called "Once Upon A Coffee House"):

Robin Thicke, getting the jump on copyright claims that "Blurred Lines" ripped off Marvin Gaye and Funkadelic.

After the owners of the rights to Gaye's "Got to Give It Up" and Funkadelic's "Sexy Ways" threatened to sue Thicke, Thicke filed a preemptive lawsuit.

The lawsuit says Thicke [and others] have "the utmost respect for and admiration of Marvin Gaye, Funkadelic and their musical legacies," but must "reluctantly file this action in the face of multiple adverse claims from alleged successors in interest to those artists."

You can listen to all 3 songs at the link. I like this lawsuit, because "Blurred Lines" isn't copying those other 2 songs. It's a tribute to that old style, not a copying. Naturally, the Gaye and Funkadelic property owners feel the normal human greed and would like some "Blurred Lines" cash thrown their way, but these threats of lawsuits deserve legal pushback, and I like seeing the new artist doing something that will deter that tactic. I'm not an intellectual property expert, so I'll let others weigh in on the likelihood that Thicke will get the judicial remedy he seeks.

Those earlier artists benefit when the younger generations get their ears tuned to the old sound. If you go to the YouTube "Got to Give It Up" page, you'll see people saying things like "The Blured Lines lawsuit brought me here." Me too! When's the last time you listened to "Got to Give It Up"? I'm a long time Marvin Gaye fan. I bought the single "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" when it came out in 1962. It was one of the first records I bought, and it was Gaye's first single if you don't count 3 failed efforts at marketing him as "the Black Frank Sinatra." But "Got to Give It Up" is late 70s Gaye, the sort of thing we loathed at the time and called "disco." I listened to it today, and I probably would otherwise never have listened to it.

Gaye has been dead for almost 30 years, so there's no way of knowing what he would think of the claims the owners of his intellectual property are making today. And why isn't stuff this old in the public domain already and completely open to picking over and reenvisioning and outright note-for-note copying? It seems odd to clutter the court with a preemptive lawsuit, but what is Thicke supposed to do about the predation his success attracts? Congress should redo the copyright law, shorten the terms of ownership, and thereby limit the potential for lawsuits and threats of lawsuits, which are especially bad when the artist is not around even to have a belief about whether his rights are infringed.

ADDED: Look at how Madonna reacted to what was much more of a rip off:

“I certainly think [Lady Gaga] references me a lot in her work. And sometimes I think it’s amusing and flattering and well done”... Madonna said sometimes Gaga’s work also appears to be a “statement about taking something that was in the Zeitgeist, you know, 20 years ago and turning it inside out and reinterpreting it.”

“There’s a lot of ways to look at it. I can’t really be annoyed by it... because, obviously, I’ve influenced her.” But the Material Girl became coy when the conversation turned to “Born This Way.” “When I heard it on the radio …I said that sounds very familiar,” Madonna said.

Asked if that felt annoying, Madonna responded, “It felt reductive.” Pressed as to whether that was a good or bad thing, Madonna told Cynthia McFadden to “look it up” — we did; the term means “minimal” or “crude” — before smiling slyly and taking a sip from her tea cup.

Maybe Gaye, had he lived, would have displayed a similar attitude. Unfortunately, Gaye was murdered, and so we are deprived of the chance to see him sip tea and smile and use words we need to look up — or whatever his version of that would be — when some reporter pushes him to say what he thinks about the similarity between "Blurred Lines" and "Got to Give It Up."

CORRECTION: The text is corrected to show that Gaye died almost 30 years ago (not almost 40 years ago).

"Photographer sues BuzzFeed for $3.6M over viral sharing model."

"The copyright issues poses a threat to BuzzFeed and similar websites, including Upworthy and For the Win, which have an editorial model based on finding content — especially images — that readers are likely to share on social media."

Last year, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti explained to the Atlantic that the site pays to license images from companies like Reuters and Getty, but that it also pulls from amateur sites like Tumblr and Flickr. In these cases, the provenance of the images can be unclear — in some cases, the photographer has made them available for public use while other times the author is simply unknown.

"Forget everything you once knew. Albums, cycles, they’re totally toast. An artist today is constantly creating..."

"... and constantly in the public eye. He doesn’t bitch that he can’t sell records, that the old model is broken, rather he explores the new avenues where money is available to be made. Piracy? Rip-offs? Imitation? That’s your greatest desire! Content ID will make it so you profit off all the imitators who cover your music! You don’t want to hold it close to the vest, you want to open it up to everybody. Which reminds me, ALWAYS SAY YES! You’re gonna get ripped-off anyway. If there are no barriers to piracy, let people do what they want. Your efforts are just fodder, starter material for others to bake their own bread. They’ll give you credit if you don’t antagonize them. And they’ll give you their money too. People like to pay those they believe in. Foster belief and you’ll get paid...."

The 2d Circuit court says the "fair use" copyright exception doesn't require that a new work of art "refer back to the original."

Richard Prince used somebody else's photographs in his collages, and the court said it's enough that a reasonable observer finds the new work "transformative."

The photographer, Patrick Cariou, made "serene and deliberately composed portraits and landscape photographs depict the natural beauty of the Rastafarians and their surrounding environs," the court said. But "Prince’s crude and jarring works, on the other hand, are hectic and provocative."

In her decision in 2011, Judge Batts gave Mr. Cariou the right to destroy the “Canal Zone” paintings that had not been sold to collectors, a remedy that was criticized by Judge Barrington D. Parker Jr. of the Second Circuit during oral arguments last year.

Destroy?!! But look what Prince did with Cariou's photographs: here. And Prince sold the works for more than $10 million. And yet, don't you feel free to take a book of photographs you own, cut out the pictures, paste them onto poster-board, and scribble and scratch on them? If you made some creepy ugly image out of photos of beautiful models, wouldn't you feel that was yours all yours?

There's a high art/low art issue here. There's the way that the snooty people who exhibit in an elite gallery think they owe nothing to the relatively low people who take sentimental photographs. But that's a topic for debate, not a reason for the photographer to hit up the high-class artist for money or — absurd! — claim a right to destroy the expensive articles of commerce.

You can resell your vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs, but you can't resell your digital music files.

The "first sale" doctrine doesn't apply.

ReDigi tried hard to live up to the spirit of copyright law. It created a system where the uploader of a "purchased" iTunes song would lose access to the music after the file was transferred to the new "buyer's" computer. Yeah, right, said the record company and the judge – there's no way to ensure that the "seller" wasn't keeping the song anyway.

"A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean..."

"... that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual."

Board Chair Verjeana M. Jacobs (District 5) said she and Vice Chair Carolyn M. Boston (District 6) attended an Apple presentation and learned how teachers can use apps to create new curricula. The proposal was designed to make it clear who owns teacher-developed curricula created while using apps on iPads that are school property, Jacobs said.

God forbid that teachers might become entrepreneurial about their creations and amass personal wealth. It's important to keep them inside the system, teaching their wards that the government needs to possess everything in order to ensure that no one gets more than her share.

"Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength..."

"... if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information," writes Oliver Sacks in an essay about memory.

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

"Prosecutor as bully."

Lawrence Lessig on the suicide of Aaron Swartz (which we've already been talking about here). Lessig was Swartz's friend and — for a time — his lawyer:

From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good....

Swartz faced a million-dollar trial, and he was out of money, "yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge."

Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.

AND: From the NYT obit:

In 2008, he took on Pacer — or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents. The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free since they are produced at public expense....

Mr. Swartz recalled, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.”...

He was scared, apparently, but he also joked and flaunted about his misdeeds:

 “Attention attractive people: Are you looking for someone respectable enough that they’ve been personally vetted by The New York Times, but has enough of a bad-boy streak that the vetting was because they ‘liberated’ millions of dollars of government documents? If so, look no further than page A14 of today’s New York Times.”...

The government chose not to prosecute that time. But Swartz moved on to the JSTOR matter, and United States attorney Carmen M. Ortiz said: “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”

The obit links to Swartz's own blog post describing his depression (and other ills). That post is from 2007, before either the Pacer or the JSTOR incidents.

"Reddit, Creative Commons and Demand Progress co-founder Aaron Swartz committed suicide in New York City on Friday, Jan. 11."

"He was 26 years old."

Aaron Swartz was facing a potential sentence of dozens of years in prison for allegedly trying to make MIT academic journal articles public.... In September 2012, Aaron Swartz was charged with thirteen counts of felony hacking. In July 2011 Swartz was arrested for allegedly scraping 4 million MIT papers from the JSTOR online journal archive....

Swartz's subsequent struggle for money to offset legal fees to fight the Department of Justice and stay afloat was no secret....

Demand Progress — itself an organization focused on online campaigns dedicated to fighting for civil liberties, civil rights, and progressive government reform - compared The Justice Department's indictment of Swartz to "trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library."

Swartz's suicide came two days after JSTOR announced it is releasing "more than 4.5 million articles" to the public.

ADDED: Here's a podcast from a year ago in which Swartz discusses his activism stopping SOPA (the The Stop Online Piracy Act). The part with Swartz begins at 17:20.

AND: Here's Swartz's Wikipedia page. Picture:



ALSO: Cory Doctorow:

I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15.... Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life... His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access....

Somewhere in there, Aaron's recklessness put him right in harm's way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn't an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn't done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.

Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who'd tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.

This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed himself because he was worried about doing time.... But Aaron was also a person who'd had problems with depression for many years. He'd written about the subject publicly, and talked about it with his friends.

AND: I started a new post for the Lessig commentary.

"Your average Dylan fan could be excused for not knowing about a new European compilation called The Copyright Extension Collection Vol. 1."

"Only 100 of these four-CD sets even exist, and they've been shipped to a tiny number of stores located in Germany, France, Sweden, and Britain."

Though it collects Dylan's highly precious unreleased studio outtakes and live recordings from 1962 and 1963, Sony is putting almost no promotion behind the collection....

Although this no-promotion thing works as a kind of promotion, viral promotion. But apparently, this release isn't about selling product at all. It's about preserving copyright. After 50 years, if nothing is done with a recording, the European copyright would expire. By doing something — next to nothing — the copyright can be extended for another 20 years. So they put out a 4-CD set — only 100 of them.

Obviously, ultimately, this is a product that will be mass produced. But it's not what Dylan wants to put out now,  and it doesn't hurt business, in the long run, to have this enticing rarity out there getting people advance-excited over what is only 86 outtakes from the Times-They-Are-A-Changin' days.

"Instagram said today that it has the perpetual right to sell users' photographs without payment or notification..."

"... a dramatic policy shift that quickly sparked a public outcry."

The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing site. Unless Instagram users delete their accounts before the January deadline, they cannot opt out.

Under the new policy, Facebook claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world's largest stock photo agency.

Think the outcry is enough to change this? Facebook must monetize all that traffic it's acquired. Remember that Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram.

AND: May you ought to quit gramming because it's so annoying, as explained here:



"Look at this Instagram: eggs benedict, side of ham.... Drinking mai tais on a cruise/just a coincidence it's also boobs..."

"Psy Makes $8.1 Million By Ignoring Copyright Infringements Of Gangnam Style."

Okay, but $8.1 million isn't that much considering the magnitude of the success of the thing. On the other hand, it's the kind of thing that becomes successful in a system of virality. But that's not the other hand. That's the same hand.

It's that kind of thing. How much more of that kind of thing do you want?

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says: "I'm not tuned in to it all, but I imagined that gangnam style meant wearing dyed cotton fabric."

Since Psy's not policing the copyright, feel free to make a goofy "Gingham Style" parody video. And since the copyright ran out long ago, here's the delightful Eugene Field poem "The Duel" — which, if you remember it, you might think is titled "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat":

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
'T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t' other had slept a wink!
The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
(I was n't there; I simply state
What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

The gingham dog went "Bow-wow-wow!"
And the calico cat replied "Mee-ow!"
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
Up with its hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
(Now mind: I 'm only telling you
What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, "Oh, dear! what shall we do!"
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
Employing every tooth and claw
In the awfullest way you ever saw---
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
(Don't fancy I exaggerate---
I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

Next morning, where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole that pair away!
But the truth about the cat and pup
Is this: they ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that!
(The old Dutch clock it told me so,
And that is how I came to know.)

And here are many more of Field's "Poems of Childhood." (Try to find a copy with the Maxfield Parrish illustrations.) Did you memorize any of theses poems? I did! I had a beautiful Golden Book collection of children's poems when I was a child, and I memorized many of them, including this one. This was my favorite one. I often ended up reciting these poems around my parents. Even though they were the sort of people who didn't display how delighted they were by children's behavior, I realize now that they must have found these recitals adorable. I had no idea at the time. I just loved the poems and wanted others to hear them. That was virality, circa 1960.